The ssg-community account has been in operation for over 2 years now. It was created in March 2018 because the community at the time was going through a major controversy regarding ownership of the pre-existing vote service. With the support and endorsement of some of the heavyweights of the community at that time ssg-community quickly became a valued service that the community was able to truly own and rally behind. We held a number of Monster Raffles of precious metals where community members donated prizes to raise money and build up the service for the good of all. Even though we have been through a savage bear market in crypto, a destabilising blockchain fork and real world catastrophe this year – the community and ssg-community are still here with us. That is testament to how strong this community has been…..but things could always be better.
It seems to me like the community has fallen out of love with ssg-community – once fondly referred to as our “Precious Mermaid”. To me it looks like the service is not really doing the job it was built for. The way I see things there are 2 really important things about the community here on STEEM and HIVE. The People and the Content. I personally think that ssg-community has done a pretty good job supporting the People who are members of the community, but the Content has fallen through the cracks. While the community may be active and vibrant in Discord (which is great) the public facing content and engagement (which was always an important part of the vision for ssg-community) seems to have declined. I’d like to propose some changes to how ssg-community operates to try and restore its original vision and once again prioritise support for the People AND the Content of this great community.
The Tag used by members on STEEM and HIVE has always been a central part of how the community collates its content to promote precious metals and communicate publically. Tag Qualification is about setting up ssg-community to only vote on subscribing members posts which use the #SilverGoldStackers tag. The idea here is to focus the upvotes (and thus financial incentive) on content that is relevant to stacking precious metals and/or the community itself. The Tag Enforcement is about ensuring that only relevant content is posted to the tag. I’m proposing that people who post to the tag with content that is not about precious metals or this community would first have a couple of warnings and then have their ssg-community vote removed, or for repeat offences even be downvoted. This policy would ensure that ssg-community once again promotes and incentivises only the content relevant to the community it was intended to serve.
In the beginning ssg-community gave out a daily vote to subscribers. Now I believe it is 7 votes in 7 days. It still requires (on average) a daily post for subscribers to get a good ROI. What I am proposing here is that instead of getting say a 10% vote every day, if you don’t post for 3 full days then your vote allocation accrues and you will get a 3 x 10% = 30% vote (capped at 100%). This won’t really affect hard core community members who post daily anyways, but some of the less active members will be able to get involved and receive value from subscribing to @ssg-community. Not everyone can write about precious metals or the community every day so this policy will allow a much more flexible post frequency for subscribers and it might help entice a few members back into the fold who we’ve lost over the last 2 years because life has gotten too busy to post daily. The content of those members is still valuable and has been missed.
Obviously, these policy changes need some customisation of the technical code that runs the voting service so it would require some software development and a return to hosting the service on a Virtual Private Server. I am once again putting my hand up to do this work and return to a role alongside @welshstacker as an operator of the ssg-community account. He has done a fantastic job keeping things going over the last 2 years but he is going to need help to get this implemented. So, just like 2 years ago when I handed over the reins to focus on real life issues, I am asking the community to restore me alongside @welshstacker on the same terms. I will once again do all the development and setup work for free, I only ask that the community pay for the VPS (costing $5 USD a month) and give me the same 50% membership discount on the service that was granted to @welshstacker 2 years ago.
Even though I haven’t been very active in the community of late (I was always a bit of an outsider anyway) I have a great relationship with @welshstacker and have kept in touch with him and some of the core community members. I’ve run this proposal past him and he supports it, so I’d like to ask it to be put to a vote by the membership as a Petition For Change in accordance with the Governance Framework for ssg-community. At this stage I am only proposing that we implement this on HIVE. If it works we can look at implementing it on STEEM too if that’s what the members want.
I sincerely believe that these changes will be in the best long term interests of the broader community or I wouldn’t be proposing them. I personally believe the community is ready to really start growing and prospering again so we need to get some solid foundations in place to support that growth and prosperity.