I just finished reading the comments in @blocktrades latest post which describes a scenario where you can buy Steem Power for SBD and I have to admit, there seems to be a real death spiral going on, which I was not quite aware of until now. In order for this platform to survive in any usable form, we have to agree on what it is and what it is supposed to do.
What is the purpose of the Steem Blockchain?
Is it a place where we exchange our goods and services with each other in a peer to peer system?
Is it a blogging platform?
Is it a place where you just buy upvotes, no matter what kind of post it is?
Is it a place where everything is for sale including Steem Power, Reputation, friendship and everything else that is sellable?
Is it a competitor for blogging platforms like Medium?
Is it a place where we learn how to build bots to automate our income?
Is it a place where we discover new ideas?
Is it a place where we form smaller collectives, in order to have a sort of basic income model, where bare bones money for survival is mostly automated so that we can focus on building a better world?
Right now it seems that everyone has their own definition of what Steem is.
I am a purist. When I joined Steemit, I thought deeply about the word, 'Steem', which comes from the word, 'esteem'. Holding someone in high esteem has nothing to do with money. Reputation cannot be bought or sold, and in fact there are certain things that money cannot buy. What we are seeing with the vast vote buying operations, and all the associated services springing up........the question we need to ask is this:
Are we in a death spiral?
If we are in a death spiral, in mid-hang of a social and economic suicide here on Steem, we need to first identify what exactly is the problem. Everyone seems to be pissed off by different causes, so this post is only an exploration of the problems that currently exist, and an attempt by all of us to come up with solutions.
Is it that the mega whales have not been as creative with solutions as they could be? Are they perhaps not the best shepherds of a social media platform? Have they gone too far in creating a socially and economically vacuous model?
But first things first, what do you see as a major problem in Planet Steem right now?
One thing is clear though. In Steemit's present state, it functions like a caste system. This is just a fact. Is this how the founders, @ned and @dan envisioned Steemit? If not, what was the vision? Every anarchist community I've helped to build has dissolved into a seething pit of human madness, chaos, disillusionment, lust and greed. Humans have not evolved, and the stewards of this platform are from a dizzying array of different philosophical fabric.
The problem I identified early is on that the major mega whales are not really the central cultivators of culture. With no one tending the fields, weeds tend to take over the beautiful crops, and strangle their potential. The ones who want to amass great wealth are not always the ones you want to watch the sheep at night.
Over time, this could change, and I think it would be smart for us all to get some outside opinions. If you are here reading this and you are not heavily involved with Steemit, we need to hear your opinion and perspective. Just like cybersecurity companies who hire an outside company to give them a full security audit, I think the Steem blockchain could benefit from getting some outside opinions about what the existing social problems are how to solve them. Above all, the social atmosphere is the most important thing here. Without that, it will become a vast wasteland of bots just upvoting shitposts.
I have often thought that we need to have a Whale Abuse Department run by AI, because no human on this platform wants to get involved in a whale war. Robots don't give a shit about reputation and they don't have inherent greed. (I'm sure this could be programmed into them though).
But as we all shrink away from combatting and dealing with obvious power abuse, so does the inherent value of this platform wither and die.
So, hopefully we are all adults and can discuss the current problems which are plaguing the system.
Put your voice below. Identify a problem you see and a possible solution. Be clear, don't attack people, stay focused on the problem and possible solutions. If we can avoid personal attacks, there will be more light shed.
I can only share my own vision of what Steemit could be and why I'm still here. I would like there to be less suffering in the world. And if I can share my artistic visions and energies with people, helping others and in return get enough for basic sustenance to keep my child and parents alive and housed, then I am happy. If I could help thousands of people see that the answers lie inside of them......this would be a paradise.
For me, that's it.
Your Turn,
Stellabelle
Hi Stellabelle,
I write about markets professionally, I tend to make about $75 AUD an hour if I've had enough coffee that morning. I make a little less than that for my posts on Steem, even with the help of profitable vote buying from MinnowBooster. If I was unable to give them that extra boost to the hot section, it probably wouldn't be worth me posting here.
Unlike other voting bots, MB has strict quality controls in place: they work actively with SteemCleaners, blacklisting scammers and have just implemented the new whitelist feature for manually verified quality content creators.
Though I largely use MB to boost my own posts, I've often done charitable things with it too - I've gifted Minnows thousands of SP and bought them solid upvotes on intro posts. When I read @evelynbelle's introduction post, I was really impressed and she mentioned she was in a bit of financial trouble so I bought her a ~$17 SBD upgoat. I checked back in to her profile yesterday and was stoked to see her earning 30 SBD on her recent posts. That is decent money in Nigeria. @Bania is another Nigerian success story helped along by myself and Reggaemuffin from MinnowBooster.
Reggaemuffin is by far the coolest guy I've met on this platform, he really cares about it and I reckon it sucks he struggles with witness rankings just because people disagree with the MinnowBooster project. Considering his love for the blockchain, technical wizardry and support for worthwhile community projects, this guy deserves to be top 20. When we were having bandwidth issues months ago, he was one of the few witnesses talking about it and pushing for action.
Yes MB is a profitable venture, but they also have thousands of happy customers they've helped and continue to help. I see a lot of people throwing stones at projects making a difference, but what do the stone throwers actually do to address the obvious hurdles new Steemians face?
If MB means just one more quality content creator stays on the platform, I think it's worth it.
this was a great response. maybe you can write a post about reggaemuffin, and i will resteem it. I have worked with him in spaminator and he is great person, deserves to be in top 20.
Thanks @Stellabelle. Yeah Reggae is a great guy and I'll seriously consider writing a post in honour of his greatness! I'm still waiting for him to an interview with @Scaredycatguide on MSP-radio which I think would be very interesting ( @reggaemuffin - give the people what they want!)
I'd happily host that interview on YouAreHOPE radio, and if you recall, I am the guy who built and then resigned from MSP Waves. :D The new station is just getting started, but we do plan to host @anarcho-andrei's witness interview show in the coming weeks, and I love @reggaemuffin as well, so we should do the thing here you are asking for @bulleth and get this show on the road!
I am just old and maybe not the shapest pencil to reply, but to me it is very important to just enjoy writing on steemit even if I dont earn much, but I still love it. It would have meant I had so sit and knit or do something that I always did. After retirement steemit just gave me that little extra use of my brain. So if there is a way I am sure there are clever people who will come up with some idea. Loved your post.
That is where I was, just happily posting and commenting then steemcleaners stopped by to accuse m e of spam tag, and adm stopped in to upvote the bot.
I suffer anxiety attacks. Getting "triggered" by a brainless and heartless bot was not funny. What happened was NOT acceptable to me. I flag and mute bots now and am just waiting for a platform where bots are not allowed to join. Feel free to look at what I WAS posting to decide if I am a "quality creator" or not. I have been told all of my life that I am an excellent writer, but maybe all those humans were wrong and the damned bots are right, I am just a spammer.
But we could not hide the fact that MB was created for profit because if not, why sell upvotes when it can use to directly upvote people's content. Beside, there's a curation rewards which is considerately huge in proportion to its SP.
I'm not against MB, I'm also not attacking anybody. Just expressing my thought as @stellabelle wanted in this post.
Of course, I don't think anyone here or from the MB team has ever tried to hide the fact that MB is profitable enterprise. I don't think there's anything wrong with running a profitable enterprise on chain either :)
I didn't say its wrong either :) its just that the essence of what has been started in the community are now gradually gone. Unless it was built for that purpose.
steemcleaners sucks, they are why I will be seeking a new platform. NO BOTS on social media for humans.
@Steemcleaners aren't bots, they are people and they are awesome. With out them, this platform would suck. Robots are here to stay and as the future nears we'll be seeing a lot more of them, both on social media and IRL.
Oh my... You folks who are so young that you never lived without technology in your face all the time just have a total blind spot. Not, "bots" are not here to stay. The earth is not "under control." There WILL be natural disasters, at some point humanity will likely be sent back to the stone age, even if we avoid nuking ourselves there. Allowing AI to become a lynchpin to your life is going to leave you pretty screwed when the lights go out. And there will be a split in society, I am not the only one who will NOT allow AI to be part of my "social" life. YOU will choose to see more of them, I will choose to see less of them.
Bots are great, you are being irrational. I just used a voting bot to help this little girl who needs spinal surgery https://steemit.com/teamaustralia/@bulleth/a-fellow-team-australian-s-little-sister-needs-our-help
cc OP @stellabelle
Now you are being unkind to a genuine human so that you may extoll the virtues of a bot. That is the exact sort of nonsense I will not toleate. I have been upvoting cryptopie whenever I see his posts. I actually read them, try to know him as a human rather than just let a bot go "virtue signal" for me. You, like the bots, are now muted. I do NOT play with AI, and I do not waste time with people who cannot understand that HUMAN interaction is vital to a peaceful world. Bots feed the divide and conquer folks. I am not irrational, I made a very rational decision, just different from yours. but that does not make me less of a human or stupid or any other insults you care to hurl at a SENSITIVE HUMAN.
Bots are not great - they suck balls and are totally fucking up Steemit...
There have been times when I was so pissed off about this website I wanted to punch my monitor and there have been times when I would wake up and jump out of bed and run to my computer to start working on stuff here. So I have seen the highs and the lows.
The highs mainly seem to correlate with a huge surge in STEEM Price and for a limited amount of time we are in a somewhat gated community because others can't get in fast enough to tap into the wealth that we are sitting in. Once things level out with more people eventually getting in and the price sinking then things get a lot tougher and then most people start falling off the bus and getting upset because they can't see a clear vision to it being "worth" their time to be on here.
From my perspective who is what I would call a mid level content creator on here (Someone who has invested a ton of time gets some decent payouts but actually can't live solely off this platform) there is always the fact that by doing a calculation for how much STEEM power we would have to buy to have a certain influence the investment still doesn't make sense in a lot of ways.
