What I like about Palnet so far, and a very few reservations...

I bought a bit more Steem recently, but mainly to buy and power up PAL to stake on Palnet. It's taken me a while to get my head around the project, but now I've investigated a bit further I really like the look of it.

Also, as with Steem, where the first rule is to mainly post about Steem, the first rule of Palnet is to mainly post about...

Palnet

(The basics, just in case you haven't heard.)

Palnet is another front end to the Steem blockchain, with its own reward-token, PAL, which you can earn on top of Steem and SBDs.

If you want to reward people with PAL you need to acquire some PAL tokens from steem-engine and 'stake them' - this then gives you voting power which functions more or less in the same way as Steem Power.

Once you've staked your PAL tokens you can use any Steem front end and then when you upvote through them, you also reward people in PAL!

All you have to do earn PAL is to use the 'palnet' tag on any of your posts and it will be eligible for PAL rewards via upvotes from accounts with staked PAL.

PALNET functions just like steem with a few very important differences, such as:

• There's only one (additional) token: PAL.
• There's a 50-50 creator-curator reward split
• You get one free downvote a day which doesn't deplete your VP
• There are no bid-bots which reward in PAL (at least not at time of writing).
• There is a shorter, 4 week power down period
• It stemming from the PAL discord and @minnowsupport project, Palnet has got a much more community feel about it (at least for now)
• It's a lot easier to get in touch with one of the main moderators on the PAL discord.
• Going forwards it looks like abuse is going to be much more tightly regulated by moderators and through the @nopal4u account.

For more detail on how it all works check out the links below:

• For an excellent guide on how to get started with PAL and PALNET, then I recommend reading this most excellent post - The dazed and confused user guide by @juliakponsford
• Click here. For the PAL Whitepaper - which discusses things such as distribution of the original PAL airdrop, inflation, sinks and so on.
• Click here For the PAL discord server which is vital for you to check out if you're interested in PAL ethics. Also, as @aggroed says - 'if you're not doing Discord, you're not doing Steem' (and you're certainly not doing PAL)!

NB: If you haven't already done so, when you log into steem-engine make sure to check whether you've been gifted any PAL in the recent air drop and claim them. The time window to do this is running short! Details for how to do that are in the above post.

What I like about PAL so far

In short I like:

• The extra rewards (of course!)
• The 50-50 voting system
• The community feel of the project and the community behind the project
• The more equal distribution of stake
• The 'take no shit' approach to abusers from the outset.

The value of my Steem + PAL votes are 150% of just my Steem vote

To use the most excellent and lucky @steevc (because I don't usually vote comment replies, but I needed a pur test case) as an example

@steevc will receive....

• $0.0185 of Steem (75% $0.025 worth of Steem) AND
• $0.001 of PAL (0.75 PAL in $ = (0.075* 0.42) *0.37 = $0.01) - 0.42 = the current PAL price, and 0.37 the dollar price.

Of course this does depend on stake -I've got about 3K PAL currently staked compared to 15K SP, so five times more Steem for only double the reward compared to PAL.

The 50-50 rewards split is worth trying

As @clayboyn points out in this post: Why Rewards Have to Change - a 50-50 split is moving towards recognizing that an author should be dependent on the people that consume (and thus presumably derive value from) their content; this compared to the failed 75-25 split on Steem which simply means it is too profitable to self-vote or sell your votes.

50-50 makes more logical sense if we want to sort out trending, move towards 'mutual support' (rather than the 75-25 self-support) because it encourages us to vote for quality content that we think others are likely to vote for, especially when there are moderators (see below) with large PP (Pal Power) accounts who are manually curating 'quality content'.

Of course we'll be getting 50-50 on Steem sometime soon, but the commitment to curation is much stronger with PAL so we might (we might not) see an even more radical shift in the curation-author split in favor of curation on PAL in coming months or years.

Your incoming rewards are much simpler to calculate

With one token (just PAL) and a 50-50% - nice and easy for my brain-thing to do the maths, or 'math' if you're American and insist on using wrong English.

The community of voluntarism behind PAL

Palnet has been brought to us by PAL (Peace, Abundance, Liberty), and MSP (The Minnow Support Project - @minnowsupportproject)

As far as I understand it, PAL started as a Discord server a couple of years or so ago to support new people trying to get started with Steem (which, if you remember, isn't that easy!), and MSP is simply the leadership group which evolved from PAL which essentially means the following mods:

@victoriabsb
@swelker101
@r0nd0n
@juliakponsford
@ma1neevent
@kubbyelizabeth
@isaria
@followbtcnews
@discordiant
@crimsonclad
@clayboyn
@aggroed
@ausbitbank
@danielsaori
@drakos

Each of these received 30K PAL as part of their 'Proof of Moderation' and will be receiving an additional 10K per month for the next 11 months (2) These are thus the people most empowered (along with the 100PP and best name on Palnet '@nopal4u' account) to provide the healthiest rewards and also to combat abuse by downvoting.

