Here is the news

Crypto is having another mini boom with Bitcoin nearing $9000 again. Steem and SBD are up a bit and well up on a month ago. Still not looking good compared to this time last year. This has not really affected how Steem ranks against other coins. It is still around 80th place. As long as the price does not suddenly rocket I plan to buy more soon.

Prices
From @coingecko

@Steemit and @steemmonsters are up a bit in the @stateofthedapps chart. The latter was showing over 4000 active users earlier in the week. I wonder how many of those use the social aspects of Steem? I keep saying the site should incorporate some social stuff such as sharing battles in posts.

Dapps

#FollowFriday

I still do not see many people using this tag, but I will keep plugging away as I think it has value to the greater community.

@ashleypox is an artist who had a spectacularly successful introduction post this week thanks to some curation projects. I hope she does not expect that every time. It is good to see that a new user can trend, if that actually gains them followers.
@peteopolis is also new. He is really into Lego. That is a big on-line community who could be using Steem.
@artistivip is another artist who managed to lose control of a previous account. We have to be really careful with our keys. If there is any risk someone has yours then change them and keep a safe copy.
@atma.love is a spiritual British guy living in Bulgaria.

I found all the above thanks to @slobberchops who seeks out interesting new Steemians. You should check out who shares your interests to have more cool posts in your feed. A friend of mine has just joined Steem, but not posted yet. Stay tuned...

The Doghouse

As usual I have been seeing some crap on Steem thanks to the @steemflagrewards team seeking it out. This week we feature @eii who is posting many times per day. It is all single photos based around a large set of hashtags that they list in the posts. I see very few other people using these. They are making a couple of hundred Steem each month for little effort. They posted last year about getting to minnow mostly using bots. They should know that is no longer acceptable behaviour. This is part of why we get free downvotes so that we can return their rewards to the pool whilst reducing their incentive to continue like this.

Eii

They seem to hand out a lot of tribe tokens, but I assume they are earning a fair few of those too. They even gave me some BEER! I know the tribes can blacklist accounts to stop them earning.

Looks at the transactions on some of the bots they use I find some other accounts doing much the same. Examples are @bonp and @omp.

They buy multiple votes on each of these from various bots. It looks like the return on this is not too bad.

I will mention @fersher who is one of a set of accounts runs by an old adversary of mine (see @stimialiti @atempt @slowgrow). They recently got a 1000 SP delegation from someone who likes to encourage disruption of Steem. I get frequent downvotes from this lot, but even with this delegation they struggle to take a cent off my posts and a single vote from certain other people more than cancels them out. They do not dare to post and will probably continue like this even though their rewards are tiny. Such a waste of effort.

Downvotes

Closing words

Despite the relatively low Steem price and seeing all this abuse I am still upbeat about Steem. I see it as having great potential and it may only take a few key people joining up to make it go viral. We are the pioneers and we can help that to happen. Keep telling the world what they are missing out on. I really do not mind spreading the rewards wider as long as they go to those who work for them.

Steem on!

The geeky guitarist and facilitator of the 10K Minnows Project.