The only way we can do it is by STEEM dropping to about $0.25 or lower and everyone being super pissed off and most people giving up on the platform. Then we would have to commit substantial amounts of capital. Like $30,000+ and then STEEM would have to make a big comeback to $2 levels or so for our investment to be worth it. It makes it a tough play and the question when the price drops is WHY is it down that low? And also there is always the worry it would just keep going lower. When it went to $0.07 I thought that it was likely finished and the founders had screwed up the platform with the most potential.
The biggest problem with STEEM all along was the distribution from the beginning was totally messed up. And like we have seen with other projects they have done air drops and with EOS the ICO is lasting an entire year because in crypto you have to have a wide distribution. STEEM never properly addressed the situation so a lot of people feel like it is a hopeless effort. @rulesforrebels has 68,000 YouTube subscribers and has put in a massive amount of effort on here and hasn't given up but he is lucky to make $0.25 on each post. To me that starts to be a red flag. He has invested in some STEEM Power as well. It just isn't enough. There have only been a small handful of content creators who were able to build anything significant here. You, @rok-sivante , @pappa-pepper and a few others. All great content creators.....etc. From new people coming in it seems like a very tall order to really build anything. Even for myself I can't spend as much time as I do on here and not use some of the money for bills. If I can make $200+ / day on here then I can skim half of it and keep the rest building. When it dips way below that then I'm losing ground on the account and can't really maintain any kind of power.
Solution: It has been mentioned before but I think their should be a series of air drops based on people's reputation, amount of comments, etc..... The problem with the Golos drop was that if you were a God King here then suddenly you were a God King on Golos. So they suffer from the same distribution issues and they are still on a exponential curve for the power.
Solution 2: These major 3rd party developers like @good-karma and @jesta should be given substantial funding from STEEMIT Inc. Enough to be working on this stuff full time. STEEMIT Inc is holding so much of the power that one of the only ways to really get other people feeling like they are more invested in this platform is to enable them to keep spending their time here. Sounds socialist...etc but you have to realize that when a capitalist comes here they might turn around and leave because they don't see a good investment and a good opportunity for them to capitalize.
This platform in my mind is one of the most promising projects in the crypto space. From a price perspective it is hard to find that balance because while buying more STEEM Power creates demand for STEEM most new users and users spending a ton of time creating content need the money for bills for their efforts so it then weights on the price. I feel like the platform could continually go in these surge / sleeper modes but will continue on for sure.
"but you have to realize that when a capitalist comes here they might turn around and leave because they don't see a good investment and a good opportunity for them to capitalize."
Yep. I've been dabbling a bit here. And I've been looking at a way to make it profitable.
A. Ain't no way I'm going to plow tons of time and effort creating content when it's only going to earn for 7 days AND somebody with more than me can trash my account/rep/earnings for any reason he deems worthwhile.
B. I considered/did the math on renting delegated SP, to boost my visibility and accelerate growing my account/popularity/etc. But the math/investment again just doesn't work out ESPECIALLY because somebody bigger with an angry hardon about 'self voting' can 100% destroy my account and the invested $ put into renting delegated SP to accelerate my popularity and visibility.
Interesting to watch this steemit thing, but until steemit changes some things my time/effort is safer and more profitable on my own business/platform. Or said another way, steemit currently isn't a safe investment of time/effort/$.
Yeah I get your feeling for sure. The numbers are kind of hard to work usually unless you anticipate a big rise in the price.
I will say this. Steemit is getting better for sure from when I got on in July 2016. And the community effort has done a lot of good for people.
I can certainly understand working on your own business / platform instead of working within someone elses. I mean shit..... Electroneum which I just looked into last night freaking raised $40 Million and all they did was clone Monero....... I was like WTF?????
People are in it for the easy money which is why they $40 mil. A bigger problem with Steemit is that there is not revenue income to back their payouts, and until they have one it is simply a ponzi where you pay people from the rewards pool created from thin air.
Youtube, twitter, everyone has ad revenue. Here there is no revenue, except new arrivals
Yeah I get that thinking but the purchase of STEEM power as a mechanism to get exposure is the "ad revenue". Think about all the Tai Lopez ads you have seen on YouTube. He pays it to get exposure to gain a bigger following and sell his business seminars and materials.
Well the same thing goes for individuals on here or companies. Look at this account. They kept pushing their posts up to the trending page to market.
https://steemit.com/@bookingteam.com
What is being sold is exposure. If you have enough power you will end up on the hot page or trending page. In Ponzi's there are fictitious returns being pitched that don't actually exist and the money is just coming from new investment. But with Steemit I can guarantee that if you purchase 1,000,000 Steem Power you will be on the trending page for every post which will get more eyes, likely more upvotes, more followers....etc. So there is a tangible result that can be tracked and seen not just fictitious returns being reported
But you can pull all of that out. It will take you 3 months, but you can. You need a revenue generation model above and beyond that. Every day Steemit prints 64000 dollars. You will burn through that million in 20 days. There is no cost, like a annual renewal fee or advertisement where the money is sunk. You are still getting Steempower for that mil, if it was the price of an advertisement you will be getting 0.
What? No.
As brian said, the price of the steempower is the advertisement costs.
And that 1,000,000 SP is still in the system (even when pulling 'income' out...and some of that income would stay in the system to increase the SP count...and there are other benefits involved that are good for steem, like the upvotes to others, the delegated steem to curator groups, etc.
Yes the original investment can be pulled out after 3 months, but that's three months it's still in the system...and pulling out the original investment can lower the price (thus one gets less back) of steem, which incentivizes the investor to keep it in and use it, which supports the platform.
Steem needs investors and people that want to profit, because they drive innovation and new users to the platform.
I notice that people don't like anybody profiting from steem, but if it's not a profitabe platform/business, then it will die, and the people that will be sad/mad are the ones (partly) responsible for killing that which gave life/growth to the platform.
The more users, the more profits available, the more steem price rises, which creates more users and more investors/participants, which creates higher demand for and interest in the rising price of steem, which.....
I would love do see delegated air drops.
Any support from Steemit Inc in delegated SP for example would be a tremendous support if the newly built communities would get some. In turn they would be able to do incentive moves, attract more new people there at the same time increasing number of Steemit members. All other points were also based on seemingly great knowledge of the platform.
I feel like a little bit of the delegating has been going on. I know @ned delegated his power to a few people recently but then I think he retracted it. I feel that if it looks to individualized then it looks like they are picking a favorite when doing it. If there was certain criteria determined and everyone was getting a blanket STEEM Power boost not just delegated power that would be interesting. I don't think it will happen though even though the numbers could support it. Just in the @steemit account alone there is $69,000,000 of value. Again not saying that it would ever happen but what if they took $10,000,000 of that value and blanketed the most active 10,000 accounts with equal Steem Power. That would make a lot of people really feel good about being part of this community and seriously change some lives in certain parts of the world. Yeah the price might slightly suffer for awhile if people cashed some of it out but an act like that would go a long ways.
He had to retract because all of them apart from @surpassinggoogle were selling their votes...
I like this idea a lot!
We have the tools to monitor these accounts for activity/vote spread/etc.
I wish the idea could be put to @ned - and we have an account called @mrdelegation (or something like that...)
Like you, I have almost resorted to punching a hole in the wall with my fist! It has so much potential, and when i see people crapping on it, it MAKES ME VERY MAD.
It really does have so much potential and we have certainly realized a lot of that potential and it continues to get better all the time for sure. It is a big concern of mine though the general crypto community seems to not like it for a lot of different reasons. @jerrybanfield will put up YouTube videos about it and he sometimes gets more thumbs down than thumbs up and you look at the comment section and people are hating on him and the platform really hard. It is a major concern from an investment perspective because all the negativity surrounding it can make it look like some "whale hang out" or some scammy system that people don't want to spend their time.
In reality even if people don't want to blog and all that it makes sense for every crypto trader to have STEEM accounts just to be able to run to the STEEM Backed Dollar during pullbacks and store the coins off an exchange in a location where they control the keys.
I have been in crypto since 2013 and STEEM suddenly was the realization of future crypto that certain people used to talk about then. Where you could send coins to a human readable address instead of having the long Bitcoin style addresses..., Fast transactions times, little to no fees. STEEM is an unbelievably good system in a lot of ways.
We just keep having to fight for it. I would like to say it is ours now but that day hasn't quite came for someone like me. I'm more like a little puppy scratching at the sliding glass door wanting in.
thanks for your epic post. I will respond soon when my energy is back up....this post wore me out...and i tried to respond to everyone...
you just made over $10 in comments, because your reply is here twice! ha ha, i just noticed...
I tried to reply on Steemit and it gave me the broadcast error. So I replied through ChainBB and didn't realize it went through twice!
I was thinking... I know we have steem whales where we can see those that hold the most SP; is there a way we can see the top 500 most prolific users on Steemit? Then we can match them with a whale that could delegate them SP for 30 days and that gives them time to build a following then they can move on to the next user for 30 days, etc. is there already something like this?
Yes we can get a hold of this data.
I think there are many good points in this post and the replies that could be compiled and put forward - who and how is the next stage. I did try with my 'delegate' post a week ago but we need someone with a bit more ooomf perhaps?
Yeah, I definitely think we need to come together as a community and prepare for the worst. I think the only thing that will help Steemit survive is if whales delegate so @ned should be getting on that ASAP or All is lost. In the meantime if anyone here has ties to whales they should reach out and plead the case.
Yes I think delegation is key for growth, especially if the whales are sleeping!
There is SteemWhales.com I believe and I'm trying to go there but it isn't coming up. But I think on there you can see who has the most comments and highest reputations look at a lot of data. There are certain projects out there like @curie where being a newer user you have a good chance to get upvotes and this a trail of bots will upvote you as well but a lot of the upvote bots and delegation of power is done individually.
