The Kindest Night Of The Year Challenge
Aw yus frens it's been a hot minute since I did a challenge, so we're doing another December-themed one! You might remember last year I held the Evergreen December Challenge, which was an environmentally-themed, month-long contest. This December's contest is going to be about random acts of kindness! Steem has been pretty down lately - I've felt down about it, I've seen others feeling down about it - and not just the price, but the whole environment. We've got people downvoting to counter @steembasicincome votes now, which is just crazy to me as SBI is there helping the little redfish and minnows and is a win-win situation in that if you want to invest in it, you also are buying shares for others as well - it's a community-driven, helping-each-other system! There's nothing "abusive" about it, but there you are - "new Steem" seems to have brought out the bullies even more than before. A lot of people are understandably frustrated!
So I thought, my favorite thing about Steem has always been the #ophumanangels community. I know, I know, it's been pretty quiet of late (the whole blockchain has been pretty quiet of late... ), but I still harbor hope that we can #bringbacktheops because dammit it just feels good to do nice things, don't you think? I know I'm always inspired when I see other people's posts about ops, and it gives me ideas!
Sooooooooooooooooo I call this one The Kindest Night Of The Year challenge (since I celebrate the solstice which is the longest night of the year)!
How It Works
Do as many of these 31 ideas for random acts of kindness as you want!
- Give someone a compliment
- Let someone cut in front of you in line
- Hold the door open for someone
- Hide a kind note for someone to find
- Donate some books to a Little Free Library
- Put some money in a vending machine so the next person can get a free drink (or whatever)
- Send a thank you note to someone
- Feed wildlife (safely! Birdseed or something)
- Offer to help someone
- Let a car in front of you in traffic or give up your seat on the bus if it’s crowded
- Send a snail mail letter to someone you care about or a prisoner in jail
- Give a gift to your mail carrier, the super or maintenance person of your building, the barista you see every morning, or someone else who serves you on a regular basis
- Shovel the snow off someone else’s sidewalk or stairs, or a bus stop
- Pick up litter (don’t forget to tag that one #cleanplanet!)
- Give money to a homeless person
- Bake extra and share
- Volunteer
- Smile and say “hello” to people you pass by throughout your day
- Plant a free tree with my referral code (hee hee): http://onetreeplanted.refr.cc/wrenpaasch
- Visit elders or sick people in a nursing home, or animals in the shelter
- Tell someone how much they mean to you
- Find a book about a group of people you don’t know much about, and learn more about them
- Sign a petition, donate to a GoFundMe, or write a letter to a company or politician about a cause you care about
- Learn how to say a few basic things in another language (this includes sign language!)
- Put things back in the correct place and make the shelf neat when you’re in the store. Retail workers’ lives are going to be crazy this month! Be extra nice to them.
- Buy fair trade chocolate or coffee, or something from a local artisan
- When putting your shopping cart back in the corral, grab another stray one from the parking lot and put it back, too. This helps both the workers as well as other drivers who might hit it.
- Put change in someone’s expired parking meter
- Tend to some place that is sacred; clean up a gravesite, or a temple, or a church, or make an offering or light a candle (where it’s allowed, don’t go setting a graveyard on fire please). In our modern world we tend to disconnect and everything becomes drab and mundane. Do something that feeds your soul (and also the souls of others who hold that place sacred too)!
- Invite someone to a gathering or for an outing who you think might be lonely or have nowhere to go over the holidays
- Leave a good review for a business or worker, and/or tip well. Usually people only hear about complaints!
Then Write a Post
Write about your experience(s) doing the kindness acts. Pictures are great, but obviously not all of them are photo opportunities, so we're doing this on the honor system. Cheating on a kindness contest would be pretty terrible, so I have faith that y'all are honest. ;)
Post By Saturday, December 21st
That's the winter solstice. Entries are closed after the date has passed in my time zone, so at 00:01 am on 22 Dec MST. PUT THE LINK TO YOUR POST IN THE COMMENTS OF THIS ONE so I can find it. Be sure to tag it #ophumanangels as well!
Winners Are Chosen By My Cats
If you're a follower of my blog you know that Maggie and Yuan judge all my contests. Everyone who enters gets their name put on a piece of paper, and I put a treat or catnip on all the papers, and whichever one my cat(s) go to first is the winner. There will be three winners, so it will be the first three treats they choose to eat!
