Back in the beginning days of Steem it was like that a lot.
Now that it's 50/50 rewards people just follow an active curation trail, don't post or comment ever, and earn money for doing nothing. Proof Of Brain has less incentive to function. It might cut down on spammers and self upvotes, but now you gotta downvote other people's posts in order to downvote people who are milking rewards pool by buying HP and following curation trails.
I've been around since the early days of Steem. I remember seeing the ugly and deciding to go my own way, which was just basically creating some content and hoping people would enjoy it.
I don't follow a trail. I've posted maybe four times this year. Been actively commenting when I can.
I don't blame the systems when there are problems. I blame the people. Who's controlling who? What you're seeing when you see what looks like a bunch of greedy sacks of shit with no integrity, well, that's humans. No amount of fiddling with knobs and twisting dials will change, people.
Just be what you want to see.
Would you apply the same logic to the systems of government, and say that US government for the last 50 years of endless wars/infinite printing money, etc is actually the people's fault?
Human psychology clearly shows people operate in systems on autopilot, and this is typically the super majority of people. If you are saying you want people to be me aware of what is going on and act accordingly(I want that too), that isn't going to happen in the next few hundred years, maybe even the next 500 years. Pretty much the entirety of human history is dismantling systems, fixing systems incrementally or making them worse, imposing terrible systems, creating new terrible systems. Where there are humans gathering to form systems that oppress there is no room for systems that don't, and almost all systems currently in place are very oppressive.
Humans largely follow psychopaths and sociopaths, those psychopaths and sociopaths create systems that people live in. Is it the people's fault they are born to follow, does one blame the 10,000 worker ants for following the Queen's orders? Or is it 100s of thousands of years of nature that the workers ant are following (human nature too)you are trying to fight? I am fighting that too by the way and totally agree. I want people to know facts, spot disinformation, see through lies, etc. Is it going to happen in our current environment? No. That's why I have been doing something about it via @informationwar for 3.5 years. That isn't enough and I plan on doing even more soon.
50/50 rewards hinders manual curators like me. I don't want 50% of the rewards for upvoting, I want to give 75% to the author. Curating/upvoting shouldn't reward 50%. It's a garbage change done by people who are misguided and think it will somehow improve things. It won't. It will cause more people to buy into it, power it up, follow a curation trail, never post, never comment, and constantly get profit for doing nothing than locking up HP. It should be changed back to 75/25, maybe even 80/20.
Well, I'm Canadian, so when I look at the government over there, I see positions of power held by people, so yeah, if there's a problem caused by people, I do tend to lean more towards the people being the problem. The president over there is just a man in a suit.
Those psychopaths are people, too. Sure, they deserve a good kick in the ass but unfortunately there are none near enough to me to prove that point.
I admire 50/50. The whole giving back to the consumer part is probably the most important aspect of platform to me. It's all a numbers game anyway though. If we had hundreds of thousands more dedicated consumers, like Youtube has for instance, where the consumers actually outnumber creators by a huge margin, a creator could easily make bank on even a 10 percent cut. Think about it. If there are thousands upon thousands of upvotes, and the plan is to give consumers a cut, they'd need a higher percentage in order to see any of that, since there would be more sharing in the percentage.