SteemReports.com is a great site for checking people voting habits. I don't see why the whales don't analyse some of the curation of users and decide who brings the best value to the platform through their CURATION and not their own posts. And check periodically that they are still voting in ways that are good for the network.
If I were a whale I would seek users who don't vote for than 5% (of their weekly total) on any particular accounts including their own. Then I could take a VACATION knowing my capital values are growing because I invested in the right people!
Wow, somehow I didn't know about SteemReports.com This is awesome!
Thank you for the information! I think it would be great if we could reach out to those people some way, and ask them to join the movement. Maybe @ned can help?
Possibly. It looks like he currently has 500,000 Steem Power delegated to others
"One thing is clear though. In Steemit's present state, it functions like a caste system."
Great, thought-provoking point.
"The ones who want to amass great wealth are not always the ones you want to watch the sheep at night."
This could not be more true.
I personally think one of our greatest problems is that the system with linear voting rewards provides huge incentive to hoard the maximal amount of rewards votable by your stake for yourself. This creates a whole culture of vote-trading, vote-buying, back-room deals, and unspoken vote-for-vote. If these are going to happen, the more transparent and public the better. That way, political will for consensus changes can hopefully be reached.
Because of the relative anonymity of the internet, you cannot create a typical system to combat this "abuse", if the community can even collectively define it. As a result, scattered community enforcement only shames the few willing to follow the rules, leaving the egregious to reap the rewards.
That's what I was getting at today in my post where you mentioned some of the ideas you expanded upon here.
I have been work-shopping an idea to align selfish (or amoral) game-theory with desired behavior, and it involves rewarding everyone directly for every vote (imagine if every $1 vote also sent $1 to your wallet, in 7 days, though voting power would probably be roughly halved), but vote trading will still require an algorithm to identify and regulate "abusers" and that algorithm will be programmed subjectively.
I don't have a solution to that yet or I'd have posted about the whole idea. I'm open to suggestions. Anyone?
I think more in terms of helping to lead a revolution.....which actually has more to do with waking people up to their own potential.
I see a platform that is in beta where a lot of things are not perfect, just like in life. There are many proponent and opponents of the vote buying and other reward-for-hire schemes. I think everyone has a point to what they think is real. I see steemit as a microcosm of the real world, though I know most of us, I included wants an utopian setting. In the real world, few still controls the wealth of billions. The only difference is in steemit you get to see how it is done. I think if the problem of reward for content is solved once and for all, that steemit would be approaching utopia. I don't even know if what I just typed now made any sense.
Genius observation:
Thank you very much for being so kind and understanding and for the upvote too. It's a skewed world. We just try to balance it out every now and then.
Great point!
yeah, it did make sense. Because of your astute observation:
"the difference between here and the real world, is that you get to see how it's done."
Wow! You're right. In here, you get to analyze how the super rich create more wealth, and how people react to that transparent analysis. It's true! We've never been able to see this before!
I believe we know how it's done in real world too :) The difference in real world it's being done in a more subtle way as disorder is expensive thing to control. As here disorder or uprising is not a threat at all as it can not happen :)
One of the most simple things to do would be to hide easily accessible wallet information. As now most post are voted per wallet size not the content. But on the other hand we have to maintain incentive for people to stack up SP. It will get better, trust me. If not on steemit then some other front end application that comes as a successor. Somebody will crack it, will find a perfect click and build on it. Trial and error. That is how all discoveries are made. Do not be sad :)
I get you. We are still in development phase, there are suddenly in the last months multiple apps and services being created. They can't be perfect in the start go. It is interesting how it will evolve on Steemit.
I have faith that we can work it out eventually.
@futurethinker lovely username, also I think you are really thinking for the future. Thanks for your wonderful input.
Hi @stellabelle. Brilliant post with things that indeed need to be said. You have asked so I will answer, long one I am afraid. From my point of view (a relative newbie) I found the whole thing a bit difficult to maintain and due to the pressures in my life, I do not have the time to invest that others in this platform do.
I have also struggled to create meaningful relationships with people, because I do not know who is genuinely interested in what people write and who is just upvoting for the financial gain. I seem to come across an awful lot of brown nosing, and that makes me feel uneasy. The fact that curation rewards are linked to the amount of steem a post gets seems a bit of a flaw. Those that get upvoted a lot will continue to get those upvotes even if their content declines in quality because many just do it to leech from the rewards.
I have introduced other people to the platform and they are doing okish with it, but they are the artistic types and it seems that sort of content is definitely more sought after, or better rewarded in any case.
I keep trying to draw parallels with other social media platforms I tend to use a lot more, and I have spotted a couple of differences. Facebook for example allows me to join groups so I can seek the type of info I want depending on my needs or mood, and the people in those groups are familiar and on the same wavelength. Here you can use the tags but you have to wade through so much trash sometimes! And the tags are just not specific enough. There is also a healthier mix of agreeing and disagreeing narratives. Steemit seems to be a place where disagreeing is undesirable because you might get flagged and obliterated as a result, affecting your bottom line.
In terms of my own content, I just think it is sad that you put a certain amount of work into something and you can only get exposure for a week, tops. After that people rather not waste their SP so it does not get shared or show up anywhere again. Yes you can wade through someone's old posts, but it is rather downheartening that they do not get the support for content that continues to be relevant and useful.
Now, what do I want out of steemit? I want a place where I can meet people with similar interests where my appreciation of their work becomes more than just a 'like'. Rewards are good things. Unfortunately the platform lends itself to just being a faucet for some, and there seems to be no way of stopping that.
I also want a platform that is decentralised and 'democratic' to some extent, so rules and processes are flexible depending on users needs. However, this requires people with knowhow and their time.
Potential solutions (disclaimer - I have some basic understanding of the workings of the creation of Steem, SP and SBD so I understand some of these things might really not work within the current framework);
Those are my very rough suggestions. Some of them might be impossible within the platform but this is just my opinion.
Thank you for listening if you got this far. :)
Hey @olayar, rephrasing the first couple of words in your comment toward @stellabelle for her post... ¡Brilliant Comment! mate. I concur fully with what you've said in your comment. But I agree even more with your bulleted points. Actually, very glad to find another steemian with quite the same viewpoint of potential solutions for the health and prosperity of our community. Subject about which I have also written frequently.
Cheers! for your very rough suggestions. :)
Thanks @por500bolos, and sorry for taking so long to reply... life just got in the way. Glad you agree because it means there might be some consensus for some of these things to happen. I really do want to keep this alive we just need people with the perseverance and know how! Thanks again for your support. :)
EXCELLENT articulation.
I strongly agree on the issue of spammers and beggars commenting. That's been a huge turnoff.
Agreed!
There have been times when I was so pissed off about this website I wanted to punch my monitor and there have been times when I would wake up and jump out of bed and run to my computer to start working on stuff here. So I have seen the highs and the lows.
The highs mainly seem to correlate with a huge surge in STEEM Price and for a limited amount of time we are in a somewhat gated community because others can't get in fast enough to tap into the wealth that we are sitting in. Once things level out with more people eventually getting in and the price sinking then things get a lot tougher and then most people start falling off the bus and getting upset because they can't see a clear vision to it being "worth" their time to be on here.
From my perspective who is what I would call a mid level content creator on here (Someone who has invested a ton of time gets some decent payouts but actually can't live solely off this platform) there is always the fact that by doing a calculation for how much STEEM power we would have to buy to have a certain influence the investment still doesn't make sense in a lot of ways.
The only way we can do it is by STEEM dropping to about $0.25 or lower and everyone being super pissed off and most people giving up on the platform. Then we would have to commit substantial amounts of capital. Like $30,000+ and then STEEM would have to make a big comeback to $2 levels or so for our investment to be worth it. It makes it a tough play and the question when the price drops is WHY is it down that low? And also there is always the worry it would just keep going lower. When it went to $0.07 I thought that it was likely finished and the founders had screwed up the platform with the most potential.
The biggest problem with STEEM all along was the distribution from the beginning was totally messed up. And like we have seen with other projects they have done air drops and with EOS the ICO is lasting an entire year because in crypto you have to have a wide distribution. STEEM never properly addressed the situation so a lot of people feel like it is a hopeless effort. @rulesforrebels has 68,000 YouTube subscribers and has put in a massive amount of effort on here and hasn't given up but he is lucky to make $0.25 on each post. To me that starts to be a red flag. He has invested in some STEEM Power as well. It just isn't enough. There have only been a small handful of content creators who were able to build anything significant here. You, @rok-sivante , @pappa-pepper and a few others. All great content creators.....etc. From new people coming in it seems like a very tall order to really build anything. Even for myself I can't spend as much time as I do on here and not use some of the money for bills. If I can make $200+ / day on here then I can skim half of it and keep the rest building. When it dips way below that then I'm losing ground on the account and can't really maintain any kind of power.
Solution: It has been mentioned before but I think their should be a series of air drops based on people's reputation, amount of comments, etc..... The problem with the Golos drop was that if you were a God King here then suddenly you were a God King on Golos. So they suffer from the same distribution issues and they are still on a exponential curve for the power.
Solution 2: These major 3rd party developers like @good-karma and @jesta should be given substantial funding from STEEMIT Inc. Enough to be working on this stuff full time. STEEMIT Inc is holding so much of the power that one of the only ways to really get other people feeling like they are more invested in this platform is to enable them to keep spending their time here. Sounds socialist...etc but you have to realize that when a capitalist comes here they might turn around and leave because they don't see a good investment and a good opportunity for them to capitalize.
This platform in my mind is one of the most promising projects in the crypto space. From a price perspective it is hard to find that balance because while buying more STEEM Power creates demand for STEEM most new users and users spending a ton of time creating content need the money for bills for their efforts so it then weights on the price. I feel like the platform could continually go in these surge / sleeper modes but will continue on for sure.
