OPEN LETTER TO STEEMIT INC., THE WITNESSES, AND THE WHALES

in #abuse6 years ago

I've been doing a lot of considering and pondering lately about a serious issue here on steemit.


A certain issue has arisen lately, and I think that a very reasonable solution is possible. Concern has arose within the community about one particular account specifically that posts many, many times per day and is receiving a good amount of rewards on every post. @Berniesanders once tried to make a deal to decrease the frequency of these posts, and more recently @fulltimegeek, @hendrix22, and others have attempted to rally a downvote effort to counteract these particular post payouts. Personally, by my own evaluation, neither of these efforts have had the desired effect thus far, so I am going to suggest a solution.

PAPA'S SOLUTION - REINSTATE THE LIMIT

Back in the old days of steemit, there was a four post per day (24 hour) limit. If we are honest with ourselves, I do not think that anyone would claim that they need to post more than four times per day. I do not want to see smaller minnow and dolphin accounts destroyed by entering a flag war, and I am suggesting to steemit inc, the witnesses, and the whales in our community that some discussion on this matter take place.

Ultimately, people are prone to abuse freedom. If we limit the freedom, we remove the opportunity for this kind of abuse, or at least greatly decrease it by limiting the possibility for it to occur. Rather than seeing a frustrated community, I'd like to suggest that you consider making a change to include a limit on posting frequency.

Again, this is simply an idea that I had, and I'm open to other suggestions, but this seems like a permanent fix to this type of behavior. Feel free to reply below with your thoughts. Thanks for your time.


Also, just prior to posting, I just did a quick search and saw that @hitmeasap shared this same idea a month ago. (great minds think alike?) Unfortunately, only 66 people have seen that post thus far. Hopefully this one will get more visibility. If there is anything that you can do to increase the visibility of this post, please do. Thanks everyone!

Until next time…

Don’t waste your time online, invest it with steemit.com


GIF provided by @orelmely


FOR MORE PAPA-PEPPER CONTENT, CHECK ME OUT ON SOLA


TO TRANSLATE POSTS VIA OPERATION TRANSLATION CLICK HERE

Sort:  
There are 3 pages
Pages

I agree that there is a problem but those who issued the hardforks have made it difficult to agree on where we made the mistake. The 4 post limit did prevent abuse, but not completely. It was prone to Sybil attacks as we saw from steemsports at the time who after having 4 posts trending per day only had to create another account to get to 6 posts trending a day.

@richardcrill and I could agree yesterday on the after party of steemit ramble with @shadowspub that it was one of the 2 main changes of the last hard-fork (10 vote soft limit or linear rewards) that should be rolled back but we disagree on which one. With each hard-fork having multiple rule changes we're left with no clear direction and steemit Inc refuse to even see that there is a problem. As far as they're concerned none of this will matter when they've built SMT's. Steem is just the prototype.

If I could fork steem myself the first thing that I would do is add vote negation, so that abusive voting can be prevented without having to make it a full time job and without causing collateral damage by downvoting the people the whale upvoted.

The next thing I would do is roll back the last hard-fork completely and take one of those changes at a time starting with voting power. Instead of losing 2% of your remaining VP with every 100% upvote, you would lose more voting power when voting on posts with higher payouts than you would voting on posts with lower rewards - discouraging the pile-ons that the exponential reward curve encouraged.

What this would mean is that if you have 100 accounts with equal SP that make up the size of a whale, each vote after the last would become more powerful in adding rewards to the payout (that was how exponential rewards worked). However, the accounts that voted first would lose less of their voting power than the accounts that voted at the end when the payout was already high. This means whale accounts voting at 100% would be slowed down more than minnows voting for posts with low payouts at the time of the vote.

This is because I believe the linear rewards curve was the wrong solution to a problem we were already having. Too much power in the hands of a few who could set up a bot to vote 40 times+ a day on the sure-hit content, leaving no incentive to vote for new members on the platform and completely dictating the distribution of the reward pool on the same authors all the time without regard for user experience.

Whatever this comment gets paid though, it was still a waste of my time because the CEO of steemit Inc is not listening.

I know you are always interested in new suggestions, and I wonder what you are thinking about my (already rather old) post concerning the reward curve: in case it wouldn't start linear, self-votes on 'empty' comments were less profitable. Therefore my suggestion is to let the reward curve start as n^2 and end linear. You can find the complete reasoning here.

(Very interesting is also this post from @clayop which I found later.)

Yes I absolutely agree that if it's feasibly possible then this is what we need to be implementing. The problem is steemit Inc no longer concern themselves with the economics of steem. They want to create a demand for SMT's by leaving steem as the broken prototype. I'd wonder how long it would take for somebody to develop steem cash, a fork of steem. I bet it could come years ahead of SMT's.

"Instead of losing 2% of your remaining VP with every 100% upvote, you would lose more voting power when voting on posts with higher payouts than you would voting on posts with lower rewards - discouraging the pile-ons that the exponential reward curve encouraged."

This is an astoundingly good idea that I unreservedly endorse. I already hesitate when I upvote posts with rewards over $100, and I feel this proposal is responsive to why I feel hesitant. So much good content languishes, that even when I am upvoting good content that is being significantly rewarded, I feel like I'm failing the platform, and those other good authors that haven't got the traction, for whatever reason.

Thanks!

I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't feel the need to always upvote content over $100, even if it is good. The few times I do it, I'm giving it the $0.10 I feel I would have given it if I were among the first there.

It's sad that with all the algorithms and hardforks that there isn't a way to incentivize human curation rather than trying to get there by discouraging the opposite. I don't have any better answers. It's just a lament that everything has to be looked at from the gamification point of view.

How about posts that have the "extra" of solving a captcha to prove they are "humanly curated" get an extra payout or something? Because I agree--"science" (behavioral psychology) tells us that rewarding behaviour is the most effective way to promote it. It's called positive re-enforcement. "Punishment;" namely, a method which reduces behaviour, is not as effective. In other words, "Kindness Wins--" or, at least that's the idea ;))

Your captcha idea is interesting. I wonder how many of those I would have to do before I got tired of it, though. Is there a way to do that where I don't have to constantly prove I'm not a bot, but where the bot fails the test everytime? :) In other words, something that puts all the work on the bot and not on me. :) Then, I'm in.

I don't think so... That's kinda part of it--proof-of-brain--every time I'd imagine. But I'm sure some smart person will come up with something :) . It's really not so bad, imo; especially the ones that you just have to check a box--take one second. At the end of the post, check the box, then it permits you to post.

I suppose. I can't remember now, exactly, but there was something I did a while back that required a series of captcha answers to get through and it was just plain annoying.

We're agreeing though that something that allows humans to differentiate from bots is a good thing. :) I'd prefer not having to do anything else because I'm the human and don't feel like I'm the one who has to prove I'm human, even if it is a simple and easy, fraction of a second box tick. :)

Here is how you fix it:
#1. No more auto-upvoting. If you want to upvote someone, do it live.
#2 Limit the amount you can upvote to your daily upvote value (weighted by your level) 3x for minnows, 2x for dolphins, 1x for whale. If your daily upvote is worth $3.00, that's the max you can upvote, either all at once or spread out over 300 pennies.
#3 Throttle back self-upvoting to no more than 25% of your daily upvote value.

The losing a higher percentage of VP when voting on higher rewarded posts sounds like an elegant solution, but wouldn't this serve a 'redistribution function' more effectively if it was combined with linear rather than exponential rewards?

Even if the CEO of Stinc isn't listening ATM, it's still useful to work through the alternatives in case he ever does, or for contributing to alternative platforms... this is still only a test after all!

No I think linear rewards have proven to create the wrong incentives for everybody. As suggested by @jaki01, something in which starts out linear and gradually becomes exponential is probably best. But I think we would all appreciate one change at a time so that we can properly evaluate the results before moving forward.

Whatever you do, please do not fork into a directly-competing "Steemit cash"-like because what such a thing does is devalue both branches. I contend that ideally we should insist and bring more and more compelling arguments until finally Ned listens

By then the competitors will have won. I wouldn't waste your time on somebody with all the invested interest to listen but with no sense when the advice comes from an ex partner.

I wasn't partner with Ned. I plan to go to Steemfest 3 (and I hope he will come, too). I'll seek him out and try to persuade him. If the arguments are good enough and repeated often enough maybe there's a chance he'll begin to consider ? I don't know but it's worth trying.

Yes there's a risk that by then the competitors will have won but what we should rather focus on is: would creating a "steem cash" - like fork do more good than harm or the opposite ? How does that risk (of a fork proving actually detrimental) compare to the risk of "competitors winning before Ned starts listening" ?

I don't claim I have the answer to the above but my gut feeling tells me that the latter is lower than the former; I don't know Ned's propensity to listen but the risk of diluting the steem brand seems so high to me that I wouldn't take it (as a shareholder who's invested above $15K of own hard-earned money in steem)

We started this experiment with a whole raft of measures carefully tailored to prevent abuse.

  • The 4 per day limit.
  • Quadratic rewards.
  • 104 week power downs.
  • 50/50 author/curator rewards split.

In the time I've been here, I've seen them all
discarded; like prophetic seals in some sort of cheap supernatural horror movie.
Now the spectre of widespread abuse has surfaced and everyone's wondering what happened.

Just out of interest, dyou have any idea or inclination of which of these @dan supported and whether their abandonment had anything to do with his leaving?

  • checks price to send firstborn to Vegas, one way *
    Edit: This was a response to a different comment. No idea why it ended up here.

I couldn't speculate, tbh.
I tend to deal in ideas; rather than people.
I don't know who pushed for what and why, I just see what isn't working and give feedback, which is the whole point of beta testing.
I have nothing but respect and gratitude for everyone involved in this project.

Very diplomatic... although on steemit the new rules (hardforks) are agreed on and instigated by a handful of people at the top (it's not a democracy is it!).... and I'd like to know more about their values to give me an indication of where we're headed!

The problem with 'unfettered capitalism' (fewer rules) is that it has a tendency to destroy itself in the long term.

We're moving away from what you might loosely call 'social-anarchism' - which would have rules in place to encourage long-term investment and broader rewards distribution.

With more social-anarchist rules in place (like pretty much all of those that have been removed) I feel this would empower and encourage MORE smaller scale investors looking to make a regular income, but this requires MORE rules!