I am ready for the treats.
Prizes!
First Place
wins 5 shares of SBI (because fuck bullies! I love SBI! LOL), 2 Steem in @dustsweeper votes (if you don't know Dusty, he scans for "dust" votes and upvotes them to get them above the threshold so you actually get paid), AND 5 Steem sent to the Steem-project of your choice: @drutter for the Mission: Agua-Possible project in Venezuela, @schoolforsdg4 to support the school in Bangladesh, or @treeplanter to support tree planting in Cameroon. :)
Second Place
wins 3 shares of SBI, 2 Steem in @dustsweeper votes, and 5 Steem sent to one of the three Steem-funded projects of your choice
Third Place
wins 2 Steem in @dustsweeper votes and 5 Steem sent to one of the 3 projects of your choice.
So Go Be Kind
Because kindness rules! :D
Lovely to see one of your contests again :) this one is inspired! 💐
Thanks! I hope you decide to join in! <3
I will do my best :)
Hello!
This post has been manually curated, resteemed
and gifted with some virtually delicious cake
from the @helpiecake curation team!
Much love to you from all of us at @helpie!
Keep up the great work!
Manually curated by @ecoinstant.
@helpie is a Community Witness.
Thank you! I don't know why that other person downvoted you. :(
This post has received a 3.13 % upvote from @drotto thanks to: @sbi-booster.
Liiiiiiiiiiiiit!!!!!
OH YES!! Bring back #ophumanangels!!! I love this - I'll share in Natural Medicine for you too. Love it. xx
And downvoting the people with SBI - that's insane. What's being done to counter it? I've noticed one or two mosquitoes but it doesn't matter much to me.
Thanks for the share!
I know that some people are countering the downvotes with follow-up upvotes; some people have tried to talk to the one doing the downvotes but apparently he isn't responding to them. But other than that, I don't know that there is a concerted, unified effort.
This post was shared in the Curation Collective Discord community for curators, and upvoted and resteemed by the @c-squared community account.
If you are a community leader and/or contest organizer, please join the Discord and let us know you if you would like to promote the posting of your community or contest.
@c-squared runs a community witness. Please consider using one of your witness votes on us here
Dear friend its been too long, how are you sorry i havent been around. I am now nd love the challange and i am sharing it in the steemterminal for all that want to participate and i will enter asap,
Love and Kiss for the CAT’s
Britt
Hi Britt! No worries, I haven't been around much of late, either. I hope you are well. Thank you for sharing! I look forward to reading your post! :)
This is a cool one! I need to keep tabs now :D
Is it really that people are downvoting to counter sbi/steembasicincome? That is so sad! Already we don't earn much :(
It is just one guy and his alt accounts from what i understand. He says that he thinks SBI is "vote buying." Some people are countering with upvotes and some have tried to reach out to him but so far he's not budging. Bullies got worse after the hf, not better...
Hi @phoenixwren. This is a great challenge, especially for this time of the year. I will try to challenge myself further this season with different items than what I usually do.
Right on! I hope you post about your efforts and join in, i love reading people's stories of random acts of kindness. :)
Great cause I need to get back on it to be honest. Although do a lot of those in my daily life. Having computer issues at the mo though as my one with all my photo's is not playing ball, I'm hoping it will kick back into action soon.... 💯🐒
I understand computer issues! My wifi was down more than up for a couple of months. Been working the past few days ...I hope it stays working!
I think it's shorted out so it's looking dyer! Fingers cross it will dry out in a few days haha 💯🐒
Great ideas!!!
Thank you! :)
I did the thing with your referral code! I don't know what happened, it just took me to an empty cart that said - continue shopping.....
So I did! And now I'm looking at this and thinking we should get involved here locally!
They sometimes have big tree planting events! The code you need to copy from a pop up, then you "shop" and choose a project and put a tree(s) in your cart, then you paste the coupon code to get one free when you check out. :)
Great to see you on The Chain, @phoenixwren. As mentioned in my last comment to you, for some reason, you do not show up on my feed as much as before #newsteem regardless of your posting frequency.
Your contest sounds wonderful and the fastidiousness of your judges cannot be challenged.
