Busy, busy, busy.org

"We don't crash ever. If the servers are down for even a day our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed."
- Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in the film, The Social Network

Who remembers the film The Social Network, the Hollywood drama about the F-word? I always thought the above line was a little hyperbolic. I mean, sites go down occasionally, even big corporate sites like banks. It happens, it's annoying, then things go back to normal.

But when I looked at the data for busy.org over 2017 (which I derived by the "app" information from the json metadata in steemsql) I came to the conclusion that perhaps it wasn't so much of a stretch after all.

Here's the full year chart for busy.org. As usual, individual author numbers and article numbers per day are on the left hand axis; author and curator payouts are on the right hand axis.

And here's a close up for busy.org over the last three months:

And here's the same three month time period for steemit.com (on a much larger scale):

See that dip in the steemit data at the start of October? See the busy.org data taking off at around the same time? Do you remember the date of the DDOS attacks on Steemit.com? October 5. Was that the first time you used busy.org? Yeah, me too.

Of course, this is an inference I'm drawing from the data. There may be other, completely unrelated reasons for the rise of busy.org. But the really interesting thing is not that people migrated across from steemit.com to busy.org. That's only natural when a site goes down. The interesting thing is that they stayed. The numbers are rising pretty steadily. And they've captured some of the bigger fish too. And even some pretty well-known mammals.

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Staying busy

So I've produced a few analyses looking at the market share of the different Steem blockchain platforms recently, resulting in some interesting debate. One commenter suggested that:

"...there is no reason why people should choose Busy over Steemit because they both serve the same function."

Challenge accepted! Here are three reasons why you should consider using busy.org:

Reason 1) Free upvotes!

All upvotes are free. But some upvotes are more free than others. The
busy.org bot will upvote your post as long as you:

• post using busy.org
• use the tag "busy"

And that's it. Pretty simple, eh?

The upvote is based on the amount of weight in Steem Power (Vests) of your followers. Now I remember reading this article and thinking that it probably wouldn't be worth my while. But today was the first time I actually made an attempt to look at the numbers.

So here's the scatter graph of aggregated vests of followers against vote amount for users that received a busy bot vote on 24 November 2017:

[Technical aside - feel free to skip on if you're just reading the narrative.
In order to plot this chart you need to extract all the busy.org vote weights for votes made by busy.org on a particular day from the Comments table, link each vote recipient to all of their followers in the Followers table, then link all the followers to their account balances in the Accounts table. And aggregate appropriately.
Once you've done this you plot aggregate follower vests for each recipient against the vote weight which you've multiplied up by the 100% (or so) vote amount for busy.org.
And if it all goes to plan you should get a broadly straight line.
It's one of those pleasing moments when you don't think it's going to work at all and then...]

So the first thing I thought when putting this chart together was: Wahey! Straight line!

And the second thing was: OMG. $6 upvote just for pressing the "Write post" button. This game is so rigged!

While you're here, if you found this information useful, don't forget to follow me! I'll follow you back etc.

So I'm at 2.5bn, hanging with all the cool kids in that bottom left hand square. It looks like I would get about a $0.35 upvote. So I'll be checking that out with my next non-utopian post!

If you want the big $6 upvote though you'll need 50bn in follower power. We're talking @jerrybanfield or @sweetsssj here (Both of whom are busyians. Or is that busyists? I'm guessing it's not busybodies.)

Reason 2) Vote slider and vote amounts!

Reason two is some enhanced functionality around voting and vote amounts. On Steemit you have to wait until 500 Steem Power for the vote slider. On busy that functionality is available for everyone, irrespective of Steem Power. And with the launch of Busy v2 (in beta) at the start of November, the vote slider is both prettier and more functional!

Now you can see the expected amount of your upvote as well as the percentage. Very useful!

You can also see the vote amounts that very generous people have added to your posts. Thank you people! (This screenshot is redacted - I'm never sure what you can include on utopian from this perspective. Also I'm British and we don't talk about money, it being vulgar. Or something.)

Reason 3) Resteeming older posts!

Reason 3 is something that came up in a conversation with @creatr yesterday. On steemit.com you can't resteem posts that are outside of the seven day voting period. But what if you find an old gem on someone's blog that you want to send around again? Maybe you know of a great post with useful tips for minnows that you want to send round every few months.

Well on busy.org that option is available. Again, very useful!

So there we go. Three very good reasons for trying busy.org is you're not already a convert!

There's lots of new interesting functionality in addition to the above. The official busy post is here:
https://busy.org/busy/@busy.org/busy-v2-is-now-in-public-beta

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Questions

If you have any questions or spot any errors please do not hesitate to leave a comment.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading!

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Methodology and Tools for Analysis

Raw data was obtained through sql queries of the Comments, TxVotes, and Accounts table in steemsql (thank you as always @arcange!) using Valentina Studio.
Data was analysed in Numbers, the mac spreadsheet tool.
Data was obtained across all of 2017 for some charts and for 24 November 2017 for the busy.org upvotes.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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