Some to the witnesses, some to sign new people up, most to the rewards pool, where it is scooped back up by investors through the use of bidbots.
My point is that that latter usage is shortsighted.
Think of Steem stakeholders as fishermen: each of them using their stakes to fish for active users of the Steem blockchain. The bait the fishermen are using is the reward pool (which is inflation on their stakes). If the fishermen delegate to bidbots, it is like eating their own bait, and those fishermen will catch no fish.
Then it will be up to the other stakeholders to catch the fish, and make Steem valuable, except they will become jealous and resentful of the Stakeholders who ate their own bait, and say: Why should I fish for the benefit of everybody when that guy ate his own bait!?
So you see, Steemit is improperly incentivized. By design, fishermen should be prohibited from eating their own bait. It should be a condition of buying Steem that you accept that the inflation on your stake will be used to grow the platform, not be recouped immediately.
This is not a moral issue, it's just a business design flaw, that slows growth, and allows the competition to catch up.
I expect Dan Larimer to solve this design problem, so Steem should hurry up because they still have a massive headstart, and every chance of being worth multiple billions of dollars.
You mentioned a very important point for every new user on Steemit.. often he/she came for the money and just wanted to stay for the money. I changed my mind in terms of bot usage the last few months and stopped it completely because of the reason you mentioned. But the short comment above yours is the truth in my eyes.. wishful thinking. It needs some serious changes within the code.. the user behaviour is nothing we can change. If a system has flaws immediately there are people to exploit them. Within Steemit it's a quite heavy challenge to solve but nothing is impossible. Dan Larimer is on the next level EOS now and Steemit 2.0 (not real name) was announced months before and is now on the finish line. Maybe he fixes these issues with this new platform.. what do you think?
Could be @onetim84 but the most important point I would like many users to understand is that steemit is a cryptocurrency platform and everyone is here to make money and I do not like to see negative people with unfounded criticism when they should be taking care of the your own blogs instead of going into the other's yard and throwing junk. I also see many here with enormous hypocrisy. These I entitle of i-phone socialists ... LOL Everywhere there will always be competition and I search in my posts to teach and motivate people writing in a simple way so they can clearly understand what I mean and this for some people is a low quality content. The fact is that I will always continue to write like this because those who are great poets around here I have already analyzed and I do not see them helping people. Anyway I vote for all those who dedicate a little of their time to interact in my posts and I call it income distribution. I do this with pleasure for those who are always with me. Regards
"It needs some serious changes within the code.. the user behaviour is nothing we can change."
I agree with you. That is why I said we have a "design problem."
The design needs to be trustless, not relying on good human behavior, and I'm certain Larimer is focused on this exact problem The man is a genius, after all.
On the other hand, I also think Steem has some time to get another better-designed app going on the blockchain, or to fork Steemit and resolve some of the design issues. 60,000 current active users is nothing to sneeze at, though admittedly the serious money will probably only come in when you get ten times that many active users.
If there is any advertising or promotional campaign of any kind, it needs to be targeted at first world markets, because users from those markets are more desirable to Brands. Users from other markets will come anyway, because they will follow the wealthier first world users on to the platform by word of mouth.
Big picture: I strongly feel that tokenized social media WILL succeed massively. It will happen. But it's up for grabs who has the most precise trustless vision, incentivized for user growth, most swiftly implemented. :)
Im in the same boat as you. I had a series running where i promoted other authors and creators by using bots once i started earning some more serious Steem and getting recognized by the music community. Trying to use the bots in a positive manner and promote such use..
After some time i realized that anything you did with bots was counter productive. Bots, for all the uglyness in the word are truly a cancer for this platform
If you google "tumor" and compare the main characteristics and effects a tumor has on the body you can easily find the parallel with what bots are doing to this platform.
This is a very harsh comparisson and i apologise to anyone that might feel offended by this, but the parallel is more then vivid to me.
Thank you for your response @chbartist. To make it clear i came here for the money and a part of me always stay here for the money. I'll try to stay always positive. My point is just how all these options on Steemit are used.. some in good some in bad manner and that is very subjective view too.
One of the most important points for me and also the most challenging i think is the valuation of that what we are doing here. Writing content, interacting with each other, curating, earning rewards, powering up/down.. using bots. Steemit has a answer for all of that. There are many moving parts come together to build this economy here. If i would color from green over gray to red the behaviour on Steemit i see a gradient with a big gray belt.
