[Popular STEM|Announcement] Our barebones experimental visibility service is now live

Summary: Three slots are now available in our community to provide visibility for authors by "pinning" promoted posts in our community. Two slots will hold the top-2 promoted posts, and a third slot will randomly circulate through the others.

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Two weeks ago, in the post [Popular STEM|Announcement] Pinned post slots available, I announced that two slots were reserved to "pin" the top two posts from our community's promoted feed. In that post, I mentioned that if there was any interest, I would automate the process in the future.

Last weekend, @cmp2020 beat me to the punch, so he rolled out a little moderation bot that will automatically pin promoted posts for us. We now have three pinned slots available:

Slot 1: Top post in the Popular STEM /promoted feed
Slot 2: Second post in the Popular STEM /promoted feed
Slot 3: Another random post from the remaining items of the Popular STEM /promoted feed. Posts in this list will be shuffled in and out of the "pinned" posts, with a likelihood that's established by the post promotion amounts.

You may have noticed the occasional changes in the "pinned" posts during the last couple days while we tried it out. Here's what it looks like:

We have some other ideas for extending this visibility service, so stay tuned!

Additionally, here are some technical notes:

• Pinned posts seem to appear in reverse chronological order. To the best of my knowledge, this is not configurable.
• Only posts in Popular STEM are eligible to be pinned here.
• Transfers to @null are permanent and irreversible. Nobody controls that account and no refunds are possible.
• The visibility service is experimental, so no results are guaranteed. Please let us know if you see any problems.
• Posts that do not occupy the top-2 promoted posts in our community are not guaranteed to receive placement in the 3^rd slot.
• We reserve the right to exclude posts from pinning if (in the moderators' sole judgement) the post contains plagiarized content or is otherwise not aligned with the goals of this community.

The Popular STEM community does not provide the /promoted posts service. We are merely providing an add-on visibility layer for authors and curators who make use of the blockchain's post promotion service. For more about post promotion, see Steem post promotion: Past, present, and future.

Finally, if you're interested in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) topics, please come join our community! We're getting close to 1,000 subscribers, so please help us get there!

Thanks for reading!

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