The News

Things are looking bad with coronavirus spreading around the world. Italy has suffered from a lot of cases, but the UK is not too affected yet. Even so some sport and other events are being cancelled and some educational establishments are shutting too. On top of that we have a bit of a market crash. Cryptocurrencies have suffered as much as the stock markets with Bitcoin dipping below $5000 and Steem touching less than 10c. They have recovered a little now. I just bought a little more Steem to power up.

Prices from @coingecko

One of the reasons to power up right now is to support our community witnesses. We have ten of the top eleven right now with Steemit puppet accounts making up the rest of the top twenty. There are others who have been pushed down the charts who could really use some more votes. Any running version 0.22.5 are operated by Steemit and could be used to force through damaging changes to benefit the exchanges who Justin Sun persuaded to help him.

Votes for @cervantes @someguy123 @drakos @aggroed @therealwolf @lukestokes.mhth @followbtcnews could give the Steem community back the upper hand. I trust them to not sell us out. I have met some of these people.

I will also suggest that you use @steempeak rather than the Steemit site for a much better experience. Together with the Steem Keychain extension developed by @yabamatt and @stoodkev it makes using Steem so much easier than it used to be and they are continually innovating. Steempeak has 'badges' that let you follow moderated sets of users. There is a badge for witnesses.

Follow Friday

Here are some other people you could follow:

• I met @cryptocurator at an event in London a while back and we stay in touch. He has been doing some good posts about recent events on Steem.
• @nickyhavey is a musician, but he has also written some good posts on how to use Steem and he has set himself a challenge to run and hike 2020km this year for charity.
• @meesterboom is a really creative guy when it comes to writing and artwork as well as loving his beer. He just did a fun post about vote buyers.
• I keep pushing comic artists here, but @sidekickmatt @northwestnomad @drwatson @arseniclullaby really deserve to have more followers. I would think people would like to comics in their feeds. There is much more to life than crypto.
• Other creative people on Steem include @silviabeneforti @paolobeneforti @ultravioletmag.

The Doghouse

Even when Steem goes down you will still see people trying to exploit it for pure profit whilst adding no value. The easiest way to find some is to check on who is buying votes from 'bots' such as Boomerang, Redlambo and Thebot (use the 'Incoming' filter to see them). You will see people using several of these per post whilst getting hardly any real interaction. This is not about promotion, it is just for the money. I see a lot of cases of fake @Actifit posts where they have obviously just copied a post and did not even say anything about the alleged exercise. I spotted one where they had the exact same number of steps each day and noticed that Actifit were not getting their cut on the posts. You can downvote these yourself and tag @steemflagrewards to get them noticed. Use 'bid bot misuse' in your comment.

Happy Weekend

I hope you have a healthy and happy weekend. The sport fans may have less to watch, but there are other things you can do. If you have suggestions for #FollowFriday then leave a comment or do your own post and let me know about it.

Steem on!