Something which is not abuse at the first glance but if you look deeper you see all the relations between the moving parts of Steemit and what implications that has long term for the platform or may have. That was the reason why i stopped bots completely and decreased my daily payouts because indirectly i supported the gray or in some cases unconsciously maybe the red area with bad actors.
The other thing is always wealth distribution on a bigger scale. We have this common reward pool and yes there is a social aspect to it. As i understand the mechanism for example if someone is paying a bot with high amounts of SBD to get an big upvote the payout comes from the common reward pool where all Steemians get their payouts from. The bot operator itself gets huge sums of cash from the author. The clear winner is the bot operator and second the author who payed and get this big upvote. I would be concerned if these practices would be a standard on Steemit.
Yes there is no free lunch.. if we always take excessively and don't analyze and be aware of what's really going on behind (if you pay a bot to get a booster who gets the money? not you, Where is money coming from? the Steemit reward pool, not from the bot) then we pull the roots out of the ground and not just the reward pool dries out.. the whole community suffers until it's gone.
Your metaphor puts it in a nutshell.. we should stop to find excuses why we must use this or that.. for visibility, to get back what we invested or whatever.. in the end it's always the same.. for ourselves.. but asking the question is this really in our favour long term or just selflish self-destruction?
I think that you make a fairly compelling case about Steemit in terms of Investor involvement and the use of bidbots. But what I find particularly interesting is the proposed introduction of a 'Steemit 2.0' based of EOS technology. From what I understand, Dan @dan and co. have amassed a rather sizeable financial warchesss and have generated a good deal of interest among investors within the tech startup community. Having been a primary player in the development Bitshares, Steemit, and now EOS, @dan has built a strong reputation within the crypto space. If EOS progresses as envisioned, he will have have the advantage strong brand recognition which should in turn make Steemit 2.0 appears as an attractive investment opportunity. If a good rewards distribution algorithm can address the problems currently facing Steemit and problems associated with new account activation, then it should follow that an EOS implementation of the Steemit model should see significant growth and attract large investments. This should have the follow-on effect causing Steemit to up its game or face being eclipsed by Steemit 2.0. Competition is indeed a good thing.
Some to the witnesses, some to sign new people up, most to the rewards pool, where it is scooped back up by investors through the use of bidbots.
My point is that that latter usage is shortsighted.
Think of Steem stakeholders as fishermen: each of them using their stakes to fish for active users of the Steem blockchain. The bait the fishermen are using is the reward pool (which is inflation on their stakes). If the fishermen delegate to bidbots, it is like eating their own bait, and those fishermen will catch no fish.
Then it will be up to the other stakeholders to catch the fish, and make Steem valuable, except they will become jealous and resentful of the Stakeholders who ate their own bait, and say: Why should I fish for the benefit of everybody when that guy ate his own bait!?
So you see, Steemit is improperly incentivized. By design, fishermen should be prohibited from eating their own bait. It should be a condition of buying Steem that you accept that the inflation on your stake will be used to grow the platform, not be recouped immediately.
This is not a moral issue, it's just a business design flaw, that slows growth, and allows the competition to catch up.
I expect Dan Larimer to solve this design problem, so Steem should hurry up because they still have a massive headstart, and every chance of being worth multiple billions of dollars.
You mentioned a very important point for every new user on Steemit.. often he/she came for the money and just wanted to stay for the money. I changed my mind in terms of bot usage the last few months and stopped it completely because of the reason you mentioned. But the short comment above yours is the truth in my eyes.. wishful thinking. It needs some serious changes within the code.. the user behaviour is nothing we can change. If a system has flaws immediately there are people to exploit them. Within Steemit it's a quite heavy challenge to solve but nothing is impossible. Dan Larimer is on the next level EOS now and Steemit 2.0 (not real name) was announced months before and is now on the finish line. Maybe he fixes these issues with this new platform.. what do you think?
Could be @onetim84 but the most important point I would like many users to understand is that steemit is a cryptocurrency platform and everyone is here to make money and I do not like to see negative people with unfounded criticism when they should be taking care of the your own blogs instead of going into the other's yard and throwing junk. I also see many here with enormous hypocrisy. These I entitle of i-phone socialists ... LOL Everywhere there will always be competition and I search in my posts to teach and motivate people writing in a simple way so they can clearly understand what I mean and this for some people is a low quality content. The fact is that I will always continue to write like this because those who are great poets around here I have already analyzed and I do not see them helping people. Anyway I vote for all those who dedicate a little of their time to interact in my posts and I call it income distribution. I do this with pleasure for those who are always with me. Regards
"It needs some serious changes within the code.. the user behaviour is nothing we can change."