There is one thing in this post which motivated me to make a comment. That is....
This happened to me recently. Somewhere along the line someone must have given my some SBI and when an upvote came from it a downvote soon followed. At first it took be back a bit; yet thinking on it further they had a point. SBI is not Proof of Brain no matter how well intended. A bot is a bot is a bot, as a rose is a rose is a rose. My final verdict was to agree and take the hit in stride.
Just thought to throw that out there as another perspective. If you want to help those little folks then my manual curation might be more in line with #newsteem. Just sayin. 😎
Wishing you a happy and non-downvoted Yule! 🎄
It's a community bot - you cannot participate without helping someone else along the way. Which is proof of brain in a different way - proof of you thinking someone else worthy of some shares, be it from winning a contest that they participated in, or you follow them and like their content, or whatever. You can't just buy in for yourself without choosing someone else to help too. So while the voting is not manual - there has never been a rule against non-manual voting. And I say this as someone who has never automated my votes. People automate for different reasons - maybe they're on vacation and they don't want their VP to go to waste so they set it to support their favorite authors. But I buy SBI for people generally because my manual vote is worth a penny. It's a different way I can support people that has more impact than my paltry vote. Making all bots punished takes away the ability of us little people to support causes/people we want to support in a greater way. I'm not talking about big ass bot vote buying - sure, downvote that with my blessing. But like, I want to send little bot votes to say, the school in Bangladesh or the well project in Venezuela or someone who does a good #ophumanangels, and now I can't anymore because it all gets nullified. It IS killing my manual choice to read an article and want to reward it more than my poor ass can otherwise. And yes, I can send a Steem plainly - but a bot vote would give them more than 1 Steem. And sending it in the wallet wouldn't give the post a chance to reach the 5 Steem threshold where it's rewards are not penalized, nor expand it's reach by having more votes on it. It's minimizing the ability of anyone without a big vote to offer an even semi-decent vote to things they believe in or have any influence or power at all. It's giving more power to the whales and less to the minnows.
Of course, people are free to be assholes if they want to be - they always have been - but this bullying has gotten a lot worse now. It's preventing people from building their accounts and supporting other accounts so that we can all grow in any way other than being financially able to buy a large stake with fiat. I think it's bullshit.
You will find posts from over a year ago, @phoenixwren, of me beating the drum for an optional distributed CAPCHA proof of Proof of Brain system for the blockchain.
Without such a system, in my opinion, there will always be grey zones of automated account usage. For example the auto-voting that you had brought up would be under the same attack as SBIs if they could be clearly identified. It is, likely, only the fact that they cannot be distinguished from manual usage that keeps them from being downvoted.
It seems to me that the technology cannot stop the use of automation of account use; nor should it. The code can, however, offer rewards to curb that behavior through the use of their algorithms.
By rewarding the usage of a CAPCHA system so that stake holders can make a more informed decision of their actions would be a good thing in my option. There would also be the bonus of giving the non-top 20 witnesses a revenue stream of CAPCHA internal transaction fees coming from a community pool.
We could then bring to the debate a situation whereby we could say definitively that , this account was downvoted when they were still under a CAPCHA verification time limit to this account was downvoted when they were not under a CAPCHA verification time limit.
Until such a system is in place (which is not likely) we must do what we can to minimalize behaviors that are not desired by the Community's representatives... the top 20 witnesses. This brings us to the opinion of the Code is Law, which is another story. You will find me in that camp.
My approach is not to ban bots but to offer an option that clearly identifies manual account usage so that dApps and stake holders can decide on their response through verifiable means or demand the use of those means to avoid the consequences of their actions.
Reading my post you will see that all STEEM generated through automated account actions are deemed counterfeit STEEM in my opinion.
[Edit : Corrected proper links and some grammer ]
I don't agree, especially with:
The witnesses are like senators in the US - mainly decided by monied interests, not the masses. A whale's witness vote holds more weight than a minnow's. None of it is proof of brain, it's proof of riches, the same as any other crypto you have to be able to buy into, abiding by the "you have to have money to make money" principle.
Steem was supposed to be different, where poor people could legit earn with work, and SBI was a way we could make tiny investments to help each other rise out of poverty and have income from it like rich people have. But instead Steem becomes more and more for the already-rich (including the 50/50 split).
