In the last weeks there a lot of debate here on Steemit if authors should be allowed to vote on their own posts, and how much, and other debates how to attract more people from Facebook and Reddit to post here. I was inspired by all these posts and especially by a post of @bless "Creating a more Secure, Fair, and Decentralized Steemit #1". You can see in the image below (that's imported from that article) that nothing has changed from last year. The minnows have a very small share of the Steem pie.
So I thought a lot to understand the problems and what can be done to fix them. And I believe I have found a solution that will benefit EVERYONE
First let's understand the problems
When a new user visits steem.com and starts posting content. Even if it's the best article, and in other mediums would get to the front page - here it can go unnoticed, collecting dust - maximum he will get like $0.72 if he's lucky. From the other side he sees the trending pages a vacation post of a whale collecting $400 or "What coffee did I drink today". Other not important posts get similar rewards. And that minnow might try hard to build a following, but even if you have 1000 followers if you don't have a friend a whale - forget it. You can make $25 but that's it. Even if your post makes it to @curie that post can make a lot but the rewards of the next one will be back to "norm". He can work out for years and still not get what he would get in any newspaper.
What's the problem?
There is a mix of power over here
It doesn't make sense (to me)
- That the whales should decide who's a good writer. In NY Times or CNN the stakeholders don't have a say on the authors.
- That the whales get curation rewards for upvoting more than all upvoters before them. They didn't do anything that they should deserve that reward.
- That bots get rewarded and decide what content should appear in the trending page. They don't read the content and don't put any work.
- That the whales decide what content should not be seen. Because they have the wealth doesn't mean they understand to media.
So what's the solution?
Steemit needs a fundamental remaking of it's platform.
There should be 3 branches:
The Author branch
The Curation branch
And The Steem Power branch.
Here is how it should work:
The Author branch is where authors write articles. After the author publishes his article - it gets transferred to the Curation department. That means it appears in the "NEW" column. Publisher doesn't have an upvote right for his post.
Arriving to the curation department it gets awaited by the Curation team. Who is that? You and me, and anyone else. They inspect the package - I'm sorry the post - and decide if it's valued stuff. If it is, they tag their upvote. A post with more upvotes goes up to the next floor - the "hot" column. A post with even more votes flies up via elevator to the 3rd floor.
Each curation member has his Curation Reputation Tag. The more upvotes the posts - he curated first or from the first - gets - plus his continuous curation - the more his reputation grows. A member with a higher reputation is like a lot voters with lower reputations.
Same is with the authors. Each author has an Author Reputation Tag. The more curation votes he gets - or fewer votes from high curation reputation members - the more his author reputation ranks. Posts from high reputation authors will automatically show in the "Top Authors" column.
The Steem Power Branch
Steem Power should be seen as Steem shares that will pay off at the rewards section. Stay tuned.
Rewards
Rewards should be splitted like this:
Author rewards - 50-65% of the post payout. It starts by 50% and the higher the author reputation rank the higher the %. Author with the highest reputation get 65%
Curation rewards - 14-29% of the post payout. The higher the author reputation the lower the rewards as above. Curation rewards decrease because there is less work curating a high reputation post, and to incentivise curation of new writers. The first curators get more than the later ones.
Steem Power rewards - 20% of all post payouts should be shared by all SP holder according to their SP ownership. People with more SP get more.
Referral rewards - 1% of post payout should go to the referrer of the author to Steemit. If there is no referrer the 1% should go towards marketing.
New rules
The rule of upvoting before 30 minutes should be nulled.
Upvoting button should be removed from the title link pages and will only be shown when viewing the article.
Since Steemit curation rewards are to reward curators for their job to find great post - no curation bots should be allowed. They don't add anything to the platform and are just reducing the reward pool that incentives for good work.
Downvoting should be made by at least 3 curators with a minimum curation reputation.
What will we gain?
That everybody has an equal opportunity to author and curate, and make money doing so.
Rewards will be paid to whoever deserves it - to the hard workers.
Whales (and minnows) will get their share according to their SP without upvoting. It's not their job.
There will be more quality content on the top pages.
This will attract new talent and get Steem on the map. And hopefully raising the price of Steem to the happiness of all of us. Else if nothing changes than we will have to do what @dan did.
Very nice post! I think you forget that people are actually investing real money into this platform. And of course they want a nice return of investment. Therefore, whales have to have much more influence than a minnow. Steemit is pure capitalism. The winner takes it all. But maybe there are some others ideas to promote great writers that do not have a lot of SP.
I didn't forget, and that's why I think they should get their stake of Steem Power Rewards. But investing money doesn't make you the best author or curator. That's why I think you need different reputation tags for them backed by the community.
What you are missing @emble, is that if you do that, people will not have a good incentive to buy more steem. Then the price will fall. Then, the whole system will fall.
