300th Witness Vote Update- Watching minnows grow up quick from their time in "the pond" aka the Minnow Support Project Discord Channel PALnet.

I recently hit 300 witness votes. I ran for public office before and I've held public office before. I earned 6,000 votes in the last election I participated in. I can tell you these witness ones feel way more important to me. This is the future that I see in the world. I want a world of Peace, Abundance, and Liberty. I'm shocked by how easily Steem seems to create abundance. The ability of the stake holders to print money and give to worthy causes is freaking amazing. It's so encouraging, and we've been able to build a great community around it.

The Minnow Support Project Discord room has grow to over 1300 unique people in 10 days. We have 7 witnesses constantly in there checking on people and curating minnow posts. We often have 200 or more "fish" hanging out in the "pond." The general chat is pretty much around the clock. We have a ton of channels opened up to general interests, groups of people, languages, art, and writing. It's still growing like gangbusters, which is of course supported by the delegation we get from @neoxian for 20k SP, @benjojo for 90k SP, and now the minnows themselves have started delegating. We have roughly a dozen people who are delegating over 5000 SP to the project. @minnowsupport is now rocking out 117,000 SP, which we're dolling out to over 1400 posts a day curated by roughly 800 people.

Within the big community we are sparking little communities and I wanted to highlight some of the cool projects and people we're supporting, growing a space for, and watching rise up:

Link to the Discord room- https://discord.gg/HYj4yvw

Venezuela

I'm very concerned about the plight of Venezuelans. They have a raw deal for sure right now. I've been going through and upvoting new folks from their country, which you can find here: https://steemit.com/created/retovenezuela. I was tipped off to that channel by @cryptohustlin. I'm not the only one that came through and did that. @thejohalfiles, and @canadian-coconut voted on a lot of them shortly afterward. Their hourly wage is about $0.09. You can imagine what it's going to feel like logging back in and seeing $100 posts in their blog.

I've been doing what I can to work with @efrageek and @road2wisdom to get a Spanish channel going in the PALnet Discord channel. I believe in the power of building these microcommunities and think this is a great way to support the people separated by language or economic hard times.

Check out the white paper for their project here: https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@provenezuela/project-venezuela-official-launch-white-paper-english-version-1497914210-8695834

Vets

I have taught high school and college science courses before. It was mostly at military schools. I love the men and women that love this country enough to defend it. I'm a major peacenic and hate how we send them to 3rd world nations to kill dark skinned people for oil and resources, but it's not the kid's fault. They were brought up in a school system that fostered the sense of "the other," and a willingness to kill because they are so different and to protect their home. The logic is flawed, but it took me 30 years to figure that out. Can't blame the kid. Now the kids come back with emotional scars from having committed such pain and you can see it in the numbers. Vet homeless rate is through the roof, and they come back afflicted with so many ailments. There are so many good kids in there and I'm stoked to help those that help them.

If you take a look at the Trending page @jdawg has a great post creating a new tag for veterans.

https://steemit.com/veterans/@jdawg/please-help-me-create-steemit-s-new-community-to-support-military-veterans-veterans

It brings me great joy to see him thriving because he was one of the first winners of the Minnow Support Project Weekly Resteem. Now he's trending and he's trending on a post helping build a community! I couldn't be prouder!!!! Similar to the other channels we've created he now has control of a Vets channel in the PALnet Discord room. I'm expecting great things and am so happy to help build a virtual home for the kids coming back from duty and to try to help them reintegrate the best we can.

Music and Podcasts

Lastly, I'm stoked to support @isaria. She's been posting some wonderful music that's caught some whale attention. Her and her husband @swelker101 are wonderful influences on the PALnet community. He's in there every day coordinating with new people and helping her create and spread her music. She's recording songs that have caught some great attention. 9 days ago they came in as pure minnows without much of a network. Now they have tons of fans and $300+ posts.

I asked her about what she thought the impact of the Minnow Support Project was and here's what she said:

When I first joined Steemit I had no idea what I was doing. The Minnow Support Project was formed about a week after I joined, and I can truly say that I wouldn’t have been as successful here had it not been for this support group. I’ve made roughly $1000 in about a month due to the support, suggestions, and friendships in the MSP community. MSP really solidifies the community aspect of what Steemit is all about and continues to help me find my voice and focus.

You can see her perform here: https://steemit.com/openmic/@isaria/open-mic-week-39-swan-swan-hummingbird-r-e-m
and here: https://steemit.com/openmic/@isaria/open-mic-week-38-the-low-spark-of-high-heeled-boys-by-traffic-piano-vocal

Now they're talking about a podcast from "the pond" with another PALnet standard @gmuxx. We're gonna get music, art, and news out to the steemit community from inside the pond and hear from minnows that have come to share their art and stories.

Witness settings

You can see how my witness is setup here. I'm about 2PV away from being in the top 50, which is a big deal, because it make it about 100 times easier to vote for the person. I'm publishing an unbiased price feed. I have a low account creation fee. I'm rocking HF 19.

I still stand by my concerns that going down to 10 votes is too few. While it's ok for many people because you have a slide bar for voting power minnows don't. That means every time they're voting beyond 10 votes a day they're dropping power. This seems to have slowed the average page views a minnow gets, the number of comments that get voted on, and seems to have curtailed minnow interactions. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the intention. I'd like to see us go up to 20 votes and add a 2x button. That way Steemians can still get their votes done quickly, but can happen without smushing minnow interaction.

Some minnows have said the number of votes doesn't matter. Some minnows have shared that it changes their own behavior towards less interaction, and many have said that it impacts their page views and interactions on their wall negatively.

I'm still concerned about trending. It looks like it made the top posters wealthier. That's not a good thing from the perspective of a guy who spends hours a day tending to minnows. Sunday's trending looked a little healthier. We'll have to see how it progresses.

Personal

You can see me growing on Steemwhales.com. I like tracking by follower count more than any other metric. You can see I'm ranked the 57th most followed steemian on the site. It's getting hard to go up too. Not only do I have to gain more followers, but I have to out pace some amazing authors. It's tricky. That said there's some legends in the list that I just passed. I'm really honored to have this much support.

About a month ago I had 450 followers. I'm glad I embraced change and have really put myself out there for this place. It's been really rewarding personally, and now with more power around here there's more I can do to help the folks I work with every day!

Please help me continue this work

If you think building a Discord channel with 1300 people in it, supporting Venezuelans specifically and Spanish speakers broadly, helping vets, supporting the arts, and making a vibrant community on and off chain is a good thing to do for Steemit and the world please vote for my witness. I've been at this less than a month and can't wait to see what the future brings. Much love to the whales that support me and the 200+ minnows and dolphins that have my Witness back!

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