@greetersguild and @firststeps presents.......

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WHATS NEW IN THE STEEMIT COMMUNITY?

VOLUME ONE

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This is the first edition of the @greetersguild “Community Spotlight”. The Steemit Greeters Guild was formed to welcome, encourage, build and train newcomers on the Steemit platform to be the absolute best they can be. By utilizing education, compassion, humanitarianism, solidarity and most of all, support, we not only help individuals find their true selves on this platform, but offline in the real world as well. The founder and President of the guild has a quote he has been using since he personally joined the Steemit platform that we are going to share. "The more you know, the more you grow". Which brings us to the purpose of this article. This publication is here to provide insight, information and education to the readers in the community. Staying connected and aware of what is happening in our community is vital for the success of our communities as a whole.

The Steemit platform is so much more than random bloggers trying to earn some cash. It is a real community with good, genuine people creating projects and initiatives that make a real difference in people’s lives, online and offline. This publication seeks to highlight these initiatives as well as other activities that are important to the education and overall positive growth of our community.

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PAY IT FORWARD BY @THEDARKHORSE

Although most of us are familiar with the concept of ‘pay it forward’, @thedarkhorse has made a unique adaptation for the Steemit community. It all started with a special contest he wanted to form to celebrate the milestone of gaining 300 followers. To honor his followers he asked them to offer suggestions on how to structure it.

A couple days later he wrote a post about his own personal experience with Paying It Forward. After receiving an overwhelming positive response from that post, he knew exactly which suggestion to choose and the Pay It Forward Contest was born.

He explains the main premise of the contest this way,

Lets help reward bloggers who clearly put effort into their posts, but just aren't seeing the rewards that you think are deserved. Your Entry will be a single Curation Post that needs to highlight 3 other bloggers and link to at least 1 of their posts. This is your opportunity to share why we should visit these bloggers and what drew your attention to them.

Another unique aspect of the contest is the reward system. Instead of rewarding the featured bloggers with SBD, they receive shares to @steembasicincome, which guarantee automatic upvotes of the recipient's posts for the life of their account. Through the weeks, the contest has evolved somewhat to include some additional rewards for entry authors and judge's personal picks, but the basic premise remains the same.

The Pay It Forward Contest has become so popular that the founder has just opened a new account to host it called @pifc. Let’s support this contribution to the steemit community by encouraging @thedarkhorse through comments and upvoting both his Pay It Forward Contests and his new account.

In addition to his contest, @thedarkhorse has also started highlighting other great community members and Steemit initiatives that make a positive difference or encourage quality content. His most recent Pay It Forward Spotlight gave some spotlight to and drew attention to initiatives started by @terminallyill, including @greetersguild. Please check out this article!

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NED AND @THEORETICAL EXPLORE SMT’S AND ORACLES

In this talk, the CEO of Steemit addresses a major issue that could be theoretically solved with SMT’s and Oracles. Currently the trending page features posts that receive the most monetary value in upvotes, mostly from bid bots or related services. This allows whales and those with a bigger bankroll a disproportionate amount of influence. This comes from self voting and vote services which allows many users to gain exposure and a following, regardless if they publish quality material or junk. This, as predicted early on and showcased now on a daily basis, encourages unscrupulous behavior such as buying massive amounts of upvotes, creating scam related schemes or the opening of multiple accounts. This was never the intention of the creators, despite the fact so many have relied on such behavior to take advantage of the Steemit platform and abuse the rewards pool that we all share from.

This article explains how this issue might be able to be solved:

“An Oracle on SMTs will be able to submit a list of users (a “whitelist”) to the blockchain who have satisfied some type of criteria. Users will be entitled to earn an SMT, whose token distribution mechanisms are enhanced by an Oracle, only if they are on the list that the Oracle(s) submitted to the Steem blockchain. One example of how Oracles could be used is as a means of validating that an account belongs to one person and is that person’s only account.