I'd like to see more rules that empower and encourage stability, equality etc... as I commented below...fewer rules doesn't necessarily mean more freedom!

Thanks for the reply...

I think it's useful to consider that every aspect of the platform is constrained by rules, most of which are code.

Changing the code doesn't remove rules. It just changes them.

It's the specific rule that has particular consequences, so it's not whether or not we have rules, but what those rules are that matters.

There just isn't a way to prevent folks from posting more than four posts, because they can just post from another account. Neither is there certainty regarding the utility of any given code, because the real world throws sucker punches and devs are blindsided by clever criminals.

I'm all about free society. I do think the platform came out swinging for that, and it's evolution since then reflects the influences the real world has impacted it with, including that Steemit Inc. is a for profit concern and needs to serve it's market.

The market for Stinc is the Steem. The majority of Steem is held by very few people, and the interests of whales are vastly different from the interests of minnows. Steemit code starkly reflects that.

Great points well made, especially the last point. Stinc.... is that your invention?

No. Don't remember who did coin it, but I liked it and use it a lot, like I did when I found the word 'enemedia'.

104 week power downs was the worst. A very good way to drive out/scare the investors and making Steem low value.

50/50 author/curator rewards split was the best rule. It brings out the best content yet people become lazy to produce the content.

Ironically, one of my reasons for originally buying 5000 steem was the knowledge that my co-investors would also be locked in for 104 weeks.

104 weeks is a bit excessive. 52 is more reasonable.

Yeah, but what happens if a very expensive medical emergency, disaster happens, or you die (God forbid) within those 104 weeks of waiting? The droplets of Steem you'll be getting per week would be of little or no use.

Maybe it would not be so wise to invest that much money into Steem if you cannot afford medical care without powering down?

Frankly, this is going to depend severely on what country you live in.
@darthnava's personal experience with this is a perfect example.

If I was concerned about immediate liquidity I could buy literally any other crypto. Or invest half in each.

Maybe you are right. Thanks for the chat.

Hope you're doing well, mate :)

Depends what kind of investor you want. The get rich quickers or the active holders who genuinely believe the future not just for themselves but for the platform. Fact is there are more of the first kind available in the crypto world and in my opinion choosing them is us being impatient with the better option.

well it is more likely for the active holders to switch to the dark side after seeing rampant abuse and no actions from the powers that be who are capable of bringing some positive change, rather than the rich quickers turning over a new leaf... steemit can be so much more, but unfortunately the delegations, support go to the wrong places and valid suggestions fall on deaf ears...

Maybe I am misunderstanding here, but do people really think that the people producing the content, and the people who find that content deserve the same payout? If you always follow someone who you know puts out good content, then you are always somewhat riding on the coattails of that hard work right? I mean it takes a lot less effort to upvote something than it takes to create something..but that's just my two cents...

the main thing that a 50/50 split author/curator does is it puts the "brain" back in "proof of brain". Currently what we have is "proof of upvote bot" or "proof of selfvote". Check out the content on the trending pages... all vote bots and self votes. The current curation reward payout is so low that even a very skilled curator, who spends a lot of time looking for quality posts, has a hard time making more than 2 SP weekly per 1000 SP of voting power. The financial return from selling your SP in form of delegation to a vote selling service is WAY more than that. 50/50 reward split would be great for minnows, there would be a lot more motivated curators specifically looking for good posts that nave little to no pending payout, because those posts yield good curation rewards. Check out @abh12345's weekly curation league reports to see what curators currently earn. It is peanuts.

I have slowly been dragged kicking and screaming to agree with you. This comment in fact is the best, most concise explanation of why the rewards for the curators are just as important as the rewards for the content creators.

Damn reason and good sense! I so want to retreat to my former position that it's ludicrous to value the act of upvoting a post to the work that goes into creating it, which seems obvious and incontrovertible on it's face.

The truth is that valuing the labor of creation of a work is a trap. It isn't the labor of writing that is of vaue, but the content of the ideas therein, and the act of delivering value to those ideas, curation, is no less integral to the process.

You sold me. I here publicly apologize to all the folks I've disagreed with on this matter in the past, because I was wrong. Thanks for planting the seeds that have eventually prompted my growth.

If curating aka voting early actually did move quality posts into visibility then I could get on board with the idea of splitting the author/ curation rewards 50/50 ... fact is, it doesn't. If you want to find quality posts you look at the posts of the curation projects that actually review posts for quality and posts about them.

Those projects put the brain back in the proof of brain not early voting.

If you mean the 50/50 reward split, each post only has one author, and multiple curators, many of whom I'm sure the author would like to see rewarded for their support.

I guess. I mean, I typically support the people who follow me by upvoting their posts and comments. I don't expect to make anything from "curating" their content. I think that what someone earns on upvotes should primarily go to them, especially since it's so hard to get upvotes for most people as it is. On top of the fact that a lot of these Dapps already take a HUGE chunk of someone's earnings. So a vlogger who spends hours a day uploading quality content is only supposed to make 25% of what they earn? Dtube takes out 25% and this 50/50 would vastly cut into their earnings. I'm not saying curators shouldn't make anything, but again, the difference between hours and hours of work vs. clicking the upvote button are insane!

Would it be hard to get upvotes on your quality posts if heavy hitters were scouting around looking for fat curation rewards, instead of shamelessly upvoting their own crap?
They're going to get a return on their investment; upvoting quality posts should be their most lucrative option.

SBD being an easy pump and dump target just increased how bad the disparity between curation and author rewards became.

Is the solution to a lot of the "woes" here not painfully obvious? Have the same payout options for authors and curators. Curating shouldn't get only SP while authors get to choose whatever is paying the best at the time.

I'm of the camp that curators should get 50% or something around there. Even if some large account holders are bad taste-makers, they're even worse content creators. I really don't want to be on a social media platform where the crypto-rich are literally forced to "create content" and roll out a pile of fresh dung every morning in order to maximize their ROI.

Yeah, the Dtube thing throws things off a little more, but a worthwhile variable to consider as these ideas are evaluated.

You seem pretty intelligent, I'm going to go see what you've been up to.

The 50/50 reward split was terrible in my opinion for everyone but a very small amount of content creators. The whales just put a handful of people who made non contreversal cookie cutter content on auto voters and called it a day. They could not even check this place out in 2 month and earn a stupid amount of money and since the reward curve was so skewed in their favor they were becoming ultra whales. No one really liked that system except maybe 30 people.

Good point.

Interesting, I've never put as much thought into that as you apparently have.

Yeah not trying to be a rabble rouser, I have just been hearing from a lot of people in the Dtube community specifically lately, and between being perplexed about high quality content being met with totally random and inconsistent upvoting, and crap content being self-voted to the moon through the use of bots, vloggers are getting discouraged, and a few of them have even dropped off. It's true that Steemit owes users nothing, but I maintain that the same applies in reverse. Steemit needs great content to keep people engaged and coming back to use the platform, or to join it to begin with. It seems as though any concern about payouts and upvotes that aren't holly jolly is being blown off as being a negative Nancy, and I don't know if I totally agree with that.

If at this point we also tell vloggers especially, that even more of their upvote amount is going to be detracted, I think a lot of them will leave. It isn't such a big deal for bloggers, but for those trying to use the Dapp interface rather than just copying and pasting YouTube videos, they have to go through Dtube, and are therefore forced to give up that percentage of their earnings, and it's not that Dtube doesn't have a right to those percentages, they are letting people use their platform after all, I'm just not sure how well all of this will go over. Although, people are always averse to change, but then usually adjust, so I guess it's hard to say what will happen until it actually happens! Just my two cents!

I think a reoccurring issue that might deserve some due attention is the problem of those unmoderated vote bots. I know it might be a dangerous statement to make, but most crap post that get high upvotes only seem able to get high upvotes because vote bot owners aren't really moderating the use of their bots in an any way meaningfully way. In other words, the crap producers are actually less to blame for the growing amounts of crap on the platform than the bot owners that allow the same crap producers to to use their upvote service, unmoderated, month after month.

Well, it's basically just putting the advertising model in automated form, and without the sponsor.

My feeling is that automated upvotes are promotion, and posts that are availed of them should be in the promoted feed. There are ways to parse the source of the promotion fee, if hostile promotion pushing posts into the promoted feed becomes a problem.

The crap producers are really a symptom of the problem, which actually derives from rewards pool mining. It is the delegation dealers that ultimately demanded this code. Stinc is dependent on them, and delivered what it's market wanted.

It's important to remember that Stinc serves a market composed of Steem, not people.

Thanks!

Read somewhere else that vote bots were probably under 18% of the pool, so it's not the vote-buyers producing most of the highest voted crap you see, surprise surprise large investors in crypto or devs aren't the creative souls the internet was holding its collective breath for!

You bring a very important point to the table.... or four of them. I'll upvote for visibility as long as we are discussing all of this.

backing that upvote up, cause yep, he's right. Dan built it to last, and somehow, that got shifted back. Why? Do you recall the history? I didnt get here till June 2017, and HF19 was the most monumental shift I have yet personally seen go past. My question is WHY were these rules abandoned and who drove the requests that became the patches and what was their personal motive in each case? Sure, I understand that they were each debated and opted in by the top 20 but to who's gain or detriment?

from my observations ... the same complaints about the end result of the previous rules are being made about the current ones. Some people's memories get really short.

Those who gain are happy with the code. Those who don't complain.

I was thinking of what change could benefit steemit as a whole, without limiting freedom. Maybe something like this:

 --Take top 10 percent of posts in monetary award
    - of those posts, take 50 percent of reward
 --Take top 11-25 percent of posts in monetary award
    - of those posts, take 25 percent of reward
    - set aside reward for 3 months? 100 days?
      --Segregated account needed?
    - given to socially vested accounts
      -- socially vested accounts
         --minimum of 3 months on steemit
         --involved in steemit
           --post at least 1 time per week average
           or
           --upvote an average of 5 times per day
         --minimum rep of 40?
         --maximum rep?
 --other criteria?

The distribution will not start until day 101 after implementation. One percent of total will be given per day.
This may not solve everything, but it does give back to steemit. I don't know how easy it would be to effect this change so lets hear from the developers/experts.

This does not address the comment upvote dilemma, but I'm sure it could be similiarly addressed if this idea is technically feasible.

kind of like a graduated income tax? combined with basic income?

  • the graduated income tax is 1 of the 10 planks of the communist manifesto.
    • I'm not at all against your idea, just asking for clarification..