Sure they will have! They get proceeds from every post.
There are a lot of wrongheaded ideas, but let's start with the most glaring one that I found:
No. Just no. Post rewards are rightly distributed to the people who wrote the content and those that curated it. What you're suggesting is my hard work and effort reward everyone else who had no hand whatsoever in making that happen.
You mention voting power being linked to SP, while simultaneously being upset that whales are granted more weight in curation rewards than others. They have more SP.
As for curation bots, manual curation takes a metric fuckton of time. I manually curate heavily every day, and I don't have nearly the reach I'd like to have. Since I know several authors who consistently put out good content and wouldn't be caught dead putting out garbage, why can't I automate voting for them? Sure there's room for abuse, but there is a robust and healthy community fighting it.
The 30 minute post limit was put in place because there was reward pool raping going on prior to its implementation. It prevents the level of spam that I witnessed firsthand last year when the platform first opened to the public, and that's why it was implemented.
Finally, whales by and large earned what they have. Those posts making hundreds of dollars a day? More often than not they either invested heavily in the platform to begin with (like most of the devs and high-end witnesses) or they had a substantial following that transitioned to Steemit, bringing more people on board (like The Dollar Vigilante). Moreover, if you read the white paper, voting power is designed to diffuse to more users over time, thus reducing the scope of power the whales have without additional investment in.
I disagree. @emble has the right idea... even if it is possible to shoot through some of this and make it swiss cheese.
A more complex system to get content reviewed and published is exactly what steemit needs.
I know we're still in BETA, and I know it's been a little over a year...
...but what @emble described... a variation of it... is what we may need and see in the future.
I thank him for his proposal. It's a good starting point to get us looking at what types of solutions could exist.
Or, conversely, if we could remove a mountain of crap posts, that would be great.
What about filters for the following:
"Under two sentence post"
"Picture post only"
etc. If I could get all that crap out of /created, I'd feel less like I'm wasting my life everyday trying to curate that garbage.
I would strongly support better filtering.
I'd also strongly support being able to filter out posts that have been upvoted by bots.
I would upvote none of them.
That's an interesting idea! I hadn't thought of the bots option.
The problem is you'd have to restrict it to users who used the bot themselves, because otherwise you could censor anyone by throwing them a randowhale vote. Then, you'd have problems regulating this, because people would just use another account to trigger the bot...you'd end up having to manually weed these out.
I think the technical limitations here might be a problem. Perhaps all bots need to be disabled unless whitelisted by community consensus (cheetah, steem cleaners).
I'd very strongly support disabling bots that curate. Unless folks consider AI to be equal to people in rights, then I don't want bots voting. If folks do consider AI to be equal to people, Imma quite voting altogether.
There are other bots that do good stuff, such as bots that ferret out good content and suggest it to people. While this treads close to the edge, I wouldn't mind a bot that provided a list of posts that contained no recipes for baked goods, make up tips, or pics of Kardashians.
The real issue for me is curation. I remain unaware of any bots writing posts, yet, so am not exercised about that.
Why not limit the posts/week by rep?
According to my plan if you author quality posts you will get much more than you currently do. It will picked up faster by curators. The reason I suggest giving 20% for SP is because all owners of SP have a share in Steem.
People invested in Steemit should get according to their investment. But should they decide which content is good? This belong to curators that are backed by the community, not by whales because of their money.
Yes but 20% is way to heavy. Maybe like 4-6%. I agree with the rest of you ideas.
This is not the final proposal. Everything should be hammered out in the unlikely event that the Steemit board decides to take a look at this.
you could make a new post with the ideas from this comment section. The more people see this the better.
New posts will not help. We need resteemers to resteem this post, to get this message out.
They have a share in Steemit. A share that increases by putting in work (either creating content or curating). And yes, they should. That's the whole point of the platform. That's also why SP can't be withdrawn immediately; it's an investment into the platform.
I often talk about community being an important part of Steemit, but the beauty of Steemit is that everyone is a curator. There is no board that nominates curators. There's no process one can game short of actually investing money into the platform, which enriches all of us because it raises the value of the token this entire thing is built on. Curators are already back by the community; groups like @minnowsupport and @curie are community-driven curation trails. @dragonslayer109, @rhondak and everyone at the Fiction Workshop, and hundreds of other groups of individuals all work tirelessly to find good content and promote it.
You're trying to address a problem that doesn't actually exist. The only thing I've gained from your post is that you don't like whales having as much of a say in which content gets a massive payout, despite their enormous investment into the platform which gave them their position. I understand that, but this isn't a problem. Egalitarianism always ends in a race to the bottom, particularly if it's top-down like this would have to be.
I'm getting really tired of people attacking those of us who bought in big to the platform. I've put damn near 100K into this platform and see non-stop proposals every day to try to reduce my influence or stake. I'm always treated like "the bad guy" because I think putting in a massive fucking investment into a massively risky platform should actually create some reward.
