Fact #1
Steem is an amazing technology. It's the biggest decentralized social network ever, and has sprouted a new type of economy that has rewarded at least tens of millions of dollars of pure value to it's organically built community.
Fact #2
We built and released dozens of cooler projects than any eth/eos developer has ever been able to ship, despite the millions in funding around these financially bigger blockchains.
Fact #3
Steem is worth $0.29 right now, still worth about 4 times as much as it's all time low, but 20 times less than it's all time high.
Fact #4
Steemit Inc has firmly communicated their intentions to slowly step back as the arch-leader of this blockchain with their recent announcements and actions.
Fact #5
Most community projects are struggling financially. As a consequence, development and new projects release has clearly gone down. Existing projects update less often, and innovation is basically non-existent. Witnesses are also concerned, as their earnings drastically reduced. Even AskSteem (a search api used by many apps including dtube, steempeak, etc) is shutting down.
So? What's wrong?
I've seen tons of blathering by witnesses or project owners these days... On discord, telegram, slack, or even steemit itself. These people try to identify the current issues, and how to solve the issues. How to re-organize. And how to make steem's future great. They say we need blockchain developers that costs XXK$/year. We need a new landing page. Also we need to implement new solutions for on-boarding users. That's all complete bullshit or ignorance as usual. These people are all either failing to recognize the real issue of STEEM, or intentionally trying to distract the casual users with mindless conversations.
The forsaken feature
What if I told you that there is one very important feature that has been working intermittently through time. Probably because it has been neglected in terms of development. But every time it's been working well, STEEM's value in satoshi and dollars has been growing, alongside many new accounts being created. Everytime I talk about this feature to other Steemians, they call me an idealist, and change conversation...
It's the feature that helped STEEM survive when it was worth $0.07, and the one that convinced 95%+ of my readers to register in the first place. The promise of a network where we would directly reward real humans based on merit instead of computing power. I'm talking about the Proof-of-Brain™ monetary distribution feature. That's the closest thing we can get to the original Satoshi's vision. And many of you were already here when it was working, and you witnessed the power of it with your own eyes, otherwise you wouldn't have stayed.
And the funny part is that nothing broke technically, it's just humans who adapted to the rules, and built truly complex systems in order to cheat the proof of brain and earn from it programmatically or systematically. These programs or systems have different names, such as: bid-bots, curation trails, app delegation, ninja-mining, upvote as a salary, and so on, but are broadly referred to as 'financial tools'. In reality, they are just breaking the rules to their advantage, and still the community has welcomed them with open arms, as if they didn't understand that any penny made by these robots, is a penny less that goes into the reward pool.
What do?
With lack of proof of brain, the incentive for playing the game normally is nulled, and no one feels like engaging or registering anymore, even less powering up. If you want to fix proof of brain, and STEEM as a whole, there are two solutions:
The hard solution would be to refactor the proof of brain algorithm, a critical part of the steem blockchain where inexperienced developers will risk breaking the consensus and forking the chain. And then you'd need to allow SMTs™ to use the feature with changeable configuration through time, so that we could adapt to any type of new abuse, a bit how video game producers update their games to detect cheaters or 'nerf' certain strategies. If SteemIt Inc can't, would you do it?
The easy solution is to make the majority of users change their mindsets. Make them stop thinking of STEEM as a way to make money. Educating them about the original purpose of rewarding the largest number of real humans, and being generous with your own upvotes when you make a real human connection. Of course that means no delegation to your favorite bid bot, nor powering down and selling the stuff on binance. Rebooting your brain to make steem work again. Would you do it?
That's what I thought :)
Amen to that. Selling and buying votes killed the heart of Steem. It's not an honest evaluation of content. And these bidbot coders have risen in witness rankings too. What a joke... Money rules the platform and minds of many. I stopped posting about bidbot issues a while ago. The community at large either doesnt care, or cant do anything because most of the SP holders support the vote selling and buying anyways. Having everyone "get it" is a dream it seems...
What about the endless circle-voting, done even before bid-bots were a thing?
When I joined Steem in August 2017, it was a nightmare getting any kind of visibility. The only reason I created a promotion service is for people to have the chance to have their content seen.
If you want to get rid of bid-bots, please fix the system. (Incentivized downvotes & higher curation rewards) - otherwise, I don't see a reason to talk about the same topic, over and over and over again.
Also, if you really want to solve the problems Steem has, feel free to participate here: https://steem.nolt.io/
Edit: I mean, honestly: do you want to force freedom out of delegating to bid-bots? That's not possible. He has 8.4 Million SP and if he'd believe that Steem would go to shit due to bid-bots, he'd stop it, I'm sure of it.
But other than that, the only way to stop bid-bots, is to make them unattractive to use. That means, either A.) Downvoting the use (incentivized downvotes) - either generally or when abused B.) Give other options for delegators that are far more superior. C.) Create closed communities, where bought votes are prohibited.
Honestly, I really wish there would be a place where promotion wasn't necessary and content would be rewarded fairly, but this dream scenario - it requires work, changes and adaption.
What if promoted content had 0-returns? What if you pay to only advertise and the bot vote rewards get sent to null? Then it would really be about promoting a post, and not getting ROI...
Fixing the system ideally would require no automating or botting behavior, where only people's real actions counted. One way is where only apps were granted access to the chain that upheld the proof-of-brain system, and users had to vote through an app. But that's not going to happen. Then only real mouse clicks would be allowed to vote. A blockchain has many issues where a "fix" is possible, but not desired by many because everyone wants "decentralized" everything to be able to do anything. So there is automated voting, auto this and that, bid bots, etc. But a responsible group could authorize apps, and if they allowed automated actions through an api their access would be revoked.
The top 19 witnesses are a group, so already we don't have everything simply decentralized to make decisions, like approve code changes for the chain. A blind focus on pure decentralization is hampering the resolution of problems. People are required to make things work, not simply "whatever the code allows",a s if the code can account for the complexity of human interactions and behavior. Decentralized code has its limits.
Incentivized downvotes and higher curation rewards won't change anything. All the bidbots need to do is change how much they charge for a % of vote, and everything is more in favor of 0-work automated curation and getting even more returns from curation rewards by selling votes, not going out to manually vote content. Paying people to flag would ruin shit big time, as then any abusive flagging would be promoted because your even being paid to do it, why stop and upvote when you can bully people and get paid to do it.
@edicted also points out some issues with those so-called "solutions".
If no one bought votes, no one would sell votes. And if no one offered vote selling mechanisms, no one could buy votes. There are ways to change things. But, when money is the goal, things won't likely change without code making it restricted. And those restrictive changes aren't desired because there goes the easy money train.
