Hi Jerry,
I don't have time to address all 25 points. But I would offer a few observations:
Yes, we are approaching 1,000,000 accounts. But we still only have a bit over 60,000 active per day.
Of the accounts that are active, we don't really know how many of them are genuine human bloggers aiming to produce the kind of content that will bring people here. As I've discussed elsewhere recently, there are rings of mutually-upvoting spam that involve many thousands of accounts per ring. I'm not experienced enough in pulling data from the blockchain (yet), but I think 1% of all accounts being semi-automated spam producers would be a conservative estimate. If they are all relatively active, then they could be a large chunk of our 'active' accounts. So maybe it's more like 50,000 active users.
Anecdotally, I've seen a large upswing in new accounts that really only exist to game the system, whether by automated means or not - usually through mutual upvoting or using low-effort comments or posts to farm bot votes.
The existence of bidbots is not necessarily a positive to either the economic or intellectual wellbeing of steemit. They potentially undermine both proof-of-brain and sweat equity. They also make delegation to community projects such @curie and @comedyopenmic less attractive. What's your plan for when these bots have absorbed the majority of the SP?
I think you understand the Steem economy quite well, but I'm not convinced you are being totally genuine. Our currencies need new money buying in to offset inflation and drive up demand. But we can't ever overtake bitcoin while the user base for steemit and all the other apps are so tiny. Nor can we overtake other social media with so few users. Eventually, this new money has to be buying ‘eyes on’ content. No corporate advertiser is going to risk tying up serious money in SP for a potential audience of 50,000.
I do not think we can survive in the long term if the majority of the community are all either bidbot investors or grifters. Sure, we can pump and dump plenty of times before anyone notices that all the actual content creators have left for another blockchain. But eventually, such a situation would come unstuck, and once the promise of new money dries up, it’s all over. In the interim, leasing to a bidbot is a great way to get liquid SBD or STEEM to sell, without the awkwardness of being seen to be powering down.
I could go on, but I have work to do that will earn me more than the few dollars I earn for the hours it takes to write a decent post.
very nice comment. your comment and thinking really good.
@SamuelDouglas, yes, agreed, understood, I sympathize, empathize, with Steemit problems. I don't like bots. I don't like spam. However, Facebook has bots too, called Facebook Ads. Facebook is already making billions of dollars off of us humans globally each year.
Steemit at least lets some of us humans on earth make some money some of the time, and Steemit is not perfect but it might be a little better than whatever Facebook might be.
Would Steemit really be better without bots? My question is asking about the alternatives we may have in life. Can http://Gab.ai or maybe http://Minds.com do better than http://Steemit.com or what? I like Steemit and I think real humans can maybe someday, if not already, outnumber, outpower, the bots or whatever that sucks. Life is full of spam, scams, bad stuff, but some of the good people and good things in life can rise up out of that mess of storms towards rainbows maybe, just maybe, eventually, potentially, someday, right?
Do accounts run humans outnumber bots on steemit? Absolutely!
Do accounts run by humans in order to post quality content outnumber accounts run by other humans that spam the network? I'm not so sure. I have seen one mutually-upvoting spam ring with over 7000 accounts. Do we really know how many more like that there are?
In any case, whether or not bots outnumber humans is the wrong question in a stake-weighted system. One account with a million SP is at least as influential as 100,000 accounts with 10 SP.
Would we be better off without bots? Probably, but that depends on whose measure for success you use. By purchasing votes from bots, minnows and plankton are fooled into thinking that the enormous divide in wealth that exists here isn't at all to their benefit.
As things stand, without bots we'd be begging whales for votes. But wouldn't getting a $10 vote be better if you didn't have to pay $9 for it. The whale who delegated the SP required could have not made the delegation, and just given you the upvote. But why would they do that when we tolerate them setting up a system where we now pay for something that they could give away for free if they wanted. If you are an investor who does not worry too much about the future, what we have right now is working just fine.
Steemit is better than so many alternatives. But it can't just be slightly better. People won't abandon their personal social networks and existing economic thinking for what we have here right now.
I'm not being negative for the fun of it either. I'd love for STEEM and sbd be worth so much that I could just hang out on steemit all day and make some decent coin off my writing. But unless we address what is happening, right now, I cannot see that ever happening. Even free-marketeers who are fans of bidbots, such as @yallapapi can see that.
Any proof? I highly doubt that. There are 8000 signups per day probably nearly all of them are sockpuppets to take SP from the STINC faucet for the benefit of insiders. Then those employed to upvote content of the cartel so they continue mint new SP to replace the STEEM they’re dumping in exchange for BTC. Continuously cashing out and minting more to replenish the swindle.
I think we may have crossed wires a little in our definitions of 'bots' - I was being more strict on the automation side - but if we use it to broadly to mean partially automated sock-puppet accounts, then yes, you are correct. They are certainly there to take SP from the faucet though not all operations require that SP.
