I haven’t been paying attention to ‘what’s occurring’ on steemit for the last month, due to my house move. However, the upside of this is that a break typically gives you a fresh perspective on something, as is the case with steemit/ steem.
What I’ve realised is that the ecosystem is pretty fundamentally flawed… having now moved up to dolphin level (near enough), there is basically no incentive for me to produce quality content exclusively for steem, or really even bother to engage with anyone else.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to become totally passive, or become some kind of selfish wanker (only up to 50%, honest), all I’m saying is that the steem ecosystem in no way incentivizes the kind of behaviour which would benefit others or the long term health of the blockchain.
The statistics suggest that investors are pulling their stakes and that fewer people are using the platform
according to both @penguinpablo and @arcange’s stats - steem is either stagnating or declining according to every significant indicator. People are gradually pulling out of the platform.
I understand this - this is an entirely rational response to the problems on steem and the inability of ‘us’ to sort out these problems.
And no, it’s not just because crypto is taking a beating.. Steem has declined about 20% against BTC in the last months. Trust me, I know, because I wish I’d waited before investing another grand or so over the last few months!
Overall the platform works much better for investors rather than quality content producers
I hummed and hawed about the ethics of delegating half my increased stake in steem, but TBH it was the right move….it’s now growing passively by about 1 SP per day. In terms of % return on my time, this is obviously infinitely better than my producing actual content.
Haejin is still earning a fortune, so abuse still works
I noticed @thejohalfiles flagging various of Haejin’s posts and thought that his days might be numbered, but no, he’s still getting decent payouts, although he does seem to be posting less.
Proposed hard fork changes to combat these problems have been delayed again
According to this recent post by @therealwolf SMTs and oracles are no longer scheduled for the next hard fork, and they may not even surface until next summer!
NB - if you ever need a perfect example of cynicism this post is it - in which @therealwolf basically condemns the current incentives system, but at the same time he runs a voting bot which profits from this system.
Use of applications other than pure blogging seems to be increasingly popular
Applications such as @steemmonsters and @steemhunt are increasing in number and more and more people are getting into them! This seems to be the current future of steem.
It also makes sense to make use of the video apps, @dtube or @dlive - TBH everyone should be attaching churn videos to every post in order to get the chance of a massive upvote from one of these accounts. With @dtube the chances are no one will ever watch said video - even if they wanted to it, it probably wouldn’t play back, and then even if it did it’ll disappear shortly. (Of course that may all be moot because the problem with @dtube is that ATM it’s so shit that I can’t actually upload anything to it!)
Steempress-io is a godsend
I’ve had some nice payouts from @steempress recently, but I’m a bit concerned that by relying on this I’m basically proving that steemit is a bit shit.
The fact that it’s so much easier to post to Wordpress and then have that post to steem a week or so later, it’s not exactly an advert for the blockchain is it?!?
Conclusions
I’m still going to stick with steem… It’s still a great platform for meeting and interacting with all sorts of oddballs.
It's also still the right platform for publishing my quirky stuff about early retirement stuff, self-tracking, and general rants, and it’s also the obvious place for reflecting on steem itself.. Hopefully they’ll be something positive to shout about soon. I’m a bit sick of seeing my passive gains nullified by steem’s declining value!
Image source - modified from @penguinpablo - https://steemit.com/steemit/@penguinpablo/weekly-steem-stats-report-monday-july-30-2018
"Free Money."
"Human Greed."
I think we can track many of our problems back to that; in a sense, it's almost always the inevitable "pink elephant in the room" nobody talks about, or wants to look directly at.
And I think we can track them back to the fact that the creators of Steemit made the same mistake every single rewards for content site has ever made: They had a beautiful idea, but grossly underestimated the sheer depth and numbers of human greed and selfishness.
I was writing a comment to @schattenjaeger elsewhere, and used the analogy of tossing a handful of coins into a crowd on a busy street. A mad scramble ensues, and fights will even break out. Even though the few pennies and dimes gained actually won't materially affect anyone's well-being. And yet? The FEW venues that persist in "rewarding people" are things like Amazon's Mechanical Turk and the "MicroWorkers" site where people are given fractions of a cent for licking on links and other meaningless stuff. And they have hundreds of thousands of active users...
... as an illustrative aside, those sites were materially involved in turning the recent ByteBall airdrop into a circus... because they are all about "How do we bleed and manipulate every last cent out of a legitimate and well-meaning system."
Do I sound cynical? No, I've just observed the same thing over and over and over again, for 20-odd years.
