I'm not entirely sure how to start this post. Other than to come right out and say it.
Over the past few days Adam (@aussieninja) and I have discussed the future of @thefreshfive. In the end, we came to the conclusion that it was time to let the Fresh Five account as it currently exists come to a close. I have zeroed out the account balances, and undelegated the SP I had allocated to the account. Once all current posts have paid out, I will begin powering down the account and will split the proceeds between Adam and myself. This will mark the end of the Fresh Five as it exists today.
I have always been very up front about the time commitment that The Fresh Five was, and when I handed the reigns over to Adam, he understood that it was a major commitment. I don't think I could have made a better choice in who to take over the daily posts. Adam has done a terrific job welcoming new accounts and being a great ambassador for Steem! Please make sure you are following him at @aussieninja and showing your appreciation to him. He's working on becoming full time Crypto and can use every upvote you can give him. You couldn't ask for a better Steemian, and I truly appreciate all he has done, and will continue to do on this plaform and in all of his endeavors.
There probably is no one thing that has brought us to this decision. But a lot of things come together to have a big impact.
First and foremost is probably the time commitment. That has always been the biggest obstacle. Adam confided to me that it takes him about an hour a day to find the Steemians he highlights. This lines up pretty well with my own experience when I was running the account. When you have a lot of different tasks on your plate, one task that takes an hour of your time is pretty significant.
Loss of Delegation - When I started the Fresh Five endeavor I was receiving two significant delegations from the wonderful Steemians @stellabelle and @fulltimegeek. All told I was in control of about 22,000 SP and an upvote that peaked somewhere north of $5. At the beginning of the year, Stella (according to the plan she had set forth when she first started giving out delegations) removed her Delegation, and some time later, Geek took back his delegations to fight in the Troll Wars. I am nothing but thankful to these two individuals for trusting me with their SP for the time that they did, and the impact I was able to have with the additional vote weight. This point is simply to point out that I had a much bigger impact on new Steemians when I was able to offer a $5 upvote to their introduction posts than I now can with something like $0.40 in upvote power.
The mess of Introduce Yourself - It seems like the introduceyourself tag has waves of activity. When I first arrived there were a ton of comments on introduction posts from people looking for new followers or whatever they thought they were getting out of commenting on every introduction post. When I started the Fresh Five it was mostly just me and @welcoming and a few other random comments. But now we are back to having 15 bot comments on just about every introduction post. It is tough to stand out as unique and worth coming to visit when you are just one comment among many. We have seen fewer and fewer of the Fresh Five selections come to the Digest posts and engage in conversation.
Low Retention Rate - This is probably my biggest factor after the time constraints. I started the Fresh Five as a retention endeavor. Hoping that by giving new Steemians a good upvote and a feature in the digest they would be inspired to stick around. My hope was that some of those people would stick around and grow to become devoted Steemians contributing to the platform. As I went through the process of weeding through the account I follow and reducing that list, I found that the vast majority of Steemians I followed from Fresh Five Posts had not posted since their first week. So many stopped after 3-4 posts and had not been seen again. So the purpose of the endeavor was not being fulfilled. There probably needed to be a second step after welcoming the Steemians to help them further. But that was beyond the scope of the Fresh Five, and more of a commitment than I could put forward.
Other Projects - Both Adam and I have other things we want to devote our time to. In particular, we are both looking forward to the release of ONO, and the promises that this new platform have to offer. We believe there may be a better home for a evolution of the Fresh Five to be born on ONO as that platform releases and becomes a place where there are a lot of people needing guidance. In fact, the role Adam is applying for pays out a stipend for helping members of the platform. I imagine if Steem Inc had opted to pay us for welcoming new Steemians there would be a massive influx of people wanting to help!
This will be my last post for the Fresh Five in it's current iteration. I am going to hand over the owner key to Adam, if he wants it, and if he decides he wants to resurrect the project at a later date, he is welcome to do that, and at that point it will be completely his project, free and clear of any commitments to me. I will leave that decision to him as he works on what projects make the most sense moving forward.
I want to finish this post by thanking all of you who have read the Fresh Five, been one of our Fresh Five Selections and stuck around, or in any way whatsoever have been a part of this adventure. Of course my deepest thanks to Adam, for keeping this endeavor running for as long as he has. He has done a phenomenal job, and kept this project running for much longer than I ever could have done myself.
There will be other projects, there will be other ways to promote new Steemians. We're just getting started! This is the closing chapter for the Fresh Five, but it is just the forward of the next story. Stay tuned...