^ this.
Seriously 'nuff said. You have hit the nail on the head.
@Reggaemuffin can we get @rulesforrebels and @brianphobos on the MinnowBooster whitelist?
If anyone else know's quality content creators that are struggling out here, please tag.
exactly. I need to find more quality people too...can you make me a list?
I appreciate you reading the response and taking a look at @rulesforrebels account.
@Reggaemuffin says he will white list you if you promise not to use an 80SBD upgoat on a zappl post :P
Hahahh, Ok deal! LOL
Hey @stellabelle, you called for newbies so here I am! Currently 3 weeks on Steemit, I sure do have quite an opinion about things here...
#1 Steemit is in beta, but it is essential for users like ourselves here to point out why we believe changes need to be made, and the developers should figure out how and what changes can be made.. I honestly feel that many use that excuse of 'we're still in Beta so cut them some slack' or 'why don't you tell them exactly what needs to be done' that it's cock blocking this platform's progress.
Example: Facebook didn't just sit back and asked their users what they wanted to see on the platform, instead Facebook tried different features and built based on the users' response.
#2 Why is everything about money on Steem blockhain? Maybe because that is WHY we use Steem blockchain in the first place? Because that is HOW Steem blockchain was marketed? According to Steemit Inc (as pointed out by @onthewayout previously:
The primary value of Steem has always been about money. Logically, users that are attracted to the blockchain are about money first before anything else! I'm a new user here, and I admit - it is the monetary rewards that attracted me to try this platform. However I promise you, there is nothing in this world that is sustainable when profit is put before anything else. It's similar to how modern businesses that rack up billions of profit today are all focused on impact first, profit second
Example: Facebook (to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected), Amazon (to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online) and Tesla (to create the most compelling car company of the 21st century by driving the world’s transition to electric vehicles).
#3 Because of #2, majority of users get on board to earn money - because they perceive the platform to be an investment opportunity for attractive ROI. This leaves us with an environment that is built to facilitate money making, such as bot voting, vote selling etc.
Bloody hell, why did we use social media platforms in the first place? Wasn't it to connect with our friends and family? Wasn't it to keep in touch with those that we don't get to hang out with often? Wasn't it to keep one another updated about our lives? Since when did social media platform became about money money MONEY??
#4 On social media platforms using Steem blockchain, we have more content focusing on how to make money off the blockchain than content that actually adds value to the blockchain.
Imagine Steemit as an online game: where you can make real money by selling your in-game currencies and item (similar to the SBD shit). But then the gameplay is all about making money - what the fucking fuck? This sounds like bullcrap, it seems to be full of shit and most certainly, it's distasteful for genuine gamers who are here to play the game (in our context, distasteful for genuine users who are here to produce and consume valuable content).
#5 When you have a shitty environment for genuine users to utilize the platform, they leave. When genuine users leave, guess who's left in the platform - users who are here for the ROI. These people will only care about their returns, that few are willing to bring up genuine new Steemians who write good shit because they are new and there isn't much ROI to help them. This builds a viscious cycle of genuine users coming and going, and eventually there will be no longer anymore genuine users.. and when that happens, there will be no audience in Steem blockchain and when there is no audience, how is it a social medial platform anymore?
#6 We ARE in the midst of this viscous cycle - it's already happening!!! Unless the team behind Steem blockchain is doing something really strict about this, the cycle is just going to continue. We can discuss all day long @stellabella and fellas, but in the end of the day - it's a matter of 'Steem improving for us' or 'us leaving Steem because it's too shitty to bear'.
#7 A genuine yet potentially-offensive-so-please-explain-to-me-thanks suggestion: Why don't Steem developers make selling of votes illegal? Like account-ban-worthy? Or rewards-stripping worthy? Or frozen-wallet-worthy? Like how Maplestory bans selling of power leveling services or mesos sales... Why can't we do that too?
I agree with your synopsis on why the current iteration of Steem is currently in decline. The signal to noise ratio of genuine users is frankly too low. There is simply too much noise with so much focus on making money rather than content. And those making quality content are being ignored.
There is so much meta discussion about the platform which seems kind of absurd to me. What we are missing are those passionate builders. Those people willing to build skyscapers for nothing. We need those adventurers who take us to the next level. The way YouTube was in 2005. The way several Subreddits are today.
But the marketing is completely wrong. Rewards shouldn't matter, at least not at this point. The biggest reason I write on the site today is not because of the paltry rewards, but because I see the potential of the platform. Sure, the money aspect still influences some of my judgements, but when I get into the zone, writing (at least for me) is fun. And being part of something that has the potential to be huge is exciting.
Mindset is important. So sure those who will help this platform are being ignored. But if you are truly in it for the long haul, you don't need rewards. You just need to do what you enjoy doing.
So, to put everything together. Yes, Steemit has problems. Yes, the genuine creators are being drowned out and tend to quit. Are there things that need to change from the top? Certainly. But to the new creators out there. Forget the money. Do what you love. If there are enough of you on the site, then things will slowly correct themselves and "hope" will be restored on the blockchain.
I'd love to see some stats on the relative numbers, but it seems hard to believe that if most of the whales did the right thing - i.e. curate good content, and output quality content themselves - that their collective SP power couldn't overwhelm the spammers and vote farmers.
In a way, this place is like a perfect example of the Prisoners' Dilemma. And to throw another thought experiment into the mix, it's like a Tragedy of the Commons. While everyone thinks that the other is taking advantage of the system, they lose out if they don't likewise take advantage of it. Perhaps the whales need to go on a team-building retreat where they all catch each other while falling and crawl around in mud together, to build some team spirit... ;)
because it's anarchy here, and an open petri dish.
Very interesting points. Yes money cannot buy you happiness. I feel this is forgot a lot these days I always have felt if the Steem blockchain could be built around social media and making connections you can only make on here. Its value although measured in $$ would actually be worth it to just use to go and communicate with people on the blockchain. I see too many people just trying to get rich minnows and whales which is actually somewhat of an anti social thing to do. I have also been part of many anarchist communities and have cut my ties with every project I have been part of. Sadly one person always has to ruin everything and takes advantage of the entire situation. I wish I was wrong but its just what happens when some humans are faced with opportunity to capitalise. If we dont realize this while we are still fresh and new that could be the problem. This goes for bitcoin as well. I dont worry everyday about how concrete things should work but I do take a step back and see the bigger picture every few months seems nobody is willing to bring it up or they dont feel qualified to deal with it. Again that makes it real easy for a wolf to go hit up the hen house. Ill be sleeping with one eye open in here. Of steem doesnt succeed doesnt hurt me too.much what hurts is knowing something had such ground breaking potential and never became what it was intended to be. This is all just a rant but I would really be bummed if big corporations continued to make bank off the "working man." And there was no way for the people to "get ahead" and not worry about finances. That in a sense is borderline slavery and should not be taken lightly.
I think shifting a bit more of the rewards to curators might help a bit as it may encourage people to amass and hold steem power instead of constantly cashing out their rewards. I realize some people do this for part of their living but that's not most of us.
I've put a good sized chuck of my own money here because I see long term potential but there are some things that need to change--some are cultural and some are technical.
I don't know how we go about changing the culture. There are so many different points of view here it's mind blowing. I saw a commenter mention maybe the culture and behaviors here should be regulated by some kind of AI because humans are imperfect and greedy. I'm not attacking anyone here but there are a lot of folks gaming the system. I'm not saying I'm perfect either by any means.
The culture side of it is very tricky. Changing the rewards system is not. We need more investors and curators--that is something that seems obvious to me. I don't know quite how we go about that but to keep trying to attract new users and to do that the quality of the average post here needs to increase. Again, I do not have a solution for this, it's only an observation.
Sorry I don't have better answers than that. You do pose a valid point though and there is cause for concern. Hopefully we will see brighter days in the future once we get past the upcoming B2X event. I'm thinking we'll see some money flow back into altcoins once that's passed. It doesn't address the other problems here but it is something to consider as another contributor to why we've seen this multi month bleed in the price of STEEM.
I think some of the pessimism I see is because we're heading into winter, and just like last winter, the price of Steem is sagging. It got pretty bad last winter, I was at $1-4 per post for a while. I hope it doesn't get that bad this winter.
The proof is in the pudding, with respect to whether Steemit works. Do people who produce good content succeed? How long does it take them to make it?
Those are the really important metrics. How it happens is unimportant to me, because I don't trust myself to know how a Utopia ought to look or operate.
I'm just trying to help people make good decisions with my articles about human nature, critical thinking, relationships and character. Andmy recipes, have fun and engage with nice people. But, you are right about humans...it hurts my heart that their are so many that will never evolve, that greed and selfishness is what drives them and that's why I don't think any system that isn't regulated will ever thrive for the benefit of all. Because humans.
Straight to the point, long ago I wanted to write about this... For the time that I'm on Steemit, I noticed that we are gradually sliding to the bottom, and I'm not at all about the prices for Steem and SBD.
There is a clear connection: the more paid bots become, the less quality content becomes. Stepshot application and a lot of Challenges, like "one photo every day" also contributed to the deterioration of the quality of posts. Why strain yourself, create something, write, spend time with translating (for many of us English is not native), if you can photograph a neighbor's fence, and buy a upvotes of 10-15 bots. The most offensive thing is that many of my friends began to do so.
Some time ago, new interesting authors could be seen in the "new" tape, but lately I've been opening "new" only to distribute flags to spammers and plagiators. Sad, but true. On the "trending" page there are always the same names, the same whales, for which hundreds of bots vote in the first minutes after the release of any of their posts. A lot of different schemes with overflow of money, voting for own comments...
In my opinion, Stimit needs a good cleaning of the stables, @steemcleaners and @spaminators can not cope with the amount of shit here.