Minnows, stop being jealous that good writers who put in 5+ digits into this platform are more successful than your cat posts to 300 followers. If you don't like it, gtfo so I can actually curate /created again.
This rant is not directed at you, I am in agreement.
Could not have said it better myself, thanks!
Tell me about it. And then I get flack for defending you guys for investing into the platform to keep it alive. How the hell are people so economically illiterate that they don't realize whale funding is the only reason Steemit is still running at basically full speed?
It is not essencially wrong to run a half-plutocratic/half-aristocratic model, but that's not what most people are signing for and without the majority all your steem will have near-to-zero value in the future. Newcomers are realizing it and trying to change the way things are instead of just leaving. Being heavly invested in steem you should be grateful and not angry about it. ;)
The (currency) value of Steem Power rewards comes from those who are willing to buy it and literally nothing else. Newcomers who invest nothing actually cost the platform substantially, in account creation fees and delegated power. There are thousands of these users costing the platform money for every significant investor.
Which is more valuable to court, and which is in shorter supply, is fairly obvious.
The value of BTC is just as you describe Steem. The number of users of Steem, however, is driven by Steemit. If Steemit fails, Steem will no longer have a use case, which will negatively impact it's value.
More significantly, the reverse is true. It is the content that users, those that invest nothing but time, money, and expertise, bring to Steemit, upon which the value of Steem depends.
This was the intent of Steemit. This is it's whole raison d'etre, according to the white paper.
I have nothing but good things to say about investors in Steem, however, investors traditionally invest in order to achieve capital gains, not to complain about the workers in the plant 'that only cost investors wages'.
It is those workers that potentiate Steem having any value beyond what BTC does.
Maybe I am wrong, but I belive the value of steem is a consequence of the potential percieved and/or realized by steemit and other(?) steem plataforms. That's what makes people buy steem, the future potential of all this, not the short-time reward they can make upvoting themselves.
That being true, newcomers actually are showing there is real potential for steemit to reach mass adoption and without it -
being a small club of investors - steem worth close-to-nothing unless those investors are willing to invest more and/or never cashout.
For that reason, I completly disagree with your perception of newcomers as cost and I belive that if most whales see things the same way you, steem is not landing anywhere close to the moon and I will probably lose those 500 usd I invested in steem potential.
In a few words: Steem is over a year and still not catching up. It's hard to convince people to post here because they have no chance in climbing up this hill. And it includes you 2.
Really? Cause I've been climbing up this hill pretty steadily by putting in the work of forging bonds with the people on here and posting consistently good original material. And yes, it has been catching up. It's a slow process that's set to happen over the course of years, but SP is and will continue to diffuse across more users as time goes on. Again, it's in the white paper. The more people receiving curation/author rewards, the less rewards end up in the pocket of whales. This has been accelerated with the linear rewards curve established in Hardfork 19, as the overall weight of whale accounts has decreased.
I have had zero difficulty in explaining the situation to people on here regarding rewards, as it's a matter of perspective. Just like in the real world, if you don't have any social currency (reputation, not just a rep score), no one's going to know who you are. You have to market yourself. It takes time, and it takes effort, but if I can do it, take a break for a few months to finish a novel, and pick right back up and gain an average of 12 users a day since I've been back, anyone can.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. This is social jealousy. Those without the clout or the following, or the extreme writing skill to get to trending without it, are always looking for ways to try to change the system for the better.
I honestly think that most of the minnows here are basically Steemit-communists. They all want to "seize the means of production" because it's unfair that "he makes more than me after investing $10,000s"
That's exactly what it is. To quote the other guy responding to me:
As if having a shit ton of money to invest just magically happens to people. Nope, no way hard work and effort ever factored into that. Risk assessment and leveraging your assets to get on the cutting edge? Nonsense. It's all luck.
Can't stand that shit.
Is changing the system for the better supposed to be a bad thing?
What were you expecting, an An-cap circle jerk? The vast majority of people detest anarcho-capitalism and prefer socialism. Look at reddit, /r/socialsim has around 100,000 subscribers, /r/anarchocapitalsm has around 1,500 subscribers.
If this site takes off, that's what you can expect. If it doesn't make the distribution system fairer though, it won't take off and users will abandon the site. Less people will upvote your posts and your payouts will decrease. Also, the value of steem will drop.
Followed you based on your comments in this thread. I'm a minnow. I'm investing a lot of time and effort to provide good content (well i hope it's classed as "good) on here. That's all i intend to do. Hopefully, over time, my investment (although not liquid like yours) will reward myself and others on here.