Flagging for rewards and more curation rewards won't solve it, sorry. And they aren't the only solutions, as I've pointed to above. They are just more ways to reward the broken system.
Rewarding content more fairly is possible, and not having bidbots is one way to promote that behavior again. Yes, the changes require work and adapting to them, but they would make Steem a more honest place with better content evaluation. No? Decentralized systems have more issues and less ability to fix things, because anyone can do anything. If that doesn't change, then not much is going to get better unless people want to make it better by not doing the crap that doesn't make it better.
I do want to fix the system, but my solutions aren't well desired by others because "Decentralization is ultimate" or something...
I guess if we stay in the decentralized-only mindset (but we aren't really anyways becuse the top 19 are a group that make decisions for the rest as well), then we're stuck with some crap because decentralized systems depend on people making them work. If money keeps being used as the measure to get people to do things, then there will always be ways devised to ruin shit because "anything goes" that the code allows. If the code changes to disallow things, then things can change when people don't want to. But not likely to happen. So we're stuck with this experiment that will fail because people will just do whatever is allowed to make money. Unless the code prevents them. Anything I've suggested would be to put the bot vote rewards into null, and not go to the voe buyer. Then you'll see how popular buying votes is really. It's not just for visibility.
As for visibility, that depends again on people voting content to make it visible. Are the bidbots that destroy proof of brain and the core of a system that's supposd to bebased on others evaluating content to reward it, really worth it? Just to get visibility? Make the rewards from bidbots go to null, then it's not about making money, and it's only about visibility. The "only reason" (as you say) you created a bidbot service was to help people get content seen? Do you then not take a percentage of the profits? If you do, then it's not "only" to help them get their content seen, is it?
Thanks for the link. How do the suggestions there get implemented?
I suggested that bots require rewards be declined and got booted from two discord servers, months ago.
Bring back the n2 and whales willing to flag abuse,...
Shouldn't the visibility of content be determined by the community of voters, and not be bought to achieve? Just like rewards? It's a perversion of the whole point of having a social network of evaluating content. That purpose is bastardized with vote selling/buying.
I Agree. What kind of business model is 75/25 split? It says: If you want to earn STEEM you have to be an author, so that's why people publishing 10 shitposts a day and using bidbots.
I know @krnel is totally against 50/50 split but the heart of the Steem blockchain is STEEM/SBD, not authors. We have to split produced crypto equally between authors and curators.
My proposal to stop own comments upvoting abuse: send 50% from every comment payout to @null (not sure if it's technically possible)
The current business model is:
Amen to that.
I'm really glad to see you, @therealwolf, admitting that the system needs fixing, really - it's about time. When I saw the birth of bid bots I guessed this would happen, the proof of brain was always a big part of why I myself invested in Steem a long time ago. That's where I saw the value and it's been really hard to stay here ever since that promise was killed with selling the votes to anyone with money and now with Ned and Steemit Inc acting the way they do being the last straw for me personally forcing me to think again if my investment here is wise with long term mindset (+5-10 years), I still think this ship can be turned around though but I'm unpowering to have my Steem liquid and ready to abandon the ship just in case I don't see any psotive progress. I do however consider people talking about this issue being one, first we have to admit there are problems rather than cheer we're the best in every case, when Ethereums one project, makerDao is more valuable than our whole blockchain.
I think this is a good start, but I'd also offer SP holders a way of gaining their rewards passively, without selling their votes and meddling with the proof-of-brain system. Some people actually want to make this place work and are willing to curate, even for lesser rewards, some don't. These two groups should be seperated rather than put together.
Implementing these 3 systems would be a strong start in making this place valuable again for both content creators and consumers.
Absolutely spot on wolfman, and its the circle jerkers and auto curators who moan the loudest.
Bid bots get used as scape goats time after time but the op gets it right when he says there has to be a switch in behaviour.
Steem should be for everyone, whatever intelligence level which is why I hate the 'proof of brain' tag. Its elitist. It should be about effort, hard work and sincerity.
The people who game the hardest are the ones who have the most to start with.
However, bidbot owners also have responsibility to help keep bad actors in check too.
Good post, great reply, as usual, it all comes down to personal responsibility from every single one of us but thats easy to say when, unlike many on Steem, Im not struggling to pay for my next meal. Many people are.
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More I think about bid-bots more I dislike and disapprove of them. You make great points though.
You create smart tools and care about Steem. So, I would like to share the following thoughts.
This Ned's video from Steemfest 2016:
He says this at 1:09 minutes into the video:
I might be wrong, but it seems to me, rewarding and incentivizing the content consumption is neglected on the platform. Not everybody can be a great blogger, vlogger, content creator. In my opinion, a majority are content consumers. But since content consumption doesn't get rewarded as much, many focus on becoming content creators.
Since bid-bots serves as providing visibility, promotion, and marketing for its users, maybe bit-bots can fill the gap of rewarding content consumers as a mechanism of incentivizing consumption of bid-bot voted posts.
Can Dtube model of curation reward distribution be implemented in bid-bots? For example, a bid-bot can share 50% percent of its curation rewards with those who voted on the posts, giving them additional curation reward.
Do you think something like this or other innovative methods can attract more people to view and consume promoted posts? Can this even be viable for bid-bots?
I think bid-bots have a potential of fixing they way content is promoted on the platform. But not at their current state. If they can't add value to content consumers, they are no different than traditional advertising. Maybe even worse, since in this case, the community pays the costs of the ads/promoting.
There are other tweaks with equal potential to affect these issues, such as zero curation rewards, 1a1v, and many more. While I am not accusing you of some disingenuity, I don't agree with your assessment and proposed solutions.
Promotion isn't necessary to succeed on Steem social media. I have never done it, and reckon I have achieved considerable success, but I don't measure success financially. Society is vastly more - and more important - than money, and simply considering monetary aspects of society limits society to it's economy.
SOC (SMTs, Oracles, and Communities) has the potential to solve the problems for all concerned by enabling the full panoply of potential platforms and the code they are driven by to eventuate, and allowing the market to sort them out. Those which aren't actually social media, being limited to actual people (society) have a place, but social media does too.
We can hope good code and a diversity of options will enable real social media to form out of the extant chaos, and I do.
So you are not making a profit? Breaking even? Running at a loss? 😅
the solution is: Dan buys part of Ned's shares of Steemit Corporation (even if he needs to pay a high value for it), he gets the control of Steemit Corporation and, with their SP, starts flagging posts promoted by bid bots.(with prior warning of course)....Steem was well designed, perfectly planned but Ned decided to hear the crowd to do what is popular and not what is right, and screwed the system.
