Let's face it, Steemit is rife with HYPOCRACY from top to bottom.
In your opening paragraph, you state: "we have to agree on what it is and what it is supposed to do."
Who is "WE" and what does "AGREE" mean
This is the heart of the problem. How can Steemit NOT function like a caste system when the best way we can describe the leadership is "we"? "We" the Whales? "We" the earliest users? "We" the designers? "We" the witnesses?
Everyone complains that there is abuse in an open system, but is that not the nature of an open system? Do you not expect users to try to use the system to their own advantage?????
Our "self appointed" leaders love to rail against abuses against the reward pool, BUT they only seem to rail against the ones they do not directly benefit from. There are a never-ending stream of posts complaining about "self-upvoting" and vote-farming. Most of our "leadership" does not engage in that kind of activity so it's easy to target as an "Abuse"
When is the last time you heard a Whale or Witness complain about Auto-Upvoting??? It's an incestuous practice that drains the reward pool just as much if not more than Self-Upvoing, but we never hear a peep about that because it "benefits all the right people".
I'll use @sweetsssj as an example (please keep in mind, this is not an attack on her or her posts, which I think are of high quality, this is just an example). She is a well known member of this community and her posts are of the highest quality. I do not deny that. What I do have a problem with is that she posts an article and within 1 hour she has 769 upvotes!! Really? 769 of the most influential Steemians had nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon than to read a post and upvote it? I looked at some of the top upvoters, and noticed that their last activity on Steem was 3 days ago.
It seems as the Whales of this community do nothing but stroke each others.....backs.
I am fortunate to be a member of a tight knit little community, @steemsilvergold. Hell, we even made our own Silver coin!
If it were not for this loyal little group, I'd have probably dropped Steemit all together.
This comment is enough to make me want to follow you, your strap line says to me that we could have some interesting debates; I think there is a good amount of; thinks like me versus doesn't think like me... I look forward to those debates :-)
Cg
Exactly. That community's voting power comes mostly from a delegation they're leasing from me; which I bought with bitcoin I chose to invest in steem for this exact purpose.
If anyone thinks I'm doing the wrong thing, I can always remove the delegation, power down, sell the steem for bitcoin and support #steemsilvergold with warm wishes instead.
There's way too much finger pointing going on.
Telling it like it is @silverstackeruk! I also would not be nearly as active had it not been for #steemsilvergold
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