With the invent of @yougotflagged among many other changes to this platform, the ongoing talk of the town is that there are two, huge, gut-crunching problems with Steemit.
- Spam
- Self voting abuse.
Let's identify the problems for the sake of any new readers, feel free to skip ahead.
Spam
Spam is tricky and will basically never go away, but thankfully we have @steemcleaners to deal with that to some degree. There's still accounts like @monitorcap which post automatically every few minutes, as well as comments, and many users who somehow find it logical to copy news about iPhones every day without crediting their sources.
Until humanity gains a few IQ points, this will likely remain.
Self-Voting abuse
Basically, people with high amounts of steem power either upvote their own stuff that gives them inflated value, rather than sharing the value around to the minnows and everybody else, or they rent out their power for a small fee, in a way that is only profitable if the person who rented it upvotes themselves silly. This means people are incentivized to post 1-sentence posts followed by 20 bot accounts commenting on it with 'thx' or 'gd', all of which is upvoted 3, 4, 50 dollars or whatever.
Sometimes you have a post that maybe took an hour to write and instantly receives $250. @yougotflagged was born to fight this, bringing value back to the reward pool, and it gets a bit of income from people upvoting the daily posts sharing what has been flagged.
But as long as huge whales like @blocktrades and groups like @minnowbooster exist, aside from huge programming overhauls, this is always going to be here and possibly get worse the more whales catch on to the lucrative scheme.
But here's my far more elegant solution
All my solution needs is for whales to hear about and be convinced by this business opportunity.
There are a number of growing, trusted curation teams out there. As of today, I am part of three of them in some way or another: @curie, @steemstem and @ocd. There are plenty more.
These have been around a while and have been doing nothing but a selfless service to the website by manually choosing valuable posts and upvoting them anywhere between $5 and $100, depending on if they were democratically nominated, or the level of quality or whatever.
I can tell you, being in these teams alone, ignoring the other language and country teams, a huge chunk of steemit is covered. If you post anything in Science, Tech, Engineering, Math, steemstem, medicine, chemistry, biology, physics, geology, psychology and so on, SteemSTEM has it completely covered. OCD trawls the feeds with a huge team in multiple languages. What great tools!
Simply, all whales need to do is put all their delegation into these groups, the ones they trust, and they will do the upvoting on the behalf of the community.
But the whales still need to profit
So all that needs to be added is a premium service. Rather than offer a service that guarantees an upvote worth more than they paid for, offer a service that puts them on a list guaranteed to be checked, and doubles the voting power the given curation team provides.
So if I pay $5, for example, SteemSTEM could slam 30% on my post rather than %15.
BUT ONLY IF IT PASSES THE QUALITY CHECK
If they pay $5 for the teams to upvote 1-sentence spam, they waste $5 and it goes straight to the VP of that curation account.
A whale could even offer double-premium, or triple-premium, $50 for a 100% vote, for example. In the meanwhile, the curation teams get the curation rewards, or get a guaranteed upvote on their own content as they see fit, or any similar benefit.
To Sum Up
What this means is that curation teams will grow exponentially as demand grows for their upvote services. Nobody pays for the upvotes but they can get priority. Nobody can spam or abuse self upvoting because it's entirely manual, curation teams profit, whales profit, minnows profit.
Spam and Abuse is simultaneously de-incentivized while striving for higher quality posts is strongly incentivised.
The only thing missing are clever people creating a system or app or group or whatever to organize the priority premium upvotes and the weight of votes to be sustainable, but with enough whales' backing, a 5% upvote could potentially be enough for the most premium of service.
Can anybody actually see anything wrong with this idea? I'm admittedly ignorant to the ins and outs of what goes on in the background so this could, somehow sound stupid. Please let me know if so.
It's been running around in my head and I've been pushing it to silence for over a week now. If you like the idea, please resteem it and catch the ears of whales. Perhaps we can save this site once and for all, and in a way that doesn't require months of dilly-dallying while the smart computer people figure out computery-number things they all disagree with each other on!
Cheers.
I'm still not too sure about Curie. The account sends out large payments to its "workers." Some accounts receive hundreds of SP very frequently from the Curie account.
Last I checked, the account sent out a couple hundred grand over the course of the year. I encourage anyone interested to use SteemSQL or something to collect all transfers out of these types of accounts and sum them. You will get an idea of the users that are profiting the most.
Curie doesn't seem very selfless. That doesn't mean I don't think it is useful, it just is paying its workers quite a lot.
On top of being a high ranking Witness that doesn't share witness votes.
The whole point of paying curators is to give the entirety of Curie holdings back to the community, there is a large amount of infrastructure involved with operating Curie, and the main point is not to support self voting, nepotism and to maintain the highest level of integrity. We do not vote for witnesses as it stands, in order to maintain our integrity such that Curie is not accused of being bribed or otherwise for a witness vote, we do not support anything which is quid pro quo that could damage the reputation within the community. With the introduction of community votes, Curie has followed communities like SteemSTEM and has given 100% of curation rewards earned from the followed votes back to these individual communities. It seems like you've already made up your mind about Curie being selfish, however the fact is that we have dedicated ourselves to give back as much as we can to grow the Steem community with an amazing team of curators, reviewers and sub-communities all of which I am personally proud to be apart of.
Curie pays its contributors 100% of all revenues. Contributors are paid a lot precisely because Curie is selfless :) Other projects are businesses, they have founders and owners that need to make a profit, hence retain a cut and don't pay contributors as much.
Curie is a community project operated entirely by the community. Anyone can get into the project (in the past it used to be completely opened, but now requires recommendations for existing curators as that was unsustainable) and through quality curation make their way up the ranks to the ultimate goal of getting a direct follow from Curie, and a reviewer's privilege. It's all transparent, fleshed out and objective. E.g. Each post accepted earns 20 Steem. To gain a lucrative reviewer or direct follow, you need to maintain a Curation Score of 200 over 6 months. Some contributors earn a lot, because they do all that work. Anyone can replace these contributors and earn that much by doing a better job. This system has developed some of the best curators on Steem, and may continue to do so. It empowers the highest quality curators.
The project runs through community contributions. The top curators decide how it functions democratically, and it has been a unanimous decision to note vote for other witnesses, to be completely apolitical and unbiased. Some curators have suggested that we would get a lot more witness votes had we traded votes etc, but we still didn't. That should give you a sense for Curie's spirit. Absolutely driven towards meritocratic and quality curation, for the benefit of promising authors and the Steem community in general, with absolute integrity and no compromises whatsoever.