Ok, but in any case, do you really think, you can persuade someone like this author (https://steemit.com/steem/@ammar0344/why-steem-is-lossing-its-ranking) to stop using bid-bots?
Nobody in their right mind would probably read his posts and he knows it, so he would continue to buy votes.
The only way I see, is to change the system in that way, where human curators would have a far superior reward than those buying votes, selling votes or self-voting.
What if I couldn't vote on my own post or any account I delegate to or receive a delegation from? What if the rules for bid bots were the same?
I really like your idea of the 50% curation rule. I'd like for it to work for bidbots in favour of the bidder too. Like if I upvote this other user's post, I'd receive close to a half of what I spent. That could happen if there is only one bidbot and Steem manages it.
The People of Steem needs to become more generous.
everything here is built on generosity, having a singular bot's a bad idea, but you wouldn't understand, having more rules doesn't make things better or simpler, it complicates and destroys free enterprise.
The people are quite generous, they run servers, make apps, produce content, vote, distribute content, make bots that do all of that, ... it seems like you aren't appreciating the good work, want more and therefore we keep having problems.
My point is that if you create just to get monetary value, you are missing the point, @valued-customer said it best
Ahem, can you be more condescending?
I am appreciating "good work" but "good work" doesn't directly correlates to "good for the platform".
But I wouldn't understand. /s
Keep wearing your pink glasses.
We'll just keep flagging him...
for fun. lolAs it stands, the lack of flagging makes the entire platform look scammy. It makes everything looks like "give me a dollar, get two back".
Agree that we need more flags in here.
of course individual shareholders will do what is better for them individually......we can only hope for good actions for players that, with their actions, can change the game and that cannot put their steem power easily in the market without screwing the price of it(Steemit Corporation)
It's been free money for Freedom, I'm sure he's gotten more out of here than he ever dreamed.
the problem is not votes, but ranking system of content in website, right now its who got more money got better visibility. But overall because of this rule, without bots there is almost no visibility of posts.
How about system neglect the user's post who used bid bots from going to trending/hot tab. I mean most of bid-bots are known so shouldn't be a hard task, so put them in ignore list. When people won't get visibility using those boys , they will eventually stop using it.
But yeah, this can't stop minnowbooster, smart steem where votes are directly sold between users.
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I will answer shortly but can develop if need.
We are definitely struggling financially, but that doesnt mean that we are not improving and updating our projects.
The real problem is most of devs are just sitting on a Steemit delegation and that comfort give them no more will to improve their existent project... So I definitely prefer my position... I'm having hard time (and my team too) to get my head off the sea, but that force me to work harder each day to find some ways to keep to do better day by day.
Innovation was never existent on Steem (at least to my eyes), most of apps are only some copies of existent mainstream apps (with 50x less features), while we have the power to make some real innovation, people prefer to assure their gain with some basic app...
For asksteem, I couldnt get my datas indexed on it, and today you have esteemsearch/surfer which is based on hivemind/elasticdb and free to use so it's not a waste at all.
I agree with some people who try to find solution to some issues, like the governance part, but I also agree with you about the "no sens" to trying to onboard users... While I say that, I don't blame them for what they do, and I just think that we are missing communication between the community (people with the will to improve the steem state) and some people with clear mind and who understand that blockchain.
I never trusted the Proof Of Brain, or not as a standalone. And in that way even before thinking about to build an app we have built the Proof of Merit which is a complementary overlay to PoB. Free to each team to dev their own layer, or to talk with us to implement the PoM. A simple thing about it, we dont try to abuse of the pool by anyway (like voting at 30minutes) or putting an alarm when we are at 100% to spend our votingpower, but mostly calculating each upvotes and trying to give only upvotes that will serve the whole community. How many team and apps can say that?
In my mind there is no difference between a bid bot and the system of dtube, which buy votes from users. You are talking about something but before that you should look at your home. And don't tell me that incentive have any proof of brain in it...
So I definitely trust that we can improve the mind of people if we give them better tools and if we educate them. And why not also improving the blockchain curation process. I don't see only one solution, but rather multiple ways to achieve that and make Steem the dream that we want to be true.
I worked with you for few months and I know how much you care about steem, as I do. So why not being an example for steem and starting to make something with dtube in that way? You have the potential to change things with your position as one of the most used dApps over whole blockchains.
But would you do it? :)
We don't have to hard fork to fix this problem. We need to come to consensus. There is a huge community and consensus here that believes in the merit of Proof-of-Brain.
So where is the proof-of-brain political party on Steem? It doesn't exist. How hard would it be for such a group to make these "financial tools" unprofitable? It wouldn't be hard at all. It would be stupidly easy.
All of the greedy leeches of this platform are lone wolves. They aren't working together to exploit this platform. It's everyone-for-themselves capitalism. A group of people working together to fix it can outgun these lone wolves by 1000 fold, bring them on to team proof-of-brain, and then move on to the next lone wolf exploiting the platform.
With a little bit of communication we can pit the wolves against each other and bring this platform back into balance.
I like the concept but how do you propose this be done?
If I had the capital, I would stand up a bot that would indiscrimately downvote vote buyers.
I don't care if the vote buyer's content is ok. All I know is they are feeding into a system that empowers our enemies.
I don't care if the bid bot owners cooperate with us to blacklist a few here and there. A blacklist is not enough by a longshot.
We recently uncovered a meme ripoff abuse network usng bid bots. That's the sort of thing that makes me want to rage quit and I have to search deep to find a reason to stay.
The blockchain does not forget and I hope it's users will not either. The ones that offer you votes for $$$ are not doing you a service. They are doing to blockchain a disservice.
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I actually just posted my solution.
Making the POB pipe dream a reality.
A proof-of-brain DAO needs to be created.
Twas a fantastic read!
Perhaps we are fully aware of that, but when some of us spoke loudly about the issue, those in position to support where nowhere to be found. Now it's too late to be vocal about it, the system has been this way for too long. I adapted and found some positiveness out of them. Do I love them? No. Do I hate them? Not anymore. Did we adapt? Yes, we had to.
What you're saying here is absolutely right.
It is the systems/businesses that are a product of human greed (bidbots are the main perpetrators) that have ruined steem. I suggested exactly what you are saying in this post (about bidbots removing value from steem without providing any positive service) in a conversation where 3 witnesses were present at steemfest, only to be talked over by a certain individual who has an inflated sence of his own intelligence/importance.