It is a tax. And it could be considered communist-like if steemit was a country and we use the tax like most countries do.....wastefully or to line the pockets of the politicians. However, this tax would be used to encourage interaction and engagement with others within the system. You would not receive unless you meet certain criteria. That criteria would need to be determined. I have just listed suggestions.

The percentages may vary, like taking 25% of monetary rewards for the top 10% instead of taking 50%. However, it is a give-back program to incentivize interaction. It is not a charity. It would encourage those with less rewards to keep trying to engage others.

This would also serve as a defacto flagging system, since this would likely catch those persons that have whales upvoting them to the top of the earnings list.

Let me know you thoughts.

Opt in blockchain based taxes are an interesting idea.

I already posted this idea on another comment here,
but what if instead of having a "tax"

  • the payouts were on a curve much like reputation is.
    • the higher you get, the harder it is to go to the next level...
      • then you wouldn't have to have anything else
    • the extra money would stay in the payout pool
  • helping everyone that was earning a payout that day.

Would that be feasible?

I just reread the comment that started this thread.
He called it quadratic rewards.

  • I guess they used to have that, but have switched to a linear payout.
    • It's been awhile since I've had an Algebra class, but this may be exactly what I mentioned above.

Perhaps the easy solution is to revert from linear payout back to as he called it quadratic rewards.

❓ ❓ ❓

I'vve thought of something that if people who don't post or comment their VP goes down. Then people like @ranchorelaxo with @haejin can't game the system. Because they are just an investor. Rancho isn't here for Steemit Community. He is here for himself. Why should he only benefit himself. Each week he don't contribute by making content % of his vote strength goes down.

If he was here for himself then he should delegate to a Bid-bot and make 500% more than he is currently doing, curating a chartist whos content is as valuable for as long as it takes him to make the post.

You need to wake up & come back to REALITY. He provides nothing worth what he is making. And TRUST ME. He would never SPEND money towards anyone else. Even if it made him money. He only SPENDS his MONEY, VOTES, anything on HIMSELF!!!

You need to re-read my comment!

Interesting, thanks for adding your insight and input @celsius100!

Now you arent saying "they Never get 50% of the rewards" or "that they go to someone else", you are just saying the reward is delayed?

I could see some merit in that. Interesting to think about!!
Peace

That could be one option I hadn't thought about. Set aside an amount from the top earners each day. It will be theirs, but it could only be used with the steemit platform. Given away to others, as such. It could not be withdrawn.

I would suggest, though, that needy projects should be the ones to receive the donations. Those endorsed, by vote, from the steemit populace. That way, the rewards would not be easily given to accounts of friends and family or themselves (through anonymous accounts). Thanks for your input.

You'd have to rework flagging, because any system like that would create more of an incentive for the smaller pockets to start flagging each other to below any rep cutoffs you set.

I'm relatively fresh here, but I'm for it! Make restrictions, make regulations, make BALANCE, lose the whales, lose the idiotic meme posting accounts...Even 4 post per day is too much I think, in my opinion, 2 at most! And powering down from time to time is in game.

It would be nice to have a curator slide, just like the vote slider but earlier on.

Very peaceful means to combat the problem and avoid flag wars. Upvoted.

I agree with the idea of a post limit. Personally, I had a hard time following Papa Pepper's suggestion of 2-4 post per day for success on Steemit. I just don't think in that realm of reality. I can't blog of vlog about every insignificant event in my life or the lives of others that many times a day because it doesn't inspire me to do so.

I look for things that have never been said before. Because of that, I have a hard time repeating myself, but I felt like there was a very specific message that I had last fall that people weren't quite getting in general which has to do with the changes that cryptocurrency will introduce to society. Then the only way I could stop repeating myself was to get into the technical details and wrote this way for a bit and realized it was just too much for most people. I found that I was just rewriting the same ideas from a different angle because of this need to post daily at minimum.

So I've been thinking of kicking back to about one or two posts per week when there's something really important to say. I think the monetary incentive is just a little too much for posting multiple times a day and creates more spam. If you knew you had fewer shots to hit the target, you'll take your time and aim better.

I just sent for that same silver hex! @pit-bullion is coming out with a 5 oz

While I reckon most of those things were better abandoned, I do absolutely agree with 50/50 curation split, now.

"... like prophetic seals in some sort of cheap supernatural horror movie."

This is worth the price of admission. What excellent and evocative writing!

I just saw an @AdamKokesh post

  • where he plans to do 6 posts / day.
    • He has a HUGE following on other platforms
      and is actively advertising the heck out of Steemit anytime he posts to them.

I'm still doing almost a million views a month on YouTube and I make more money from a single post here than in a whole month on YouTube.

I'm still getting my own production fully up to speed, but when it is, I should be making about six posts a day here.

Would we really want to limit a man with his talent and followers?

Yes. Nobody needs to be posting 6 times a day.

Why not?

  • We have 24 hour / day channels on TV... news comedy movies... entertainment...

Sure but those channels are made up of dozens/hundreds of different shows -- you're not going to see 6 new episodes of Game of Thrones per day, right? And if we could, I wouldn't want that because the quality of the show would deteriorate into oblivion.

It takes time to form anything that has substance, and I just can't imagine a ton of examples where someone could be making 6+ posts a day that gave an audience much value at all.

... much value at all.

  • Like MSM huh? haha

So I take it you are also against the other frontends to the Steemit blockchain?

  • Like Zapple, Steemshot, dmania, ... ...

I'm not against any frontends running on Steemit, I'm against content that isn't quality, and I don't think many people can put out 6+ posts per day that isn't going to waste my time.

I would love for you to give me an example where someone is putting out 6+ posts a day on steemit and it's beneficial to the community.

In my opinion back then when those rules were in place the STEEM blockchain didn't have much of a future. It was primarily going to be a whale hangout and since the distribution was messed up it was going to be about 15 or 20 whales circle jerking each other passively.

50/50 reward split? I spent hours, days to write up my content and I have to share half of it? Why do I even bother writing a 500 to 2000 words post when i can just autoupvote posts. And here i was complaining about appics' reward distribution. 65% to author 10% to company 25% to curators. Video editing can take hours as do writing. As a content creator, 50% is not a good incentive. What happens when everyone just prefer to autovote and no contents gets produced? 80% is a great number to incentivise authors to produce. I think the 50/50 will not fly and will greatly devalue steemit.

50% of what your quality post makes today, probably not; but for 50% of what your post makes if whales were voting for you instead of for themselves, I think you'd continue to grace us with your presence.

"If" whales vote for me. I don't think distribution is the answer anyway. If they can't be stuff about curating who can force them to. If they want to vote for themselves, it is their money after all. If they want to circle jerk each other so be it. I don't think we will find the answer until we test out the waters. Implement something, see what happens. How about a rule that stops a whale from voting their own post?

I am sympathetic to your arguments, as @carlgnash just managed to convince me they weren't as incontrovertible as I'd thought on this post.

Whales can just buy votes from bots. Such a rule would do nothing. It's also how to get around the 4 post limit. Just post from another account.

I'll reiterate here the reason that it's a good idea to split rewards 50/50, since you may not see my earlier discussion with @carlgnash.

It's a trap to focus on the labor of writing or creating content as a guage of it's value. This is illustrated by the old saw about 100 monkeys typing out Shakespeare eventually.

The value in content comes from the ideas presented therein, and curation is the act of delivering value to those ideas via the market. While the act of upvoting is trivial, seeking out good content (particularly on Steemit with it's broken feeds) is a significant task.

Also, ALL the curators split the curation reward, and thus are but fractionally rewarded compared to the author. So the dichotomy isn't quite as stark, except for posts where whale curation might dominate the curation reward.

While it takes significant labor to create good content, it takes labor to produce crap content, and one being rewarded and the other not depends on good curation.

It's worth compensating.

Beautifully well said.
Comparing the effort of writing with the effort of upvoting is looking very superficially at the issue.
If money is a substitute for labour, then the money I have tied up in the SP I use to upvote, is 'effort' I've expended engaging with the post.

While I agree and support the sentiment, I feel it would ultimately be pointless. It's not hard to create two more accounts and still make the same 10 posts per day. The reason for the 10 posts per day is because it's the maximum amount of 100% upvotes any one account gets per day and they are clearly just milking the investment made by the whale account upvoting those posts 10 times per day. I still believe the only solution to this problem is to make curation profitable so that it's more beneficial to upvote good content than it is to vote for low quality posts. Of course that can be manipulated too and the inherent problem is that greed always finds a way if that is what people feed. Not trying to be a downer here, just pointing out some of the problems I've already thought through on this issue.

"... so that it's more beneficial [profitable] to upvote good content..."

There's the rub. I haven't conceived a way to give a financial incentive to good content, specifically.

Any ideas?

@beanz idea sounds like one of the best I've heard honestly. My thoughts all revolve around making curation more profitable than self voting, but the problem we ran into when curation was "more profitable than it is now" but still not more profitable than self voting is that we just had circle jerks going non-stop. Then you see massive whale accounts, some still do this, going around only upvoting each other and creating multiple shitposts per day to use each others autovotes.

Well, I thought of making curation pay more as you curate more authors, and particularly new authors, but I haven't the chops to determine whether there is ever a 'price point' at which circle jerking is less emunerative under such a scheme - that won't break folks that upvote their friends too.

The solution I have come up with that will work NOBODY likes, or will like.

VP weighted by rep instead of SP.

It just ends the problem by removing the cause, which is that voting is a means of producing ROI, instead of supporting good content and driving an exceptional social media platform.

Love it!
Cough, I'm actually guilty of this one. I made a second account so I could post more.
Back when there was a limit.
I love that you suggested that curation should be more profitable. I agree with that one! Not everyone wants to make content.

This was what I thought to begin with. Even with controlling the account creation, Steemit would gain nothing useful and most likely only lose with this.

You are correct, I've been thinking about some of that too since I posted. Thank you for being honest. Thanks man!

Maybe we should implement something to make account creation more transparent. Just a thought!

I have a few accounts, but I don't hide the fact that they are for different projects I am working on, including my witness account.

Firstly, I agree, this is a relatively easy way of putting a limit on the kind of abuse you talk about above, and I'm glad you're 'onside'.

As far as I am concerned having an absence of rules* on steemit doesn't mean more freedom, it just redistributes power and certain types freedom (the two are inseparable) differently.