Steemit my first love. There are things to be said that would make a blog post on the problem with steemit.
Equality. I joined steemit when the fork of equality was just concluded, and never in my minds eye or physically did i see such equality. I think the first place the failed in the equality aspect is the maintenance of the score number of reputation that obviously separates the newbies from the oldies.
This is the problem, in the mind of those who have acquired atleast a reputation of 50 and above, we feel that those below are not worthy being seen or talked to, creating an unspoken sense of superiority between the two worlds.
Now these persons below in other to impress the seeming gods of the platform try to conform to the standard being set by the oldies, losing themselves for cheap upvotes and attention. This is why it will be insane taking people away from fbk, because on creating a new account, you are given a level playing ground with the old members, which inturn aids for a sense of belonging and expression.
I keep on saying it, steemit is not a platform that encourages new users. And the effect of this is that once these new users are in and try to struggle to keep pace, but no result, they will leave and the room will be all to those who feel the platform belongs to them.
I have been some worth disenchanted from the platform lately because of the ass licking attitude expected from those below, which i cant keep up with. The truth is, the crypo world is insane and massive, and until the steemit community find a means to encourage new users, it will be a site where the rich keeps getting rich.
Steemit should borrow a leaf from the bitcoin community.
you said a lot of good points. I think a new dept is being formed to help new users, like a service dept. Maybe you can help them...
I will be most obliged. Thanks for your services to the community.
Hi @stellabelle,
I am using steemit for 2 months. And maybe I am still half outsider. Or maybe the greed took me too, and I am lost…
My experience - When my account was approved I made a post and the first thing first was comment: ” I up voted you, please up vote and follow me”, and again and again. And I did not like it even when my SP was zero. The feeling was that I am showing too late for the party. Great opportunity that I missed because I did not know about it a year earlier. Maybe many people have the same experience. And they make noise (SPAM), because they did not know a better way.
I decided that I will never beg for vote and will not play the game “I will follow you if you follow me”. I started to post my videos from YTB and after 10 days I made 0.
My conclusion was that no matter how good your post is there is too much noise (SPAM) and I need reputation. I started to watch the bots. I am not great writer but I am good in finding patterns. I learned when and how to use them to maximized the effect. By the way you made something nice for me when I went to a whale a month ago and asked for a micro loan. Thank you!
Now what is the problem?
Concentration of STEEM.
Too much STEEM in few people. They cannot cash out. If they try the price of STEEM will go to 0. They can’t effectively curate thousands of users it is not humanly possible. They are overloaded and this is the reasons the small users think that it is extremely dangerous just to talk with a whale. And If many users become disappointed, the millions of STEEM are worthless, just a dust in the block chain.
What is the solution?
Many I mean MANY people with big enough vesting interest. If you have thousands of people to defend the block chain new spammer or scammer will be located and punished in hours. Bad posts will be obviously negative for the authors.
How?
The bots. It is ugly and unfair. I feel it every time. But with time even with the bots the natural selection will choose who will survive and prosper and Steemit will have its middle class. Strong middle class (many, many dolphins ) will cure most of the problems.
i can't remember what i did......
your observation is quite good....a large middle class is the answer, i think.
I asked for 2 SBD micro loan. It was to small for neoxian. You upvoted me with your full VP it was nice. You did not said anything just helped me.
Ha ha....it's nice to hear i made a difference. I learned from papa-pepper something vital: "it's our job to help others when the opportunity arises."
Yes, and it was about time for me to say Thank you!
After reading your post and all the comments so far, it's clear that Planet Steem is just like the outside world. Rich getting richer, supports the one who has the same equal status in terms of SP (Not all but most of the whales, yes, they have this mindset), middle class people looking to get some money from rich and we have thieves as well in the form of spammers (Thieves are created, not born). You can't say anything to a rich, otherwise you'll be caught and punished (Flag thingy)
Solution
Equal distribution of wealth among the quality content creators is something I believe can change the ongoing negative side of this community. Whale's SP should be automatically delegated to some quality creators minnows and red fish. Suppose, once you reach at 50,000 SP, 10 or 20% of your SP should be automatically delegated to some other creator(s) for a specific period of time. In this way, the person getting the SP would have more chances to grow in a shorter period of time. We can play with numbers/figures but this is something implementable.
Think of a world where everyone is helping each other, guiding everyone how to grow without having an element of greed. I know it's not gonna happen in the real world and here as well, corporate structure thingy is what we all believe on.
I am not so sure of that. I currently interact with at least 5 individuals, on an almost daily basis, that have far far more steem SP than I do. I am at the 140SP level, and they are all 10,000SP except one who is 5,000sp level, and all of them 2016 members.
And who would decide who the Quality Creators are? You? The Whales? The Minnows? The problem with Quality is everyone has a different opinion of it. I found that the best Quality car I ever owned was a Mitsubishi Mirage Coupe**. You must admit, not many people would consider that a quality car, but I certainly did, and hate the fact I had to give it up when moving.
I will always vote against any and all redistribute the wealth schemes. They do not work, and only cause laziness, and sloth.
Support doesn't mean only interacting, mentoring and appreciating by upvoting the content also falls under support. If you get them from those accounts, then congratulations. Adding to that, my response that you quoted above doesn't apply on all the rich in the real world and here as well but we have to accept the fact that majority ones are doing for themselves and I have no issues if they do so, they have their own life and they are to decide what to do. I am just quoting the reality and majority of whales would agree that they don't spend time reading other's content on Steemit and again, it's perfectly fine if they don't want to.
Not me, you or whales, Steemit Inc itself. If Youtube can monitor and decide what content should be monetized, then I guess this platform has all the resources to start the same. We have an example of @curie, curators find the quality content and @curie upvotes them. Why Steemit Inc can't start the same project? Hiring people like @curie, assign them the top 20 tags we have on Steemit and then they decide which account should be given delegation. Steemit Inc then should have a team of reviewer to finalize the nominations for delegation. I didn't want to mention here but we all know that the owner of Steemit delegated a huge amount of SP to some accounts, what was the logic behind that, I don't know and I don't want to know either! (No personal attack, this is a reality and I have no issues with that)
People like me who regularly use @minnowbooster to get some pennies would be motivated to produce high quality content as they would know that in return, they might get some delegation from Steemit and in return, people would not be using bot services or we will see an incredible decrease on the usage of upvoting bots.
My whole comment sounds like I am frustrated, demotivated and have a negative approach towards this system but that's not the case. I am sharing my own neutral thoughts about Steemit current system and I won't stop posting, commenting or upvoting, I just felt and decided not to set unrealistic expectations here like I would be earning a lot of money here. If I would, that would be superb for me and my family but currently, I have a nice paying job, working on some coding stuff and have some plans to start my own small business. So I'm not concerned with the money part but yes, I want this system to get improved and if it doesn't, again I have no issues :)
I don't youtube, but have heard a lot of complaints that they (youtube) are censoring people's content and de-monetizing people, but like I said, I really have no experience with youtube.
On that I 100% agree. it is nice, if it becomes a P.O.S, and I do not mean proof of stake, then I will find someplace else, or do like last time take a 10 year social media break. Thank you for your comment, even if we do not see 100% eye to eye, it seems we both want an improvement.
You should read this as well.
https://steemit.com/whales/@stellabelle/money-cannot-replace-integrity-why-i-still-vote-according-to-my-inner-compass-instead-of-max-roi
One of the examples, I have many but don’t want to mention here.
Thank you those were two very interesting post
Thank you for your post! I agree, we do need to decide what we are. I believe we are the best social media platform, where we may be anonymous if we prefer, it is encrypted and can not be deleted, where people with like minds may share what is on their minds to help Earth become what it is meant to be. Searching for freedom liberating love, and fighting for the underdogs. With all this, there are limited rules enforced on the platform users, giving us the power to be individuals (unlike many social media platforms). We are helping people around the world have access to economic freedom, and pushing the world to stop using paper or electronic currency controlled by governments (or worse). Steemit.com has a ways to go, but they are still officially in Beta. Thank you for your input! Let us help make this platform set a standard for the world on a few important levels.
can i ask you a personal question? How did you come up with your name? And why? just curious...
Great question! I do not usually answer this, as I am asked it often. . . But for you, I will! After a long while of lack of care or desire for life I have decided to dive deep back into living. Often referred to as "ballsdeep" I changed it a bit b/c that's who I am, and balls are not in my cup of tea. Then dog, well I am half dog presently. I have been for over 3 years now, with my Service animal GinGer always by my side, in my arm or on my shoulder. Put them together and I have what I find to be a comedic name "dickdeepdog". Some people find it a little offensive, but I am a man who may offend, either by accident or with purpose. Thus, I decided if a simple name with a basic body part is too off putting for someone, I figure there is no need for them to examine me further.
haha....well i find it funny, namely because it's vulgar, and i suppose we have all been in a sterile social media environment before, on facebook....anyway, good story. Thanks for sharing.
The point you made on buying upvotes is damn true.
Everyone can buy an upvote from the bots no matter what content they write in their posts.
I myself use those upvote bots to upvote my crappy posts sometimes.
The thing is that these bots should only upvote the posts with good content.
Coming to the steem power which some projects are currently offering, I am not against these services because you can buy that steem power if you have money, so that doesn't make any sense to me.
Or there should be a system where you can withdraw your money from steemit but no deposits should be made, that wil keep things transparent here on steemit.
I have been on steemit from july and my estimated account value is around $100 and a reputation of 51 while my friend who just joined steemit jumped to 52 in no time and gets more payout than i do.
That is simply because of the fact that he had money to power up his account.
There are a lot of other issues that need to be addressed @stellabelle
with this comment, your rep is now 52
Yeah, well I guess I was on 51.9 😁
Thank you!!
Fuck Hillary. Stellabelle for president!