Of course, Curie can go down a different path if our community so desires, but as of now, this project has survived for fifteen months never asking a single penny or a vote follow or anything at all, from the community. It runs entirely through donations, curation (mostly), author and witness rewards.
PS: Any questions, feel free to join the #curie channel on Steemit.chat. Someone will be around to answer your questions.
I don't know about the primary, or inner circle of Curie folk but I am basically a Curie worker and I certianly don't get quite a lot. In fact, I'm excluded from curie payment. As a science curator, I get paid, but as you can tell by my wallet history, it ain't much, 50sbd a week, and some upvote rewards (but not by the curie train).
The ones we at steemSTEM give $100 to (using curie and steemstem together), are ones that we consider exceptional content. Most are given about $10-30. This is still for posts that are well referenced, original content, however.
But yeah your main point I can't so much comment on, I agree that it's not a problem per se, but if they're getting extraordinary payments, well, that's a shame but the curation work my teams doing has benefited supremely from curie's input so far, so I can't really complain!
Glad I'm not the only one that saw that. Lost my vote a long time ago.
It'll be difficult to deal with the butthurts if people paid for the premium-queue and don't get any votes in return if their posts don't pass lol. Anyway, curie has been operating without providing any curation rewards back to the delegators. It all gets distributed back into the ecosystem instead.
Stake-holders would do well to realize that delegating SP without any strings attached will lead to a meritocratic curation ecosystem. That'll ultimately lead to a healthier Steem network, that may (given an informed market) increase their stake's worth by millions of dollars. Surely, that's worth a lot more than fishing for a few thousand here or there for selling delegations and votes.
Of course, the whales need to unite and take action to enhance content on Steem, and delegate to hundreds/thousands of the most engaged and loyal curators of the community.
Yes, I know this is an utterly utopian idea, and will never happen, but thought I'd leave it out there. But then again, Curie and steemSTEM are still surviving, so it is not impossible. As far as I'm aware, neither pay for upvotes etc. The same might also be true of OCD, I think?
PS, to clarify: Projects that do not ask anything from curators or authors. They do not pay for voting power, but rely on altruistic whales. They return all revenues back to the community. This way, there's complete apolitical meritocracy with no scope for corruption.
As mentioned in the chat, that's not wrong, but I think if we limit subjective requiements and focus on objective, as in, referenced, credited images, original content, more than 25 words, then we can easily guarantee a minimum, and if they don't match those objective requirements then they can't complain.
Regarding Curie, at steemstem, we get paid via the curation rewards that are generated from our team's work in science. It's not huge (the people we upvote get substantially more than I ever will being one with the power), but it keeps me happy
We basically need more OCDs and curies and steemstems, and utopians. And for the whales to delegate power to them. How do we do that?
Ha! Butthurts
@mobbs, in order for us to determine if the whales will bite, would be to first determine what their ROI on leasing to upvote bots is. After that, if you can get close to that ROI, then its all about what the whale feels like doing. If its far below, then its certainly going to be zero dice unless they understand what your unique value proposition is and how they can benefit from it.
I think what you are offering might not be reasonable, only because there are plenty of whales who do not post and only upvote. Why? Because if I had $500,000 in a savings account, chances are that I don't have time to sit around writing and upvoting stuff.
The reality of what will happen to steemit can only be one of two choices. Both of which fall in line with whales who are only here to turn a profit. If steemit continuously produces bad content, then the circle jerk upvote bots will continue to accelerate the erosion of value as steemit continues to attempt to take off.
The other way to make money, and much more explosively is to find ways to incentivize people to keep producing GOOD content such that over time, those who strive for perfection and growth of their craft will be on par with the best users on youtube and instagram. Which in it self, is NOT an easy thing to do. The only pitch I can come up is to say that its in their best interest to push the best of the best to continue to provide the best content in order to increase the value of STEEM, otherwise it will be stuck at its current price, forever.
Lets face it, the most successful bloggers and vloggers on steemit are a FAR cry from those who are on youtube. That's because theres still not a large enough economic incentive for them to switch to this platform, which means that the only way is for steemit content creators to improve their craft, and in for that to happen, they must get the biggest rewards.
Sorry I read this on my phone when I woke up and forgot about it.
Well, a large part of what you write is exactly the intent of my proposition and I think it would be potentially quite successful in doing so.
The whales I refer to are precisely the ones who don't post, the ones who either upvote fo curation rewards, or sell votes thus spurring the abuse.
My proposal doesn't even touch upon upvote bots. Upvote bots are not a critical problem as of yet, the majority made for small users who are trying to get rich quick, not for the millionaires on top.
However, I've determined that the vote selling business in question makes about $720,000 a year if the rate is the current blocktrades rate and they get rent out 4 million's worth of SP, as blocktrades is.
With my idea, a random example of paying $20 for a premium upvote, and 50 people do that per day, that's $360,000. You could very reasonably double that to 100 a day, or $40 for bigger votes to match their current model, or even more.
Finally, I don't think we need to be comparing things with YouTube and so forth. YouTube took up 2% of the internet at one point, we're hardly in the same league, this is a small community website where almost everyone knows everyone else at a certain point, so I'm not concerned about upping quality, and besides, quality is subjective and we shouldn't really force higher quality upon people
no worries! Thanks for replying! I think the quality of the content is critical to invetors (whales). If I were a whale, I wouldn't support half the content on here. strike that, i wouldn't support 75% of the content on here. There are days where i struggle to find something to upvote. And while quality is subjective, we can all agree that we wouldn't upvote something that is equatable to midnight word vomit that summarizes everything an article they read just said.
Trying to stay back on point now!!! If you offered premium upvotes to whales, then you still need to incentivize them to post to begin with, otherwise they will default back to upvote bots. I wouldn't bother posting a day to try and collect rewards from my $500,000 investment. I would litterally have more important things to do.
So if I were a whale, what a I really want is to see my money invested into something that is legitimately good, like a community project, an ongoing series, and growing idea etc.
I bring up youtube because youtube has become an area where someone use it as a utility to show something on video, rather than trying to only collect the attention of other users. Its a bit more raw in its use, which is something that we need here to create more real characters.
Now to make some breakfast....
One of us is misunderstanding the other hang on... I don't want any whales to produce content, which seems to be what you're saying. All they need to do is delegate their money to curators, and then sit back and watch the money come in. Which is exactly what you're saying you would want to see: 'money invested into something like a community project' - as in, curation teams that do the quality checking on the whale's behalf.
