How to build communities on steemit. The birth of @artzone
First I met with @surfyogi on steemit, I really like his blog. He is a whale on steemit, but he does not want to rape the reward pull. He wanted to a build communities. He told me about his vision of @artzone and I thought it was more than a brilliant idea. That is why I started to use my IT skills to implement the features that we brainstormed about with @surfyogi.
In this post I will write down the technical challenges that I had to face during the creation of the @artzone bot.
The ingredients for a community bot:
- virtual machine
- Steem acount
- lots of SP
- an IT guy who maintains the system
Rules of artzone:
If you want to get upvotes from @artzone, you have to follow these rules:
- have #artzone tag in the post
- follow @artzone
- post body length should be greater than 300 characters
- have at least one link in the post
- @artzone can give just one upvote per day
- original artwork
Challenges:
- Finding the posts to upvote:
Although there is an API to find posts with specific tags, unfortunately it did not find all the posts. Therefore the bot uses web-scraping tools to find the posts that have the #artzone tag. The posts can be found on the following link: https://steemit.com/created/artzone - Growing the community:
I think it is a huge success, in a few weeks only @artzone reached 4k followers, and it supported hundreds of artists.
The block transaction was a big help in this, and so were the posts commented with #art but without #artzone tag. (We made this just on the first week) - Finding curators to check the posts manually, comment them and identify the winners. @surfyogi did an amazing work.
- Calculating the vote value:
The bot votes in every hour. The SP can recover after a 100% upvote in 144 minutes.
So if the voting SP is 100%, in every hour the bot can give out around 41% upvote. This is the number which is divided by the number of posts to upvote in each hour. This determines the vote value.
I have uploaded all the code into the following github repositories, if you are interested in the details:
https://github.com/misrori/artzone_on_steemit
I hope my code can be an example to many other communities to start.
Future of @artzone
We experience a huge and rapid grow that we did not expected at the beginning. So latter on, if we still want to give value to the artist, we need to find more SP for the bot in order to keep pace with the huge demand.
Thanks for this interesting article, there are many things I didn't know yet. Only two questions left: Why is it mandatory to have a post body with 300 characters? Some artists are a visual kind of type who actually doesn't make many words...
And what kind of file is this bot source code? Looks for me like simple json, but that's my first insight in steemit bots :)
Very difficult decision, but I think we will manually curate and drop this requirement for some artistic and musical works. It's necessary for automation to look out for crap posts that are so common..
We have 8 curators and will soon be manually curating as well as automatically.
Hello friend, I am a little worried about the value of the coins in the market that you would advise me
buy now if you want in low!
I am
@surfyogi I have a question about the 300 characters criteria
I normally put my own footer at the end of my post. The footer will consist of
Thanks
Hello @surfyogi, nice work you are doing, weldone.
More grace!
Do videoart projects count? My dream is to create something like this so maybe I’ll just help build this?!!
I ❤ this community of creative minds! Resteemed!
Fun article, thanks for taking the time to both document the history, and the code on github for others!
So much fun we have had! Explosive growth!
4050 followers!
And now @wafrica! #wafrica
Hello dear friend, thank you for the support you have given me. I am always very grateful. I go little by little but for the little time I have been in the community I know that I have grown a little. My goal is to have a great account. I love this community. Greetings
thanks for this article , I know more about @artzone &@surfyogi .
hopefully they become success
Thanks for the interesting information
This has conspicuously added to my knowledge of #artzone. Thanks for bringing it on board
artzone all the way
Excellent post Congratulations
If the auto upvote function of the bot is draining the SP, maybe stop that function, and the curators should do the upvoting, upvoting the winner 100%, and the honorable mentions 50%...?
Thanks, maybe we will separate the bot ad the human curation. It is possible that an other steem acount will do the human part and the bot part will remain with artzone.
I have not announced it yet but we will create a second manual curation account and do curator comments and upvotes from that second account. Will announce to curators soon!
Hello! I find your post valuable for the art community! Thanks for the great post! ARTzone is now following you! ALWAYs follow @artzone and the artzone tag, and support our artists!