Sure. And why would you wish that on Stellabelle. President is life changing for those that go through it, not clear it changes many for the better.
haha! This made me laugh!
There were such epic replies that I couldn't get through them all to see if what I'm about to say has already been covered but these are problems I see as someone that wants to love the platform but still is hesitant to use it:
Sign ups often take too long & it instantly dampens enthusiasm & momentum & it lowers my confidence that the platform could handle a large surge when it becomes mainstream & there are a few big people it'd be cool to try to pull. (Witness incentives as a solution?)
Creative types may not necessarily want to learn HTML & formatting, so removing that initial block would help a lot. An elegant but simple WYSIWYG editor with intuitive file uploading would be great.
There's no alert system for favorite posters/topics & a lot gets missed unless I also follow people on Twitter/ IG & YouTube. Frankly I wish it wasn't so much work to want to fall in love with the platform & remember the writers I enjoy.
It'd be intriguing to me if Steemit worked with Instagram & other social media, similar to how I can post to Twitter, FB or Tumblr from the app. It'd be great if they had an incentive to build on our blockchain eventually instead of them starting their own. (Whether it's multi-publishing from here to there, or the other way around)
It'd be nice if there was some incentive to seek & invite talent to the site & a motivation beyond the initial financial one for them to stay here. Even if it's a different type of publishing with an imbedded contract that provided some form of protection of IP, residuals & derivatives. It's a tough sell to give it all away. We're being given the platform to create our own media empires & yet are lacking basic tools to do that.
I don't believe it's a death spiral, I think we're all just here ahead of the curve...I hope. In my head it's similar to that quiet time when seeds are hibernating under the snow, waiting to burst forth when the conditions are right. There's still life, but it's sleeping.
First off @stellabelle, hellova discussion you have running here. Post 10 hours old, started reading it at about the 8 hour mark, 170+ comments. Took awhile to read the comments, dropped a few comments on comments, so it took some time.
One issue I have seen since first joining is the explosion of bots. There really are only a few I feel are worth anything, but wont mention them in this post. Upvote bots need to be done away with. That is my opinion. They add "ZERO" value to the community, (they do add value to the builders and users though). More emphasis needs to be placed on the "eyeball" Icon, the number of views.
So solution to the upvote bot situation:
Steemit currently tracks "Votes", "Comments", and "Views". Any upward movement to an individual's REP should take into account all three of these Items. If people want to see steem differentiate itself from run-of-the-mill everyday ordinary social media, it needs to do so in a fair way. So I propose in order for an individual REP to be increased apply a weighting system to those three items., Number one and heaviest weight would go to comments received, second would be to Views, and the least important one would be number of and value of votes. Vote bots gone, or severely crippled. Of course this would just mean more comment bots, so a way would then need to be found to negate them.
Look like a nerve has been touched on by you @stellabelle, loads of actually very informative and "real" comments, not a bunch of busy body bots.
yeah, i was so surprised to get these post-long epic answers! I guess just opening the can of worms, and saying "your turn'...
It does seem to have gotten the conversation rolling, 350 votes, 235 comments and, 683 views. Those are some great numbers and shows that people really do care and have Ideas about steemit.
I loved the list of things steemit is for people.
I have realized that everyone interprets what steem or steemit it from their own level (Should i say perception of reality)
And to me all those purposes are valid it is just a matter of steering in the right direction.
A token, is a thing and it has the value we want to assign to it.
The same this platform can and will be anything that we as users, shareholders, investors, authors want it to be.
I think the key is in the slogan: Come for the rewards, stay for the content.
If we analyze it coldly, it is an appeal to human greed to join in, and the second part implies that once inside you will realize there is more than money.
I particularly have found a place where people that shares my points of view was hiding (or congregating) and i believe that more than all the purposes and definitions, the greater strength and purpose of steem is to provide a platform to build a human network where the word HUMAN is capitalized.
Once you realize that in general the more you give, the more you receive and you manage to set aside part of the unconscious selfishness that most of us show when seeing things from our perception of reality. In that moment the user becomes a steemian and anything is possible.
It only requires our investment and participation because it is a liquid democracy also, and everyone has a role or purpose.
I found your post very interesting and pertinent, so I'm here. Just like you, I am a "purist" user who still preserves the innocence that we earn here according to the quality we add to the platform and that we do not rely on vote buying projects to have our success or recognition.
I've been here for over a year and what I see on Steemit is that the system is crashing. They say it's because we're still in beta, but what we see is the "descent of a slope" on that platform. I'm sad about this, because I love this space and I do not want Steemit to be restructured to vote-buying projects and the same people on the trending page.
Thank you for the opportunity to express my opinion.
the vote buying schemes really do take a toll on my feelings. It affects me, and cheapens this place.
Well @stellabelle, I'm new on Steemit and what caught my eye as soon as I joined it is the amount of upvotes and comments in the posts of members with a high reputation. Without demeaning the quality of the content, but I realized that some have an automatic return of many upvotes and comments on anything they post. It seems like everyone wants to please and be friends with these members. It reminded me a lot of the first episode of the third season of Black Mirror called Nosedive.
there are a lot of similarities with Black Mirror, especially when one lands in Reputation Dungeon.
I sometimes can't help thinking that steem and Steemit has accomplished exactly what it's creators intended! Let it be falsely advertised that a gold nugget was found where gold doesn't exist. It will not be the throngs who will get rich! It will be those who own the land, and sell the tools to mine the nonexistent gold. Their will be a few who will catch on, but the majority will work their guts out as long as the creators, while the the diggers sleep toss a few golden flakes into their diggings. As the throngs become discouraged and their interest wanes, the creators find other gems and move on.................billytwohearts
Hello @stellabelle!
I am convinced that the main problem within the ecosystem of steem, which ends up modulating the economy and behavior of all of us who participate in this experiment, is the way in which the reputation of each of the users is measured and perceived.
You can argue that it is the great content that should stand out and give value to the platform, but the reality is that the contents that stand out or are promoted are those that have won the most money, regardless of the number of readers, of the quality of the content, of its creativity, or how innovative it has been for the social network.
In the current situation, it does not matter at all what your goals are in the long term, because the only way to achieve your goals is to make money. I think there is a lot of ingenuity in thinking that it is possible to obtain a high reputation value simply by publishing good articles. When the reality is that, with the current system of measuring reputation, you can only have a high reputation if you are supported by users who have a lot of money and who assign it to you with their votes. If you do not earn money, your reputation does not increase. Thus, the goal to be a great influence is to earn a lot of money .... And when none of those who have much steem power do not want to support you, then you buy it, rent it, or establish any strategy that allows you to fulfill your goal to increase your reputation, and inevitably all go to accumulate money ...
If we want any change in the way in which the steem economy is working, which in my view is only responding to the needs of its users that is making money, then we must change the way in which we perceive who are the valuable users within the community. That number enclosed in a circle should stop measuring how much money that user has received in support, and start measuring what the user's actual contributions are. The real challenge is how to get that number does not depend on the variable "money" or as it is called here Steem power.
I have seen as users who have articles with thousands of readings, but with a reputation of only 40, change their strategy to grow buying the vote of the whales. After a lot of effort, and in my way of seeing lost time, they have no choice but to thermalize in the generalized behavior and act accordingly. The sad thing about all this, is that this type of users are often "the voices of conscience" in our communities ...
I am convinced that the way in which reputation is measured is the problem, because it is the only variable that we should all depend on in this ecosystem to be recognized, but for now it is only destined for those who have more, or those who They know how to outwit the system and earn profits.
If the reputation does not depend on the amount of money that you are granted or that you are able to generate, but on the contributions you make to the community, then we would have an excellent variable that would give rise to a new type of user that would not only be focused on the generation of money.
To finish, and answer each of your questions, steem is everything that serves to meet the needs of the user who looks through their own perspective and lens, and for now, unfortunately no matter what optic that distorts your reality, all they are reduced to obtain more and more income. Hence, I believe that the behavior of the steem economy is appropriate to current conditions.
Greetings and excuse the length of the comment.
you raise some good points. I don't have the answers to them......thanks for responding.
I don't have any major issues with Steem or Steemit. I knew from day 1 that it's an experiment. I knew that bots were here; I was greeted by one on day 1. I love the concept of bots but they are made by people so will have all the range of behaviors people do.
I knew from day 1 that this was a lottery and an economic system that could be gamed. I never thing about individual rewards; I consider the average over time.
I knew from day 1 that great people are here telling great stories. I met you here on day 1. I'm very glad I did!
I have met people here who are earning their living from the platform. I support them with my Up votes. I have met people doing amazing charitable deeds. I support them as well.
I don't concern myself with the gripe of the month around here. I just come every day, read a lot of posts. Up vote some, comment a few, and look forward to tomorrow.
And you are a very supportive and amazing person. I wish you would clone yourself! I'm glad you won my clay Steem dollar in the beginning.....that was way before the vote buying bots settled in...
Hello @stellabelle. I love the frankness with which you outline the problem that we have been experiencing in this beautiful Steemit platform.
I will dare to put my voice in these comments, because, although I am very new, I love the traffic that I have made since June.
I think that for the Spanish-speaking community, the problem is presented to us, from the sectarian point of view. There are several groups or "projects" that wear out in quarrels, pretending to corral the "little fish" in their networks. Practically it seems that there is some trait of neocolonization. Some time ago, they even told me, leave the things of the "whales", among the "whales". They say why write in English?
And I thought: Could it be that I can not cultivate friendship, beyond my language?
I read first, the philosophy of Dan Larimer, in terms of a better world and a fair profit based on talents. Where live fraternity, solidarity and humanism, before so much selfish debauchery that abate the world. And I always say, as @stellabelle says, steemit is like a Light.
I hope the conscience shines!
You have actually nailed it on the head, because the word you just put down is from your hearth and not your head.