Right?
i am defintely misunderstanding you because I didnt get why a whale would pay for a premium upvote (other then to vote on thier own content). But yes, I think delegating SP to curators is the key to success, but this success must bridge to the outside world. Content creation and keeping SBD internal to the steem economy does not serve any purpose. The more SBD can reach the outside world, the more likely it is that the outsideworld invests in SBD. its sort of like wall st. They sell financial instruments and that cycle creates a predictability of money that is the engine to the world economy.
I like the idea very much! However, as Steemit continues to grow, these curation efforts will become harder and harder to keep up. Also, it seems, for the most part, your proposal would suggest to whales to take their delegation away from a wildly profitable endeavour, which is Upvote Services which I doubt they will.
I'd say that Upvote Services are a much larger problem than people realize. With each upvote that is shelled out, that amount is taken out of the rewards pool. It also completely ruins the sorting algorithm as a piece of content that organically earned $100 in upvotes from creating awesome content, would sit next to a piece of trash which upvoted themselves for $100.
Since everybody uses Upvote Services, the playing field is aritifically heightened. For your content to ever see the light of day is $10 earnings before anyone even sees your content.
You would have to first, spend money, which gets taken out of the reward pool, and paid to a whale.
I have created 2 in-depth posts, one, identifying the issue and how it is negatively impacting Steemit as a whole, and another, posted on utopian.io as a proposed solution. You can find them here :
Growing Unhappiness with Upvote Bots on Steemit
Proposal for New 'Promoted' Function
I seriously think this is a major problem facing Steemit right now and will continue to make Steemit more and more toxic until somethings changes. I sincerely believe that the solution I have came up with will alleviate the issue as well as bring a positive impact to Steemit. As of right now, I am focusing on bringing more awareness onto the proposal in hopes of it ever being implemented. Please do check it out if you have the time.
Thank you!
seems to me, someone one, perhaps even me, should make a steemit blockchain based website that filters out the 'upvoted by bot' content value. of course this does nothing for them leeching the system, but i think i'd enjoy the content more.
The issue is that with the current state of Steemit, that would eliminate a good chunk of all content in circulation. We clearly need a massive change to see this issue ridden of.
if the whales are sellouts just to make money, that greed will destroy steemit.
Then we are set to die along with it unless something is done. Somehow it really seems like every whale is avoiding me. I have tried very hard to reach out.. I posted on @jerrybanfield's post about Upvote Services, it is the no.1 comment on the page and he skipped me completely, and went on to upvote and comment on replies below me. Right below my comment @frystikken, the owner of @booster and also a witness, somehow didn't see my comment or couldn't be bothered to reply as my proposal is in direct competition with his extremely profitable endevour.
well i wouldn't reach out to the ones clearly abusing the system.
one thing, that is calling my attention now, is to focus on the wanted instead of the unwanted, and that is something i'm seeing fulltimegeek doing. he is promoting those that are thinking/acting independently. i liked this post ... so there are those working in the other direction. but maybe the answer isn't to destroy but just to do our best to not support those that using it, and finding those that do it right. my feed is actually getting better than 'trending' because of resteems/posts of those i'm following.
so i've not lost all hope yet, greed is a powerful drug, but it self destructs on lack of creativity.
I sincerely believe that Upvote Service owners don't have poor intentions on the matter, it may just be that at some point the profits become to intoxicating.
Thank you very much for the reference! I actually read that post and left a long long reply on his open forum post!
Indeed! I have not lost hope either, I have decided that I truly feel the need for my proposal to be taken seriously is important enough that I will keep pushing forth and bringing awareness to it as well as writing a proposal 1.1 adding new stuff and refining on existing points.
I don't have any dream that this would be a permanent solution regarding the size of steemit, but what we need right now is to clean up the platform, and this would be the quickest and easiest approach in my opinion.
Vote selling yeah... well I haven't done the maths as to its profitability compared to my idea, but I don't think it's impossible that they could make just as much money from priority-selling. Using curation teams vastly spreads out that reward pool to a much larger field, and as more whales get on board, the bigger and more numerous curation teams become: more money for the many, but including the elites.
I actually have had a thought about your idea more, and I think it is a good solution.. I will integrate it into my proposal 1.1 and give you credit accordingly!
woo!
No matter what the system, someone will figure out how to exploit it, and I get jealous because I didn't think of it first.
:)
perhaps, but that doesn't mean we can't make it really, really hard, and super not worth the effort.
A good proposal. Without profitable business solution, curation will never get big attention and lure of voring bot will always persist.
I was proposing the similar ideas to @minnowbooster, @buildawhlae and @bellyrub for eons while they got millions of SP from whales.
https://steemit.com/bellyrub/@bellyrub/what-if-bellyrub-picked-the-users-that-can-use-my-services-and-last-a-week-than-we-can-choose-others#@riseofth/re-bellyrub-what-if-bellyrub-picked-the-users-that-can-use-my-services-and-last-a-week-than-we-can-choose-others-20171126t012110367z
One more request, since you have worked on these curation projects ( @curie, @steemstem and @ocd). Can you make a post, how users (new) can use (get benefit from) these services? How do they work? How to get their attention? All these curation site does not have wikis on their profile. Yes, it is possible to do a research and reading (searching) old posts. But it will be easier for someone like you, who already have great experience with them.
Can you kindly make a big post about those curators and provide a link in your profile (perhaps) to help us all?
you mean doing the right thing doesn't pay as well?
being a schill is more profitable?
it has always been this way, doing what is right is usually less exciting, but always better for the long run.
unfortunately I'm set to leave OCD because I'm about to start full time work and I can't handle the workload of all these AND my own posts. Regardless, I don't really have the reach or influence for a post to be 'big'. this post has a huge discussion going on but even that has gotten less than half the payout of bigger users posting photos of their garden or something.
Each individual team have their own way of getting their names heard: OCD post daily and comment on every post they curate, steemstem have comment pictures on upvotes posts or posts that need advice/improvement also they post weekly content for the purpose of recognition of other users etc.
Curie is just so huge that everybody knows it. There's not really much I can add to that!
I am for the curation teams for sure.
I am also for decentralised platforms and am glad to see some high SP users giving out their Steem Power to individual curators.
More of BOTH please!
Hopefully your dream will be realized =D
i don't really agree to this, the reason why steemit is "fading" is that bots are everywhere, trailing bots etc, post are valued by a small number of people with powers or with large powers following them.
The quality of the post is judged only by a few, yet the value or the factor of relationships kicks in and make things bias. I think the solution to this is everyone's vote contains the same value, and no bots/ trails are permitted for voting, after all if you haven't read the post, how can you say you like it just because someone represent you that "liked" it.