Having no limits on posts empowers and encourages those who want to put up short form content regularly, but also the type of 'extraction abuse' that's currently going on.

HOWEVER, it makes the rest of us less free because we have to devote time and energy to combatting said abuse - IF we want to maintain our share of the limited reward pool (another 'rule' we're all exposed to).

Your proposition (which I agree with) would INCREASE freedom for most people on steemit - by allowing us more time to create good content, and free us from the tyranny of shit spam posts to a greater extent.

*In fact, there isn't an absence of rules on steemit: if you're posting to get rewards through dual-account collusion, abusers are already effectively 'limited' to the amount they can post by the recharge rate: which is 10 * a day.. it's a still a rule... a 'limit' build into the system... putting a hard limit on this wouldn't be so different.

The whole concept of freedom and rules is something that I need to write about at much more length. Sociology can help a lot here: in short: we depend on structure to be free, an absence of structure may make us less-free.

I'll watch closely this post to see if any whale is opened to discussions.

You have to come out with an idea about abussive upvoted comments too!

@jwolf - I guess I did not take into account the multiple accounts scenario either. If a person wanted 12 post payouts per day, they would just need three accounts then.

Upvoted to increase visibility. Just trying to brainstorm here.

I don't know if multiple accounts issue can ever be solved...

A second account needs to recruit its own followers; but that's the only real drawback.

Well, there's a specific example that I think we're all keeping in mind here, and that account receives most of it's rewards from upvotes from one account. It'd be easy to simply spread those votes across accounts, eliminating that drawback (in this instance).

An additional benefit that might have prevented a great deal of controversy regarding that account to having multiple accounts instead of simply pouring all those rewards into one wallet would have been the obscurity that would have provided.

Multiple accounts can be reduced significantly if they were tied to credit cards.

Please, let's not make credit card theft even more popular than it already is.

some people are smart enough to NOT use credit cards

Yeah, you are correct aren't you? People would probably just upvote comment after comment instead.... good thinking and thanks for adding to the discussion.

I have nothing to those who are upvoting some comments a day with $1-$5.

But those over $50 are a shame from my point of view :D

Large upvotes for minnows is a way to help those especially from poor countries where a little help goes a long way

Yeah, some would just shift full power upvotes from their own posts to their own comments.....

Maybe an earning limit on comments?

Yeah, this sounds plausible.
I second this.

I don't. I typically get 3/4 of my rewards from my comments, rather than my posts, and such limits would probably be difficult to design to prevent harming folks engaging on other's posts.

Particularly for new users, doing that is a far more profitable use for their time than posting epic blogs into the void of obscurity most posts fall into.

I'm just eclectic and interested in the ideas folks come up with, and discussing them is educational.

Get rid of self upvoting. That would solve some of the problem I think.

Instead of selfvoting, folks just buy votes from bots. It's a little less profitable, as the bots cost money. Not enough of a difference to make a difference though.

That was my initial thought when I read this, that they would just comment and upvote 100%.
Maybe there could be a limit to the amount earned by a steemian per day. But then there's the issue of multiple accounts...grr.
It would be really nice if something could happen to remedy the situation.
I myself, a plankton with best intentions, showed my support for a friends band (the Key of H) on @hendrix22's post and got flagged!
Luckily I was "healed" afterwards by ftg, but still thats just bonkers.
I'm not sure if the flag war is going to solve the problem at hand... If it's all we can right now though, I support it.
I hope we get a great thinker here with an awesome idea that we can implement for a more peaceful resolution!
Thanks for talking about this papapep. It's good to have high profile steemians not sweeping it under the rug and rather putting out a call to action.
Take care.

I'm not sure about limiting the amount any one person can earn per day. I think the recommendation about limiting the number of posts is good, but limiting the amount someone can earn on those 4 posts is somewhat counter-productive.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but I look at your suggestion this way...

I am working in a company for a promotion and that promotion comes, however, they can't pay me more than my current salary because there is a cap, even though it is a higher level position. Get my point?

Who is to say your post or contribution can't make more than this or isn't worth more than a certain amount - to tell you at what point you can no longer earn on something you have worked hard for.

I think limiting someone to 4 posts per day is a good enough step in the right direction.. true... there is still the issue of multiple accounts, but at least it's a start.

I think that regardless of how much I feel I might be entitled to due to my efforts, if it's taking away from other people who are also putting in the same effort I am okay with having a cap on my earnings. Isn't that the issue, that these people are taking too much from the reward pool and thereby limiting rewards for others who are deserving?
I'm out of my element here, just chiming in with my thoughts, I'm a peaceful person who believes in equality on and off the blockchain :)
If the choice is do nothing or limit posts to 4 per day, I definitely choose limit.

yea.. nothing against your idea at all. I just think the frequency is the issue. The accounts in question are posting at almost an hourly interval which means he gets paid out a huge sum of money for something he could have combined into a daily post

Yeah. Man I wish people could jusg be decent and fair. And I do think if we could limit that would be great, just then they'd use different accounts.
Finding a solution is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack but its got to be out there somewhere

this is a start, and a good idea.. but i think there are deeper issues also .. coincidentally i just wrote a WHOLE post on this.. and even more coincidentally the titles are almost the same! wt*!

https://steemit.com/steemit/@eco-alex/an-open-letter-to-all-steemians-and-especially-whales

(upvoted for visibility)

Wow! Really? I'll check it out man!

thanks for the support..a worthy cause for the betterment of Steemit! IT is a Loaded topic of course and one that i think lots of people have an opinion about.. Peace!

please do feel free to comment on it , if it not to hot to handle! -)

Loading...

One thing I wonder about as more platforms are added to the Steem Blockchain.... you have Zappl (like twitter) where multiple post would be a natural...Dmania that only post memes which is like the playful part of Facebook. Dtube for Videos. Steemit for articles. Ned said in an interview that he wants 100's of companies like this on the blockchain which would certainly increase the price of Steem which is great. So as this happens, how do you limit posts when there are so many different platforms? It's just another aspect of this as different platforms have different uses. I'm not going to put my life story on Zappl, but then I'm not going to post a meme on Steemit, but I will post it on Dmania which is the "meme and video" platform. All of this shows up on Steemit but it is actually coming from multiple applications. The Steemit world is growing which is a good thing and we are just experiencing some growing pains in the process.

Good point. I hadn't considered that stuff either.

The vote and comment was strictly to make a point and draw out Daniel's long-running, subtextual, subversive intent to compete with Steem, to give the public alignment with his private discourse, which has long been filled with express intent to compete. And of course I will retract the vote.

Dan left Steem expressly to create a competitor to Steem and is advertising it with a supposed “inside track” to the future here on our platform while acting like he is no competitor. And whether he leaves the platform for good today or 6 months from now to join his Steem-competitor depends on if we choose to see through his intentions and care. It’s possible I am making the mistake of caring. It’s hard to really say until these platforms have existed for a while 10 months from now. I would prefer to ship our tokenization platform, Smart Media Tokens (SMTs), which outcompetes any version eos can string together, and get moving without Dan clouding the marketplace. He asked me for the same months ago. This is reasonable and all business. I vastly prefer Steem and SMTs.

thanks a lot @beanz - wow - not thought of it, an intelligent bot :-)

So now you got a fake account Ned? What the actual fuck? Are you completely out of control with your manic SMT copy pasta paragraph, or is this just a copy pasta spammer cloning you? Either way, its still jealous shit talk from a baby wanna be ceo who cant get a platform interface built worthy of comparison to circa 1994 open source forum scripts. Fire sneak, and shut the fuck up about SMTs till you fix your broken damn house.

Fearless comment of the day =D

Edit: I LIKE the OG interface. As complex as Steemit is, a simple interface prevents one more learning curve from getting in the way of my fumbling along on it.

Are you sure you wanted to comment on this post or a different one :-)?

Bruh have you heard about our lord and savior SMT and communities?

Edit: What's really odd is I commented on beanz' comment, it was during a period of bandwidth issues so I have no idea how this happened.

Good good steemit should welcome the competition. It will help it grow by seeing what others do and stealing their ideas. (They stole steemits so why not)

What about limiting the reward amount itself.

Maybe not a hard limit, but more something like a multiplier, a posting power, that decreases with post frequency and that needs to recharge (like the VP).
you post once, you get 100% of reward but your PP decreases by say 20%
the second post, posted just after the first one would get you only 80%. You would need 6 hours to recharge from 80% to 100%.

For the comments, no multiplier, but a hard limit that comes into effect after say 10000SP and becomes smaller logarythmically as your SP increases: i.e. minnows no limits, Whales limit.

That could maybe be a way to tamper the hijacking of the reward pool everybody moans about, without eating up too much posting feedom.

Whales with bot armies would dance around those limits.

I feel that seeking to impose limits is peering in the wrong direction to find a solution.

I reckon what we should be doing to seeking to incentivize what we want to encourage. Recruit stake by making it profitable to benefit the community, rather than trying to prevent them from doing harm by profiting.

IMHO, the solution to the problem the platform faces is finding a way to incentivize curating good content, but not just the top 1% of posts. We need to acknowledge that we are all on a spectrum of quality, and there is far more value in a community of posters of all levels of skill than there is in one in which only the very cream of the crop receives any reward at all, and everyone else is just a consumer of their content.

So, let's turn your idea in that direction. How about each separate account you upvote increases the curation reward you get by 1%? This encourages single, rather than multiple accounts for curators, and also broader penetration of curation in the community of creators.

Still no idea on how to incentivize curating quality posts, other than our native interests as people.

I hope framing the quest for a solution in this way might help those wiser than I to do so come up with carrots, rather than sticks.

Thanks!

That's a neat idea worth some whiteboard time to see if it works out mathemagically. Humph, had not thought of this one. Good thought.

That's silmilar to how it used to work but the decline only started after 4 posts. It would still be easily avoided with the use of extra accounts.

Reading through the post and the comments, what really strikes me is that there seems no viable solution that doesn't involve loss of freedom. So I thought, how would we have dealt with this before rule of law?

Back when we had small villages and communities, the survival of the community depended on everyone working together and for each other. They could probably support one or two people who didn't pull their weight as much, but if there was someone who threatened the safety of the community they would be asked to change or be ostracized.

