"The current economic model of Steem incentivizes large Steem holders to continuously upvote their own content and other creators who specifically support their content. This creates an ecosystem where a content’s true value can’t be recognized or be fairly rewarded."
Speaking two days ago about why DLive is joining the Lino blockchain, moving away from Steem, Charles Wayn voiced this as the reason, explaining that DLive is currently unable to "deliver upvotes as evenly as possible."
If I am going to be honest with myself, Wayn's words are not wrong.
Community members who are not “privileged” enough to be a part of these groups with large voting power are therefore penalized financially. This problem has been brought up many times within the community and even by prominent figures outside of the community. We believe that this problem, along with the current market conditions has led to a decreased consumption rate of live streams and videos on the platform and is one of the most important issues we are looking to resolve. For DLive to reach the next level of live streaming and video, we need a more sustainable ecosystem and a more fair mechanism to encourage content consumption and production on the platform.
So, DLive is leaving us and the question remains:
Is there a problem with STEEM?
Or... more importantly, is there anything which can be done to improve on the described situation?
With the Steem Velocity Harkfork (HF20) around the corner now is as good a time as any to talk about this.
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It is not possible to always be 'fair.' At least not according to everyone's different definition of what 'fair' would be.
People are going to vote for what they want to, who and what they believe in, what they find interesting, etc. Somebody else can't tell them that it isn't 'fair' that there content wasn't included. Also, an individual only has limited hours in the day to spend online, and only limited voting power. So we can't demand any person or whale to spend the hours or days needed to discover the 'best' content, and when we try, someone will disagree that we chose correctly anyways.
I have seen some 'whales' and people follow curation trails BUT they must lower their vote %'s to between 1-5% to cover so much ground. AND THEN people complain about how 'stingy' all the whales are being. So if we give larger votes to a few, people complain. And if we give small votes to many, people complain. And if we spend many hour spreading out medium votes to a large number (but not huge number) of people, people complain!
No matter what -- someone will complain.
So we've all just got to do the best we can and not try to please everybody and not expect Steemit to be 'fair.'
One thing that I could think of that perhaps STINC could do, IF we had a proper way to count views (which we apparently do not right now) is to upvote from the STINC account the most viewed posts/videos of the day. Or if there was even a post made each day to highlight the most viewed posts so that others could decide to upvote. Or even another tab beside 'trending' and 'new' to show 'most viewed' ... but alas that seems impossible from what I have read as people view Steemit posts from so many different portals.
Maybe DLive will be able to monitor the views properly on their new platform, and then distribute rewards according to who was viewed the most, which I would agree is the best way to be 'fair' with rewards for video creators. If so, then they've got to do what they've got to do, but don't complain how 'unfair' Steemit was and leave here on a sour note as if Steemit did you some wrong.
Thank you for your detailed response to this question Linda.
I can see how it must be incredibly hard for Whales to distribute their vote in a way which works for everyone. And please don't get me wrong, you are Steemit's living angel in the way you support so many people. I suppose in the end we just need more Whales here!
View count would certainly help, or a mechanism like the one you described so people could easily see which posts were getting the most views every day. For films I would say view count is essential and having now uploaded over 100 films to BitTube (where they reward based on view time) I can see people watching them (looking at view count) and this seems like a system which will reward more fairly.
I do agree the content of the DLive message to everyone could perhaps have been toned down a bit. No need to leave on a sour note as you say.
Another thought that I just had ...
I would say that on Steemit, relationship is as important as the quality of the content. We form relationships here, and tend to vote regularly for those people that we have a relationship with!
For example, I have seen some of my favorite YouTubers come on here and post their videos on Steemit, BUT they do not engage anybody in the comment section or upvote anybody else. If I see that is the case, then I don't vote for them on here, or just throw them a low % vote on occasion. I will continue to watch their YouTube videos over there if I like their content, but I save my limited Steemit upvotes for people who engage other people on this platform.
My point is, that their content may be spectacular, and it may be something that I greatly enjoy, but I still limit my upvotes if they don't spend more time on Steemit beyond the time it takes to simply make the post.
There were also instances of people gaming dlive by faking live views to show up on the front page.
Wonder if they took that into account? Is it fair to do that?
People will always game the system. Stake weighting is the best answer we have for now in regard to beating these Sybil based ways to game the system.
Is getting whale support on steem any different from a Twitch user that gets a $1000 donation in terms of “fairness”?
In my opinion not really.
True. Not much difference there.
Wasn't aware of the dlive faked stuff, and yep, doesn't surprise me they didn't mention that!
In my mind view count seems like it could help with this situation and I am unclear why it is not already part of the equation?
I have to say I fully agree.
No question about it... relationships are key and if people upload or post without engaging, they are not as deserving as those who do. No matter how great their content may be.
Slightly off topic here but I must tell you that I spotted the staircase your husband built yesterday! It was in the movie Skyscraper with 'The Rock'... I recognised it instantly and smiled :)
It looked fantastic by the way!
Ah, thanks! Yes, we liked the movie although for some reason it got poor reviews.
I'm glad that you spotted it.
hey mem..are you like so much to seeing movies???
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