You won't randomly like post on facebook without looking into the content, so why is this allowed in steemit, and money is involved?
(but of course we are all here for money right, even the curation teams are just for profit anyway, so steem on~)
Totally unworkable. Bots will happen anyway, and stake-based voting works in favour of the platform. One identity per vote isn't something that can be solved all that easily.
You conflate the two parts of his idea. Stake weighting is killing the platform, not working in favor of it. It is the primary vector for oligarchical concentration of rewards.
Bots are a separate issue, and 2FA can go a long ways towards reducing bots on Steemit. Captchas can do more.
The unworkable thing is NOT taking necessary steps to reduce the financial incentives to ignore posts from authors with low stake. Rewards were intended to gravitate to good content - not deep pockets. Stake weighting VP has failed to do that, and mitigating those failures with more financial manipulation is likely to just make the problem worse.
Delink SP from VP. Make Steemit become what it was meant to be.
Destroy all bots, and make Steemit an actual SOCIAL media platform, rather than a rewards pool mining bot farm.
Edit: need to point out that's an old chart. I think the problem may actually be worse now, as that was from just prior to HF19.
It's rather naive to think bots can be stopped in open, permissionless blockchains like this one. My as well embrace it and develop a culture for good use of it.
As for identity/stake arguments, please check out my sidenote and the top comment in this recent post: https://steemit.com/flagging/@kevinwong/the-value-of-downvotes-explained
How many bots can solve captchas?
How many phones can a botnet have?
Perhaps bots can't be eliminated entirely, but using those two readily available methods, 99% of them would be gone.
@andrarchy didn't address either. Nor did you.
Your solution is predicated on the idea that anyone wants to correct the problem and not just go on milking the cash cow. I don't have a problem with people getting a return on their investment.
It's the pretense of promoting quality content that annoys me.
i.e. Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining.
i was thinking something like each person per day could have 10 votes each worth 1 SBD or something, so either you have good social network where people really like giving it to you or your post is really worthy of that 1 SBD. (if you want to vote more than 10 posts, then you can use the delegated votes from others, instead of pouring all the votes to limited number of post that person could read per day). This should diversify the value being paid for each post, and the content spectrum of the post.
To me right now steemit is like a journal publication group, post are submitted to review (not peer review!!) , get "paid" if pass the "selected" panel (with huge SP), while post that are not within their expertise becomes undervalued and those writers will gradually fade out from the community. As the platform is more like a publication group rather a social media platform for leisure while earning money at the same time.
Bots will happen, I understand but i do believe that there are ways to discourage or reduce the use of bots.
I think we need to not pretend that we're all here for the money, as you say, and provide some monetary benefit for the elites on top, which is why I came up with this idea, it aims to satisfy the rich 1% while also handing it down to the honest portion of the 99%. Removing a whale's power by limiting their vote power would de-incentivize them, I'd guess, and again it would be so much of an overhaul that it wouldn't happen in decades... you know how slow progress is on here!
If the true purpose of Steemit was to promote and reward quality content, then there'd be no weight staked voting.
1 person, 1 vote.
Sure, you'd still have people with lots of sock puppet accounts and the circle jerking vote blocks but their influence would be a lot less.
@sweeeetsssssj would still get huge payouts because half of Asia votes up her shit. But she is so innocent and lonely looking.
The true purpose really depends on who you are. In many eyes, the true purpose is to make a profit on the market while some losers write shit. To others it's to have an uncensored media platform to push one's agenda without suppression. For the most part, it's far more about making money than content and we shouldn't try to hide that. 1 person 1 vote is putting too much emphasis on an idea with its footing in a non-existent utopian society. To assure this utopia, drastic measures inevitably get made and things end up more like Communist China (slight exaggeration I know) or the US war on drugs.
Embrace the greed and make it work in everyone's favour, I say.
This is why the retention rate for all accounts opened on Steemit in 2016 is ~11%.
Embracing the greed will never work in everyone's favor. It will only continue to concentrate wealth in the hands of the greedy. Apparently, ~89% of folks aren't greedy, at least in 2016.
I dunno. I get your skepticism but you haven't yet pointed out a reason why my idea wouldn't be a far superior situation to the current one. Obviously as I said it may not actually be the ultimate solution, but as far as progress goes here, this is likely the best we have realistically
You're right. Every word.
And she is innocent and lonely looking.
your idea is good, too bad (almost) nobody will give a shit
I dunno I'm getting quite a lot of discussion here. You're the only waste of space so far =P
I will be happy if I am proven wrong and this actually leads somewhere!
Honestly I was looking to refine it really. Either that or somebody steals the idea and takes all the credit. That's how things usually go in my life!
here, have my resteem and shut up
aww, shucks
I got a lot of fun reading your post. I liked the post very much...Iam requested to all of you please give me vote for my comment///PLEASE
Spamming comments is frowned upon by the community.
Comment spam is currently defined by @steemcleaners as:
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Copy/Paste comments that serve no purpose or the purpose is self promotion.
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Re-steeming for more discussion around this.
Hey @acidyo, would you please consider checking out my proposal on post on the issue of Upvoting Servies and a my proposed solution? I really do believe it is in the best interest of Steemit. I wrote a long comment on the post as well, but I'll just quote it here for your convenience.
Thanks ;)
Nice pic
Interesting ! I agree with your view .👍
Good content. Great definition each other @mobbs
First, you work off your ass and earn STEEM.
Or somebody gave it for free to whales? 😜
Then, you give it away to somebody, just because you do not value your work anymore - you have your status, right? You can put a whale status on a plate and have it for the breakfast. 😂
I have a real solution anyone can try just in few seconds.
Buy $5000+ of worth STEEM.
Power up.
Become a Dolphin.
Give away your votes.
It's hard to understand this, I mean English wise, it's a little fragmented sorry. Nobody is giving their own money away, it's delegated? If people have $5,000 then certainly buy it and feel free to power it up.
AFAIK, there is only two ways on getting SP:
And only then it is delegated between all users.
Or, I missed the free STEEM part?
Yeah sure that's right, but not exactly related to my post. In case you're not sure, people can 'rent' their power to users who have a kind of virtual Steep Power. Give that to the curators, and they can provide the 'earnings' to the posts.
Everyone can continue to post and comment and upvote as they see fit in the meantime. This is a solution for the big whales out there and abusers
I will rephrase it.