So I have to wonder, does what this person is doing have the potential to bring down the platform? If so, then they are a danger to the rest of the community and their freedom. The reason we keep losing more and more of our freedoms is because there are always those who will endanger everyone else and their way of life, so everyone ends up paying with freedom in order to combat that minority.

Do we start restricting everyone's freedom to use the platform how they want or do we ask the one endangering it to leave? Which is the lesser of two evils?

It is a perplexing situation to be in for sure.

I agree with bringing back the limit of 4 posts. 100% agree.

I've been here since September of 2016. I've seen how many different bloggers from all walks of life run their blogs here.

Majority of those who take their work seriously here and on other blogging platforms, including places like Youtube, work hard to be able to produce one blog/vlog per day. Offering the opportunity to earn from 4 posts in one day is being incredibly generous. Most will not be able to fill that quota, but some certainly can and will.

This would also improve the quality of what we see out there while browsing. People will want to put more effort into their posts rather than simply throwing random posts out there just to see what sticks. We'd see less spam as well.

Having fewer posts to choose from also gives bloggers more visibility. If they're working hard, after they press the post button, their post isn't lost in a sea of thousands of people attempting to churn out ten low quality posts per day.

It's a great idea to put this 4 post limit back in place and many of us have already seen how well it works. It was a bad idea to remove that limit. We tried it, we see abuse, the 4 post limit worked, so let's bring it back.

Sheeesh!

Despite that, I totally agree - I can barely kick out 1 post a day.

100 % agree.
Original and quality posts need some time!
At the moment posting daily a lot of unoriginal memes, getting vots from votingbots and then get the dmania vote gets good rewards on steemit.
That is not how to support good qualitiy content!
That is how to support spam!

I wrote a lengthier response in another comment about why the 4 post limit isn’t really workable, but your comment brings up another point.

I think it’s past time that Steemit begins to filter content to only things posted from Steemit. Many people who are upset about post quality & frequency don’t necessarily realize its coming from elsewhere. Steemit shouldn’t be throwing everything from Zappl, Steepshot, ChainBB, dMania, etc. into one feed. This would improve visibility for “high quality” posts if Steemit is going to define itself as a blogging platform.

They could simply place Zappl, Steepshot, ChainBB, dMania, etc. tabs or feeds on a home page. It can still be on Steemit, just organized.

Agreed! I even posted a mock-up 10 months ago beginning to imagine a “widgetized” page when just Zappl and Steepshot were on the horizon.

I still hope a direction like this will happen. Clearly Steemit at least has plans to further develop the current sidebar areas.

My man!
Seconded.

I much prefer this route...the all out war doesn't yield anything profound and long lasting. Perhaps turning it into a learning opportunity for adjusting the platform is the best that could be hoped for. Thank-you for offering a platform for these suggestions! I absolutely agree...4 posts a day is reasonable and meets the aims of the flag war contingency.

I wish I would have seen this earlier and I tend to agree that the measure you propose would limit abuse, it would at least make it harder.

The other idea I came up with is that any account can only upvote any other account the equivalent of 2 - 100% upvotes a day. This would include yourself.

If you had a favorite author you wanted to upvote 4x a day then they would have to be 50% upvotes.

I believe that this would force people to find more good content creators rather then just relying on 1 or two high frequency posters. I also don't think it would hurt most established authors that much since the really big whales almost always only upvote with a portion of their SP.

This solution also isn't bulletproof but I think it is an improvement to how things work now.

Both solutions are prone to sybil attacks - setting up multiple accounts to get around the barrier.

True but it is still more complicated for someone to set that up then it sis now.

Not if you know what you're doing. It takes about ten seconds (and a few steem).
The only drawback to starting a second account, is that it then has to recruit followers.

Right, even if the net earnings are the same it would be much more difficult to accumulate followers and reputation. Which means it would be much easier for the community to take corrective action. In the case of this certain bad actor part of the issue is the large number of upvotes from lazy People looking for guaranteed curation returns.

Limiting to 4 posts a day might help - but it would only likely be taken onboard wholeheartedly by those who have bought into the true spirit of steemit.

For others who only have eyes for the quick buck and be damned, clone accounts would be spawned with gratitude and rapidity.

Steem is a focal point of human nature. We can peer into it and see the best of times and the worst of times just swirling round and round.

In a room with no rules the words optimisation and exploitation bounce back and forth off the walls. Which word you see and which word you miss depends on which door you came in through.

Well, something has to be done, and soon, otherwise the entire platform will tear itself apart.

It's pretty simply to bypass the 4 post per day limit by just opening up multiple accounts that upvote each other.
My offering to help resolve this is at steemocean.com - which contains a voter ranking table that allows us to easily see the voting behavior of each account. While this doesn't actually add any control over anyone, it does bring awareness so that voters know who they are voting for.

Hey @papa-pepper. Hope your day is going well my friend.

@Berniesanders once tried to make a deal to decrease the frequency of these posts,

I appreciate your efforts to try to find a solution to the problem of abuse by @haejin and his friends but I have to be honest and say I don't think this is the best reference since it makes @berniesanders look like 'the good whale' he would have everyone believe he is but to my mind, while I appreciate his efforts in bringing attention to the abuse by others, his own abuse of the power he has on the platform should also be questioned just as strongly and vehemently as his own criticisms of others.

I also think limiting users to four posts is an ineffective way of dealing with the problem since, as @clayboyn mentioned, there are other ways to increase the amount of posts you make and with the introduction of zappl etc, it may be that it becomes pretty regular for users to be making more and more posts each day.

I made a post of my own a while back about creating a community bot to tackle abuse. I thought it was a pretty good idea but it didn't get much attention. If you want a look you can check it out here but in truth I'm not really a problem solver.

Another suggestion I would have is to create a kitty or bounty that everyone who wants to see the end of abuse could add to so that it was a large and worthwhile kitty and offer it to whoever within the community can come up with the solution that finally draws a line under this period in the platforms short history. The attraction of a large kitty might be enough to attract the right sort of thinkers to the problem. :)

Thanks again mate. Have a good one! :)

"The attraction of a large kitty might be enough to attract the right sort of thinkers to the problem. :)"

This is an excellent example of problem solving =)

Doesn't Utopian.io have a bounty system somewhat like this?

I haven't essayed the learning curve yet to find out what Utopian is all about, so have but hazy and dim recollections of off hand comments I've seen about it to go by.

As witness 73 and rep 61 with only a small dolphin wallet, my opinion is not worth nearly as much to others as it is to myself lol. I think there is merit to your suggestion but as a 3 decade plus veteran developer of software, my immediate reaction is to analyze how to break this and its too easy. Just multi account, generate even more spam and upvote yourself. This happens already so Im certain this solution would only exacerbate that.

Then you get into philosophical issues of control and rules in the decentralized free market we really would prefer to establish in the first place.

Something must be done but i believe the only viable solution is social pressure and cultural change in the behavior of users.

Criminals gonna crime, spammers gonna spam and cheaters gonna cheat.

How do we get our overall society to affect the change we want to see in our world?

Tough question not metaphorically distant from the american gun control debate. We have rules already that aren't working. We want freedom for the rule abiding decent folk and we want to mitigate the damage done by opportunistic greedy bastards and their bikini clad ramen recipe posting sisters.

Do I have a solution? Sadly no. But I think this one moves the problem from single account abusers to an even harder to control or see or stop pile of sockpuppets getting that money out of the pool anyway.

What are we overlooking?

Where is the damn easy button to fixing this?

Perhaps the answer lies not in limiting post quantities per time cycle but rather in the debates going on about linear reward curves vs capped or reverse weighted curves?

@SirCork
Witness #73
Founder @YouAreHOPE Foundation
Founder @SteemStarNetwork

Thank you for adding that in, and I love the way you ended it. There are obviously some things that I overlooked, and there apparently is no easy button. Thanks @sircork.

I don’t even think curve changes can help for all the reasons you described. People would still calculate the most efficient way of deploying their stake across multiple accounts to counteract the curve.

I think you have it right with social pressure & cultural change. A big part of that is downvoting. I feel the stigma the flag holds now needs to be removed and it needs to gain acceptance among the community.

Downvoting is very important. All the altruistic "big voices" such as @timcliff, @Patrice and others, including my smaller dolphin self are working hard to get people to understand the importance of the downvote in corrective action such as this. Could you be at risk of spiteful retaliation? Sure, but does that in turn shine a poor light on an asshole spite voter? Usually, yes, and the good whales love to eat those guys for breakfast.

Sushi anyone?

Absolutely. Particularly in the case of abusive self voting, if that individual revenge flags it’s nice to realize they have effectively turned every vote on your blog into flags against them, since the amount of voting power they need to counter your rewards they would have been voting themselves in a vacuum. If you draw out revenge flags, you’ve sneakily made everyone who upvoted your work a flagger in your cause!

I remember when Dan was proposing a “negation” mechanic and I think this could be revisited. We have upvotes with downvotes as an inverse action. If we’ve added delegation, we should conceivably have inverse delegation, having a portion of your SP negating the SP of another as Dan proposed. Bad actors can be neutralized without “censoring” their posts or needing to code a bot to automatically follow all their actions around.

In the case of the most well known rewards dispute ongoing... genuine followers feel like the content they support is being attacked by flags and their vote and voice are trying to be suppressed. In actuality there’s only about 3 accounts voting patterns under scrutiny creating 92% of the rewards, and using their stake in a way that some in the broader community feel is irresponsible. If negation were possible, the average user would never see any flags, the post value wouldn’t decrease as it had never gone up in the first place, and the actual follower support would be left untouched - resulting in $20-$30 rewards per post.

50% attack? Control more than half the SP on the network, negate everyone's SP, and you can vote on yourself for 100% of the reward pool.

The social stigma of downvoting isn't the only issue with it. It's also extremely time consuming to use it efficiently. @steemcleaners is a full time job and they're only fighting a percentage of the small fries. Vote negation was supposed to reduce the amount of time and energy put into preventing abuse. It would be a good place to start, downvoting wouldn't be enough.

I don't think you can ever really lose that stigma. Most of the time a minnow isn't going to flag a whale account, because their flag is just an irritating fly to them, but that whale can wipe them out with their return flag. I really don't know how it can be seen as anything but a punishment.

To a point you are correct, but every week on the @SteemStarNetwork, both @patrice from SteemCleaners and I on our respective streaming shows, remind everyone to flag anyway. Make the point, use your voice. If the whale retaliates spitefully, let me know.