NB I am 100% fine with all of these people receiving this much PAL - I know how much behind the scenes effort it takes to run something like PAL and minnowsupport. This airdrop process has all been very upfront, details of which can be found in this post.

It's also worth noting that many of these new PAL Orcas (1) are relatively small-fish on Steem - some only have a few thousand SP. Others, as you'll no doubt recognize are much larger Steem holders and Steem witnesses, but overall there is a lot of 'fishy class diversity' here.

NB - many of these people have recently put out their own personal guidelines for their curation strategies, so check their feeds for more details!

Do No Harm, Take No Shit

That is the summary motto of PAL, and the translation of the Latin on the Palcoin graphic (2)

The more extended versions of PAL can be found in the following three posts (copied below from the PAL discord server)

• THE RULES: https://steemit.com/minnowsupportproject/@minnowsupport/minnow-support-project-community-rules
• THE COMMUNITY STANDARDS: https://steemit.com/minnowsupportproject/@minnowsupport/minnow-support-project-community-standards-the-spirit-of-msp
• THE BYLAWS & CHARTER: https://steemit.com/minnowsupportproject/@minnowsupport/minnow-support-project-updated-governance-bylaws-and-charter-approved

I'd recommend skimming the above if you're thinking of buying PAL, you may as well know what it is you are buying into, but the brief version of the ethical guidelines may be summarised as follows:

• No cheating, plagiarism, and/or dishonesty of any kind
• No sale or trade of sex or illegal substances
• No stealing or destruction of any form of intellectual property:
• No harassment of individuals or groups of individuals
• F4F, V4V, vote begging, post-promotion are all highly discouraged:
• Don't abuse the bots: defined as getting more than one every 12 hrs for a single human. In a similar vein you are only welcome to have one Discord account per human.
• Don't be aggressive:This is a Peace group.
• There are also guidelines for dealing with conflict and maintaining trust

Some people expressed concern when a certain account was muted for harassing another user, worrying that this might be the beginning of a small group enforcing censorship.

However, the rules of engagement have been in the Discord server for a long time, and maybe a certain level of 'policing' is preferable to a free-for all?

@nopal4u and the prospect of abuse fighting on Palnet

Anti-abuse is a big thing on PAL and the @nopal4u account is powered up with 100K PP and ready to downvote spam and other overvalued posts. This is yet to begin proper, but I like the idea of a large PP account dedicated to fighting abuse from the outset, that way we're much less likely to get the sort of travesty of trending pages we've got on Steem.

More equal distribution of Pal Power

Besides the dozen or so mods with 30K PP, the original airdrop to whitelisted steemians (something else I like, the whitelist concept!) was capped at 2500 PP, so things are much more equal than they are with Steem.

I personally see this with my own capacity to reward people - it feels relatively greater on Palnet than it does on Steem.

Reservations about Palnet

Some have concerns over a small group of mods having too much power to 'mute accounts', seeing this as akin to censorship.

HOWEVER, my own view on this is as follows:

(a) Anyone can get on the PAL discord server and vie to be a part of this rule-making process
(b) If we just allow total freedom, it just means larger accounts can act with impunity. Individuals don't generally come to the aid of victims of harassment. Having a group of mods to act on abusers might be more desirable.
(c) We've tried this without ethics and more individual freedom - and look at the joke that is Steemit and the Steem price
(d) the PAL rules are overt and fairly standard rules of reasonable human behavior.
(e) It brings us more into line with mainstream media, and thus gives us more mass appeal.
(f) muting only happens in extreme circumstances and only after due process.

A few of us have maybe benefited unfairly from having having active alt-accounts, I've even noticed certain rather large-names taking a cheeky pay-out from the smaller community accounts they run.

I think the #palnet hashtag needs to evolve as a means of getting PAL payments - I mean, what am I supposed to use as a tag for posts about palnet?!?

From an entirely subjective perspective I had a turgid time on steem-engine the other day trying to pick up some cheap PAL - people just kept under-bidding me!

Conclusions

I'm glad PAL on discord has evolved into Palnet on Steem. I don't really enjoy hanging out on Discord, chat rooms aren't my thing, but this evolution looks like it's going to be great for the blockchain!

Notes

(1) I don't think you need quite as much PAL to classify as an Orca as there's so much less of it than Steem, also if I arbitrarily set the fishy boundaries @3s rather than @5s, I'm a PAL dolphin, near enough. Cheers!)

(2) Edited from original following clarification.

All of this is my own interpretation of what's occurring. If I've made any errors please let me know in the comments and I'll edit accordingly!