In other words your solution says - I know better because our community is great and we do it better. And since we are better, we can spend your money better. Or, lets call it everyone's delegated money. Just give the darn money to us. 😉
Current renting services already work that way. Adding a premium service is not going to change the system. It will just "legalize" the problem that their money is delegated to some elite group of people, who, then decide to whom give this money. The problem is not solved but made not so clear. Because now there are more filters.
You can already do it with existing bots. Improve bots if you have a better system. Why do you need a premium service?
It's totally different from current systems. My solution doesn't say 'I know better'. Each team have a set of requirements for their upvote, and they will find the good stuff that matches their requirements (each team would vary in the details) and vote an amount that isn't abusive; say $25 instead of $200 which is what vote selling permits.
By giving the power to the hands of the trusted teams, A) abuse is witheld and B ) the teams easily get shut down if they abuse.
Premium is only going to work if the user provides good content, in which case there's no problem with giving them a bit of an extra boost. It's the abuse and greedy monopolization by individuals that is the issue. Take that power from them.
How many people can create bots compared to the number of people who can write a cool blog? How many bots are actually lucrative without investment here?
OK, I will try to explain the core of problem, how I see it.
Actually there are 2 different tasks that should bet taken care of:
Currently, money is distributed only between big fishes, because in this way they get their dividends back and both sides are happy. Who cares about small fishes, right? The system works like that.
Bots were created to make life easier for big fishes and they can automate this process of voting. You do not like it, because small fishes are out, again.
Your solution says the best way to spend the money and nothing about how to get back to whales. Yeah, some premium - who cares, anyway. Just give it to our curators and somebody else should think about premium service and how it should work.
This is the core problem - how to get back the money. If you do not have clear vision then there is no reason to talk about distribution.
Because we all know how to spend money. That is easy and we do not need a solution for that.
But there are no solutions that can distribute money to the best creators and give back to big cash bags. This is the task you should think about.
Yes, actually. Most of the Steem extant was mined before Steemit even existed, and the largest stakes are mined stakes, not purchased with actual money, or earned from posts.
They just mined it.
And you can't.
OK, lets take this money out of those few whales who got it "for free" and distribute to minnows. And what's next? The problem is still not solved. Everybody gets his $0.02 cents and is happy?
I don't want their stakes, unless they part with them voluntarily.
So, no, that would not make me happy.
I want to see Steemit become THE replacement for the post market economy.
THAT would make me very happy, indeed.
I totally agree with you, with one exception: is it really needed a premium service? I think that the idea of "Pay to be rewarded more" is a bit far from the Steem vision, where a post is payed more only if it is a really good quality post and nothing else. I used voting bots in the past but in the last days I'm asking to myself if that is good for the Steem environment...
However, resteemed ;)
The reason the premium service is there is for the benefit of the whales offering the delegation. They need to earn money in some way, otherwise they will continue renting it out for self-voters to abuse the reward pool.
This way, they get money in a less abusive, more honest fashion, but people are also encouraged to post good stuff, or at least 'passable, non-stolen' stuff. It's important to pay attention to the whales, too, that's the crux of the issue
Yeah, well, whales have a superb avenue of profit: capital gains. As Steemit grows, more ppl use Steem, the price of Steem goes up, whales profit.
No more financial manipulation, and all whales profits are dependent on the good of the platform.
Delink SP from VP.
It's the only way.
That's what they said about HF19. Somehow I feel it can't be the solution, and if it can, won't (because of point made in the other reply to you)
The world will not end if Steemit fails, continuing the slow spiral into bot-circle-jerks unto dearth of content, until nothing's left but memeposting bots and worthless stakes.
I guess Calibrae was stillborn, @l0k1 unable to cope with the issues that made him so volatile long enough to fork and alter the Steemit code to reformulate VP to reflect rep.
Others will make forks, and bespoke platforms, with these fixes, if Steemit doesn't.
The popularity of Steemit seems to depend on waves of freshly minted accounts come for the vast rewards promised in the marketing materials, trying various means of achieving those rewards, that just don't come from the blogging as advertised, and then being replaced, when they bail in disgust, with a new lot.
Piling on new mechanisms of manipulating the rewards pool isn't going to change that. A few of each wave of new users find some niche, pandering, botnets, vote-buying, and rarely, other valuable skills, and sticks around.
This will continue to happen, as long as the oligarchy continues to stifle content creation by concentrating the rewards pool in their wallets.
When the problem is fixed, either on Steemit, or off it, it won't happen anymore. When new users have a look, they won't see oligarchical control of the rewards pool, but a fair distribution system, where a free for all of content vies for views, and votes.
Then, if the fixed platform uses Steem, Steem will moonshot.
And I'll be happy.
It’s fasciating to delve into. A social network where interactions are guided by an earnings model.
I’ve often heard Twitter described as an MMO, is this the first instance of an F2P MMO?
Regardless. I’m treating the entire thing rather plainly - posting and interacting in my usual fashion, come what may.
I'd still be more inclined to call it a P2W MMO hah. But yeah generally I just curate and post and have fun. The money isn't something I intend on even touching at any point in the future I see. Just enjoy the community =)
I’ll concede it on P2W!
I’m with you though. Approaching things in a rather ideological and purist fashion. Content and communication.
As a new member, I find it difficult to understand how steemit pays people and what upvoting does. Is there another post to clear this up?
Probably the best way is to google the right questions. Searching on here isn't that intuitive yet.
I can summarize quickly for you though. Your account has a certain strength, depicted by money.
If your wallet has $1,000 for example, you can put that into 'steem power' (check your wallet to see that), and that $1,000 will grant you about 8 cents of voting power. This means all your votes will give people 8 cents each time.
If you make good stuff, more people and more powerful people with say, $500,000 dollars in their wallet upvote you. Your post makes $40 and 7 days later you can put that into your wallet to increase your voting power. Over time your vote becomes stronger and so on.
The problem I talk about here is that the huge users with millions of dollars have votes worth $50-100 a pop. They can sell that as a service to individuals who can then upvote their own content for $50, even if it's just a single sentence or meme. It means only a few people are taking all the money that exists on the platform and it basically collapses, and everyone is looking for a solution. I think mine is the best!
Ah okay that makes so much sense. However, does upvoting any content go against you? I like your solution by the way
Against you, not really. Potentially you could upvote something somebody else disagreed with who then goes and downvotes you, but I don't think that's ever happened...
Interesting thoughts, Although this means that curators will now have even more pressure than before to judge if a post is good or bad. And people will definitely feel robbed when the article they felt was "ok" actually wasn't.
You could work around that with a system like the one of utopian.io where moderators help the guy improve the post in a way that makes it votable but it would require a lot of unpaid work from the curators. Then we could implement a participation pool like utopian.io but I feel like this would not be very optimal.
