I suspect most users will translate the changes into:
More power for whales
More money for whales
Less money for authors
More downvote abuse
I suspect most users are right.
I don't see the whales spending their time searching for the quality content to upvote. At best, the bid bots will be replaced by the curation bots. My prediction is that we'll see the whales running/delegating to the curation bots and those bots upvoting the golden boys 24/7.
Write good content, get rewarded is a lie. It's been since I've joined the platform and it will be in the future. Steemit is a collection of the upvote circles of various sizes and strength + bid bots.
The dApps and their creative use of the reward pool are the way forward. The quality content is neither being produced nor rewarded here. Nobody outside this bubble cares about it. Hell, even those here don't care about it.
What they care about is getting the big upvotes themselves. Just ask them what the quality content is... it's always their content first, their friends second, and at the distant 3rd place is an objectively good content produced by a talented author that's not in.
What I'm trying to say is that all those things that you hate, I like. My opinion is not a popular one but it is honest at least.
From what I've observed as an outsider, the loudest noise about the quality content is being made by those that lost the big upvotes when the bidbots showed up. The whales delegated their sp and the golden boys' posts payouts went down.
I can already see a bunch of self-righteous pricks running around downvoting those smaller than them. Fun times ahead.
In conclusion, the whales will get more than now, the golden boys will be downvoting the small guys that dared to use the bidbots...
PS - The proponents of this change should keep some numbers. Let's see how many whales are doing manual curation today, how many will be doing it 3 months after the hf.... I think we both know that whales won't be spending their time searching for the quality content to upvote. Curation bots here we come!
I would like to think I am creating good content. My earnings are minimal, though. Between bid bots, whale cliques, and the sheer mass of spam, it's hard to get noticed. We need someone to address these problems, and I haven't seen a good argument for why tweaking the numbers will improve things yet.
Honestly, we are pretty close to "bottom" right now already in terms of whales just taking as much as they possibly can. It can't get much worse than it already is. The system needs to change if we have any hope of making it better. Unless you are in the camp of thinking that the system is so messed up that it is beyond fixing, then why even try - then I'd hope you can at least see the potential to at have a chance of making things better.
The famous last words :)
True statement. I just don't think that the proposed changes will get you the result that you want. Call me cynical, but all that I can see as the result of this change is more drama. The whales will find a workaround and still get what they want out of it (even more than what they are taking out now).
Steem is what it is. All the HFs before this one made it that way. I'm more for accepting this reality and see what we can do with it than going after the whales & bid bots... See what works now and what keeps people around here. Do more of that.
Creating the right incentives that will bring about the original steemit vision is next to impossible. Mostly because the original vision (great authors get rewarded) is ignoring the reality of the human nature.
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on the whales doing just fine, and the small guys getting less and less while at the same time being abused by the self-righteous downvoters.
In any case, good luck!
... according to your name you are a betting man ... :)
Even if whales are getting a bigger piece of the cake it doesn't help in case the whole cake (the STEEM price) is getting smaller and smaller. So they shouldn't only think about how to get more from bidbots, from curation rewards, from circle-voting or whatever, but how to increase the value of STEEM and thus their own investment.
The proponents of this change are right - something has to be done. I just don't see this one working as planned. In any case, we'll see soon enough what will happen.
Right, the question is just: what?
If you like to know how I see things you may read My STEEM Vision..
Maybe so. We might end up there anyway, even if we didn’t make any changes. My goal is to try and make the best decision to do whatever I think has the best chance for success.
Close to bottom? Just wait for the bidbots to powerdown and commence 13 weeks of pain. The trend is your friend, up to maybe a 15 week or so trend, don't catch a falling knife, and their will be FUDD and severals months of it. Steem inc will just have to sell more Steem to keep paying the idiots making these dumb decisions. The best thing steem, inc, could do is undo HF21 immediately after it begins to mitigate the harm as much as possible. Bidbots were the scapegoat to hide managerial incompetence. Managerial incompetence prayed upon user's envy as a tool.