The fact is that a huge amount of value has been taken out of the system by bidbots/vote buying as these people who run them are only in it for profit. They aren't building anything positive, there service simply promotes the dumbing down of our trending as shit reaches a place that should be highlighting steem's best and brightest... and to add insult to injury, some of these people who run bidbots, are involved in a high position in some of the better discord communities. Honestly, they should be held accountable for the damage they have done! It is not all about steem price. A huge amount of talent left steem within months of joining because they saw what was going on with vote buying. But also, a huge amount of value has left steem as these vote buying services sell there profits to fiat.
There is a concerted message being pushed across steem right now, mainly by whales, about minnows & dolphins building a successful blockchain. These same people are talking about too many minnows didn't power up & took there steem out to fiat etc. But, these are the same people who delegate to vote selling services because they are too lazy to curate. They throw some autovotes to people who are agreeing with them or getting involved in thier projects but they do not curate content based on quality. Some do delegate to @curie or @ocd but even OCD have started there own vote selling now.
Basically, we have a situation here where responsibility for the mess the steem blockchain is in, is not being taken by the people who contributed most to what we're left with now. And they are certainly not changing their behaviour because they want that easy money Politics and crowd manipulation might be as old as the Bible, but that doesn't mean we should accept it or perpetuate it. Unfortunately, people are pretty much set up to be followers. Add the financial dynamics of Steem' into the mix and it is easy for people to be incentivized to say 'yes sir, I'll put in a tone of work for you' without questioning who or what they're really working for. It is also easy for bad actors in this space to suppress facts they would rather not be held accountable for through the fear of down votes.
Anyway, that's my 10 cents.
P.s. I have powered up nearly 100% of my earnings, both from posts & curie curating.
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You are right, brains are not rewarded. Brains are eaten by money.
As long as Steem is marketed as a place to “get paid for your content” and as long as the incentives are set up to push rewards to those most likely to sell the tokens, this blockchain will not see any real growth and prices will not hold any meaningful gains.
What would be the necessary change in your opinion? Removing author rewards?
I don't like that idea. People should be making good content rather than playing the system, but one of the things that attracted me to Steemit was the fact that I made more here than I ever managed to make on YouTube. If there's no author rewards, we might as well be on Reddit. And a (admittedly variable for many) income source is cut off from people. That's not a good thing. Choosing to have only one income source when you are in the position to have multiple diverse income sources is idiotic and taking away author rewards would be detrimental to everyone except for people who only curate - and curators shouldn't be getting paid and creators not - that seems really backwards given how much work goes into creating things. Curation isn't more deserving than creation.
Rewards attracted most of users here, you are telling to remove them!?
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He said : As long as Steem is marketed as a place to “get paid for your content”.
It's not about removing the rewards, but giving some different offers and possibilities to users than only getting paid for sharing a content.
If 'getting paid for your content' was bringing some value on Steem many steemians would be rich now no??
So I definitely agree that people shouldnt see it like a finality or as the main purpose for their apps, (even if they use it for marketing) but rather like a little bonus to attract people, which is cool in my opinion.
It has been more than two years now and the most common questions from steem users and for most of communities is : Why I didnt get upvoted? What I have to do to obtain an upvote?
In fact only a small bunch of apps really care about this. I can count them on my hand's fingers ;) In that way, nobody is perfect of course, but everyone can still try/tend to be better.
For the rest they keep to ruin this ecosystem while making hypocritical post where they tell you that they care about steem and they make tons of tools and apps without any value for the blockchain.
It's easy to QQ about steemit inc, steem, whales, and the current situation for avoiding the real problems.
I maybe wrong too, those people can be stupid as hell and not hypocritical... but I have some doubt :)
That sickness make me mad lol, I go back to my bed.
I agree with your assessment that the distribution mechanism is broken. When it comes down to changing user behavior or refactoring algorithms, it's clear to me that user behavior won't change. Nobody really flags. They complain that there isn't an incentive to doing so, but if you look at it long enough there is, but that if you can get beyond ROI-centric views. Most folks wont.
Which leaves us with refactoring the algorithm. In my opinion, we are suffering from a nothing-at-stake problem where users can behave in undesirable ways because they have little to lose. If we increase the downside (beyond flags) so that risk comes into play, then low effort milking becomes harder to do, because something is at stake. But of course such an idea would be massively unpopular because freeloaders gotta freeload.
Agree as well and we've been working to increase those stakes using off-chain tools. For example, running flag campaigns against a bid bot abuse 4chan ripoff network on my @smartmeme alt and using the SFR bot to claim upvotes for flags w/ explanatory comments (including a valid SFR abuse category and mention as well). Some resistance is better than no resistance.
If you are interesting in being part of turning up the heat on users following abusive patters, feel free to join us at @steemflagrewards. We're a flag happy bunch but we do strive to be reasonable.
SFR Discord
When I first found Steem 'Proof of brain' was what most attracted me and helped me attract others to this place. In my year and a half here I have tried to be true to the vision of how I thought the system should work as advertised, creating what i think is good content and upvoting others who I think also produce work that is of value.
I have never used a bid bot or set autovotes to other people. I want my success or failure to be based on merit, being a real human and manually curating. All of this is recorded on the blockchain for all to see. There are many users here doing the same and they are the ones I try and support.
I agree with what you say, that the system is broken the way it is and the automation of voting is, for me the biggest culprit. It has taken the 'social' out of the 'social media'. Making the place pay to play and scaring off many amazing creators.
Even though it has been pretty hard going I am in for the long hall. The lack of readers on my posts doesn't make me want to leave but it does make me check out other platforms like Whaleshares , a platform that seems to care about content and it is there that I will be sending other content creators to in the future. Sorry Steem
I do see @therealwolf 's side of the argument but in the long term it is creating a centralised power on how the rewards are getting distributed that will slowly but surely reduce to nothing for all involved.
It might have worked at the early beginning, as the circle of Steem users and those having stake was fairly small - but over time more and more people come together; and expecting everyone to act in the best interest of the platform, won't work. That's wishful thinking and won't happen.
There need to be rules, implemented on the blockchain level and the incentives have to be correct.
And I'm not sure how often I've said, but I gladly say it again: I don't have any problems with Smartsteem.com as promotion-service becoming redundant. But only if the system is fixed and self-voting, circle-voting is less effective than voting on good content. If that happens, people will automatically start to do the correct thing.
@therealwolf, everybody should act in the best way for her/himself. That's is what the concept of the free market says.
So, noone has the right to blame the individuals/the Steemians. It simply means that the ecosystem is economically not viable. So, it is the problem of the Steem Blockchain, not of the individuals.