For a start yes I think this definitely opens a book of master classes or workshops, and that is nothing but a good thing, but as I mentioned in another comment, I think if we simply make the criteria objective rather than subjective, there's a lot less pressure. For example with steemstem, you can probably get a worthy upvote if your content is original, references, credited images and more than say 100 words.
If that kind of thing is clear, people won't feel robbed because it's laid out in front of them. For the most part people will more likely strive to work better for bigger upvotes. Kids at school who get a D- typically don't complain, they know they suck and they don't much care.
Kids who get a B are typically good kids who will see that as a promising result with room to improve. Not many will storm out of the classroom demanding an A! Though I'm sure that happens...
I usually don't care to uncheck the "upvote my post" check box. I'll uncheck it from next posts. Thanks for sharing
Your idea is brilliant! I listen to it! May be useful to me someday ..
Think of the new ones that increase the development of the site and this makes it easy to earn money and help from the old and this increases the development and spread and not to sow despair in the new
thank you for this interesting read and your thoughts how to make this place better.
about the 1-sentence spam.
i'm photographers and all my posts about my own works. sometimes a single work, sometimes a series with a story about. even i do believe that the real photography don't need any explain about what is going in the frame - as Art it's bringing food for thinking - so most of my posts are "1-sentence spam".
about curie - my posts are touched by this team many time (last time it was this week) but not with $100 touch but more often 10-20 and i'm happy that between the real spam they find my post with not many words (and i do believe that i never will get these $100) but with my own photography. without this Curie help i have to write some bots, scripts or whatever or i never with cross the plankton line :-))))
If its your photo and your work, one sentence isn't spam lol. Art posts don't require a 500 word essay of course. Contextually, yours would do well if an 'art' or 'photography' curation group came to exist.
That being said, currently big 100$ curie votes are rare to come by, saved for the top most exceptional posts, so you shouldn't be dreaming about that. If you want to try though, you can always write the story or a little blog of the process of the photo, details of the camera settings, opinions and feelings, all kinds of stuff you can do to make it more enjoyable and more than a quick glimpse =D
i write almost always about the details of my projects, using by different and new for me cameras, the process of taking and if its a film so also of developing... but you know to write 500 words about - who want read this stuff :-) looks like cryptography is much more interesting here :-)
thank you for your response ! and yes i don't dream about $100 curie touches - my dreams about absolutely different stuff, not the $ :-)))
Yeah theres usually no need for 500 words heh. General rule of thumb is no more than 700 - people don't have that kind of time!
Thanks for reading =D
my pleasure !
Not sure I agree with the premium service idea. Isn't that relatively the same as selling your votes? Seems like it would take away from the purity of the curation itself.
Not really. The user still has to pass the requirements of quality, they still have to work for it. I suppose it would be like joining a golf tournament but you get to pay for the nicer golf club set. You still need to shoot straight at the end of the day, but your results might be better and more people will look at you. It's the only way I see that can interest the whales away from what they're doing now, short of programming an outright ban against their will - which will just cause people to find another way to abuse the system.
Ya, but the whole point the way I understand them anyway, about these curation teams, is they are place as a free service to enhance quality content rewards.
Yeah and that still goes on, nothing changes in that regard, just some people get a slightly higher percentage vote. They would get a vote regardless for free (assuming enough teams to cover most ground)
Doesn't that then fall in the realm of vote trading and 'circle-jerking'?
This system means people have to A) Dedicate time and effort into their work B ) Pay for slightly more recognition. It's not exactly upvoting a small group back and forth regardless of content and quality (which is what circle jerking is)
If the concern is that they can somehow abuse this by, say, being friends with the curation leader, then they can just do what OCD already does and limits premium services to one or two times per month.
This is why it's so elegant (in my opinion), because curation teams have already figured out the most elegant ways to curate, all that's needed is less people voting themselves indiscriminately.
'Slightly higher', as in 100% higher.
If whales don't get the higher votes, because they don't invest the effort at creating excellent posts - which is the bulk of the issue with trending now - then they won't fund the curation anymore.
This will either kill the initiative, if the curators are idealists, or compel them to disregard the quality assurance, and upvote the whale posts anyway, to save the initiative.
The latter scenario is more likely, as the curators will be forced to choose between a return to the present (and the disappearance of the rewards that they reap from their work), and compromise.
It'll turn into vote-buying by whales, with, again, crumbs that fall from the table being fought over by starving minnows.
I prefer a free for all of content creation, and whales dependent on the success of the platform to realize capital gains. Capital gains have worked to incentivize investors since before writing existed.
They'll work for Steemit, just as well as they worked for the builders of Gobekli Tepe.
Consider that if Steem reaches but 1% of the present value of BTC, investing in Steem now will provide better than 80 fold return. That's 80 * 100%, not 80% - 8,000% return.
To reach 1% of the value of a crypto that Steem has far better scalability, 100% lower transaction fees ($0), and far faster transaction times.
Really, the only thing preventing whales from attaining this return on Steem investments is the greed driving the oligarchical stripping of rewards from content creators, and repressing Steemit's growth.
New vote-buying schemes isn't the fix.
Free market capitalism, and competition between content creators - as was intended from the outset, as outlined in the white paper - is.
Edit: math broke. Fixed it.
I think you misunderstand somewhat. My idea is not about whales creating content - they don't create in general, they just sit back and curate.
I mean they delegate their SP to curation teams who then go out and curate the little people, thus spreading the wealth. The whales just sit back and reap the rewards which is all they want to do anyway, which is why I proposed this in the first place.
Speaking of capital gains and value increasing to the moon is not much more than pipe dreams - there's no evidence to suggest steem will ever sustain above a dollar, and although it might, it's been 'on the verge' according to everybody the entire 7 months I've been here. It's a pipe dream.
My idea is obviously not the best solution, but I believe it's the most realistic one because it's so simple and easy to implement. Everybody else's suggestions are either wishful thinking or complete overhauls of the system which is again wishful thinking because not much of anything gets done on this platform in any 6 month period.
At least for now, removing vote buying abuse and preventing reward pool rape is the only realistic way to go
Well, I pointed out the reasons I feel most repress appreciation in the price of Steem.
Steem has been above $4 before, and has better cryptocurrency chops than BTC. Those aren't guarantees, but they are evidence.
So, as I understood your proposal to generate income from selling 'potential' premium upgoats to whales, and now you agree that whales aren't going to be posting for upgoats, what is this new, unspecified mechanism that will compensate whales for their delegations to the curation teams?
