The News

It has been quite a week for #Steem. Just a week ago Steemit Inc was bought by the Tron company owned by @justinsunsteemit. So he now controls a big chunk of the available Steem. We well have to see how he chooses to use that power. There are worries he could displace the existing witnesses, but if we all use out votes we may be able to prevent that. Feel free to use me as a proxy. I just noticed one I voted for is inactive, so I will move my vote.

A lot of people are justifiable concerned about what plans Justin has for Steem, but it is looking like a lot of witnesses are cautiously optimistic.

The markets have not gone overboard on the news. Steem is up a bit on a couple of weeks ago, but has settled down for now. It is still in the high 70s of the crypto charts.

Follow-worthy Steemians

• We have had posts by Steemit employees @andrarchy, @vandeberg and @gerbino. They seem to think the new owner can have a positive influence.
• Members of the Tron community have been joining Steem. @jtsofficial has 19.5k followers on Twitter. They now have a decentralised place to post. @offgridlife has been doing a lot to help them get started. I have offered to create accounts for people, but Steemit are processing them in hours now.
• Tribes like @steem.leo are helping out too. They have a quickstart guide aimed at 'Tronics'.
• One Tronic who contacted me for help was @hilman.pradigo. If you find others then make them welcome.

Join a community, or three

Steem communities have been in beta for a few weeks on Steemit and Steempeak. In the last week they became part of the main sites. Anyone can create a community for 3 Steem, but you need to work on building them up and making them useful. The idea is that you can follow a community rather than all the members who may do other posts you are not interested in. Communities have administrators who can control what appears there.

• I have created Guitar and Home Automation communities. I welcome more people to add relevant posts.
• The BEER Community is already pretty big thanks to the efforts of @detlev.
• I know of at least two communities devoted to comics. I would hope the comic artists can congregate on this one or this one.
• I may be active on the Running Community, but will not be posting every run there. In my opinion it should be for more general posts about training, gear or events, but that is up to the community members to decide.
• The @SteemFlagRewards group also has a community. That may be somewhere to track what issues need attention.

I would love to see communities migrate from other platforms such as reddit. Why not when Steem offers more freedom as well as rewards. We just need to build the audience to make it viable.

The Doghouse

An easy way to find people who are trying to milk rewards by buying votes is to check the transactions on those bots. These are some for @boomerang. You will soon find some buying multiple votes per day who deserve some attention. They are not doing this to promote their posts, it is just to get unearned rewards. I leave it to you to decide if this should go on.

Steem on!