If it can be determined that a person has only one account, then the number of upvotes rather than their monetary value, can be used for the trending page. That way a more equitable system of ‘one account, one vote’ can be implemented, helping eliminate the abuse of the platform and hopefully returning the Steemit platform to its intended glory. This will make it easier to both locate and reward quality content for everyone utilizing the Steemit blockchain.

We personally endorse this effort and we believe it’s important for all concerned Steemians to follow the @steemitblog to stay up to date with news regarding the Steemit platform. Even if you don’t completely understand some of the technical aspects, it’s a great place to express your concerns, learn new things, become more active within the platform and most of all, show your support. Changes in the community start with us as a community, so please do your part and support efforts that benefit us all as a community!

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ELEGANCE: A NEW STEEM PLATFORM FOR ARTISTS

As we all should be well aware of, all of the creative arts are important to any community. They help mold not only our lives, but the world around us by providing culture, expression, individuality and most of all, beauty. Every member of @greetersguild believes that the creative arts should be showcased and celebrated regularly. Poets, authors, musicians and performers have found a home on the steemit blockchain, either through blogging or applications like @dtube and @dsound, or newer applications such as @dlive. But what about the visual arts? Up until recently however the visual art community has not been given a suitable platform to work from. That was until Elegance was created and provided incredible new opportunities!

According to this article “Elegance is a platform where artists of all kinds - painters, designers, print-makers etc can express their imaginative or technical skills and get rewarded in return...” We can show our support of the art community by resteeming this announcement, curating the material from Elegance, writing articles based on this new platform or sharing it on your other social media accounts. Be sure to drop by the Elegance site to show your support and appreciation by commenting, upvoting and resteeming any posts that catch your eye.

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WITNESS APPLICATION BY BRANDON FRYE

Please check out Brandon Frye’s Witness Application

Witnesses are the backbone of the Steemit blockchain and help keep things running efficiently and effectively. As the Steemit platform grows, so does the need for reliable witnesses that are vested (and invested) in our communities. We plan on featuring new applications and developments regularly as part of this publication, from witness backed software down all the way down to concepts for initiatives created by minnows. These features are for informational and educational purposes only. Any features in this portion do not represent an endorsement from @greetersguild or any of our members unless stated so.

Voting for witnesses is important and should be considered a civic duty for all Steemians that utilize this platform in any way. If you would like to know more about witnesses so you can make a more informed decision, check out this post by @pfunk.

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STEEMIT FOR NEWBS BY @viking-ventures

Another feature that we plan on highlighting in this publication is a community resource that we find helpful. This week we chose a book by @viking-ventures called Steemit For Newbs. The author describes the purpose for the book this way:

“As with any internet platform, Steemit comes with its own share of advantages and disadvantages. Part of the point of this book is to help you overcome the disadvantages and turn the advantages into profit, even if it takes awhile to see any return on your investment – whether that investment is time or money or a little of both.”

That sounds like some solid advice that even those of us who have been here awhile could use.

Please take a look at the first chapter titled “What is Steemit”. If you find it helpful be sure to resteem it and encourage this incredibly talented and upcoming author through comments and/or upvotes. Remember, providing and curating quality material is what the Steemit platform is all about!

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HELPING UNDERPRIVILEGED CHILDREN GAIN ACCESS TO EDUCATION IN BANGLADESH

We believe the best thing about the Steemit community is our overall willingness and ability to help those in need. That is why, every week, we will be featuring a special need for either an individual or a charity, hoping to gain them some much deserved exposure and help reaching their goals. Please support these causes by upvoting, resteeming, interacting and/or donating.

This week’s feature is the School For Social and Educational Development of Underprivileged Children in Bangladesh, overseen by @azizbd. The school has been working to provide free access to quality education to the community and has aided in educating roughly sixty children since 2016. They also provide quality nutrition such as fruit once a week for the children in attendance, as well as food every month for the most impoverished families.

As stated in all of his posts the money from upvotes will go to personally support @azizbd. The best way to support the school is by transferring steem to @schoolforsdg4 or writing a post about the school and donating the proceeds to the charity. All help is appreciated and is going to an honorable cause!

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