If you read this post, you would see that nothing changed from last year https://steemit.com/steemit/@bless/creating-a-more-secure-fair-and-decentralized-steemit-1-2017725t17584872z
@anarcho-andrei The speed of the distribution will change depending on the inflation rate of steem (new coins issued to authors and curators) and on the behave of whales. If inflation is low and whales and selfish, the distribution may not be enought to keep new users comming to the plataform and everyone will hurt.
It's even harder when you think of other languages and without them steem will never grow global. We have good people on steem trying to make national projects, like @camoes for portuguese, but it's almost impossible to make relevant money writing in other language besides english. So, if steem is to really go global and became what it is suposed to, the distribution speed should increase. You are right, it's better after HF19, but maybe not fast enought yet.
And it's not really about social capital. A famous brazillian youtuber could come here with hundreds or thousands of fans and still would be a minnow since very few people in Brazil have any SP to vote for him. Today, it's more like a plutocracy + aristocratic system where you have to either put thousands of dolars or be connected to the nobility class to become relevant. What you are saying is that connecting to the nobility is possible and I agree, but people are saying that maybe it's not the best thing to do with this plataform.
Everyone belives on the concept, but people have different expectations. Let's keep discussing until we find a way to make everyone happy and rich. =)
Cheers!
"Let's keep discussing until we find a way to make everyone happy and rich. =)"
We don't want this. Most of the content creators on here create garbage. They deserve the nothing they get.
Hi, you may be interested in joining the discussion on my recent post on Steemit's issues.
Let's all work together through building awareness of these problems to find a good solution.
Well, your transaction history tell a different story. It shows that you've been buying lot's of steem rather than earning it. It shows that you have 1,479.318 STEEM yourself and people have delegated 9,048.881 STEEM to you - probably because you purchased it off a whale. It also shows that you've been buying upvotes.
You've simply used your wealth to buy yourself a better position. How on earth is that fair to those who don't have the wealth to buy themselves influential positions?
It's my earnings. I can use them in whatever fashion I want to. As for the delegated SP, I purchased that with the earnings I gathered from all the posts I've made previous to now, and I purchased it to expand my ability to curate. So you can shove your self-righteousness. You know how I earned enough SP to power down into Steem so I could purchase wider curating power in the first place? Good original content and building relationships with people.
I earned where I'm at and what I'm doing. I've put forth a year's worth of effort to build my position. I'm all for charity; I've delegated to curation bots I believe in run by people I know and trust. I have sat on the introduceyourself tag and greeted hundreds of new Steemians and answered tons of questions on Steemit.chat and Discord to help new users out. What I will never support is the notion that this should be automatic or a feature. No one deserves something just for showing up.
Show data please.
Show me a current chart of the one I posted earlier, in reply to another comment. I have asked @arcange for a new, post HF19 chart, but receive no answer.
Social media needs to be useful to everybody, not just salespeople. While people that market themselves successfully can succeed in business, ordinary people just posting the stuff they post are the market for Steemit. This isn't supposed to be a marketing platform, but a social media site.
The rewards, as you point out, increase as folks gain followers. But, as long as bots, collusion, and punitive flagging exist, those rewards are going to continue to be concentrated in the accounts that 'game' Steemit for rewards, rather than to post ordinary content on social media.
This is not what the white paper lays out. Indeed, the white paper says
Being equal in VP does not mean we'd end up with Kim Kardashian ASSets being the highest paid posts (a race to the bottom... get it?), but rather that the content that more people found worth a vote would be valued most.
A good way to examine what that would produce is to follow @screenname, who tracks posts that are undervalued, when the number of votes is compared to earnings. No ASSets end up on that list.
Neither does @sweetsssj. Dunno why exactly @dan started flagging her, but speculation I have heard is that the drain on the rewards pool was his target.
The problem of inequity in rewards certainly does exist, and just saying it doesn't won't make the content creators that are angry about stay and post more good content.
"People invested in Steemit should get according to their investment."
Did you notice all your support comes from no-investment, sub-60 rep commenters?
...
...
...
Of course, they want a change. They don't want to continue getting pennies for their work.
Maybe they should try networking with the evil whales and dolphins.
Maybe...
Networking, or pandering? Is there a difference?
I don't think there is for you.
If Steemit is all about making money, then good luck with it. That's not the goal of Steemit according to the white paper. It's supposed to be a social media site where content creators receive rewards that other social media sites just capture as profit.
This is why it's supposed to become the gorilla king of the space.
This is why it will, unless
In which case, there will be no (further) capital gains for investors. Competition, which I have predicted, has arisen. Calibrae seeks to improve Steemit in several ways which @emble advises.
Hey @anarcho-andrei,
Glad you wrote this comment. Steemit is an opportunity. No need to complain about whales having more. There's a reason they have more and all of us have opportunity to increase our Stake in Steem. Thanks for taking the time to express your thoughts on this.