I agree with you on the following perfect point;
I see the issue in part stemming from things like the minnowsupportproject. While this project masquerades as supporting "minnows" it is actually just gobbling up many people's individual votes and allowing a few moderators to choose where those votes go. That is not how a decentralized platform is supposed to work. Everyone needs to not be lazy and vote on content that is actually worthwhile. Not just voting on things to get followers. You hit the nail on the head when saying human nature has not changed. I think that things like the minnowsupportproject need to go away, everyone needs to vote for articles they truly like. Also the platform is currently set up as a blogging platform but as Gary Vaynerchuk says and I firmly believe that everything is going towards audio. This platform needs an audio streaming ability and also better video showing capabilities. Just my two cents after having been on the platform for 4 days. Would love to hear your feedback.
@timdunn I respectfully disagree 100% All members that join msp receive votes from the msp bots.. ALL.
In addition to that, we also have manual curators that go around looking for non members posts and upvote good content.
We have almost 5000 members in msp and when you register there your username is auto registered with a few bots to receive an upvote every 12 hours on your post. that is all done through a script we built.
Then we have another tool, where we allow a handful of people access to to go around manually curating.
Is there abuse? Of course there is... BUT we have a full time Anti-Abuse team on the job, working around the clock to mitigate the abuse.
All mods at msp volunteer their time and their money to help minnows gain traction on steemit, and help educate them.
If you have any questions at all, please come and ask us anytime in Discord. We are always there and it's a great community to be a part of.
@stellabelle I am sorry to go off topic on this reply, but I felt it was important it was addressed with facts. And thank you for your support @stellabelle
yeah, it's good to get some clarity for us all. I never went through minnnowsupport and actually I know very little of how it operates...thanks.
from what i have heard, MSP support minnows very well, so I wasn't aware of the problems with it.
That is exactly how a descentralized system works. If people want to associate and work together or as individuals it is entirley up to each one to decide. If people want to be idiots that is their decision...if people want to delegate their voting to someone else that is their decision.
I disagree for one major reason. Yes it is their decision but if there is a huge incentive given to people for giving away their votes then there will be very few who do not give away their votes. Then by definition you have a centralized system. When power is in the hands of a few.
Centralization is a consequence of "free markets" (which is a euphemism to "let people do what they want to do").
Unfortunately when people are free to do what they want they will commit mistakes...it's human nature.
I believe that centralization of power leads to abuse of power but how do you avoid it?
I am open to suggestions.
I've been thinking on this one a lot recently. I think it comes down to this one central problem of human thinking which is primarily based on our short life span:
Once a human gets control of a large sum of money, they tend to want to either hold onto it, or make it grow larger.
This is the central issue that I see creating problems. Ned's delegations actually set an example for other whales, but when @blocktrades said he was going to sell his, I viewed it as not a great solution. I believe that blocktrades' Steem would go up in value more if he delegated his SP to builders of communities....my guess is that blocktrades may not know who these people are or may not want to do this....
In a "free" system such as the steem blockchain each participant has it's own agenda. @blocktrades runs a business and I understand why he is trying to capitalize on an opportunity to profit from it.
If we analyze it it's basically a lease on SP. The service can actually be used to grow the influence of a community. If my math is correct at the end of the delegation period you can get a ~17% ROI if you just auto-vote (10 full votes per day).
If a community pools their resources into one account and then uses the delegated SP to vote on the posts of it's members the community can grow it's influence over time (measured in SP).
The difficulty would be to setup some sort of social contract that everyone agrees on.
Power is in the hands of the few. Same can be said for reputation.
You may count me as one of the very few then I guess:
The only real downside to the vote issue are bots, and people that, (like in the real world), just do not vote on anything.
And then there are the people that whine that your vote, or their vote is only worth $0.001, I wish those people who do whine would just send me that .001 vote, I appreciate them. My vote at one time was only that, now I am at the $0.010 range. Moving up. Soon I will get to that magic number of 480 steem and get a slider so I can vote more.
No incentive is worth giving away your vote. People need to stop viewing Steemit as a carbon copy of life. Where they feel their vote is meaningless in the real world, for me on steemit their vote means a lot to me whether it is big, medium, small, or petite, they are all equally appreciated.
There is video and audio that runs on the Steem blockchain, DTube and DSound.
I apologize I didn't know that, I will check it out!
Well said Ma'am, I actually do concur totally to your analysis particularly this part.
A persons Reputation cannot certainly be purchased with money nor material kinds. The good book says a good name is worth more silver or gold.
I feel bad whenever I see great genuine post earn little or no upvote probably due to selfish or other reasons.
I am glad you made this post.
Steem should give rewards to credible post no matter how little it maybe this would help ensure a good sustainability of Steem.
Thank you!!!
I have done it. Finally I have finished reading every single comments on this post. Now I deserve a delicious meal as self reward for the wonderful job I did.
Hi stellabelle, one of the greatest issues is the terrible distribution of steem. It has created all manner of instability within the incentive mechanism. I think the change to the reward curve in HF19 (was it?) was an error....but pre HF19, the curve would probably have worked better with a much wider distribution.
Vote buying is a plague in my opinion....it should be vote gifting that rewards contribution, thereby squeezing out the vote sellers.
Steem has value, it survives because it is extraordinary, unique and has great utility; a stable value token anyone can earn and send anywhere at any time, quality publishing, direct decentralised charity, experimental data, cross-border community building, censorship resistance...etc.
Reputation is not clear within steem and because it is critical to the health of a social media dapp, a lot of work needs to be done.
I love what steem has accomplished and what the creators set out to build. However, it is being parasitised and who knows if it can survive....I have my doubts. If it can grow to millions of users and the whales can gift their power wisely enough, maybe. I fear steem could be out-competed soon by a dapp with a better distribution.
These are my opinions, certainly not facts.
Thank you for raising these important issues.
I share your exact thoughts and even I have considered launching a new site that has better distribution. I feel that a group of very committed community builders could get it right.
I've suggested that a distribution list at least partially created out of steem accounts minus the garbage and that equalises influence over a far narrower range and not necessarily stacked according to current power. Combined with the EOS ERC-20 distribution, it could make for an interesting seed for a new social media dapp. In reality, I suspect solutions that are way better than I can conceive are being developed. I hope so. Nothing catalyses change or focuses direction more effectively than competition. Ultimately, we have to keep trying to get this right as these dapps are critical to blockchain adoption and everything that comes with it....the protection of life, liberty and property for all.
Let's face it, Steemit is rife with HYPOCRACY from top to bottom.
In your opening paragraph, you state: "we have to agree on what it is and what it is supposed to do."
Who is "WE" and what does "AGREE" mean
This is the heart of the problem. How can Steemit NOT function like a caste system when the best way we can describe the leadership is "we"? "We" the Whales? "We" the earliest users? "We" the designers? "We" the witnesses?
Everyone complains that there is abuse in an open system, but is that not the nature of an open system? Do you not expect users to try to use the system to their own advantage?????
Our "self appointed" leaders love to rail against abuses against the reward pool, BUT they only seem to rail against the ones they do not directly benefit from. There are a never-ending stream of posts complaining about "self-upvoting" and vote-farming. Most of our "leadership" does not engage in that kind of activity so it's easy to target as an "Abuse"
When is the last time you heard a Whale or Witness complain about Auto-Upvoting??? It's an incestuous practice that drains the reward pool just as much if not more than Self-Upvoing, but we never hear a peep about that because it "benefits all the right people".
I'll use @sweetsssj as an example (please keep in mind, this is not an attack on her or her posts, which I think are of high quality, this is just an example). She is a well known member of this community and her posts are of the highest quality. I do not deny that. What I do have a problem with is that she posts an article and within 1 hour she has 769 upvotes!! Really? 769 of the most influential Steemians had nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon than to read a post and upvote it? I looked at some of the top upvoters, and noticed that their last activity on Steem was 3 days ago.
It seems as the Whales of this community do nothing but stroke each others.....backs.
I am fortunate to be a member of a tight knit little community, @steemsilvergold. Hell, we even made our own Silver coin!
If it were not for this loyal little group, I'd have probably dropped Steemit all together.
This comment is enough to make me want to follow you, your strap line says to me that we could have some interesting debates; I think there is a good amount of; thinks like me versus doesn't think like me... I look forward to those debates :-)
Cg
Exactly. That community's voting power comes mostly from a delegation they're leasing from me; which I bought with bitcoin I chose to invest in steem for this exact purpose.
If anyone thinks I'm doing the wrong thing, I can always remove the delegation, power down, sell the steem for bitcoin and support #steemsilvergold with warm wishes instead.
There's way too much finger pointing going on.
Telling it like it is @silverstackeruk! I also would not be nearly as active had it not been for #steemsilvergold
🍻
G'day. Wow! What a powerful post. Articulated perfectly.
At the end, I actually had a good laugh at the irony of it!
The quality of the content and the resulting volume and quality of the responses is ACTUALLY what Steemit should be all about.
Human individuals actively interacting with each other to raise issues, voice their opinions and work towards solutions whilst at the same time, rewarding each other for their efforts!
Just a short while ago, I commented on another post which seems very relevant to here as well, so I'm going to copy it here (shock - horror, this is the first time I've copy / pasted on Steemit .... Lol)
Here it is:
"G'day, The way I see it, there are very specific concepts of Steemit that are very important but not realised or understood by a lot of people on here.
From my perspective, this is what I find important:
To me it just seems that not enough people take the time to put some effort in.
There is too much auto-voting, bot voting, soliciting, begging and plain spamming, taking away from the core values of Steemit.
You seem to support the same principles as I do, so keep pushing out the quality articles and rewarding where you see fit. Well done!"
I could have changed a few things to better align it to here but I thought it was better to leave it as it was.