I agree with you. That is why I said we have a "design problem."
The design needs to be trustless, not relying on good human behavior, and I'm certain Larimer is focused on this exact problem The man is a genius, after all.
On the other hand, I also think Steem has some time to get another better-designed app going on the blockchain, or to fork Steemit and resolve some of the design issues. 60,000 current active users is nothing to sneeze at, though admittedly the serious money will probably only come in when you get ten times that many active users.
If there is any advertising or promotional campaign of any kind, it needs to be targeted at first world markets, because users from those markets are more desirable to Brands. Users from other markets will come anyway, because they will follow the wealthier first world users on to the platform by word of mouth.
Big picture: I strongly feel that tokenized social media WILL succeed massively. It will happen. But it's up for grabs who has the most precise trustless vision, incentivized for user growth, most swiftly implemented. :)
Im in the same boat as you. I had a series running where i promoted other authors and creators by using bots once i started earning some more serious Steem and getting recognized by the music community. Trying to use the bots in a positive manner and promote such use..
After some time i realized that anything you did with bots was counter productive. Bots, for all the uglyness in the word are truly a cancer for this platform
If you google "tumor" and compare the main characteristics and effects a tumor has on the body you can easily find the parallel with what bots are doing to this platform.
This is a very harsh comparisson and i apologise to anyone that might feel offended by this, but the parallel is more then vivid to me.
Thank you for your response @chbartist. To make it clear i came here for the money and a part of me always stay here for the money. I'll try to stay always positive. My point is just how all these options on Steemit are used.. some in good some in bad manner and that is very subjective view too.
One of the most important points for me and also the most challenging i think is the valuation of that what we are doing here. Writing content, interacting with each other, curating, earning rewards, powering up/down.. using bots. Steemit has a answer for all of that. There are many moving parts come together to build this economy here. If i would color from green over gray to red the behaviour on Steemit i see a gradient with a big gray belt.
Something which is not abuse at the first glance but if you look deeper you see all the relations between the moving parts of Steemit and what implications that has long term for the platform or may have. That was the reason why i stopped bots completely and decreased my daily payouts because indirectly i supported the gray or in some cases unconsciously maybe the red area with bad actors.
The other thing is always wealth distribution on a bigger scale. We have this common reward pool and yes there is a social aspect to it. As i understand the mechanism for example if someone is paying a bot with high amounts of SBD to get an big upvote the payout comes from the common reward pool where all Steemians get their payouts from. The bot operator itself gets huge sums of cash from the author. The clear winner is the bot operator and second the author who payed and get this big upvote. I would be concerned if these practices would be a standard on Steemit.
Regards
Yes there is no free lunch.. if we always take excessively and don't analyze and be aware of what's really going on behind (if you pay a bot to get a booster who gets the money? not you, Where is money coming from? the Steemit reward pool, not from the bot) then we pull the roots out of the ground and not just the reward pool dries out.. the whole community suffers until it's gone.
Your metaphor puts it in a nutshell.. we should stop to find excuses why we must use this or that.. for visibility, to get back what we invested or whatever.. in the end it's always the same.. for ourselves.. but asking the question is this really in our favour long term or just selflish self-destruction?
I think that you make a fairly compelling case about Steemit in terms of Investor involvement and the use of bidbots. But what I find particularly interesting is the proposed introduction of a 'Steemit 2.0' based of EOS technology. From what I understand, Dan @dan and co. have amassed a rather sizeable financial warchesss and have generated a good deal of interest among investors within the tech startup community. Having been a primary player in the development Bitshares, Steemit, and now EOS, @dan has built a strong reputation within the crypto space. If EOS progresses as envisioned, he will have have the advantage strong brand recognition which should in turn make Steemit 2.0 appears as an attractive investment opportunity. If a good rewards distribution algorithm can address the problems currently facing Steemit and problems associated with new account activation, then it should follow that an EOS implementation of the Steemit model should see significant growth and attract large investments. This should have the follow-on effect causing Steemit to up its game or face being eclipsed by Steemit 2.0. Competition is indeed a good thing.