A New Look for Crypto
Earlier this year, we stumbled on (and were absolutely blown away by) the trailer video for Brave -
Aside from our excitement for the future of BAT, Brave and a better web, we were even more enthusiastic about craft and artful aesthetic of the video itself. It was so different than what we’ve seen before with more robotic explainer videos for hundreds of tokens and other blockchain projects. The Brave animation wove together a compelling narrative for why current browsers have a lot more room to improve and what Brave was offering its users.
 |  |  |
|---|
 |  |  |
|---|
 |  |  |
|---|
A New Intro to the Sndbox Incubator
The design studio behind the amazing film is Humdinger & Sons. Long story short - we reached out to them to see if we could make one of our own for Sndbox.
We’ve kept it under wraps long enough. For the last couple of months, we’ve been working closely with the creative team at Humdinger to develop a film that artistically explains the offerings of Sndbox’s incubator program and benefits behind the Steem blockchain. After a journey of making scripts, mocking up storyboards, and deciding on custom music styles, the Humdinger team is currently finalizing the animation sequence and beginning voice overs. We thought we could share this news with you all and give you a sense of what’s in store for May.
 |  |  |
|---|
 |  |  |
|---|
The video will be an introductory (~1 minute) narrative about our Steem-powered incubator.
Sndbox and its supporting team have always strived to continuously explore and enhance the way we incubate new content creators, projects, and institutions within the Steem blockchain. We truly believe that this video will be a powerful message for traditional social-media users to migrate to the Steem ecosystem and start empowering their work with cryptocurrency.
Getting Serious about Marketing
With this video, we'll be targeting and recruiting new creative and entrepreneurial talent into the Steem ecosystem. Like the Brave video, "the Sndbox intro" will be a major new resource (for us and everyone) to articulate just how important and disruptive the cryptocurrency ecosystem is becoming. This video is just the start of a very big 2018.
We're opening up applications for Cohort 2 of our incubator next month. And we're going to do it with a bang.
Super exciting! Woop Woop Looking forward to the unveiling day.
Kudos to all u do!
wow!!..what a fresh concept art animation and great narration voice..cant wait to see the sandbox version!! ..wish all the success for @sndbox
Love the Brave video!!! Clean, elegant, impactful! Can't wait to see what they do for @sndbox :)
Very unique and different intro. Our eyes were fixed on the video til the end and it was done quite effectively and kept in mind the user's interest and psychology.
That VO voice tho...
A Voice of Reason in the Wild-West of Crypto ;)
This is totally awesome, amazing and very creative, I am patiently waiting here to see how unique the version of @sndbox will look like. @ humdinger & sons, you work is simply great and outstanding.
This is good news @sndbox, thanks for all the support towards the steemit blockchain.
@blinks
in that case I say welcome to a new world order. Steem and sndbox taking over
Hehhehee love this!!! So glad I'm finding out more about @sndbox!!!
Thanks man. Glad you found it useful.
Nice!
hehehe - yes! buuuuuuuuuuuutttttttttttttt.....
woman.
;)
It's an amazing way to understand better this project. Visual presence impact more than words and this will definitely give a big pump to recruit more talents. I'm pretty much new here, and I'm still learning about how things work in the steemit blockchain, but what I do know is that this is a step to the future for under rated creators (talking from my own experience.)
Glad I found this project and I'm excited to know more about it 💎
Hi @unicornia!!!! :) Hehehee
Hiya!! <3 @dreemsteem
This represents the height of royalty and prestige the people of this native give to their leaders in those days
?
Very good
visit my blog https://steemit.com/life/@ismailrafael/steemit-mengubah-kehidupan-kejam-dan-seram-steemit-turns-a-cruel-and-spooky-life-6544321002de8
Pretty cool! I'll look forward to that.
Very special video
It looks like a great movie
You are a successful person
This is very cool @sndbox
lovely video 😍
sndbox amazing, have a nice day :)
It's a very special video and very cool I really appreciate your excellent work thanks for sharing your excellent marketing film project post
Wow! Fantastic!
these are excellent news, what if I am sure is that in steemit there is talent ... the choice of new talent will not be easy.
The animations and voice overs sound intriguing. For real , it will help others who have not embraced the steem blockchain or anything about cryptocurrency to key in. Amazing concept @sndbox, its applaudable. .....@adoore-eu
Can't wait to see this amazon piece of art!
Awesome Brave video! this is all very exciting :D
snbox is instrumental in improving the progress of media users, especially steam, blockhain
Wow what an amazing video
Wow, with the brave video that been produce, cant wait for the #sndbox version.
Hi @sadkitten, @personz and team - is this bot looking for weekly percentages? Our self voting for the month has been 8.7% which we had assumed was pretty healthy. We always try to make sure our votes are dispersed effectively and impactfully.
Here is our monthly below...
Here's our weekly which does breach the 10% mark, a rarity for us.
Any feedback would be deeply appreciated. Thank guys!
Hi @sndbox 👋 first of all, I personally really like what you guys do, well done.
@sadkitten takes a weekly snapshot. Self votes payout is always analysed relative to SP, which gives a return on investment value for self voting, or the
svROIwe talk about in the explanatory post.I know @andybets, he's very competent, and I really like his steemreports tool but because it is not open source I cannot vouch for it's accuracy. It is claimed that votes are adjusted for weight, but I do not think they are adjusted for payout relative to SP, and especially changes in SP.