The most likely returns this could generate for whales would be some percentage of the curation rewards.
That's unlikely to remain the case, for long. After the Sybil attack purchases the witnesses, the new centralized PTB's will likely be very active changing code.
As noble as your idea is... i think is highly impracticable. For most people, return is more important than quality.. and if you cannot guarantee a profit, you will not to attract anyone's attention.
I'm carrying on a personal battle against spammer (here) and despite authors thanks and appreciation, any whales accepted the request to delagate some SP to permit me to flag a larger number of spammers.
Anyway, you got my appreciation for this initiative.
The fact that return is more important than quality is exactly why the site is in such a mess, human nature can exploit it increasingly since HF19.
The idea above still assures return, because people can still upvote and do whatever they normally do like they can today, but the very top users simply stop giving $100 to worthless posts, basically, which is what everybody is trying to do, and why yougotflagged exists.
Doesn't seem too impractical to me! FAR more practical than getting dozens of quibbling witnesses to decide on what algorithm to implement across the website in a giant overhaul 7 years from now
Don't get me wrong... I fully agree with you. But I think that human greed conquers all.
Whales give $100 upvotes... to post which they consider good content (but we may consider worthless posts).
Yeah it was the inevitable greed I was trying to work with, but I'm assuming it'll always be a 'war against' instead heh
I don't think that asking the powerful circle-jerkers nicely to delegate SP will work. Why would they want to delegate SP to the likes of curie for curation rewards which would, in turn, find more posts that potentially push them off the trending page? They get far more reward from the brown-nosed up-voting than they probably ever would from delegated curation rewards. If they were really here for the curation and the benefit of the platform, they would spend more time searching out good posts and helping out minnows and less time annoying berniesanders. They aren't though, so they will suck the reward pool dry until something is done programatically to the platform to stop it.
sigh
Well I mean the ones in question are handing out their SP regardless, they're not typically the ones writing posts, they just sit there and collect the money. Their concerns are not about being trending. We're not talking sweetsssj, here, we're talking Minnowbooster, blocktrades, lafona and so forth.
Sounds like a good idea to me. I plan to carve some time off to figure out who to delegate some SP to and your list seems like a nice place to start.
Awesome! Yeah OCD and SteemStem both lost their big delegations recently (one choosing to vote-sell instead) and, working in both of them I know everybody works really hard for really small rewards, but it would be amazing if users like you could make either of them more notable and grow the size of their followers!
I resteemed this because the content's quality is high and this is a vital information because we need to stop reaping the reward pool to make steem valuable...
I don't really know much about this reward pool reaping until last week when Bernie mentioned it. Good point of view, friend.....
Ciao for now..... 😂
Bernie has thankfully made it less of a taboo to talk about so it's a good time to conjure up ideas like this =D
I'm a steemSTEMer, and I can attest to their selfless services. This is what steemit should be all about. Community of people helping each other.
Yeahhh we all rule!
As long as steemit is free and open it will always have problems, but more and more elegant solutions such as these will be expanded and improved.
Yeah there's no denying that. I mean even Youtube, a place that at one point took up 2% of the entire internet, is STILL a hugely flawed place (right now perhaps more so than Steemit since the new direction), so we have to carry our ghosts of shame or whatever, but as long as they're manageable
I think Steem is more nimble. Since we're not a huge slow company changes can be made quickly and multiple solutions can be developed and implemented by many different individuals.
My initial impression is that you want to take the power that users have individually to buy votes, whether right or wrong and consolidate that power in your own hands to distribute rewards and upvotes as you and your associates see fit.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the cream will rise to the top given the chance, I feel. Quality does not need to be sold...it sells itself.
That's what I think anyway. :)
Not at all. Users are untouched in this idea, they continue doing whatever they please with the same power they always had. This is purely focussed on the top, like, 20 individuals with millions and millions of steem who are selling their power for spammers to give themselves $40 a post, 7 times a day.
Rather than put their power into the hands of irresponsible spammers, instead give it to trusted, democratic and public teams whose actions can be easily scrutinized, which also spreads that wealth of the top 20 among the common community, rather than the pockets of those with a bit of cash to spend on vote buying.
Well, the platform isn't all about beauty, and quality is subjective. I spent months on here writing huge, high quality scientific posts, some of which took the better part of a day to construct and research, all for 3 or 4 cents. Not everybody has the perseverance or joblessness that I do to keep plugging away with multi-hour posts for nothing in the hope that they might earn $10-15 6 months from now.
However with the curation teams I'm in, new users who may just be introducing themselves are getting $20 or more, some who find the steemSTEM tag jump right in on $30-60 and knowing they have the right stuff for curation, are pushed to make good content and earn that money every time they post. Totally different to what I 'grew up' with on here.
The more curators, the more recognition - nobody needs to sell anything to get there, but the option for a little extra boost (premium service) is there if a user is particularly passionate about their work
In this reply, you completely neglect to mention that the delegators will receive no return (except capital gains), unless they post quality content and pay for premium service.
Do you expect @freedom to start blogging? @tamim to post anything more original than verses from the Koran?
I don't see it. It's as fruitless for those accounts as delinking SP from VP, and creates yet another mitigation of a mitigation of... you get the point.
Again I think you misunderstand the premise. Whales don't post. They charge a premium to small minnows, say $10 for a bigger upvote on that minnow's post, if it meets the quality requirements. I've already done a back of the envelope calculation that could give blocktrades a $360,000 return annually, and that's just one example.
but to be clear, the curation goes on for free regardless, boosted by the delegation handed out by those whales, who only sit back and get rewarded
Ah! Tyvm for the concise clearing up of my misconceptions.
So, whales still sell upgoats, albeit 'potential' upgoats, for cash. The upgoats, and payments, are handled by the curation team. Whales then attain to a portion of the curation rewards, based on their % of the delegated SP held by the curation team, or are directly contributing their upgoat for direct payments, as well as a slice of curation rewards?
Or no slice of curation rewards?
Not sure I presently up to speed completely, but perhaps zeroing in, at least.
Well, I was to put curation rewards straight to the curation teams, but that could be a thing, depends on the calculations I suppose. Previously I worked out the premium service was more than enough to keep whales happy. Curators could also be 'paid' by getting guaranteed upvotes on their own content, providing it also passes the requirements.
Thanks for clearing that up well!
I'm still very new to Steemit so this is very informative, thank you! :)
thank you .. that was a very helpful and informative article :)
I appreciate your thinking on this matter, and I wish I could agree it was the grand solution.