As for the slowness of developments from STINC?
If history is anything to go by — and again, I've seen this many times — it's mostly a result of them scrambling to do "damage control" on what's happened, instead of focusing on new features. As a metaphor, you have great plans to sail across the Pacific, but you get 50 miles out to sea only to discover that your entire effort has to go into plugging holes in the hull. Consumes resources and puts a damper on the party.
As for Dan and Steemit 2.0 on EOS, not so worried... because he will STILL make the mistake of underestimating greed, and the sheer number of "penny miners" out there. It might be a different path to the problems, but the outcome will be the same.
Best we can do is just entrench here and slowly build our SP; only vote for those who actually CARE... the way I see it is that every "responsibly owned" Steem is a Steem NOT in the hand of a greedy rapist.
Thanks for the well thought out comment, bleak though it is, your conclusion gives me some hope!
Keep calm and carry on it is then!
There are also dozens of wonderful initiative on Steemit to protect the environment. Have a look at @cleanplanet.
Yes I am aware of quite a few good initiatives, however, they are tiny compared to the number of passive investors!
I will check out @cleanplanet for sure!
I think a way to think about it is the current system, if we were to personify it a bit and suppose it is judging content for those that are helping build the platform versus, that the current system is not a good judge of all but rather one that is corrupt and can be bribed such as often the case with vote buying. It is true that we ought not to reward passivity (aka a euphemistic way to say lazy. ;P) over actively working to build the platform.
We need a new mechanism, a new judge, that is able to discern and reward activities conducive to the growth of the platform and penalize parasitic selfishness. I know that I am beating a dead horse when I say this but we need to place a greater emphasis on building communities that people want to be a part but the problems are so deep seated at this time that I am concerned that such labors would merely be adding to the bloat of the parasites which is my segue into the next analogy.
If Steem were a host organism, it is currently infested with parasitic organisms. The ideal is mutualism but human nature, as I expect it to via my anthropology, has led to the departure from that system and rather an unsustainable one. The reasonable folks like us want to feed and grow the host but the leeches are sucking away and becoming more powerful than our kind and securing their control of the flow of sustenance.
Therein lies the problem, we all want to build Steem but our efforts inevitably benefit the leeches. I don't care for feeding any damn leeches which has led to my becoming sheepish when it comes to investing further into this blockchain because I do not want to enable or empower them. Rather, I think it may be prudent to let nature run it's course. They will continue to feed and I believe Steem's value will continue to bleed but there may be hope at the end of the tunnel which I will explain.
I believe @freebornangel has it right when he suggested something along the lines of once Steem reaches a certain point, the abusers will depart and find a new platform to exploit. That may be when we come in and work together to make Steem the kind of blockchain it was meant to be.
A blockchain based on mutualism and not incentivized exploitation. That is the Steem I yearn for...
Excellent write-up, my friend!
I agree with what you say.
On the human nature point - I believe any individual has a certain propensity to act selfishly, neutrally or to work actively for others. The systems in which one works encourage these propensities. ATM steemit does not encourage 'good behaviour'.
I hope that eventually the abusers should disappear... there is a steady decline ATM.
A push at the systems level I think is needed to help that happen!
Just wish I'd waited longer to invest more.
Please keep in mind that the user who wrote this statement is a user on Steem and while he is quite smart, he is not a Steemit Inc. employee.
First of: thanks for mentioning me ;)
I don't believe I was cynical. That's your impression and it's ok.
However, I would like to clarify something:
My goal with the post was to explain my stance on the current system and how it doesn't allow or give enough incentives for big content creators to create on Steem.
But Steemit Inc is working hard on changing that and that's also what the post was about. How the coming changes will hopefully change the system for the better.
With that said: Steem is an amazing blockchain and I've been working full time on Steem related projects for nearly a year now.
And Smartsteem, the service I have build, has the goal to improve the current system by giving every user a voice through promotion purchases. (vote-buying)
So if you don't like promotion-services, no problem - that's your right! However, they are part of the current system and as long as people need them, they have the same right to be here as your opinion :)
And if the next system makes them obsolute, even better!
Hi - Thanks for the comment, and for the clarification on the fact that it's your interpretation of what's occurring on the block chain, not steeminc's view.
As to smartsteem service, I've delegated some SP to it.... so I'm a 'cynic' too, I didn't mean it in a derogatory way. I think that word has got some bad press over the years.
A major problem is that Dan is pumping out a fancy version of steemit 2.0 on EOS that will even have a coin that is actually pegged to the USD to go with it. This in combination of a bunch of stuff at once, long term most people are preparing for EOS to just cause a shit ton of disruption in this space.