And just when youtube purged users the other day in a new policy update, steem is going to pay whales to demonetize and pseudo censor content here and on d.tube. The market is begging for something better, and steem already had the technology but is ignoring the marketplace who is tired of this big tech crap.
So what do you recommend we do?
We should recognize that the coin has become a psuedo proof of stake, and accept that proof of brain will always be gamed. The present downvote issue is driving many long term users away, and that will likely escalate under HF 21. Social media platforms will always have a lot of garbage on them, but people with guidance will find users and communities that they do like without hiding content. I think the downvote is unnecessary. There might be issues with copyrights, but perhaps a post, when timely flagged for copyright, can be rewarded to a steem inc owned account and rewarded later either to the author and the curators or to null (or to the accuser for their services) depending on the finality of the copyright decision.
Steem, inc, should recognize that people, sometimes through voodoo like tactics, have morphed the coin into basically a POS. In embracing that it is a POS, the company should [start to] offer more POS rewards in steem for inactivity or light activity based upon SP. At the same time, reduce the number of rewards for posting content to a level where bidbotting would be an act of charity instead of a business model-but at the same time not scaring away the present investors who have helped transmuted it into a quasi-POS state. The alleged whales upvoting their own junk posts might realize it is better to to hodl if the math is done properly as to not scare them off. The Whales who delegate to bidbots would have no more profit incentive to do so and can as they wish.
Certainly, this takes value out of posting content to steem it which seems to also be one of the pleas people are making. This may not bode well as to the Metcalfe's law, but neither would HF 21. Reddit seems to have done quite well without steem's potential. But aside from avoiding a lot of pain, Steem can focus on bringing in users through marketing instead of proceeding in HF21.
It needs to market itself to appeal to the present market place in social media, and there is a large opportunity that is being missed due to the present management at steem. They need to recognize the problems that are inherent in social media with the purges and exodus that is going on, and advertise their platform and perhaps even sponsor banned personalities to join their platform. When Milo went to telegram, he managed to have acquired 16000 users-not to mention telegram and gab have been receiving a lot of free press.
Granted steemit isn't developed like a facebook or myspace, but does offer features similar to youtube and reddit. The emphasis would need to be that steem doesn't ban ideas, and that steemit will be the new go to place to find information and hopefully to connect to their favorite speakers.
An auxilary focus would be to try to create a revenue stream through advertisement in the white space and to reach the point of profitability, and when profitable using equity to secure a minimum value that steem can reach. The trending system may be broken in terms of intended purposes, but this can be done on a typical CPM basis-and perhaps enhance [to a weekly limit] it to reward steem users a small percentage who may go on to visit the blog and/or follow the speaker.
It also needs to emphasize that the crypto transactions are free. Perhaps changing the steemit logo to emphasize the features might help to the broader crypto market. Three squiggly marks in a sea of over 2000 listed cryptos on coinmarketcap-at least it is in the top 100.
A further focus should be on presentation and building the community such as the creation of groups, [off chain] emails, and chats and instant messaging apps, and other apps that might be useful. Much of the development could be done without steem, inc. But development doesn't appear to be easy, and management's focus should be of making dapp development more accessible and let the community do the rest.
From the development side, I notice some of the software will not run on my hosted server for obvious security reasons. I don't particularly desire to run an at home server. Instead of relying on third party executables, it would be nice to just upload a php (or cgi) script and config file, edit the config file, then proceed to write dapps.
It would also be interesting to have an online console (with tutorial) to interact directly with the block chain where users could get to get to test non-traditional features of the blockchain to get a basic idea about what they can do before trying to fight with the installs or network changes/investments. I think there is a lot of untapped developmental potential in the blockchain if it were easier to access and people could more easily play around with it and get their feet wet.
I flag trash (and morons). You have received a flag.