We were originally planning on setting aside the Steem into a separate pool to be used for tipping outside of Steem such as Twitter or Reddit. Telling someone how awesome their content is and giving them a tip in Steem outside of Steem would've been pretty powerful, that user would surely have gained interest and a bot picking up the tip comment would've sent the receiver a message letting them know how they easily could've created an account and at the same time automatically received the tip. There are some other options out there as well that work differently but that was my dream of having such a tip bot but I think due to the low price, low interest and low amount of devs on Steem right now there's not that many wanting to get this done. I'm going to write a proposal to see if we can get this funded through the @steem.dao somehow instead cause I think something like this would go a very long way to get new content creators interested and easily onboard. But okay this is not what this post is about.

That was the original plan with 5% of the cut we take with @ocdb's returns but since the Steem was just stacking there for many months and as you know liquid Steem just laying around won't do much else than lose value over time (considering inflation but doesn't mean in $ value considering the heavy price swings crypto is known for), so we decided to put it to work and started funding Gods Unchained tournaments, giveaways and growing the community here on Steem while showing them what else blockchain is good for than just true item ownership. The reception has been great and those who stuck around and started to learn more and more about Steem got pretty fascinated by it and as many others that we have onboarded in the past one key question kept coming up: "Why are there not more people on Steem?"

Good question. :)

Anyway, since the hardfork and all the great changes that came with the EIP, many that first a bit later after some adjustment made it's proper impact, one thing that's been a bit lacking now is engagement. Many seem to point at active authors and keep saying how the changes have made everyone post less, leave altogether, etc, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if they are posting less right now, it's one of the effects of the EIP and bid bot usage for ROI being frowned upon. If you think about it, before the HF you could literally post anything, of course not complete dogshit but the border didn't have to be far from it for anyone to bother or even have the power to do anything about it and you'd still get your ROI by buying votes without realizing that the real winner in the end was the bot owner and the people delegating to them cause all you did was get a 5 to 15% ROI on the Steem you used yourself on top of a few free votes here and there from gullible curators losing out on ROI. So a decrease in posting doesn't just mean that people are leaving, it can also mean that now they know there is curation they will have to put more effort into posts, or write longer posts or just work harder on the quality and in turn they are rewarded with curation without having to spend any Steem in the first place. Anyway, price has been pretty stable ever since the HF and I'm looking forward to see what's going to happen once word of mouth gets out to the returning authors that have been against the bid bot era in a long time and come back and of course all the new users that will join having skipped all the trouble we've been facing in the past. 

"Acidyo, you're sidetracking again, I wanted to know wtf the title in this post is about."

Sorry, you're right, so yes, this is sort of an announcement after some more thoughts on the disincentivized engagement due to the curve penalty we thought we could help improve that a little bit, you've probably read those posts already if you follow me or @abh12345 or regularly check out our hive community as they've been pinned there for over a week.

Since Gods Unchained is a bit slow right now in terms of userbase we figured we'd slow down our funding of it for the short term as well, the SP is being delegated to @ocdb to continue generating some liquid Steem for it but effective immediately we won't be hosting tournaments as often until either the new Season begins or they implement 1v1 where we can start playing vs eachother in the teamOCD community with spectators/streaming and turn it into some classic head to head tournaments that should be a lot of fun with Steem, GU Genesis Cards and other fun stuff in prizes. We will be giving out the rewards of the last tournament that was posted on @ocd soon but for now on that will be the last one we host, thanks for your participation so far and turning teamOCD into one of the biggest GU teams in existence. We hope your Steem journey has been a fun one so far too. In terms of curation we will be continuing to curate GU posts but there will be some changes coming up towards that soon as well so stay tuned for that info. :)

Now, since engagement token issuance is still a bit on the low side as there's only 61 holders of 1k engage tokens or more we will only be buying up with half of the initial 5% planned on a weekly to biweekly basis. The markets were so thin on steemengine the other day us buying with only 100+ steem caused an insane "pump" as people like to call it so we decided to use the other half to place a buy order on top of the other ones. This will give the tokens some liquidity and value and hopefully people will have an extra incentive to engage more. We will be monitoring that no one abuses it though. Gradually over time we will adjust the amount of Steem that goes towards buying up more ENGAGE tokens or funding GU or hopefully in the near future funding some tipping which was the initial idea. The engage tokens that we purchase with ocd will be given out to ocd curators for starters who are interested in issuing out tokens themselves to engagement but once everyone interested there we will be inviting outside users that we personally feel we can trust and have proven themselves to be trustable to join us and get to 1k engage token if they're not there yet. (it really is not hard to get there in general even without buying, though)

Other than that we also have a lot of fun ideas on how to improve on the engage token in the future, especially with SMT's and in combination with communities. So distribute them wisely. ;)

Anyway, thanks for reading and stay tuned for some more OCD news this week as we're getting things rolling slowly but surely again with curation and all our other activities and make sure to check out our own community on beta.steemit.com! 

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