This is pure nonsense. You may have put in the effort to create a decent article, but if it wasn't for the people upvoting it and the flawed system which allows whales to make shit loads of money simply by upvoting their own content, you would get no monetary reward from your effort.
Did they fuck!
That doesn't mean they earned it any more than a lottery winner earned their money. A whale can only claim to have earned their place if they've got their through curation and posting alone. Just like some people are lucky enough to win lotteries, some people are lucky enough to have a shit load of money to invest.
The fuck outta here with that nonsense. Let me guess: rich people never earn their position, right?
No, quite a few people have worked their way up from the very bottom and earned their position and wealth. Investors don't earn their income though and that's why their income is classed as unearned income as opposed to earned income.
None of the wealthiest people have earned all their money though as it simply isn't possible to actually earn that much money.
If you make a shit load of money from investing, you've done nothing to earn that money. You've used money to make more money and any rich idiot can easily do that by paying someone to do it for them - they don't even have to do it themselves.
And the crack-addict in Detroit who just sold his Obama-phone earned more than an malnourished infant in Somalia. @marcusorlyius
What happens when Atlas shrugs, Marxus O'Rlyius?
You pay Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk & will soon pay Daniel Larimer, Ned Scott & I'm betting on Honest Andy, @anarcho-andrei too.
John Lennon got this one right.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
What the fuck are banging on about, you gibbering loon?
He sure did.
Ah! @@@marcusorlyius
Ad hominem eh?
The Gibbering Loon
As your dead prophet at Highgate would say
When you run out of arguments on any day
Innuendo & slander work anyway
What if someone you out-thinks?
Opium eating masses; are anyway out of sync.
Show them the ones they can loot
The real One, Marxus O'Rlyius, knows a tree by its fruit
PS: John Lennon went to be as one with the world, leaving behind everything to Yoko Ono including a Rolls-Royce Phantom. Of course, the children of Bangladesh did not count. It did for George Harrison, though.
Where'd the money come to invest in the first place? Magic? And how is investment - taking calculated risks or paying someone to manage those risks for you - not earning the income you make? You put your currency on a risk hoping it pays off in a certain term. It's a risk. There's a chance you might lose it.
Given your propensity for communism, I can see how you'd think that people don't deserve to keep what they make off of trades. If you want communism, go start a commune. Stop trying to ruin my platform.
No, it came from working or from inheritance. Just because you earned money in the past though, that doesn't mean that any money you make in the future has also been earned.
Earned Income vs. Unearned Income
Did you think I was just making those terms up or something?
Is it though? What's the risk to a billionaire if they lose a $1m on a bad investment? There's no actual risk whatsoever. It's like me throwing a penny away.
It's not your platform and communes are not communism. I'm not a hippy and I'm not living in the the 20th century. Automated labour and Matrix like VR through brain-computer interfaces is the way to achieve communism. I don't need to do anything but wait a couple of decades. We'll all be god like entities at that point capable of creating anything we want just by thinking. All your wealth will be worthless and you'll have the same power as everybody else.
Let me know when you can create matter from nothing. I'm sure the Venus Project is going to make communism work this time.
Some of these solutions definitely need some fine tuning...but the only one I'd definitely remove is:
I'm actually very ok with the concept of curators giving up gains because they vote within moments.
There are plenty of posts that randomly get upvoted without actually viewing the content in full.
At best, if you wanted to modify that, I'd consider using the same formula "Medium.com" uses to predict read time...and if it has a video in it, API call to YouTube to get the runtime for that video as well...but I wouldn't totally remove the rule.
The rule was made because of the upvoting bots, but if we remove these bots and we remove the upvoting button from the Title link page, than it shouldn't be a problem. But yes your solution sounds good.
I would give you back up on this everytime. This is a nice plan.
Best,
mountain.phil28
Some good critical points on how to make it Steem even better ... especially for little fish!
Thanks for your input. We need to spread the word
Great ideas emble! I think you really have some valid points here and your solutions would make Steemit more fair and give all of us a better experience.
My only concern is the 1% referral commission. It might resemble a MLM system too much.
Upvote and resteem from me!
@ronni
I don't think rewarding referrals resembles an MLM. You don't have to refer to make money, It's just like an affiliate link that all big companies - like Amazon & eBay - use.
Thanks for you support.
good ideas - i am following you in support
I think it's great to think about these types of things, I wish I was as motivated to "think about the system". No system is perfect and can always be improved; Steemit is no exception. One point I'd like to make is that while it could be more fair, I also think it's a good thing that it is difficult to become "whale-like" and make a lot on your posts. I definitely don't think it should be easy. Even if their posts seem silly sometimes, most "whales" have worked hard and long for their following, and not just a following, but the right kind of following. It incentivises me to work harder and I respect that.
Anyway, I look forward to following your ideas in the future, and I hope we can get Steemit to the right balance of power. Thanks!