This is where quadratic rewards empowered even the smallest of minnows with the chance to trim a decent chunk from a high payout - low quality post.

Actually, it could prove to be more useful than whatever the current situation is.
If the account creation process will continue to take as much time as it is taking now, I'm pretty sure spammers will leave Steemit in the blink of an eye. lol

They don't sign up via steemit as it is, there are dozens of sites to sign up at, including via the command line wallet. Steemit inc is not the block chain, and its a huge problem that people do not understand the difference.

I'm aware that there are 3 ways to sign up kind sir.
Any proof of fact that people aren't using Steemit to sign up though?

Join @patrice of steemcleaners and I on @steemstarnetwork every Sunday or Tuesday night and get some facts, including your proof. And there are dozens of ways to sign up, not "three" nor did I say "three" so, whats your point?

My point is simply that I know of 3 ways to sign up. Not trying to start any argument, I know you're a knowledgeable veteran of Steemit and are a part of @patrice's talk show, but please don't judge and look down at a minnow who is only trying to lighten up a tense situation.
Also, thank you for bringing it to my attention that there are many more ways to sign up. That's interesting.
Cheers!

anonsteem
steeminvite
steemit
utopian
command line wallet
steemconnect
any other of the dozens of condenser clones
and others

Patrice's show is her own on Tuesdays, Mines on Sundays. Both are on the network I created and built

Not arguing, but you came at me on the offensive demanding "proof" and such.

It hardly sounded like "lightening up" anything.

And again, STEEMIT is not STEEM. I am a veteran witness of the entire block chain and many, many related interfaces. Given my choice, steemit inc itself would dry up and get out of the way, since they constantly prove themselves incapable of producing 90s era quality UX/UIs in their interfaces to the chain and are more concerned with Ned's salon hair budget than fixing glaring errors and omissions and failures in their lame ass attempt at a blogging site.

I use them all, chain, busy, zapple, dmania, all the d-sites... we really dont even need steemit inc anymore, and they cant seem to focus to save their own asses.

I earlier commented that rather than looking to impose limits, we should be looking to incentivize behaviour we want to encourage.

The example I used was to increase curation rewards for each account upvoted in a day. This encourages curators to use a single account, and to broadly penetrate the market seeking accounts to upvote. I thought a 1% increase per each new account upvoted might work, but I've not done any math to examine whether this is a good figure, and I'm confident better heads than mine are better able to calculate an optimal increase.

Thanks!

I just found this post, and I have to say the discussion here is the most civil , well balanced and mature dialog I've seen regarding this issue. BIG thank you for posting and hosting this important discussion here. Thank you @papa-papper, much needed.

Big Upvote and Resteem

I have to agree. @papa-pepper's humility and honesty grant a substantial buffer against hyperbole and hyperventilation that's marked the comments here. They're a pleasure to read as a result.

Thanks!

My thoughts are as @jwolf stated- what about people who have multiple accounts? True, if they have many accounts the rewards' abusers could continue as they do now; just as they are now, spread over more than one account.

While I am still new to the blockchain, steemit and cryptocurrency I have been following the unfolding of this issue that has plagued the platform.

What can be done? It would have to be a multi-level solution.

  • Limiting number of daily posts- even as active as I am, I have maybe posted four times in day a dozen times in the last eight months. Percentage-wise, that's fairly low. Honestly, how much can you say in a quality post; let alone four times a day? This would effect the multiple account issue too.
  • Limiting the how many times an UPvote can be used at high percentages by each member. (ie. Member A makes a post. Member B comes along and upvotes 100%. Member A now posting as Member C has Member B come along and does another 100% UPvote. After Member B has made X-number of 100% UPvotes in the 24-hour period, he has to wait for the clock to tick to be able to do another 100% UPvote for anyone else.) Maybe a restriction of the number of 100% UPvotes allowed would help curb the excessive use.
    But as @clayboyn stated there is already a limit on ten 100% upvotes per account per day; so this is the Magic Number so far. Maybe this needs to be reconsidered and lowered.

@clayboyn adds about curation being rewarded. I fully agree with that too. I scour the platform on a daily basis for my homesteading community, qurator and muxxybot looking for quality posts to share with others in my following and groups. I started doing this from day one of being on the platform. t's time consuming and I do it, not for rewards, but because that's the type of person I am. Helping others is the way I was raised.

I know the witnesses have long days, work hard and have the best interest of the members' at heart- if they didn't, they wouldn't be where they are now. We vote for the witnesses we feel will do justice to the platform and keep the reputation of steemit in a positive light; so to speak. I know they will read this post as well as ALL of the comments and suggestions (which the comments are enlightening and full of great possibilities and concerns) and take into consideration what some of us are thinking.

Thank you for attempting to help us evaluate this and adding to the discussion.

I think you are on to something. The soap opera has to stop at some point.

I never was a fan of soap operas. I just didn't want to end up seeing a minnow massacre.

Ah, I see that it would be like limiting Face Book or You Tube to only put out 4 posts / videos per day. Not sure if this would work and grow the Steemit Community. I do see the concern on the other hand with abuse. Its pretty bad about flag wars taking place here on Steemit. That's to bad for sure. I hope the one's in charge come up with a feasible solution. Thanks for the post.

We will see if there even is a real solution. Thanks @crowe!

You are right @papa-pepper I saw Bernie's post 2 weeks ago and I also saw the user's post ... every minnow and even almost all the whales are scared of the user because he has very high steem power ... so everyone is scared of being flagged or something , only Bernie isn't though ... and we have all seen how that cost him .... and I don't think steemit.inc will want to make some changes particularly because of one user , though your solution is a good one . If they are willing to go ahead with it

OH HELL NO!

I disagree whole heartedly.
I couldn't disagree

MORE!

Never, never ever, no never
Limit Freedom.

Some freedoms are limited with good reason. The freedom to take out all steem power at once is one of thousands of examples.

Yes, I agree! I think that's one example of necessary limitation that cannot be bypassed.

Other freedoms are there, but if you act on them, there are consequences. To keep it to steemit, one can choose to spam or farm, for example, but he or she lives with the potential consequence of being flagged.

you misunderstand the meaning of 'freedom'.

'Limiting freedom' sounds and is really bad.

But social pressure is needed and must be applied constantly and started yesterday. Otherwise in a short while abusers will be the ones doing it.

Well, consider the inverse approach to the problem (any problem, really): incentivization of what you want to encourage, rather than trying to stop what you want to go away.

Instead of limiting how many times people can post, or what they can earn on a post, give curators financial incentive to curate more broadly, such as by increasing the curation rewards they get on each successive new account they curate in a given day.

While specific contractual relationships, such as might be undertaken for a bidbot vote for example, might not be sufficiently discouraged by this specific example, it would generally encourage curators to curate from a single account, and spread the joy more broadly across the platform, rather than just circle-jerking their friends with autovotes.

incentivization of what you want to encourage, rather than trying to stop what you want to go away.

I completely agree with this approach, unless it produces more anomalies. Unfortunately this is a fluid system, and encouragements or limitations can have side-effects as well, which sometimes can be more important than the main desired effect.

BUTT
that's what they told the tomcat
'it's for your own good'
that's what the rapist told the woman
'relax and enjoy it'.

BUTT

Yeah, it would still leave things open for multiple accounts and "abusive" comment upvoting too. Thanks @everittdmickey, I was wondering what you would think anyway. Thanks man!

you've a right to your opinion
BUT
I spend ten or twelve hours a day on Steemit.
youre telling ME that I can only do FOUR posts?
I don't like that one LITTLE bit.

looking back on YOUR record.
pot...kettle..black..much?

I completely understand where you are coming from, and your first point is valid. As for my record, it has been pretty strictly 4 or less within each 24 hour period, although there have been sometimes when it did hit five. I once thought about cutting back to only posting once per day, and there were those who were disappointed in that, so I increased the frequency after a few days.

so how come you are the number one or number two 'most posts made' with over 40K a few months ago before SteemWhales died?
(I was keeping track)
I had a mere 20K...and was trying to catch you.
(like a tricycle trying to catch a lambo)

I think comments are included in that total.

yup..I'm sure they are.
lookit THIS post...how many comments did you get?(and make)

now im crossing my mind! Let's just wait if what steemit can do about this issue..

Hope we can all have peace of mind and love!

a little bit of freedom is a dangerous thing.
people might NOT do what you want them to do
GASP..they might exercise their own initiative...
can't HAVE that.
we need RULZ...lots and lots of RULES..
and censorship...people should only say what we want them to do

limiting the number of posts is censorship

i respect you sir!

What about when devs (or anyone else) choose to hide people's posts on the Steemit platform with the flagging tool? I think that's a form of soft-censorship at the very least.

The dev in question claims that it's "editorial control" and if that's the case, basically anyone with enough Steem can muzzle anyone they want, in the name of editorial control.

I thought this platform Steemit, not steem was censorship free, but it turns out I simply fell for some very clever propaganda. The devs always say that the "blockchain" is never censored, when the topic of censorship comes up.

Meanwhile, one of the devs will soft-censor via their social media UI if they disagree with the ideological leanings of the person who made the post. I was all for Steemit for a while because it was really a great tool in helping me to exercise some creativity.

I was even encouraging YouTube personalities to ditch YouTube because of their censorship tactics to come to Steemit. I've since had to eat crow and apologize, and correct the record that Steemit does in fact engage in a form of soft-censorship, when they and their users; can bury posts, and hide comments, and redistribute potential rewards etc.. etc..

What do you think everit have you ever had a post flagged?
If so, do you think that was a form of soft-censorship?
Or am I looking at it wrong, in your opinion?

yuup...i've had posts flagged..
pissed me off.
BUT
the key here is
innovate, adapt and overcome.
Steem (or steemit) was NOT made for YOUR connivence.
(or mine)
it was made for those who ponied up MILLIONS of dollars.
if you got the money..then they'll (maybe) change it for you.
have you got a few million bucks you want to invest?

I din't think so
so..quitcha bitching.
plays the cards that are dealt.
(or go back to facebook)
SURE the game is rigged.
but if you don't play you can't win.

and I've been winning pretty big.
pick your battles..

Thanks for your feedback on the matter Everitt. I hear you, and I am going to adapt. I'm going to change my mission. Initially my mission was to come on here, write articles, and earn Steem by trying to flex my creative muscles.

