I appreciate that you're opening this conversation, and that you're also looking for people who care about this platform in earnest. Admittedly, as I'm part of the @followbtcnews witness team, I have a bit of a bias towards the work and attitudes we have towards the platform, obviously 😊. What I can say is we've been in the top 20 for three weeks now, so we are absolute outliers among the rest of this collection of people — that the 'rules' for us have been a bit different from others — but I'm okay with that. We came here to work; if this was all about the money, I'm pretty sure I personally would not have gone the community/witness route, that's for damn sure. We just put out an update talking about this sort of thing, so it's timely.
- we test built a suite of tools including a keyword analyzer, a blockchain explorer, a mentions tool - we don't charge for any of them, but used common wants to better understand how to develop for the chain
- Jeff is the vice chair of Minnowsupport, and I spend about 10-12 hours a day moderating in the Minnowsupport/SteemDevs/Writer's Block/etc. communities and connecting and developing new initiatives every day
- we developed, and are re-developing a script and dashboard system that handles the delegations and tiered voting for the Minnowsupport project at our own cost, which is thousands of incoming delegations of all amounts on the fly. We're redeveloping it now to release it to any community on the chain to encourage manual curation efforts in niches, and to bring an easy-to-use spam blacklist system to everyone and anyone... with the ability to "click on" one or more trusted blacklists and make sure no accidental autovotes are given to an account the community at large has identified as a problem
- we host, manage, moderate, and develop Steem.chat and take on all associated costs with that
- host upgraded seed and witness nodes and backups
- host and manage a full public 512GB RPC node, and split costs with MSP
- we're working on two large scale projects around greater adoption and better ease of use of the blockchain — one complimentary to steemit, one in place of steemit. These are huge labours of love and they have taken enormous amounts of our time and most of our "profits"
- we've been plugging away at completing pull requests for Steemit for things that people really want that no one has been willing to do or pay for (case in point, a recent one for on site avatar and banner uploads. The little things that really turn people off about this platform that just keep getting ignored)
Is it enough? Honestly, like @timcliff has said here... compared to @jesta? Nah, it probably never will be. But, in a few months, we've not actually made a profit: we put it all back into the chain in one way or another. Our power-downs basically pull just enough from the account to keep paying the thousands of dollars a month in servers alone, and for all the of the dreams we have to make the chain better. We know we have to prove ourselves as the "newcomers," and you better believe it's not a complaint, but I also know we've had a much harder climb than some others and I'm proud of it. I look forward some day, that if we have the chops to stay up here, maybe getting enough profit to power up my account so I can also do a bit more content creation and voting around the platform to reward the people who make this place great.
I for one really appreciate the work you do @crimsonclad and @followbtcnews. MSP was a really great introductory to Steemit, and you personally helped me a lot when I was first learning how it all works around here. You two seem to take on so many projects and responsibilities, it's admirable.
Honestly, @jesta is on a different level. Reaching for the top is always great, but some people are just a step ahead. I'm still fairly new around here, but if we had more folk like you two and @netuoso in the top 20, I could see Steem really thriving as an ecosystem.
Attagirl :)
I think we take you guys for granted, frankly.
I'm glad to see this, even if I think the msp tie isn't going to impress Bernie much, but as for speaking up about how hard you work, excellent! Well done. I knew you had it in you!
It wasn't lost on anyone that Follow and you got the nicest assessment in the OP.
Not trying to impress Bernie; just addressing Bernie. He, like everyone else, will make his own decisions to vote regardless of what proselytizing is done by myself and the masses, and regardless of what anyone may be saying they're going to do here on the chain.
None of us here expected Bern to read our stuff, I'm still glad to see you owning all you do out loud, for some well deserved notice.