It's true that "most "whales" have worked hard and long for their following" but quality content should be king. You can see posts that would be downvoted for spam making a lot of money.
It's not difficult at all if you're wealthy though as you could just purchase SP, essentially allowing wealthy people to dominate the site an earn all the rewards whilst giving them the power to censor the views of those who are poorer than them. This should come as no surprise given that it's made by an-caps. Also, this is what an an-cap society would like like.
One thing I have posted about that you mention here, is that with sufficient capital, Steemit can be completely controlled.
There are entities with sufficient capital to purchase nominal Steem to completely control the witnesses, which in turn allows control of the code that Steemit runs on. I believe this was not unknown to the devs, although the only evidence of this is that they're smart people, and it's an obvious feature of the weighting of VP by SP.
If some RL whale buys enough stake to do this, the devs retire rich. If it doesn't happen, Steemit keeps growing and becoming more relevant - until it does happen. It may not be a get rich quick scheme, but as long as Steemit doesn't fail for some other reason, it is a get rich for sure scheme.
What if you take %5 rewards away from curation and give it to everyone who resteems?
Nice idea. But usually resteeming is not a hard work. It's a click of a button. You don't have to browse through all the posts. My idea is, you get paid for doing the job.
I've thought about a curation-like curve for resteeming too. It might be worth investigating further. There will probably also be opportunities for abuse.
The worst problems are most human profiles being spammers and spammer-minded and this: https://steemit.com/steemit/@stimialiti/bots-and-multiple-accounts-on-steemit
The suicide part is by not having direct ads, although the promoted content and the system as is now, actually encourage advertisement in a sense and help mitigate some of this problem.
I really like the idea. I've been reduced to kinda spamming things a little. Just to get the word out of what I want to promote or talk about. I'm a real person, not a bot. I figured out it's not easy to make it, like you said, some just talk about some coffee they had and make $500.00. UPvoted.
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You're right, you are kinda spamming.
Still, you substantively commented on the post, so I'll cut you slack. I can honestly relate to the frustration that comes of trying to promote and running into ignorance and apathy.
Still... there is something to be said for simply making relevant comments, and letting the quality of your comments drive subscriptions to your blog, where you can post advertisements.
Just sayin'.
Yeah I've cut back on it, I want to be more legit :)
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This post has received a 0.96 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @emble.
Some very interesting ideas, similar to past ideas of mine. The exact implementation needs more thought though. I don't have time to go into detail right now because it's extremely complex.
Thanks for getting the message out. This is not meant to be a final proposal, just a new way of thinking here. It's true people invested a lot of money and that's why they should get rewarded with the Steem Power rewards. But to keep motivation, attract new authors, and make Steemit a source for quality posts - a seperation of power is required in my opinion.
You're on the right track, a lot can be improved on SteemIt. Starting with rating curators in some way, currently only authors are rated. Also currently curators aren't earning enough when voting on others, so a lot just decide to vote on themselves without creating content (just a 1liner spam comment).
What if Steemit simply didn't show the curation/post rewards. If people didn't know how much a post was worth, would they upvote it anyways?
At that point, it would be more similar to Reddit (except you earn crypto, it's not censored and there are no adds).
Making the curation reward 'blind' would only deprive the general populace of insider information. Cliques of folks currently collude in timing their upvotes to capture the bulk of curation rewards, while sending the post on to the trending page. I have witnessed this happen, in a chatroom, where the timing was discussed.
The clique has to have enough SP to make the post trend in order to profit the most, but, in lesser form, this is exactly what MSP and other bot driven curation trails do.
The blindness only impacts those that are not in communication with the author, or for authors that aren't guaranteed to trend. Your proposal would not work for @sweetsssj's posts, for example, because her every post, no matter what the content, trends.
In order to continue to game the system with @sweetsssj, you only need to be able to curate her posts within the first 30 minutes, and this is relatively easy to do, even without direct colllusion, just by programming a bot to watch for her posts.
Very good points. Do you have any recommendations?
I do. Recently there have been a couple developments that hugely impact Steemit, and the rewards mechanism.
The SEC has announced that they have the authority to regulate cryptos, such as Steem, that are securities. Steem, since it's the basis for voting rewards, as SP, which weights VP, and thus determines how rewards are disbursed, is a security. Also, Steemit now has competition, or is about to, as @elfspice, a former Steemit witness (l0k1) has started Calibrae.
Most of the problems with user dissatisfaction with rewards on Steemit are due to the weighting of VP by SP. This weighting assures that the same factors that influence wealth throughout history (it takes money to make money) influence wealth on Steemit. There are other problems, but some of THEM stem from the influence of SP on voting, as well.