@sndbox is in the top 20 self voters for this week due to high relative payout of self votes to SP. I understand that many collectives self vote to fund their activities, but this is still self voting. You can find the rationale in the above mentioned post.
EDIT: I confirmed, steemreports does not take into account dynamic SP changes over the period so it has the potential to be very wrong and misleading
I think we are actually calculating different metrics here, so comparing them doesn't really make sense.
Steemreports measures the self-votes as a percentage of all votes given, whereas if I'm not mistaken, your metric is measuring self-votes as a percentage of maximum reward pool allocation possible?
Quite right, that is my point which I hope I made well enough, that comparing them is not useful.
But no, that's not my method. The metric we use is the extrapolated self vote return on investment. This means that self vote payout is determined over a given period (in this case one week) as a percentage of their investment, which is the net / available SP, and extrapolated to a year (x52 in this case) as if they voted this way all the time, to get a kind of annual return.
The net / available SP is adjusted to changes in SP to be accurate to the time of casting the vote, which is what matters to the blockchain also, and why we do it. Both our metrics are sensitive to large changes in SP over the given sampling period.
Ok, I think I get your method now thanks. Is your code for obtaining the self-voting information open source?
This limitation has always been explained in the information popup on the chart page. Whether it actually results in inaccuracy in the case of outgoing votes is IMO subject to definitional debate.
Yes, the code is open source.
I have found this limitation to be quite severe for my own metric. I'd be interested to know what you would consider this definitional debate to be in the context of your metric. Suffice to say, the metrics are incompatible.
Hi @personz, thanks so much for your reply and kind words :)
We really appreciate projects like this that look out for abuse within the community. Thank you for your transparency and for your response.
With respect to your last point - we would suggest creating a whitelist / blacklist that could help identify outliers or perhaps communities. This post (for example) references a film project that was funded 100% through blogging and creating content. Something we hope will become a strong explanatory resource for others. Just our 2 cents.
All the best - Sndbox Team
The project will not make use of white / blacklists. If you are a high self voter then we disagree with your voting habits, whether you are a single person or a community. For example even steemcleaners do this, and their service is vital, however I have long been an outspoken critic of that practice. @sndbox is not an outlier, your self voting is very high.
I think this is a good moment to reflect on your own practices.
Hi @personz, I appreciate the explanation and am personally in support of initiatives like this to combat abuse. As part of the @sndbox team, I make it a priority to make sure our organization is neither abusive nor misunderstood as abusive.
Over the last year, we've refined our voting methods, reward usage, and growth strategy, all of which we've been completely transparent about. This why in certain cases I would encourage others to not view self-voting as flat-out wrong. The way in which it is done, its level of transparency, and how rewards are used are all critical factors to decide whether a user or account is abusive. If involved members of Sndbox only wanted to focus on rewards, we would have taken drastically different steps. As of now, I'm confident that we've struck a good balance on voting practices that best allows us to fund projects / initiatives / campaigns all of which are designed to support the value of Steem and community impact within Steemit.
I don't really expect this response to change the trajectory of your initiative (though I second the idea of creating a whitelist) and that's completely fine, I'm happy to agree to disagree. I'm grateful that other dedicated Steemians are taking on a role that we cannot, even if that means not necessarily being in alignment at times.
Thanks for your thoughts @hansikhouse, I personally enjoy your posts a lot and have been a follower for some time.
It's not surprising that collective accounts such as @sndbox behave differently that other users. Even @sadkitten is a collective account, several users delegate their SP to have no direct return on that part of their investment, sacrificing it to improve the platform a little bit.
In the pooling of resources (not only investment but time, creativity, etc.) it's normal to pay yourself out of your collective pool. On Steem this looks like self voting, or collusive voting where a central account (maybe using a bot) votes for members. When the beneficiaries list is small this constitutes a voting ring, and where it always goes back to the main account it is a ring of size 1.
I've long thought about this practice when I looked at the numbers in a months long analysis almost a year ago. Another example was @adsactly where were one of the highest self voters by actual payout value at that time (see here for details on that analysis. We've since switched to measure self voting relatively, not on absolute value. But Adsactly are still doing this, and I recently talked to the project head on this (I think, it's hard to know who is controlling the account at any time) who also claimed context of supporting users with the proceeds of self voting, etc.
When done to high amounts, I do not think the context of a collective legitimizes the practice. This is because I support the view of Steem where voters AKA curators expend some effort to evaluate whether or not a post should be voted on. I'm fine with bots performing this effort to a degree, but not simply following, whitelisting, etc. In the long long loooong debates I had regarding self voting the point often emerged that why wouldn't you self vote, since if you spent the time to write a post you clearly think it is worth something! This point makes sense, and even more sense in a collective where your goals are at least in part about supporting the collective and it's constituent members.
However it's not the only reason and not the guiding reason, as when it's brought to it's logical conclusion why should you vote for anyone else then? You need to take more into account when making that decision, or at least you should. The "should" is important here and is underwritten by my opinion, not any blockchain code. That's why the bot exists, to express an opinion via action.
I am also happy to disagree with people here and I'm always glad when that can be done with civility (though I do not require it), so thank you. I stand by my statement: consider your practices in the context of the platform, where you want it to be and the vision you support. The means matters, as does the ends.