But, what I have noticed recently is that many witnesses and dApps developers has started to panic. So, it means the ecosystem is quite shaky. And from a point of view of a small investor it is not the best stuff to see/observe. But, anyway! Let's wait and see what will happen.
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What will happen is that those that can make happen will. If you can make happen what you want, it is certainly better to act and make it happen.
Still, I am waiting for them as can to do, as I reckon most of us are, since I am incompetent to do.
Thanks!
That's the vision of @steemflagrewards and @flagawhale, to go after circlejerkers in the low and the high places and thus nerf the reward capability.
We simply do not have the stake to downvote all the abuse out there. We have plenty of people but we have to wait for our bots voting Mana to recharge at a measly 14k SP.
You've assisted us in blacklisting abusers from your bot and making @smartsteem better. I hope this becomes a two way street as I would hope to reward SFR flaggers more appropriately especially since many are likely taking flags from your former customers.
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Implement whitelist with users who are only posting good quality content. That would be a step forward. Simple but effective, something that @ocdb does.
I know that a lot of us can see the bigger picture, that helping everyone keeps it healthy for the majority, but I agree, there are always going to be some who abuse the system and leave a desolate landscape behind, like any exploitative-extractive industry does.
I don't have an ultimate solution, but what if flags were changed so they they were decoupled from SP? Everyone's flag is equal in weight. Then the damage is decided by HOW MANY people flag instead of one whale being able to decimate someone they don't like, minnows being afraid of retaliation, true abusers being taken down by a concensus? I suppose big whales could make a bunch of alts. But if little fish were unafraid to use them, I'd think you'd get a lot more participating in downvoting spam which might balance it out.
It was just an idea that came to me, and I'm not a techie, so there might be something that would make this not work that I don't know.
Good to see you post and I hope you continue to do so. Any plans to tackle these issues you highlighted with dtube?
I don't see any radical shifts in thought coming down the line any time soon. It would be interesting to see how the various apps / trending pages would change if people weren't able to purchase votes or if whales didn't have the massive influence they have.
It would be compelling to see if the majority of "stakeholder" rewards came from interest / curation -- and then the 'content' rewards could be more aligned on a 'per-vote' basis rather than rshares (or some other crap that I barely understand).
The infrastructure provided by the steem blockchain is actually super interesting and cutting edge -- but it's being utilized in very traditional, 'old-school' mentality ways where everyone is trying to maximize their ROI... Which isn't a massive surprise since it seems the most popular 'content' on here is blabbing about price-action and stock movement or whatever.
I do not use bots. I never have used even one bot. I don't agree with it. Therefore I will not use them. I am a human sharing my human life with my family. That is it and that is all. I give authentic engagement. If I leave a comment I have read the post as well as watched the video (if the post has a video). How to change other people though? Not possible. Unless the system can be tweeked or programmed to solve it I have no hope that people will stop using these "tools". As long as these tools are within grasp of people they will use them to generate profit. If there is nothing to stop them, why would they stop? This is why we need police otherwise people will rob banks, and hijack cars etc. And even with police some people still commit these crimes. So what does that say? Not much. If the system allows for this behavior and there is nothing in place to stop it.. then it will continue. And just because I am aware it hurts the platform and I choose not to do it.. does not mean the next person wont.
On another note why don't we add advertisements to generate income for the users of the platform as well as the platform itself? Since with out money the Dapps, users, and creators will all suffocate? Why are we not changing the things WE CAN change.. instead of dreaming about what we can't change. We can bring ads on board! But we can not change the hearts of men.
Lets fix what we can. And only if the system can be altered to stop bots than it will continue.
The questions are:
Can the system be changed to stop the use of bots? (not by changing the hearts of men we all know that wont happen) but technically speaking as a programmer?
What can be done to bring Ads onto the site to generate profit for the entire ecosystem?
What other solutions can anyone suggest that does not involve telling people who make bad choices to "be nice". Obviously that does not work. If it did we would not need prisons, or police. I could just stand out side and yell from my porch.. be nice everyone.. and don't do bad things.. and then everyone would suddenly never commit crime? Of course not. There needs to be some form of barrier in place to stop the use of bots.. and if there is not than it will continue.
It's a tricky one, and it truly is what I think @curie has been trying to accomplish. Ironically, if all the people who delegate to bid bots, delegated to Curie and other quality-based curation platforms, then the entire platform would be much better off. Instead we have a system where short-term greed outweighs the long-term gains.
The alternate trending page you made a while back was brilliant... it's a shame the various front ends didn't incorporate it into their products.
Many things you have written about I agree on. Human nature is such that any system created, they will attempt to find, create, or manipulate that system to their advantage. Call it greed, ambition, or whatever other term you want, but it is their nature.
So perhaps the real question is if you want the easy solution, how do you make the majority stop thinking this way? I can only see education as perhaps a solution, but it's most general problem is that it takes time and therefore doesn't necessarily equate to "easy". Changing the human nature of greed is never easy.
Agreed. Especially when everything already went this way. It becomes even more difficult to educate people when they can make better profit another way.
Too bad nothing will ever happen because steem is rocked by ultra capitalist morons who dont know jack shit about the platform
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More fcats
#6 wealthy steemians are gaming the platform and draining the rewards.
#7 voting bots are lowering the quality of content
#8 steem is not really decentralized
#9 99% of people are here only for the money
#10 steemit looks like a website from the 90's
I completely agree. However, I think you called changing people the 'easy' way. LOL
Code is law, and the code is broken insofar as it fails to prevent exploits such as bidbots, curation trails, and autovoting.
Either we are posting to social media, which means society, which means people are doing it, or we're doing something else. Right now these exploits have made 'social media' on Steem something else, and profiteers are sucking the life out of it, while folks that aren't aware of the importance of the principle(s) aren't working to stop it, or even stop contributing to the problem.
SOC (SMTs, Oracles, and Communities) have the potential to fix the problem, allowing the full panoply of possible platforms to eventuate, and letting the market sort them. Platforms which aren't actually social media, meaning limited to human beings posting and voting, etc., will have their place, and I expect that there are a lot of folks that won't understand the difference between them and social media, as well as plenty that profit from that ignorance.
But platforms that are actually social media will arise, and those will varyingly fulfill the promise Steemit first made possible. I am no seer, but reckon this is not an unreasonable expectation given the extant conditions.
BTW, I'm not sure why, but I am unable to view either Dtube videos, or IPFS, and thus am little able to fight the war against Youtool by using your service. Any consultation or assistance you might be able to provide may resolve this problem. I suspect it's something in my browser or plugins designed to block ads and surveillance tricks. I would be grateful for the grant of your attention to the matter, should you be able to afford the time.
