This is such important insight Richard. I agree with you 100%. I hope what you’ve said here is genuinely considered by anyone who wants to see this blockchain reach its potential. The SCOT communities have already done much to address these issues. I think it’s a great direction.
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Thank you for saying so @choosefreedom. Sadly the people that had a lot of stake that saw this problem have mostly left. The people that are here now with significant stake don't seem to see the bid bots as a problem. Not sure why @acidyo doesn't seem to see it. @ned must be for the bidbots. I know @heimindanger sees this and he is still here. Maybe if someone forks his DTube code to make a blogging platform it could work. @dan saw the problem and couldn't get enough of the other people with significant stake to see it so he left. I know @ats-david and @krnel were vocal about it too, but I think they have realized that it's not going to change.
@ned has fled the battlefield. :)
Lol, apparently he has.
@acidyo has been consistently against bid bots for long time. He even founded @ocdb as a form of lesser evil to mitigate the effect of the post quality agnostic majority of bid bots.
I knew I had a favorable impression of him in my mind. But I guess like many, myself included, we gave up. After realizing the biggest stake holders weren't going to fix it. I guess after I made my tribe, I realized that communities won't fix this problem. It's a step in the right direction and I am all for it, but it doesn't fix this glaring problem. I don't blame @acidyo for giving up, but I just can't sit with it anymore. Something has to change. So many things in this world have been over taken by short sighted greed. I will no longer accept it. I will always point it out in places where I know there are people and possibilities for change. I'm not gonna fight against Steemit Inc. forever though. I've learned that fighting against something is often not the way to go. We will probably just have to create something better that isn't controlled by greed. But I had to try to save something I loved. Quality standards are an improvement to bid bots, but selling votes to the highest bidder, even with standards, ruins the whole idea. If we could start a culture against bid bots and get communities going, I believe we can save this thing. If we don't get rid of bid bots, somebody will and I will go there and support it. If no one does it soon, maybe I will try to do it myself.
Crowdsourced and stake-based content discovery and rewarding, also known as Proof-of-Brain, has been proven a failure, at least in its ideal form. It is, however, better than just wasting power like PoW. I think what the network and all its participants have generated in the three years of Steem's existence is much better than entropy which is the only thing PoW leaves in its wake.
At the very least, having been a participant has taught me many lessons about human nature. The difficulty of getting anyone to join has also been an eye opener.
By the way, I don't think bid bots are the crux of the matter. Vote farming is. Bid bots are but one of the many ways to accomplish ROI maximization at the cost of putting in the effort to curate altruistically.
Then again does that matter? I think Steem is still a shitload of fun and the money is vastly better than on any mainstream platform in spite of everything.
What's great about communities is that each community has an opportunity to create their own variant of PoB, some of which may actually work. What I think has the best possibility of working is an app owning the vast majority of stake in a community token and treating content creators like freelancers and keeping other curators in line by negating any abusive voting done by them.
Proof-of-brain is not an alternative to proof of work, delegated proof of stake (DPoS) is.
Proof-of-brain and content voting generally could be turned off entirely and the Steem blockchain would continue to run, apps which don't rely on the voting for rewards such as SteemMonsters and others would still be working fine, etc.
Proof-of-brain was one feature added to the Steem blockchain intended to help it attract users and grow. It worked to some extent but its effectiveness to date has been fairly limited.
I'm fully aware of that. However, Steem allots some of the token inflation to content creators and curators.
I know. I've actually been saying for quite some time that I wouldn't mind if PoB were discontinued at the base layer at some point but not any time soon (meaning a few years).
It has made also made the stake distribution somewhat more decentralized. Even if it didn't add too much value otherwise in terms of driving traffic, it has furthered the decentralization of stake.
I think that is very debatable. Many of the largest stakeholders have gained enormously from it's actual results (as opposed to the intent or theory) through a variety of schemes including but not limited to bid bots. Some smaller stakeholders have certainly benefited but to talk about "decentralization" in the aggregate you need to consider the full spectrum including the enormous earnings at the top, and the conclusion looks shaky to me.