Insiders? STINC insiders? I know @themarkymark implied that recently, but I was beginning to wonder. What's the benefit of minting new SP at the same time as dumping STEEM? Is it to artificially boost some market indicator? I'll have to think this over in the morning, when I'm less sleep-deprived.
I was thinking about market manipulation as we approach the launch of SMT's. There's a question that, AFAIK, no one has asked @ned. I'm not going to bust it out quite yet - but I'll just say this: I suspect that for SMTs to be attractive to investors, STEEM needs to not experience any precipitous falls.
(Sorry of this makes no sense - too tired to internet).
If I am not mistaken, the STINC faucet doesn’t mint new SP. It distributes SP they already own to new accounts. The purpose of distributing these to sockpuppets would be to obscure the fact that these sockpuppets are being employed to upvote their own content which pay rewards to the same entity. So in this way a large portion of the minted rewards end up in the pockets of this entity. This helps replenish STEEM that is being constantly dumped for BTC.
Regarding SMTs, the white paper is blatantly pointing out that one goal is to drive more demand for STEEM. And of course what is not spoken but is obvious to astute observers is that the issuers of an SMT can then duplicate this corruption that STINC is allegedly doing, siphoning off BTC continuously while surreptitiously capturing most of the rewards for themselves.
The fly in the ointment for these clever nincompoops, is that the entire rewards ruse is (as admitted in the Steem whitepaper) predicated on the psychology of fooling most participants into doing more effort than they’re equitably compensated for. Thus the success of SMTs is predicated on fooling the users and investors into believing this ruse. I doubt that non-crypto traditional social media sites can get the same enthusiasm from their users for this type of “proof-of-brain” rewards system as is the case for Steem. People come to Steem because they believe in the ruse. Thus I conclude that the SMTs will not be able to obtain sufficient interest except for new ICOs for new projects targeted to crypto audiences. Remember the early adopters of Steem were via word-of-mouth (bfs to their gfs) via those who (bfs) were already very enthusiastic and invested in crypto.
The whitepaper of Steem admits that the “proof-of-brain” reward system depends on being able fool most of the users into doing more effort than they will be equitably rewarded.
P.S. hope you caught up on your sleep. I’m experience that often also.
Aha, so it's a way of covertly converting their enormous wad of SP in to cold hard bitcoin without powering it all down.
Yes, the ruse. I had a few socialist friends when I was an undergraduate. I never read as much Marxist theory as probably should have (as a philosophy academic), but I did have enough intoxicated discussions of economics with those guys to reasonably channel what their take on the ruse would be - that it's not unlike the treatment of labour under capitalism in general. Now, I don't know if I'd go this far, but it does seem that people with the most ardent, but least critical, belief in free-market economics are those mostly likely to be taken in by this strategy.
It was that sort of thing I was thinking about when I responded to @littlescribe regarding our good friend Jerry Banfield - tldr; I suspect some of the ways he talks up the steemit community are intended to present us as 'bag-holders' to a certain class of prospective investors and/or condition us to exhibit that behaviour.
As for the SMTs - anyone with half a brain must be able to see that they are indeed intended to drive demand for STEEM. What mystifies me is that people see this as an endorsement of the success of steemit and DTube etc. I think it could be reasonably interpreted as just the opposite. While I (hopefully) have your attention, I may as well as voice the question that I can't let go of: What happens to the value of an SMT (or all SMTs) if the value of STEEM drops ?
There are probably interactions/dependencies between STEEM price and SMTs but I don’t have time to study the intricacies of that. The SMT whitepaper is not well written. Obviously who ever is writing that is not a PhD, lol.
My high-level interest is whether there can be significant demand for the STEEM “proof-of-brain” rewards paradigm on traditional social media websites that want to monetize their userbase? My thought is that their users must have the ideological enthusiasm of Steemians and also there must be sufficient economy-of-scale interest in each specific SMT token. Why not just buy STEEM instead of the SMT since it is the common denominator for all SMTs? Any social media site that is larger than STEEM would build their own system and not leverage SMT.
Thus I think the SMT is some sort of hype vehicle and perhaps another way to obscure sock puppets and other manipulations. I would have to dig into the intricacies of the SMT design to ferret out all the obfuscated game theory.
Let me say for the record that I don’t know whom at STINC is corrupted. I have no way of knowing if Ned is just a pawn and if he really believes they are developing great technological solutions. Ned’s video at the SMT website actually makes some astute points that are in the design I am working on. Most of those guys may actually believe that SMT can take over the Internet. Also perhaps they have some connections to significant traditional social networks that I don’t know about.
I claimed the market analysis for SMT is dubious, but I also realize there’s some unknowns so I can’t outright claim it will fail.
Wololo!
(RandoHealer has healed this post because your blog was targeted for healing due to malicious downvotes!)