Thanks!
I'm still mostly operating on a proof of brain principle, but it's hard when you see people milking th system in various ways with hardly any interaction with anyone. Vote and delegation sellers seem largely happy to assist with as they make money on it, but I think it's harming the platform.
I kept going through the 7c days because I was having fun.
I'm stuck in my old feed too :D
What do you mean by that?
I pretty much stopped steem 6 months or so ago, feels like you are pushing that boulder every day in hopes of people seeing the good in good ideas, but at least in my world I wasn't seeing much change, at that point it was a year+ of "get people to read" "learn to express yourself", "This place is great, but it used to have more engagement... it's better, trust me :D"
So yeah 2 years ago, you would get no views and autovotes thanks to trails, last year you would get auto-votes and auto-comments and empty views thanks to bid-bots.
So what's next, we make a AI social networks, so it can make content and value itself, maybe then we remember we used to read and think by ourselves :D
(numbers are subjective)
When I joined in user participation was ~30% since half was automated already, and 20%(70% in total) seems like it was whale stake, nowadays I'd say there is, let's say 5% honest human engagement in the grand scheme of promotional and auto-vote, auto-comment, spam accounts, bot accounts.... so that kind of means by my logic, whales should hold 90% of the stake nowadays :) of course half are community whales, dunno, I'm making this longer than it needs to be.
7c? days is that some hardfork version here, if so I missed it :D still when I joined in it was a golden age, real people, talking together, something unseen before in the traditional media of the day (although that is what internet media used to be, youtube, twitter, before it was politicised and marginalised and weaponised ... )
Around March last year Steem was worth just 7c and those who just cared about the money were giving up. I kept posting and commenting as it was still fun. I earned a lot of Steem then as there were less people to share it with.
I enjoy online communities and there are still some great ones active as well as lots of cool projects. It's hard to know if it will all succeed, but it's fun to find out.
yup I agree, I've mostly tired of this conversation since i did answer it for myself around 2 years ago, basically around that time, everyone was screaming I need money this and that, but it was the people that were giving that were getting in return and most people were really focused on the getting aspect.
Strangely enough that's the time I was blogging my 20 or so posts, I've kind of been stuck there, somehow wishing people would somehow see and feel like I did :D
exciting, new, opportunity for change
It doesn't look like it, but if you look into it that's what steem is for me.
I love this place for the people it housed, it's still my preferred social media, even if in general I hate the concept, at least in the current traditional sense.
Earlier people had to depend on 'whale sightings' to get visibility and when they didn't get so, they bitched about it. Now we have bid bots for visibility, still bitching?
This (and everything) is imperfect, once we solve bid bot problem other will pop up. Either you have to adapt or leave.
At least due to this bear market we are seeing fair distribution.
One more thing, most of the times you lose money when using bid bots.
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People did not recognize the power of Steem and most importantly how it's design to bring change to millions of people around the Globe. I've witnessed so many life touch with this protocol. For over 2 years of operations, we haven't seen any protocol competite with Steem Blockchain, apart form sister chains. But 2019 could see change and we will be seeing new social network protocol. It's will come from the DPoS Blockchain family products. So juts keep working hard. Steem is the only mass market blockchain use case, but it's suffering from leadership and entrepreneurial mindset.
Well written, it is disgusting that even witnesses don't see how bad these "financial tools" are for steem economy.
We should start with witnesses votes need to be renewed by user from time to time, not longlife.
It’s the move from 50% curation + quadratic rewards to 25% curation + linear rewards that is destroying the platform. It’s also much easier to trade and exchange votes 1:1 now with easy to price votes like I can sell you a 10 dollar vote for 8 bucks now, etc which is the heart of the bidbot economy - stability and predictability. Our current equilibrium is 80:20 rewards ratio between non-curation vs curation.
I’m still pushing for 50% curation + n^1.3 rewards + low % downvote pool to inch us closer to the 50:50 rewards ratio between non-curation vs curation so both kinds of activities are economically competitive. Just give stakeholders enough returns upon an agreeable vote and more will just use their SP for curation.
Well said!
You may find this presentation interesting.
Well said @heimindanger.
I totally agree with you.
We need to be educating the people more about what this platform is about and teaching them that it's not just a quick money making platform.
I never thought about this but it makes sense. I started in December of 2017 so I didn’t experience the initial PoB stages. I could see more relationship building happening if we returned back to that model which is one of the things I like best about this platform. -Ken
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Thank you for sharing @heimindanger , what you say through this writing will really change a person's thinking, beautiful logic, but in certain circumstances people must adjust the situation to what you say.
Yups, hopefully everything changes like what you say ...
Thanks.
Well written, it is disgusting that even witnesses don't see how bad these "financial tools" are for steem economy.
We should start with witnesses votes to be renewed by user from time to time, not longlife.
Yes Truth.
would achieve its true purpose ...
@heimindanger, interestingly written point of view.
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Interesting, but you have right
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Steem at least serves as an example of what can be achieved. I'm not clear why there is such a reluctance from the developers to really build their brand and IP. Maybe they had a different vision for Steem and they ran out of steam?
Hey @heimindanger I have been posting on DTube for a few days how about some of that 2 million real person vote love :)
Baha! iKR!
!gif funny
Very interesting insight and perspective.
Resteeming.
Please post more often.
Bid-bots are solving a particular problem even though they are undesirable. The provide visibility to anyone instead of having the content simply being whatever whales choose to upvote. Thousands of upvotes from minnows and dolphins can't even equal one vote of a whale, hence the trending page will probably be mostly be hand selected by a few people.
It is tempting for me to use bid-bots to promote my latest project and I am not sure if I will do it. I really don't want to. I don't want to have to resort to using bid-bots for getting visibility. People use it because it works and serves a need.
Bid-bots can become unprofitable if people would downvote. Since most people are not going to do that because they fear retaliation or don't want to waste their VP, you see posts with nothing but upvotes. That is not utilizing "wisdom of the crowd".
We can change the interface by removing upvoting & downvoting or likes & dislikes.
For example, content could be voted simply by typing in how much you think the post is worth. Maybe hide the current pending payout until after someone casts their vote. If someone says that a post is worth $10 but the current pending payout is $35, their vote would be counted as a "downvote" and based on their stake, would decrease the vale of the post. People's names could be hidden from the UI and perhaps only viewable from a backend like steemd or something. On a UI level, you could simply show the % of people that voted above the current pending payout and the percent of people that voted below. No "upvote" or "downvote".
which can't work in a decentralised and transparent media, the point is no singular control and no censorship, you are kind of saying keep the up/down vote mechanic, get it off the main site, make it more complicated and don't bother us with it...
sounds interesting, but I'm not sure how to quantify it, downvotes do that right now, obscuring people to provide a level of security?