Right now Dlive is awesome and I am really trying my hand at working my ass off to be a content creator. I am almost starting to get my feet on the ground now too as my post payouts are going up in general. My burn rate is currently around at least 100 steem a week and I am ALMOST just barely making it, but sadly even with a ton of effort I am going to likely be in bleedout ultimately.
Random bills and even the IRS are popping up on me so I am just kinda fucked. Ill be pretty happy if it turns out I still have over 1k steem by the end of the year. :/
We are in challenging times to say the least.
I'm glad Dlive is working for you, I really like it: unlike @dtube, it actually works!
My earnings were similar to yours before I eased off last month, back to it now. TBH if I can earn $100 a month for the next few months, I'll take that.
I agree about EOS, like everyone else on here, I've got a few to hedge my bets. In fact I've made a point of buying EOS every time I've bought more steem over the last year.
If things don't pick up on either platform by next summer, I might be on a 'rice and beans' strategy.
Way ahead of you there man. I just wish the beans didn't give me so much gas...
I think it will get better with time. I use a site called SteemPeak instead of Steemit sometimes, and I think that site would be more attractive to the general public than the current Steemit site. For one thing, it's got an alert system similar to Facebook and Twitter showing your recent activities.
The slider to show how much you want to upvote with also shows you the financial weight of the vote, which is nice. You can save templates for your posts, as well as schedule them to be posted in the future.
I think when the Steemit site improves, and maybe when there is an official app, more people would use it.
Hi - thanks for the tip about SteemPeak, I will check that out for sure.
Amen!
The topic of trust in Proof of Brain was explored in an old blog post of mine, whose link is included for your reading pleasure.
https://steemit.com/steem-network/@novacadian/where-is-the-trust-in-proof-of-brain-mining
Once the summer is over and the Steem price goes up everything will be solved 😋
That's at least what some people believe, but not me!
I don't agree with the theory that it's summer causing the stagnant steem price, that's medieval!
Obviously, It's because Mars is currently in Aquarius. Once it gets back into Aries in mid Autumn, that's when everything should be on the up.
Lol
So I conclude that the Steem price will never go up 😂
Looking on the potential bright side of the big investors pulling out by lowering down and selling is that there is more supply for newer users that can come in and try to build stakes for what the platoon is really intended for which is content. We have seen an increase on apps getting some delegation to actually deploy on the adoption of these users and their content. This could signal a diversified influence pool despite it being slow.
Yes fair point, I am aware that it's still very early days. Part of the problem is that developments to stop abuse are just too slow in coming!
Can't agree more!
Resteemed for discussion.
Have you put a pencil to your delegation investment?
If so, please comment what type of a ROI you are getting, on the post I just made about the state of the different environments here on Steemit. That is one piece of data I did not have to include, since I haven't done any delegation.
Oh yeah! Welcome back. Hope that move turns out good for you...
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by anthonyadavisii from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows. Please find us at the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
If you would like to delegate to the Minnow Support Project you can do so by clicking on the following links: 50SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP, 5000SP.
Be sure to leave at least 50SP undelegated on your account.
Well I can't argue with any of your points :(
I am still a red fish, pretty close to minnow but far far away from dolphin. It looks like the blockchain is dead. 20K post per day, yeah. But at least 6K are automated ones!
Also people do stop to comment because most don't even have the power to give the comments an upvote above the dust threshold.
I do have almost 1K followers here, and I did do a test. I did wrote something and did post it here and on Scorum. Scorum is only 1,5 months old and is a steem clone but than sports related. Here I got 3 genuine comments and there more than 20. What also could be the difference is that my SP here is just below 500 while I do have there more than 5K.
But still, I am here for 7 months now. Doing my daily posting, writing some genuine comments and so on but it feels like the blockchain comes to a stop.
If we also look at the stats from @arcange and @penguinpable it shows that the most used caregory is photography! Nothing wrong with that but still for a blogging platform ....
To bad, I am not yet in a position to delegate to some tools, which could give me some money back. I will just have to struggle my way up, work from there and hoping that Steem will get a decent value somewhere in the future!
Cheers,
Peter
The blogging aspect of the platform might be dead, the apps seem to be taken over, I think that's part of the plan!
The less SP you have, the more of a struggle it is for sure! And people are leaving in their droves it would seem.
I might have to check out that alternative, although it seems a bit niche for me.
It's still early days don't forget!