A guy I like a lot said something like 'the kind of thinking that got you in trouble isn't going to get you out of it'.
Solving financial manipulation with more manipulation seems pointless. Two lefts don't make a right, it takes three lefts.
Stake weighting VP opens vectors for manipulation. It also makes the witnesses but commodoties, ripe for the picking of anyone willing to pony up to takeover the blockchain.
There's a solution - delink VP from SP.
No more circle-jerks, no more vote-buying, no more Sybil attacks as easy as buying a soda. Sure there'd still be problems on Steemit, like botnets, spam, etc., but less of them - and those problems have to be handled differently, anyway.
I've never once used a votebot, never self vote, and don't promote my posts. Steemit is a social media platform, and I am unwilling to promote society that consists of bots. Society, to me, means people interacting.
I don't disparage people that feel differently, I understand that my personal views are mine alone.
But they are mine, and I stand by them.
Delinking SP from VP solves many of the problems Steemit is being repressed by, and I would really like to move forward on a platform where the ROI of whales isn't what determines if content is high quality.
Because, it really isn't.
Frank Zappa said that top40 lists had little relation to the quality of music, and ROI has just as little to do with Steemit posts quality.
Perhaps grand solution was strongly put, I used it jokingly in chat and just kinda adopted it. That being said, the reason I came up with this is because ideas like yours require A) A massive overhaul of the current system and B) all the witnesses and devs to agree unanimously in the first place.
This, as we have evidently seen has led to basically not much of anything being done over a very long period of time. In a system where it has so far taken over a month to NOT fix the error problem when posting a blog, you can't sit around twiddling your thumbs demanding the system be completely made-over from the bottom up, or even moderate programming changes.
Even if that were to happen, people manipulating the system is a fact of life, look at steemit, the governments of the world, the police, hackers, no matter what we do to try and suppress and prevent crime or manipulation, it will always happen.
Rather than have a costly war on drugs that costs billions of dollars and thousands of lives, why not legalize and regular drugs?
Likewise, rather than try to stop the highest wallets from taking all the money and giving it arbitrarily to those undeserved, why not embrace their position in a way that benefits them and us alike?
Even if your solution did solve every problem, it's not realistic to think it'll happen in the next 12 years, if ever. Mine is a quick and easy solution, perhaps imperfect in an imperfect world, that keeps things honest and open, no?
Well, I confess, I don't think your idea will make it any worse.
I'll do that, if you delink SP from VP.
Deal?
Sure! But even if we all agree on your idea, it still won't happen for years to come
I don't think Steemit has years to come, in it's present form. If SMT's are popular, the the stake weighted votes that control the witnesses will allow Zuckerburg, or Eric Schmidt, or some cabal, to simply purchase the accounts holding the mined Steem that controls the witnesses, and the blockchain will be in the hands of the enemy - and those mined stakes will become golden parachutes the Steemit founders drift off into the sunset on.
I am aware of several forks of Steemit in development presently. Furthemore, with retention after one year at ~11%, including botnets and alt accounts, Steemit is facing a crash of users right now.
Steemit doesn't have years.
Edit: only delinking VP from SP protects the witnesses from this Sybil attack, presently as easy for moguls to prosecute as buying a soda.
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STOPYou problem mean advent or creation or something else, invent doesn't make sense in this context.
No, this sort of approach sounds completely valid. It would be an interesting change in that people that deserve upvotes would be investing for more upvotes. Unfortunately there's still a certain level of auto-spam/auto-vote, etc. problem that will need to be manually squashed. But without some sort of automatic way to squash it, it just wont be profitable for people to do it manually and there will always be a certain level of noise on the platform. And so there will be those squeezing a little profit here and there, and they'll continue to do it because they will have created a system that makes it work automatically. The question is, will this level of noise be acceptable or will it be too high?
invent, as in, invention.
You 'problem' mean quashed =P
I think the current system is totally unsustainable and I would guess that is the general sentiment, since there really is no feasible way to properly squash what's going on
damn auto car wreck....
Didn't even occur to me that you meant invention.
And yeah, I agree that something needs to change.
To be fair I could have just said invention lol
Congratulations @mobbs!
Your post was mentioned in the hit parade in the following category:
I am new here. I am glad that I found your post and read it. I am starting to see that there is more to this than I first thought.
I believe paying a premium to joing the to-check list is a great idea. Us creators are confident in our work, or at least should be, but often things like time of post, less than enticing thumbnails and the like don't let our content shine. This could be a way to make sure the people who can make Steemit profitable for you really get to see your writing.
Upvoted! I hope the idea catches on. I sure would be all for it!
I'm too small to make it really catch on but hopefully it's planted a small seed in some bigger minds who read and some day down the line it'll take effect! Thanks for reading =)
Well, with the amount of discussion and interest that's come to this post, I'm sure the meme is planted. I'll make sure to support it whenever I see a chance!
How about giving rewards to those who downvote bots and spam. Then we will have an army of bots downvoting each other.
Well, yougotflagged does this, and that's one system in place, but it's an unbalanced system and a subjective one at that. We've already seen flag wars dominate the site so it's risky business
2 fix this must be of prime importance
good job
I think this is very good idea and something that can bring a lot more sustainability to the system. It will surely bring the quality of the posts around the platform to a higher level as it is going to be more difficult to get an upvote just by paying a certain amount.
And there are pragmatic reasons for whales to be willing to participate. As this approach would be much more sustainable than the current one, they could expect good ROI not just because they'll get a good percentage in terms of STEEM, but because this becoming the norm is very likely to help the price of STEEM grow. And if you are a whale, a small increase in the price of STEEM could alone offer huge ROI. The current pay-to-gain system is unsustainable and is making the steem community worse off, less attractive and less stable. This means, it's certainly getting some people turned off and the interest in being a part is being lowered by that. This is bound to have an adverse effect on the price. If this is countered and high quality content is rewarded, this will surely bring in more authors and more investors willing to profit from a growing and expanding community. I think if this point of view is presented to whales on regular basis, they might actually come to the realization that supporting sustainable practices will get them a higher ROI than supporting practices that undermine the integrity of the platform for immediate gains.
You have good vision and perspective. It's a shame some of the whales don't. For the most part, why think longterm when short gives the immediate reward?
Short sightedness, i know. But like the rest of the cryptocoins, the rich are just pumping in, exploiting then pulling out and moving to the next one, it wouldn't surprise me if this is just another version of that!
Anyway I'm hoping enough people read this that it planted a seed in the minds of some of the bigger users I know who saw it, and over time wll evolve into a thing! Keep an eye out for it!