I just don't see a point, currently you can see anything and nothing is being kept from you, that is in miles better, you don't have to wonder, that mechanic is in place right now, if you don't like a post and you think it should pay out less you can use your stake, or you can use your stake to reward something that has more value than it's currently getting, hence you have the whole authority of your stake and vote.
An upvote and downvote is confusing because a downvote psychologically implies that you dont like the content. That is different than a disagreement with the payout. Most people dont downvote content if it is overvalued because it doesnt benefit them and they may fear being singled out. This results in most content only having upvotes which means rewards arent distributed fairly according to “wisdom of the crowd”. Everything is still transparent from the backend like steemd.com but the interface keeps it hidden. If you keep the payout hidden before voting, each person votes on their subjective perception of the value. In this case, they wont know whether they “upvoted” or “downvoted” until after they vote because they wont know whether they voted above below the current pending payout. The interface will faciliate the mentality of giving fair rewards as opposed to choosing whether you “like” or “dislike” content. Their corresponding stake will either add or take away rewards from the post. I dont understand why you think that cant work in a decentralized and transparent manner. From the blockchain, everything is still visible and transparent.
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Namings don't matter, that's subjective, because we put a negative connotation on the word "negative" doesn't mean that electro-magntism is bad, currents and poles still exist and the particles love it.
because of the complexity it has to bring relative to the "result" the result is a idealised version of what we have now, currently if everyone was a fully-formed individual capable of expressing opinions and their view of the world, steem works, we get to talk to one another and negotiate what is good and bad, hence upvote downvote.
In practical terms you want to quantify a relationship between people and content, that requires values, how do you measure subjective value, well you say what you mean and mean what you say.
We have that same functionality, I'm sure changing the packaging will change how people see it, but right now you can do what you said above, if you don't like a post, or for whatever reason want to downvote, you can. Stake is still king as in your interpretation.
In short that's a front-end "fix" to a problem that wasn't solved years ago, it's not a real solution, it doesn't change the dynamic.
It's the same thing, it's been proposed a lot of times by a lot of people here, " just obscure the rewards and they will be more honest? " sadly the cat is out of the bag and in reality it doesn't work like that.
I misunderstood your idea, I thought you wanted to have some back-end layer of logic that sorts a pool of data and determines the post value on payout, which we currently have, since the blockchain was made,
right now your stake directly determines the amount of payout, so you can do the math and if you think a post is worth 10$ you are free to flag that 150$ bid-bot post (and based on your stake you will make a difference :| ). We don't do it because it would be bad to slap someone, I'd rather give my 10 cents to real people that don't move just for money, rather than slap some spammer that wants to live in his glass house.
So in theory your idea is what we have right now, plus a bit more complicated on the front-end, seemingly a simple solution, but it won't change anything.
Namings definitely matter. Names greatly influence human psychology. If you ask any random person that isn't part of the Steem blockchain what a "thumbs up" means, they will say it means "good" or a sign of approval. Likewise, a "thumbs down" means disapproval and a sign that something is bad. On Steem, a thumbs up is supposed to mean "this post is worth more than it is" and a thumbs down should mean "this post isn't worth as much as it is". This creates confusion and makes people resistant to downvoting. That means overvalued content will probably stay overvalued. Steem is currently failing at showcasing the best content on the internet.
So when the interface has a thumbs up and thumbs down button, people will only use the thumbs down button if they disapprove of something (i.e. the content sucks). Why are we going to use a symbol or word that people associate with something being "bad" when we actually want people to decide as a whole how much a post is worth? A different presentation needs to happen if we instead want people to vote on how valuable they think it is. That is the point of "wisdom of the crowd". The idea is that if you get a crowd of people to vote on something, the answer will probably be closer to the truth than randomly selecting an individual person. This will allow a lot of overvalued content to decrease and increase undervalued content.
We do have the same functionality, but it isn't used effectively because of what I said. Having something more neutral than thumbs up and thumbs down will remove biases in voting habits more effectively.
Nothing needs to change on the blockchain if this is implemented. You're right; it is a seemingly simple solution. Stake is still the king but it is currently biased towards overvaluing content remaining overvalued. The only thing is changing the voting options that are more synonymous with voting on value as opposed to a post being "good" or "bad". I have to disagree with you. I think it will change.
first paragraph is why I say it doesn't matter, people should understand and then see through, thumbs up and down is associated in history as the "wisdom of the crowd" the emperor hears the crowd and kills or boasts the gladiator...
hence we have that problem since we have crowds and we have that since we have people, so we have a lot of problems we keep naming differently, hence namings don't matter.
And
But we just said people have biases and now we are saying if we make a bias based on biases, we would have a objective measure of value...
The only thing that will change the current result is a different behavior, so think differently, act differently, make a difference, stand by it, in this case, make a dApp, run it, change people's behavior, come and bring light to the forsaken :P
but yeah you can't remove voting biases, you need them in fact, you need more bias as you say, people are too positive to downvote the trending crap, trust me many have tried, :D people just like business as usual, it's not bad to be good and say things need to change, people have been doing it, actively, that's what I like about this place, but still you have the problems persisting, because we are human and we have them and we allow them.
The idea is quite vast, so a perception of a metric won't change the outcome much, we are talking about poeople's interactions, a simple framing could have great consequences, but do you think that just that would change everything necessary for a whole behavior to change.
Personally I think when you go into a new place, you don't carry the old stuff with you, you go seeing what is different, then you go back to your old stuff and change them, that's a better approach than going somewhere with your problems and asking for solutions.
So I was quite active here or quite a long time, trending back then was 70% same old, as some say whale-voted authors, didn't matter, didn't care, it bothered me, I saw better things elsewhere, it's not fair, that's life... it's not better now, it's not gonna become great tomorrow,
I've been saying people need to talk to each other and read more, that's not feasible in scale, but it sure would help everyone out more, it would build more bridges back and forth, the economics will still be broken because the whales will still have the stake, but hey who needed to be visible, wasn't me I bidboted one post about bubbles :D fake visibility doesn't make you famous, if you are crap in real life having 500 payout on a post might feel good, but that's not real value.