I have recommended that votes be equal, and that investors receive their gains as the price of Steem appreciates, just as they do for BTC, or stocks, bonds, and all other traditional investment vehicles. The mining of the rewards pool needs to end, and rewards need to be distributed to authors that are popular with folks, not just rich folks.
One whale vote can presently be worth more than 10,000 minnow votes. There is no way that the 'masses' will find this a fair system, and they will vote with their feet, since they can't vote with SP.
The reason the SEC matters is that only because VP is weighted by SP does Steem become a security. Were votes equal, or weighted (as I prefer) by reputation, the SEC would not have any authority to regulate - or prosecute - anything on Steemit. Since most of the Steem in existence was mined before Steemit even had users, and then Steem was offered to the public after those huge stakes were mined, those 'investors' may have trouble with the SEC, regarding offering securities to the public.
I don't want that trouble to come to Steemit. I don't think anyone does.
Calibrae is a HF of Steemit, which is designed to eliminate the stakes that derive from mining before Steemit was available to the public, and make some other changes that make it more fair.
It is the first Steemit fork to do so that I am aware of, it is just beginning, but it will not be the last.
Before Calibrae, Steemit really had no competition, and anyone that wanted to get rewards for posts had to come to Steemit, regardless if they thought it was fair or not. Calibrae is competition for that exact space, and either Steemit will be better received by the public, or it won't. There is now a market for this kind of social media, rather than only one choice.
As I said, Calibrae will not be the last Steemit competitor either, and those problems Calibrae fails to fix, someone else will, until we have an optimal platform (according to my basic understanding of economics).
Calibrae yet retains SP (or Juice, as @elfspice calls it) to weight VP, and I think this is a mistake.
However, we'll see.
More excellent points.
For what it's worth, I gave you a full upvote for this.
Likely the best reply I've read since starting steemit.
Ah, now I'm blushing! Thanks for your kind words =)
Great response. I've mentioned much of the same in my own post on the subject, but was told my post "doesn't even make sense" lol.
That would also be a great idea. Currently the platform users focus is making money, so why do you need the read articles - a bot is good. But if you want it to be good content a change is needed.
Very good read you definitely have a point something different is needed, cheers mike
Thanks for your support. We are all in the same boat. Whales should be the first to support this change, it will bring them much more wealth.
All good ideas but I think the major problem here on steemit is the signup process. I'm still getting message after message from my audience telling me that they can't sign up or they are having problems signing up. First impressions are important and many of these people will never be back.
There are easier signup processes for a fee. Look at this post: https://steemit.com/news/@timcliff/new-tool-from-busy-org-create-new-steem-blockchain-accounts-with-steemconnect
Yeah, that's kinda my point. If people have to pay to sign up because its so complicated...FAIL. I mean we want mass adoption eventually right? Social media should not be hard to take part in...IMHO.
The website is still in beta.. The current signup process is not the final product. They are working on changes to the whole signup process in hardfork 20. The system that is in place for now works for the time being, and when there are cases where it doesn't - the people in the community are here to help.
Im really looking forward to the updates....just not sure how my audience will react to, "okay, this time it really will be easy to sign up an account". Im all about second chances though.
It is a goal of the dev team to improve and streamline this process. It is probably going to take some time to get there though. As users of a 'beta' website, we should not have the expectation that everything is going to work 100% optimally and have all the bells and whistles of a full blown social media platform. It is a work in progress, and we also need to consider how the platform will look in 6 months or even a year or more. Right now we are all the 'early adopters' - giving the site a try and providing feedback on how it can be made better.
Hopefully we don't have a sudden influx of new accounts. According to @furion, @netuoso, and others, the network is iffy now, and dramatically increasing the number of users may well cause it to be unusable.
This is not my specialty, and I am not privy to the technical details. You might be, as a witness, though. Anything you can add to the issue with RPC nodes, and requiring more and more RAM to keep Steemit running?
I don't know what 'designs' Steemit had in mind when they built this platform and I don't know if your suggestions are any better, BUT what I do know is that if the platform doesn't find a way to get better circulation and "compensation" of its "better" authors, then eventually the most talented people WON'T stay here and that will create the opportunity for competition that might drive Steem prices down as people leave for a "better" option.
I agree, the first alternative to address all these problems, will for sure build on the expense of steemit.
Calibrae has already begun. @elfspice, a former witness, has recently begun to solicit 'survivors' that seek a platform with greater fairness.
Lemme know what you think.
..respect!..don t know if agree with everything, but you think seriously about it..seems to me..follow you..upvoted..resteemed..
Thanks for your support.
This makes totally sense. I am newbie, but I see your points, which urgently needs correction.
I hope you will succeed here.
I got a bellyRub and this post has received a 2.45 % upvote from @bellyrub thanks to: @emble.
I agree with your overall sentiment but strongly disagree with some of proposals to sort it as they would just further increase the inequality.