Thanks for the opportunity to contribute. I hope in some way it makes a small difference.
good advice, which i agree with. thanks for your comment.
It's everything on the list plus whatever anyone else comes up with (that is the nature of decentralized systems).
Accordng to Steemit Inc it is:
Source
Does it really matter? Once SMTs are rolled out we can build our own communities with their own set of rules and it's own interfaces.
No disrespect intended but I think you are overreacting.
I can see your point, and the thing that surprised me was when I was going on my merry way and thought everything was great, then I found the comments on blocktrades post. Did you read that? https://steemit.com/blocktrades/@blocktrades/blocktrades-now-offering-steem-power-delegations
It was this comment that got me thinking about it more deeply:
[-]joe.public47 · 2 days ago
buying delegations !
i dont think this is such a good idea.
its the mony lenders who fucked the world, why would you want fuck this platform as well?
I thought about it a bit more and I think that under the current conditions all of these SP delegation schemes are not good for the platform and made a post about it.
https://steemit.com/steem/@onthewayout/why-steem-power-delegation-services-are-bad
I'm not trying to stir up shit. I am trying to figure out if we are all blinded, at least those of us with significant SP. Are we in a myopic state where we cannot even see how to improve?
I did read the post but did not go thru all of the comments. To be honest I used the service to get some extra SP. It was an impulse decision that I regret. Afterwords a did the math and realized that to get back my "investment" I am going to need to auto-vote seven times per day at full power which is not what I wanted the extra SP for.
That is a tough question...the main reason being that not everyone will agree on what needs to improve and how to change things. Some will not see a problem at all.
What I think is pretty simple: Steemit changed its logo, forbid folks from using said logo, tested new updates on a live site and rendered it barely usable for a prolonged period of time -- it is evident to myself that Steemit Inc wishes to distance themselves from the Steem blockchain. The Steem blockchain, in turn, through the introduction of SMTs and the continuous creation of 3rd party sites and support services, is looking promising.
The issue is we're at a point where there's mass-use and the closer we get to the mainstream the farther we get from quality at all levels. What we need is more general understanding amongst the user base. What's the difference between "Steem" and "Steemit"? What are "witnesses"? What is a "frontend" and a "blockchain"? That sort of thing.
I like your idea of getting external opinions. I think I'll give that a shot and see if anyone involved in a parallel if not competing project wants to take a shot at an answer. Will make a post if I get anything.
STEEM and steemit.com are clearly different. And the founders are more interested in making STEEM more technically capable.
You and I align to that point.
We differ on the 3rd party apps. Why would they stay on STEEM long term, when there will be far superior chains, like EOS, that they can move to soon?
Counting on 3rd party apps to make STEEM go looks in my opinion to be a MAJOR STRATEGIC mistake.
The founders would have been better off taking their leading position with steemit.com and focusing all energies on making steemit.com better, the best, unassailable.
As it is, steemit.com will become the myspace of social media on blockchain.
The "Facebook of social media on blockchain" will be coming along soon. It will be a company virtually no one has heard of today, it will come out of nowhere, and in 10 years be worth a trillion
And the founders of steemit.com will be able to go to parties with the founders of myspace.com; and commiserate on their bad timing, bad luck, bad execution, and bad strategy,
EOS isn't out yet so we'll see how that works but I see your point. No matter what I try to think of to counter your argument I can't.
My original thoughts were that one of the 3rd party apps may be successful in every way Steemit could not be (and evidently does not wish to be) but that is unlikely. And that would be on a relatively minor scale, nowhere near the level of Facebook or the like. We don't have the professionalism for that.
But yeah, you're correct and pretty much predicted the future there.
I hate to say this, but I have spoken to folks in Stinc, heard promises, and am no longer waiting on them being kept.
After Steemfest in Portugal ended, I heard someone say that Stinc said 'it's just a business. I don't care.'
That jibes with what I've seen.
I've spoken to top witnesses, and diligently waged words fearlessly with brazen flaggots, posted numerous times regarding what Steemit can be, and how much more financially rewarding that can be for whales, all to no avail.
@teknow just prophesied the botty descent of Steemit into Pay2Hell, and I see it.
I dunno, it's after two am, and I'm sick of watching Steemit fail to address the relevant issues, and I'm feeling emotionally charged. Maybe I won't pack it in.
But, maybe I will.
I know it's after payout, but take my $.01 anyway. It's only a gesture, but my vote never was anything else, anyway.
I know how much you care, and that is the only reason I am bothering to reply. I have a lot of respect for you, and appreciate the effort you put into this community. Maybe this is good-bye, so Imma say it.
I hope it isn't. Gonna have to sleep, and see if I come back into manic phase =p
Be at peace.
Arguably, yes to all of the above.
Steemit is an experiment. Perhaps we have simply not yet discovered what its most important function will be.
ha ha! i love this one!
I think I need to bookmark this just so I can quote you every time I find myself arguing with an anarchist. :P
That said, I think this is part of the problem... so much of the content here is anarchist/libertarian because of who is drawn into cryptocurrencies in the first place. That alone doesn't play super well with, well, anyone but anarchists and libertarians. In fact, I wrote a post about this over a year ago: https://steemit.com/steemit/@telos/this-one-simple-trick-will-make-steemit-wildly-popular
And that kind of leads me into the second issue. I keep debating whether I should focus on Steemit to create a blog, or just run my own website... the big case for my own website is that an article I wrote a year ago could still make money today. The payouts on a Steemit post stop after, what, a week?
A concerted effort to get more mainstream posters on here might help, and part of that might be letting posts earn SBD or SP forever as long as they keep getting upvotes.
@telos, I have been a big advocate of this; however I have been given many technical reasons why it can't/shouldn't be done.
The first is DDOS attacks, somebody could just set various vote bots to continually vote on their articles forever, and after seeing some of the activity on here, I have to concede that that scenario is not only possible, but likely.
My solution to it, also solved another problem, the fact that most articles don't get (m)any votes after the first hour, so hour one 65 votes, day 7 67 votes.
I felt that if it is possible, we should program in a kind of easter egg vote machine. Whereby you can get a huge(ish) reward by voting on older content. If possible the algo could be tweaked so spending time on the page and commenting might also give you this easter egg reward.
After a while people would end up engaging with older content, and get rid of this; once it's over a week old a post is dead to me type attitude.
In fact, I'm off to comment on your old article right now!
Cg
I think that would actually be difficult. Each bot needs to exist on Reddit/Facebook and can only vote once... so it becomes a lot of work to have tons of bots just to upvote your own articles. Plus until a bot has enough SP it doesn't really affect much...
You could code a bot to do that. In fact, making it just go to every article, wait an appropriate amount of time and then upvote would be trivially easy so all those awards would probably go to bots.
Maybe a check for posting/commenting would be more appropriate. Of course bots comment too so that might not work either.
Maybe allow bots to vote through the API, but humans have to vote with reCaptcha to get those kind of rewards?
You'd be surprised at the work people are prepared to go through, last year in the very early days of Steemit. We had various people creating bots to comment and then vote on those comments.
I think the money wasn't even very much, it was just a proof of concept, and it worked until @cheetah got on the case.
I didn't really explain the Easter egg idea properly. Even if you created a bot to go onto every article and wait, it wouldn't necessarily work.
Because the appropriate amount of time would vary wildly, so in some cases it might be a month, others 2 years. The point is to try and reward content long after it has been posted. So a particular article might have had 20000 views in 18 months after the initial posting.
One of those views and votes, will get the Easter egg, no one bot would ever be able to guess when that particular bonus would drop. Plus you could tweak it so that only answers of a certain length, referencing certain key words would even be applicable
Also you could do it so that the curation reward was shared out among the voter and 25 random people who had voted in the time period.
Dunno, it's a long running debate; and I'm sure it'll rage on for many more moons. It's tough to sort it so that everyone's happy, we'll see what the future holds :-)
PS, I once suggested CAPTCHA to the Steemit community, and it went down like a French kiss at a family reunion :-D
Cg
the ledger here is better than any website. Use Steem.
A better ledger with substantially less in it doesn't excite me. In fact that's part of the problem, the biggest enthusiasts say steemit is good because steemit is good... You're marketing the technology rather than showing how it improves peoples' lives. Blockchains are great ledgers, and in fact credit card companies are starting to use the technology for that reason.
Existing ledgers work fine though, and most people would rather make more money than have a slightly better ledger.
Meanwhile the trending page is mostly Steemit enthusiasts talking about Steemit.
Many people perceive the same problem since the beginning of Steemit.
https://busy.org/steem/@lexiconical/code-is-law-only-when-i-want-otherwise-it-s-abuse-the-shaming-syndicate-of-steemit-our-own-brand -of-sjws-and-social repression
However, it seems that people with the power to change things are part of the problem.
@stellabelle, you have spoken exactly the threats that are affecting our beloved blockchain. Well, for me, Steem World has always being a place for me to affect lives and for my life to be affected by others. A place to learn and enjoy a screen book!, a place to read about others view of the world around them, A place to CONNECT, that is what I see as eSteem!. I read the welcome page when I first got into Steemit, it says
That is what the steem blockchain is to me, and I believe that is what it was intended for, let our concentration be directed to great content and forming a social-friendly base rather than $$$, We need Reputation most!. Thanks for your post.
i think that justice relay on power here on #steemit so we hope that in the future we can change that or i can change that ... :(
There are so many components to Steemit right now. There are several that you mentioned and then many more. I think the biggest part about Steemit that we need to be tuned into right now is where it is going and what is becoming the stronger parts.
There is everything here from markets to relationships. So much in the works, and so much at stake.
Steemit is not only brand new, but it is still growing, developing, and even more so becoming bigger and better every day.
The biggest part of Steemit that I am tuned in on is how the blockchain and the community go hand in hand with each other and the platforms value.
~ @Timbo