Now, i'll be using the platform and my steem to expose the fact that Steemit engages in soft-censorship, while hiding behind the fact that the blockchain (something that noone cares to read in it's raw format) is uncensored.

It's very manipulative of the developers to tout the fact that the blockchain is uncensored as a diversionary tactic to not talk about the fact that Steemit itself engages in censorship or post hiding or whatever they want to call it.

If I can convince even one person to make an informed decision before joining this platform, it will save them a big headache later down the road. Ultimately, it would be nice if the devs fixed the flagging tool, but whether they do or don't at this point doesn't even matter.

All that matters to me, is that I will do my best at unraveling the myth that Steemit is some kind of bastion of free speech.

looking at your wallet

334.231 STEEM
(-300.349 STEEM

yup...youre gonna make a YUGE impact.
(poppa pepper makes that in one day)
.
not to mention his wife's account...his children's account..his goats account...oh..don't forget the sheep/guinea fowl/ ducks...
dunno if they have accounts or not..

(who can compete with cute and cuddly? He's got children and BABY LAMBS...sheesh...not fair)

ahem...

evenso
that's petty.
if you're going to be a twat
go on twitter.

A post limit, especially only 4, is completely unworkable. Others have already brought up that it does not defend at all against multiple accounts, but the main problem is the Steem vs. Steemit distinction.

Any limit would need to be imposed on the blockchain level. One of the main strengths of Steem is the unified account & identity across multiple applications. In a day, I could easily make 2 Steemit posts, 4 quick Zaps, add a couple photos to my Steepshot page, update a project on Utopian, post a vlog to dTube, and end the night relaxing by throwing a meme on dMania and streaming the video game I’m playing on dLive.
That’s 12 posts, completely non abusive. The 4 post limit may have been fine when Steemit was the only platform, but it’s gone for good reason.

This is what I was saying, but you said it better. I really think many on Steemit don't realize just how many platforms are included in the Steemit ecosystem. You named a few I didn't know about as well. We all want Steemit to grow, as you said that is the strength of the Steemit platform....many platforms in one.

Thank you @papa-pepper for this post. I resteemed this post because I think it is important that minnows will not be dissapointed in steemit and leave because of this issue. I see many minnows writing posts that they are thinking of quitting with Steemit mainly because of the trending page they see. This platform will not only survive because of whales and dolphins but also minnows and there are just much more minnows than whales/dolphins.

@papa-pepper, what do you think about the soft-censorship on Steemit Inc that lay in the hands of anyone who has the Steem power to abuse the flagging system?

I came to Steemit in good faith that their was no censorship, but that was because when the Steemit developers bragged that there was no censorship, they were talking about the Steem blockchain itself, and not their social networking platform. At the time, I wasn't learned enough on the two, to comprehend the difference.

Anywho, feeling a bit bamboozled and abused. One dev in particular is exercising his inner snowflake to try and shut me up the best that he can, and well it's not going to work.

The flagging system is broken, and when Steemit has a dev running around willy-nilly soft-censoring people's posts because he doesn't like what they are saying; that's ultimately going to kill Steemit's reputation in the long run.

Right now, people have been jumping ship from the popular censorship platforms. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, they're all losing people who think they are coming to greener pastures (steemit and other companies) who purport to not censor.

The cake is a lie when it come to Steemit not censoring. The fact that anyone can soft-censor on this platform, makes the whole platform a very contentious place.

I think your idea is probably a good one, to slow down the reward pool rape. However abusive flagging because of ideological differences. It's going to kill Steemit's reputation in the long run. I'm hoping that large steemholders like yourself have some kind of say. Or influence with the Devs to come up with a better solution that people can't so easily abuse.

Thanks for reading...
[/end of rant]

I did a post, on an alternative idea for the flagging system, but it was immediately censored by the same dev. I know my idea isn't perfect, but I just wanted to put it out there. I think that flagging should only be something used to stop spam/and/nsfw.

My recollection is that Steemit is touted as 'censorship-resistant', rather than immune to it.

Ultimately, I completely agree regarding @sneak.

This is exactly why appealing to devs and whales to fix the problem is like asking a firing squad to set you free. @sneak is a senior dev, and Stinc serves the whales as the vast majority of Steem is in their hands, and thus Stinc is dependent on them for it's profitability.

You and I have also been graced by flags from @blacklist-a as a result of @sneak invoking it on us with his flags. This is a mechanism that prevents an army of upvoting bots from doling out rewards, which is a means of encouraging accounts 'approved' by @sneak and his cohort. If it's any consolation, @ned and @dan are both also blacklisted =p

I also note that @dan left because of the issue, I think (it's what I've heard from them as claim to know), and I like his proposal to counter stake, rather than limit such interactions to votes on posts and comments. @bloom (who describes himself as a 'professional flagger'), for example posts but little, hardly even comments, leaving a tiny window for his victims to fight back. Since he is funded offchain, he isn't dependent on upvotes to be able to fly his flags here. As an aside, @bloom should alarm folks interested in free speech, as he exemplifies a mechanism whereby hostile parties can suppress Steemers from without, for whatever purposes they choose.

Folks don't need to open an account on Steemit to promulgate their views, or suppress voices they don't like. They can just fund @bloom to censor for them, and if he doesn't post, there's no way to fight back directly. The hospitality industry probably funds @sweetsssj in a complementary advertising initiative (just my private speculation, but a valid potential mechanism that may well be far more widely undertaken on Steemit than we might suspect, as propagandists are going to seek influence here, just as they have flooded 4chan, Twatter, and ZeroHedge).

Being able to counter stake instead of flags would neutralize the ability to censor, prevent flags from crushing rep, as has been done repeatedly to @skeptic, as @dan did to @berniesanders himself, and more recently @sneak has done to @iamstan, and also enable folks to counter abusive whales without being drawn into flagwars.

I haven't seen the post you linked, but will have a look at it now.

Thanks!

That's interesting, I didn't know that dan left because of that issue. You got a link that demonstrates that?

I've been told that during my rounds commenting. I'm sure a devoted search with a staff of data analysts could find it in my comments in only a couple weeks.

I doubt also that just one issue was the cause. Also, no one gave me a link that I recall. I'ts definitely hearsay.

Interesting hearsay nonetheless!

I personally think that 4 is more than enough times to post. Any more than this would be abuse in my book. You would have to ask yourself why one would even do more than 4 post? There is nothing good that comes from a flag war but also there is nothing good that can come from the magnitude of abuse that is dominating the platform. I would love to see a focus put on comment self-upvotes. The comments self-upvoting is simply a way for the abusers to try and go unnoticed and is probably far worse abuse then everything else. Thanks for bring this to everyone's attention, in will Resteem for more visibility.

          I finished reading the 191 comments prior to writing this - -that's a lot of comments not the most I have read - - bit still a lot. HF 19 was done for a reason, I do not have the history behind it, but it was done in the Past to solve some sort of issue, I do not know if it was the nogono issue , (which it is my understanding @berniesanders solved for the whales), or some other issue, it was put into place to fix a problem. Like I said I do not know what since that was before my time. I do know when you institute a solution you do not completely do away with and return to the past problems, you seek new solutions for new problems that were created.

          Limits, Nope steemit is not Perfect, what I have grown tired of is people telling me how to vote, when to vote and who I am allowed to vote for. The other day I saw someone that wanted steemit to start charging fees because then it would speed steem transactions up, (obviously he had no clue in that matter as I have no clue in some matter), NOW it seems people want to tell me how often I can post. Soon it will be what I can post, then it will be a certain time I am allowed to post. No limits - If you don't like how often a person is posting, or what they are posting use the damn mute button.
          And all this bullshit talk of soft censorship, the post is there. the comment is there. I'm I censoring someone because I muted them? You bet I am. Do you or the poster that I muted, or anyone else have the right to tell me what I want to see? NO you do not. If you want to see someone's post then click the greyed out post all you want. Someone exercised their right, to vote how they wanted to. They did not vote the way the poster wanted them to, to bad grow up, not everyone likes the same thing.

          If steemit inc thought there was a problem, they would take action to fix it. With only 2 or 3 witnesses, looking at and talking about it, seems to me it is all a mute point. With the complete lack of whale support that @berniesanders has received from those that are investors, it is apparently not a real big deal. So in conclusion, I do not need someone holding my hand and telling me or schooling me on, how to vote, how to post, how to comment, or how often to do any of those things. Use the mute, button, or give @berniesanders a billion SP and let him continue to do that which whales do not want to do because they may get their hands dirty.


I strongly agree with most of what you've said here, except regarding censorship. Consider @bloom, for example. He is funded from outside Steemit, and calls himself a 'professional flagger'. This enables ZuckerBorg to silence people by flagging them into negative rep such that most folks won't see their posts unless they look for them, and he could do this without ever having an account on Steemit, by just paying @bloom to do it.

There's no way to counter @bloom, since he but rarely posts or comments.

@dan proposed a method to counter this by countering stake itself, rather than merely upvoting or flagging posts and comments, and this would at least help Steemit counter enemedia propagadists and censors covertly influencing content on Steemit.

Thanks for speaking your mind!

There are voting bots and voting rings, and self"ish" voting whales. There are spammers, flag wars, and a general lack of understanding what's going on at the top of the blockchain. Yes, I am aware of the problems. I've read quite a few well paid articles addressing them in a thoughtful, technical manner. It's not that there isn't anything to complain about, but a large majority of the complaining is completely counter-productive.
There are plenty of people working hard to bring light to the flaws of this platform, and to solve the problems we face. The issue is that there is no quick fix. It takes a long time to write the code for each new hardfork, and HF20 was already under way when the problems of voting rings and self voters came to the forefront of everyone's consciousness.

A very productive way to change this system for the better, is to vote for the witnesses who care about the issues and will vote for a Hard Fork that they expect to improve the platform.

The STEEM network has many checks and balances to ensure everything is vetted by a decentralized group of trusted (elected) individuals before taking effect. No hardfork will take effect until at least 67% of the active witnesses have upgraded to the latest update.

Just because Steemit Inc. releases a new version of Code does not mean that everyone is forced to upgrade to the new code.

So if you're making that assumption that Steemit Developer Control STEEM , you're Wrong!

That is why I included the witnesses on this open letter. I was wondering what their thoughts were.

I seem to be the only witness responding so far. Typical. And disappointing, eh?

You know what, i will give you a witness vote for that :-)

Me too!! You got my vote as well!!