For example, having more SP shouldn't allow you to earn more SP. That's completely backwards and just funnels SP to those who already have the most. What's required is a progressive distribution system like that used for income taxes.
It's like saying that people who have more money in the bank should not get more interest. SP is like money invested in the bank, so if you own some of them, you should get more interest. It's only a question how much.
Yes it is like that and that's also completely fucked up. Why should being wealthy allow you to accrue more wealth for doing absolutely fuck all compared to someone doing hard physical labour every day? Such a system is pure insanity and the only possible outcome is the majority of wealth being funnelled to those at the top.
This is true even if everyone earns the same percentage - a poor person with $10 to invest could double their money to $20 making $10. Meanwhile the wealthy person who invested $1m in the same stock will earn $1m. Why should the wealthy person be able to earn $1m more than the poor person if they both did the exact same work? If you think that's fair, you must also think it fair to have a pay difference of 100,000:1 for two factory workers doing the exact same work.
This isn't a flaw in the system. The system was specifically designed to do this.
Like I said, the only way to sort it out is by using a system similar to progressive tax systems that dampens the power of those with the most SP and boost the power of those with the least. Those with the most SP still get the most SP, they just no longer get ridiculously greater amounts of SP.
Given that most of the devs and witnesses are ancaps though, I don't see it happening. What I do see happening is a rival platform not dominated by ancaps using a sensible distribution system rather than the idiotic system in use here. Just like the majority abandoned digg for reddit due to power users dominating the site, the majority will leave steam for the new system that isn't dominated by the wealthy.
@elfspice is making Calibrae. Check it out.
Even if your post makes it to @curie"
It's worth noting here that Curie has a reputation cap for submission. So, if Curie gives you a bump once, you'll probably have too high of a rep to be eligible again. @JerryBanfield has a great post covering all the ins and outs of Curie for those who are interested.
"Steem Power rewards - 20% of all post payouts should be shared by all SP holder according to their SP ownership. People with more SP get more."
This is an interesting idea, but like much of the rest of your post, I think is far too drastic a change. Not going to get witness and community consensus on such enormous changes.
It seems most of your suggestions are to reduce the influence of stakeholders, so why would stakeholders buy in to this?
Companies uses profit for dividends or growth.
Steemit dividends are the rewards old investors/whales get and Steemit growth is achieved by atracting more active members to the community.
Newcomers represent the growth of this endeavour and stakeholders have to decide if they do rather get rewarded more now (dividends) or re-invest it to turn those newcomers into active members, increasing the lon-term value of the plataform.
How do you vote, sir?
The stakeholders will get paid per their investment regardless if they vote or not. That's 1 good reason for them to support this change. Second, the price of steem will soar with these change bringing a lot more users and adoption of steem. Else steem will stay a small community with whales to stay and minnows to go. That means almost no new authors + no adoption = Steem to fail.
Almost every single idea in your post is exactly correct. I would only disagree with the referral 1% (which opens up the Ponzi scheme nightmare, and presents other difficulties), and am perhaps unclear on what you mean by departments.
If you mean actual offices, I'm agin' it. However, you imply that the Curation department is us, and that just means the public decides, which is cool.
I reckon one important matter you have missed is that some votes are worth more than others, and this isn't cool. As you point out, just because someone has a grip of ducats doesn't mean their opinion is of greater value than a pauper's.
Votes should be equal.
This also eliminates a great many work arounds and fixes that have been put into place, including bots curating, to try to feed rewards to authors with small holdings of SP.
Frankly, all of those work arounds pale in comparison to simple popularity, as folks should decide what is good content, not tricks, timing, or the thickness of the wallets folks are packing.
Great post! Imma follow you now.
Sorry I missed the curation cutoff, or I'd have thrown a vote at you too.
I didn't mean physical departments, I meant it should be separated. I'm not a fan of equal votes because there are better curators then other. Imo the folks should decide who are the better curators.
That's what reputation is: vetting by the community. I'm quite in favor of VP being weighted by reputation, for exactly the reason you state. I'm also hard agin' SP being used to weight VP, for all the reasons you mention, and mebbe more.
Take a look at the Calibrae project. It is a fork of Steemit. The aim is to fix the problems you are discussing. Development is well under way. Comment on the thread if you want your account copied over from Steemit.
https://steemit.com/calibrae/@elfspice/calibrae-strategy-change-opt-in-rather-than-algorithmically-determined-opt-out
Read further posts about the project here
https://steemit.com/trending/calibrae
Yes, I saw it and already commented. I'm still not sure what it will look like because currently it's a 1 man band.
I have been having indepth conversations with him. He knows his stuff. He's recruiting others for the task.
Great!
This is a solid proposition. I've written my own stance on the matter here. You might be interested in checking it out and joining the discussion in the comments.
You are right @emble. So, what's happening now? Can we have any update on this?