People talk about "onboarding the masses" while making it less likely that they will ever want to do so. I don't talk it up to my friends anymore, that's for sure.
So I was thinking on it and here is my idea for how witness votes should work:
If you have:
posted x number of posts/comments total (with an algorithm to check for spammy ones and not count those);
and you've been active (posting x number of posts/comments per month) for the past year,
then you get to witness vote.
The witness vote is weighted just the same for all active members of the community. If a person becomes inactive for a few months, then their witness vote stops counting, which erases the problem of people setting their witness votes, quitting Steem, and still having them affect things. Also, witnesses who quit being witnesses automatically get unvoted as well, solving the problem of people setting their votes and not checking them to make sure the witnesses themselves are still active.
This way, the votes are decided by active, established members of the community, rich or not. And no one has outsized power. The witnesses are still people who know how/can afford the hardware, but if they don't do what's good for the community, they'd lose their spot.
The witnesses are representatives that achieve their positions via stake based voting. Because of that governance we are able to have the fastest, free transaction fee, scalable blockchain that exist to my knowledge - without the hashing power required by Proof of Work blockchains.
Those witnesses receive stake based votes. Even in the White Paper STEEM's design was stake based. One can wish it to be different, but it never has and (unless one is willing to put a lot of stake forward to enforce that change) it never will be other than stake based.
If someone has led you to believe that it ever was an egalitarian democracy they have done you a mis-service.
STEEM is quickly moving away from the one trick pony that it had been from the time of my account creation. The power of that fast, free and scalable blockchain is rising and Condenser is quickly becoming just another dApp on The Chain. A wonderful and unique dApp to be sure. A dApp that allowed us to put personalities on hash addresses.
My feeling is that STEEM was never meant to replace Facebook. My feeling is that Delegated Proof of Work was an experiment to see if scalability could be achieved.
It has been achieved.
We are likely going to see the blockchain explode in ways we cannot yet imagine after the next HF. We will have users that don't even know they are using the STEEM blockchain. They will deal in tokens while not even realising that those tokens float on top of the foundation of STEEM. It may be hard to believe that this experiment is only a little over three years old the way we look nostalgically back at that short evolution; but STEEM has only yet begun in my opinion.
Because the whole premise of STEEM mining being based on Proof of Brain, it seems critical to me that all forms of automated counterfeit STEEM mining be penalised, so as to reduce the counterfeiting. A bot is a bot is a bot which devalues STEEM through counterfeiting in my opinion.
OK, again, you're allowed to disagree with me and love it Because Technology or whatever, but that doesn't mean that I don't think it has problems and would like to see it improved. It has always been stake based voting, but I think that sucks. You can think it's lovely. People have always been unfair here, and I think that sucks. You can think it's lovely. Your opinion is your opinion and mine is mine. I am way more concerned with people escaping poverty than any other aspect. I've always known that this space was very heavy with ancaps, but I am not one and so my values and priorities are different. The tech is the means that I was hoping to be used for the ends of lifting people out of poverty. If those ends aren't met, then people using the tech to play games and not realize they're using it means very little to me.
You're allowed to think the system is great; I'm allowed to think that it's not. You can think that the community on the blogging end is irrelevant in the long run, I disagree. You can think the blogging end was all an experiment and "one trick pony" and so doesn't matter, but I think the community came and showed their dedication and then were given the shaft in repayment for their hard work.
I'll hang around to support the people I care about and the causes I care about, but from my view, things are a lot worse than they were, and a lot of our community has left our little village, and I think that's sad. If Steem wasn't serious about the "social media" aspect, then they shouldn't have touted it as such. If it was only for the techies and no one else was welcome, then "onboarding the masses" should never have been attempted. It should have been billed as "an experimental forum for blockchain enthusiasts."
Steemit had been flying a Beta warning on their opening page for about three years. Only recently has it come down. Does that tell you anything?
It's irrelevant to my point. Again, you can think it's great. I don't.
The fact that the project was deemed to be in Beta until fairly recently by the main developers of the project is very relevant in my opinion. But let's save that thought for a happier day. 😎
It's relevant to your point, but not to mine: alleviating poverty and community.
We're not going to agree on the point of Steem and it's potential though, so yeah, let's leave it.