You got my vote also, for caring enough to reply to everyone and get involved.

Very much so =/

Thanks for being involved!

Great points.

A caveat is that witness votes are stake-weighted, and the vast majority of Steem is held by very few accounts, and almost all of it was ninjamined before Steemit even existed. That's the ultimate reason the top witnesses are who they are, and why the code is what it is--because it's in the interest of those stakeholders that control the top witnesses.

I've posted a proposal to weight witness votes by rep, which not only democratizes the witnesses according to the communities wishes, it also secures the blockchain from a hostile takeover that presently requires no more than enough Steem to vote in witnesses that will run whatever code you want.

Thanks!

Its very rare that I post more than two posts a day on the platform to be honest, I am all about not posting for the sake of well posting. I always though the object of steemit was to post good quality content, I spend most of my day on steemit but right now for learning than just posting. Its hard though because a lot of it is about crypto currency, and while its important I don't necessarily agree that it should be the be all and end all of steemit. I think steemit is so much more than that. But in some way it would be good to have some sort of community maybe in a sense of whales and dolphins who can monitor this sort of activity when and where they can to be able to nip it in the bud. Nice to meet you by the way this is the first chance I have had to check out your posts. I was recommended by @sykochic :)

Now that I know your voice I'm reading this comment in your accent in my head XD

Lol you got me doing that now reading in a geordie accent. :D

"...it is about crypto currency, and while its important I don't necessarily agree that it should be the be all and end all of steemit. I think steemit is so much more than that."

Society is so much more than an economy, and there are much more profitable things than money.

Thanks!

I think putting some new (or old for that matter) limitations in place may help... though honestly... wouldn't we just see @haejin2 and @haejin3 if that were the case?!

I hope we'll get a seperate VP for flagging pool or something along those lines in a new HF asap. Flagging needs to be less costly so that the community (whales especially) finally isn't disincentiveised from flagging anymore!

P.S.: little did I know that @haejin2 is already a thing :P

Yes, you are correct I believe. I had not initially thought of that. People could also just upvote their own comments over and over again, while only making four "posts" total for the day. I was hoping for an easy fix, but apparently was not looking at things from every angle.

The important part is really just bringing some more awareness to the situation!

Thanks man! You being concerned on the matter does count for a lot around here I think!

Too many people are obsessed with the short term profitability over the longer term health of this ecosystem.

Too many people are obsessed with the short term profitability over the longer term health of this ecosystem.

I hear you.

So the idea is to limit the use of the applications on the STEEM blockchain?

Under your proposal, I have the choice of 4 posts spread across steemit, zappl, dtube, dmania, etc.... Using Zappl as an example, they are trying to become another twitter...so 4 zaps and I am done?

I do not think it is a good idea to create a system where we are telling people to limit their use of the things on this blockchain. I thought the idea was to get people to do more on here?

Ultimately, people are prone to abuse freedom. If we limit the freedom, we remove the opportunity for this kind of abuse, ..

What other freedoms are we going to limit?

Today it is the number of posts, tomorrow it could be what is posted.

Havent we learned this lesson from government. They use the people will abuse the freedom. It use to be you couldnt yell fire in a crowded theater or verbally threaten someone, now if it isnt politically correct, it is hate speech and needs to be taken down. Of course, that hate speech can change depending upon who is in charge.

Is that a can of worms we really want to open?

Agreed. One scenario that comes to mind is realtime journalism coming to steem - in the event of an important event or story that a journalist would want to cover - they may need to make many dozens of various posts to keep their audience up with the particular topic - and those post should be able to keep full value so as to be easily found in the hot and trending tabs.

I'm not sure if a post limit would really solve the issue at it's core here. After all it doesn't take much effort to either post on alternate accounts or do your usual abuse via comments instead of posts.

I don't think there's any simple solution really. A powerful user here can only be stopped by an equally powerful user and only if that user is willing to use all their power just for that one person. Maybe a system to reward justified flags would help, but as it currently stands you'll always hinder yourself as well by using your vote power for flags.

There's really no clear cut where abuse of the entire system starts either. One person upvoting all their posts and nothing else seems really bad, but where does it stop? 5 people exclusively voting each others posts? 100 people exclusively voting each others posts? And how do you encourage people to vote for people outside of their comfort zone? I just can't imagine a scenario where there's not at least a decently sized reason to vote for yourself over anyone else.

And then there are bought votes, which I'm also not sure about. Originally I would have thought the 'promoted' section would suit the needs of people advertising their posts, but there's no denying that paying for votes that get you the same or more attention while also paying you back after 7 days is a lot more profitable. But honestly I feel like that's not really beneficial to have in the long run either. People who decide not to pay for upvotes end up having a really hard time being seen at all, while bad or mediocre content with bough upvotes flushes their posts all the way to the bottom.

Lastly there's the last minute before payout abuse, which is also really problematic. However from all the problems I feel like this one might be easier to resolve than the others. While it comes with it's own disadvantages I'd say this can easily be prevented by having the payout of posts happen not all at once but rather a fixed time after each upvote was used. That way there's no way to quickly translate voting power into cash. That could actually include the ability to earn from older posts as well, as I've always found it odd that older posts can't generate value anymore. You'd have to rethink a lot of aspects about this place though if that's going to happen. I'd be interested in seeing how people would go about this.

In any case I'm looking forwards to seeing what's going to happen, it's certainly something to talk about and discuss.

Quite a thoughtful comment.

I do agree that sneaky ninja selfvotes and botvotes at the last minute prepayout are a result of the 7 day payout period, which also renders posts with longterm benefit devoid of purpose. Who would publish 'Moby Dick' on Steemit? It's a strong disincentive to produce lasting content, which is counterproductive of Steemit's highest potential to benefit society.

Also, there are ways to incentivize upvoting others rather than yourself. Code is infinitely mutable, and while penalties for selfvotes are easily sidestepped, incentives to upvote others instead encourage behaviour that benefits the community, rather than trying to prevent behaviour that doesn't.

Consider the impact of increasing curation rewards for each successive account upvoted in a given day, week, month, etc. Coupled with strongly limiting bots, such an incentive could radically impact curation, and thus rewards for content creators.

Thanks!

Put a cap on maximum award earned by an account on one post, one day and one week?

That could be a plan too.

I agree, two caps, one for comments, and one for posts...as well as the maximum posts per day.

Multiple accounts bypass that too.

But it will cut the payments down. Make them work harder.

I was thinking that too, but multiple accounts would get around that easily.

That's what they did with sports teams. Not perfect but a start.

Cap the upvote value - or make sure account really has the rep to deserve it. penalize self-voting and circle-jerking, limits on 4 post per day is a little low, and how does it address commenting which are also being used to abuse the reward pool? Otherwise, I'm glad that you're stepping up to say something

If I remember right, one could post more than 4 times, but there was a negative impact on the rewards. This seems like a good idea for this situation.

Right, I believe that the rewards began to decrease significantly.

I absolutely agree, I have noticed a few people who post 11 -16 times per day. I do believe it is wrong. I support this entirely. Upvoted and resteemed. Hopefully this time someone is listening. Thanks for advocating for the greater good of Steemit.

I try. That's all that I can do.

The only thing to consider with that is that I think that such a change would have to occur via a hardfork. The sites could possibly implement it, but there would still be ways around it.

Thanks
It's a useful article.

100 % agree.
Original and quality posts need some time!
At the moment posting daily a lot of unoriginal memes, getting vots from votingbots and then get the dmania vote gets good rewards on steemit.
That is not how to support good qualitiy content!
That is how to support spam!

Good point, I posted about the issue too few months ago and suggested at least 2 to 3 Max post limit daily beause when steemit has millions of members there will be flood of posts thus limiting account daily post will help to curb the abuse. It seems that decision makers tend to ignore and allow flag war to go on due to this issue and the abusers keep doing what they like. Thanks for writing about this...

I will definitely resteem this Papa. It's funny, because i just discussed with @opeyemioguns about some people having several posts a day that generate lot of $...then your post dropped in. Great minds think alike yeah?. Hahahaha.
Jokes apart, i think there should be a limit too. More than four posts a day is too steep. I make maximum of two per day and sometimes one post. Something need to be done and i know they will. The bandwidth is a little restriction but can't help it all. Recently, new people find it hard to register on steemit because they are now doing manual verification. For them to come up with that, definitely, they should look into restricting number of posts a day.
Nice thought Papa.

Thank you! Glad to hear that you are thinking too!

😊. Thank you for bringing this up. I have been reading all the comments.

It is nothing but sheer act of criminality to have some self centered user raking in absurd earning and abusing a system meant to benefit everyone. This act of raping the reward pool must stop.. i am with you on this.

Out of curiosity, what is the basis of your belief that Steemit is a 'system meant to benefit everyone'?

Are you aware of the ninjamine that created most of the Steem in existence, and is where almost all the whales got their stakes before Steemit even existed?

I'm thinking it's possible that market forces determine cui bono, and the system is designed to benefit stake, rather than everyone.

Not disagreeing with the idea that the platform SHOULD benefit everyone, or saying it doesn't. It clearly can benefit everybody, but it may not be the actual primary purpose the whales' stakes are acting to achieve.

Seriously, there is an urgent need to reshape freedom in this platform before it turns to something else.i personally have not post more than 2 post a day .that does not mean that i am running short of quality information to share but to keep the original intent of ned scott who build it for us to interact not only on posting but also have time to read others people post ,have time to comment on people post .i tell you those who post more than four post a day ,hardly read people' s post which is highly wrong.i fully support the campaign to reshape people's freedom in terms of number of post per day before this platform turn to another thing.thanks @papa-pepper for this idea.

what kind of ideas would you like to plan?
I also agree to restrict posting, because to make a good post and quality should have the idea and time to write, when we write with haste, then do not give birth to good writing.

my suggestion @papa-pepper if there is posting every account maximum of 3 posts a day, then remind them, so they learn and understand, and the system is done like the BOT that I think is effective, each account only once a day may post.

I think that's a nice idea.
And also I feel sub sites like dtube are bias in upvoting. I feel people no longer upvote because it's a quality content but because they know the person making the post.

I feel it's unfair to minnows and newbies. To me I also feel the system makes the rich richer and the poor more poorer.
I suggest a platform should be created where newbies are upvoted till they become minnows. This will help encourage newbies alot

There are 3 pages
Pages