Still that has been proposed at least 2-3 years ago, it's not that well argumented as a solution I suppose, it's just a name to a mechanic, sure it will give you a different perception, but people don't go to the trending page to read good content, nither do they go to downvote to make content more deserving of rewards, I go there to sift through 50 posts, get some new updates, read two good posts and get out to people, at least I used to when I was here all day.
so yeah alternative trending pages are made, steemit.inc hasn't announced changing the condenser front end also called steemit, so no updates on the upvote/downvote popups, in fact it used to be called flagging, it was said that it should be used for what you said sooo now it's downvote, because that's what it does on the blockchain to better reflect the true behavior or something. Even back then downvoting was bad and people were arguing much like we are now :D call it downvote not flag and so on, flag is associated with reporting bad behavior ... :D
merry christmas also :)
If people would vote on the value of posts on the trending page, the majority of the posts would be raided with "downvotes" which makes bid bots less profitable. Maybe a post on the trending page is only worth $50 to most people but it is overinflated to be $250. Having a more neutral voting appearance would make most people "downvote" the content (which thereby uses their stake to return steem back to the reward pool) and now that can go to better content.
By the way, what solution are you proposing?
educate people on education, economics, psychology, sociology, throw some history, hope for better judgement, so we don't keep running into this wall at least ...
out here you don't get to vote on all content, the stake reflects your stake in the system, so you can't affect the whole system, only the part your stake reflects, so most people wouldn't have a say in the trending page, as they haven't for the most part, there are good whales, there are bad whales, people act differently, I don't see any solutions, I was out of here for some time now, as I said in the other comment, it's been a persistent problem, lots of things factor into it, I don't see a simple solution.
even less powering up
I know some guys that have been powering up massively last weeks. (sorin cristecu - stayoutoftheherz) @coruscate also made a good point about the growing steem middle class.
@pengiunpablo you can also the positiv net powering up within the last weeks.
think we'll survive 2019! Good luck and steem on!
I personally don't think you would ever change the mindset of the majority users, unless the majority measured success another way.
Lead by example I suppose, not that it's easy, we kind of like comfort and reliability.
Everyone likes reading about successful people, nobody likes getting up at 4am and working 4 hours extra before your work-day starts :)
"The easy solution is to make the majority of users change their mindsets. Make them stop thinking of STEEM as a way to make money. Educating them about the original purpose of rewarding the largest number of real humans, and being generous with your own upvotes when you make a real human connection."
Rewarding the largest number of real humans... with cryptocurrency which can turn into money. It's a social platform where you can make money and you should be able to make money here. People shouldn't be using cheap methods to do it, and should be genuine, but even "rewarding the largest number of real humans" was still with cryptocurrency which could turn into money. And it helped me pay bills and was a lifesaver at times. I can't agree that it isn't at least partially about making money.
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Hello and actually I am your second person described totally!! the first part I do not have that skill set.
I completely agree with part 2 but it’s true most do not. We also need to get rid of the ded fish and have some whales power down to spread the wealth. Thanks for this.
Ps. STeem was created as a test and the initial users to make money.
Hey Heimindanger,
Regarding attracting People to Steem apps, I think having dtube be less clunky and easier to use as well as more reliable would be a strong win.
I'm curious how the community can help you improve dtube?
100% agree. I just paid 5 Steem to make this account. I also have about 140 SP and 52 liquid Steem.
I plan on powering up everything (the liquid Steem will be used to promote my posts with bots) but everything else will be powered up 100% on my account.
I wish there was a simpler way for new users to get noticed. I only have 9 followers so far. I wrote a good intro post that I promoted with bid-bots, another about Horizen, and another about my new pupper.
It's just hard for people to attract followers and to receive decent sized upvotes. Lets face it, no one wants to post to so few people and earn pennies for content they spent hours working on. We need an easier way of promoting new users that create good/decent content to get them to stick around.
This post was upvoted by SteeveBot!
SteeveBot regularly upvotes stories that are appreciated by the community around Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface.
Well I have been offline or the past half a year or so, that is coming from someone that dropped pretty much everything just to be here, it truly was a spectacular place, at least for me, I'm not discounting the problems from before.
I want to bring attention to the fact that this place was vibrant with conflicting opinions, whether good or bad there was color, whether it was @krnel and @berniesanders warring, basically there was a healthy balance of discussion and argument.
There was a heart to steem, people were here to express their ideas and ideals, share and communicate, the system was always broken in the sense that the power rules, so if you didn't get the free steem the first month, shame, bow and fit in ;(
To be honest the easy solution is getting further away from my sight.
Thank you for the post and to @krnel for the resteem :)
I'm a bit late here, but not too late to mention that this is one of the best articles I've found on the Steem blockchain in 2018.
Thanks for the eye-opener and for directing our attention again to where the true potential of this project lies.
The original vision of Steem to give back value back to those who add value has never gone out of style, and I really hope that we'll be able to reactivate it. I by myself am on a creative break from the chain right now but will be happy to be back in 2019 with new ideas and energy, hoping to be able to help pushing Steem where it actually belongs: to the top.
Again, thanks for this incredibly valuable piece of content!
Loved and resteemed.
Merry Xmas!!
And... are you going to head the message in the post, or keep buying votes for your posts?
Hey @krnel! What an honor that you’re commenting on one of my posts :-) I’ll be happy to inform you and the rest of the community in detail about my personal blogging strategy and everything else I’m thinking about, once I’m back from my creative break. Real life’s keeping me too busy currently :-)
Merry Merry Xmas!!
I think that the attraction of steemit for the average user is to make money! You either failed at making money with other social media platforms or you heard you can earn crypto for mediocre content!
I would know because I was one of those people but as I got into the ecosystem I found that building stake means I have more influence and that’s what I want so I can help the platform move forward! Plenty of users I’ve met as we all grew our accounts have cashed out and stick around drawing small rewards or cashed out and left or worse delegate and go into hibernation and earn passively because the current system allows that!
I think that it’s going to take a big drive to her say 20 000 minnows and have a middle class that can group together and build influential communities as well as mitigating behavior we feel is counter productive
Unless we continue to redistribute the currency we won’t see great value! I’d rather have 5 Steem worth 5 dollars than 5000 Steem worth nothing!
I still feel this blockchain has great potential and should be sitting up their with EOS and ETH as dapp chains worth building on! We also have a bit of a marketing problem it’s amazing how many people know about EOS over Steem even though EOS spent ages as an ERC-20 token without a single dapp built on it and was the first billion dollar ICO! Imagine a billion market Cap for Steem how this place would be pumping
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What people fail to realize is, the value of STEEM comes from it's users. And if they aren't happy, there is no value. It's why curation groups are actually among the most valuable things here, as they actually reward users, keeping them engaged and building steems value. The more this becomes about earning money, the less one will earn. Hope the "top witnesses" use their brains and realize this is true... Oh wait, they don't care.
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