Blurt Booster Introduction + Rules and Guidelines

Hi, folks!

In this post we (the Blurt Booster Team) would like to tell you about the Blurt Booster project, how it works, the different ways in which you can benefit from it, as well as to lay out the rules and guidelines to be included in the whitelist.

How Blurt Booster Operates

Blurt Booster does partly automated and partly manual curation of posts on the Blurt blockchain. This curation is backed by delegations from Blurt users. 85% of curation rewards received by Blurt Booster are distributed to its delegators in proportion to their share of total delegations. The remaining 15% is used for gifts to team members and others who contribute to the Blurt platform in various ways. It is also used for subsidizing account creation from the JoinBlurt Discord bot, which is used for creating free accounts for new users who come to Discord and verify themselves.

Delegating to Blurt Booster is a good way to get passive income from your stake if you don't have the time or the desire to use it for curation yourself. If your stake is idle, you're missing out on curation rewards, and it would be a good idea to delegate it to Blurt Booster or some other similar service that will pay you for the use of your stake.

Delegating to Blurt Booster does not guarantee votes, and conversely, you do not have to delegate to Blurt Booster in order to receive votes or be included in the whitelist.

The Blurt Booster Team

Blurt Booster is a Blurt Core team project, originally started by @saboin after @megadrive had the idea for the project. The name Blurt Booster is based on the MinnowBooster vote bot, which is a project by @megadrive that was runnning on the Steem blockchain. @saboin is still the sole developer and also team leader for the project.

When it first started, there was no team and the bot would upvote all new posts as long as the author of the post wasn't in the COAL list nor blacklisted locally. That quickly proved to be unmanageable because of abusers that had figured out ways to get around the bot's safeguards. So it was decided that Blurt Booster would operate on a whitelist model. Since it's very hard for one person to find all the good, deserving authors, there was a need for a team of people to manage the whitelist.

At a later date, a manual curation option was added so that the team members could vote for posts of authors who are not yet whitelisted.

The team consists of a few Blurt users from different parts of the world, and who speak different languages. This was done on purpose in order to reduce the bias toward certain languages or cultures.

In addition to the main Blurt Booster team, wardens, and core team members also have access to the Blurt Booster admin channels.

Rules and Guidelines

Requirements for Inclusion on the Whitelist

These are the prerequisites for being added to the whitelist. Those who are on the whitelist get one post per day automatically voted on by the bot, provided they meet the minimum word count.

1. The account must post original content, free of plagiarism. If any image or part of the text is copied from elswhere, it must be clearly indicated, and the source of the copied image or text must be cited. It also doesn't hurt to cite the source of images even if they are yours. For example, you can add a note at the end of your post that says what device or software you used for creating the images.

2. The account must make meaningful comments on other authors' posts. A meaningful comment doesn't have to be long, but it should be related to the post and add some value to the post being commented on. Simply spamming "nice post" on every post will not be considered meaningful comments.

3. The account must have followers and also follow other accounts.

4. It must be at least 30 days after the account's first post before an account can be added to the whitelist, and a minimum of 5 posts during those 30 days (this rule can be waived at the team's discretion in specific circumstances).

Things Not To Do

These will get you removed from the whitelist.

1. Plagiarism. This one is self-explanatory.

2. Reusing old content without adding a significant portion of new content to it.

3. Making posts that consist entirely of copied text without adding a significant amount of new original text. A post should consist of at least 50% original text.

4. Tag abuse. Tag abuse is when you use tags on your post that are unrelated to the topics in the post. The first tag is the category of your post, and it is the most important one. Make sure that you post in the appropriate category for your post. For example, don't use the blurtchef tag to post about your dog (unless your dog is wearing a chef hat!).

5. Posting in wrong community or category. This one is related to the tag abuse. This includes making off-topic posts in a category or community, or making posts that go against a community's rules.

6. Vote trading services. Any service where you buy votes or you get votes based on a delegation to the service.

Applying for the Whitelist

If your account satisfies all of the above criteria, you can apply for the whitelist in one of two ways:

1. You can come to the Blurt Discord server, and leave a link to your Blurt account in the blurtbooster-whitelist-application channel.

2. You can do so on-chain by typing the following text on a line by itself in a comment:

@blurtbooster whitelist apply

That's All, Folks!

This will be it for this one.
We hope you have a good time until the next one.
Please continue having fun and making friends on Blurt!