I'll try, and I'll try not to ramble too much but no guarantees. My first handful of posts were about precious metals and they got a bit of traffic so that was nice. Then I made a post about the 10oz of silver at spot price on JM Bullion. In that post, I put a screenshot of the deal from the JM Bullion site and when I came back the next day this self-appointed Sherrif had downvoted my post and commented about how I was plagiarizing. This brought an avalanche (a few ;)) of downvotes. I contemplated having it out with her right there but decided to just not use screenshots any longer.
I slowed down on my posting at this point but did show up daily to read, vote and comment on other posts (my bread and butter on steem when I started here). This is when I noticed The Sherrif and a few others start to push their view of a quality post. The Sherrif made quite a few posts about what made a post a quality post as if it were a black and white thing but for me, it is not. What I see as quality someone else might see as shit, it is just no that cut and dry. She also started a downvoting campaign and was downvoting EVERYWHERE. To me, this was like legislating morality in a way and it left a bad taste in my mouth.
While this was taking place there were also some good posts about ways to improve the site overall and there was also a separate site to suggest fixes and the like with some excellent ideas. The next problem I noticed was that the developers and the management team were almost non-existent. I have worked in big corporations and owned my own business and if there is one thing I know it is that if you want the business to succeed, as an owner/exec you have to be accessible to your customers/clients in some way. These folks were nowhere to be found and it fostered resentment and doubt and pissed everyone off.
A big mistake (IMO) was that downvotes were anonymous and reason free. In other words not only did you not know who downvoted you, if they did not comment you did not know why. This is just dumb. I am fine with anonymous but shit, let me know why I was downvoted so I don't fuck up like that again. As you can imagine this led to grudge-based downvoting which was sad. And during all this, the "team" was nowhere to be found. I can only guess but I do believe this is a big reason they failed.
As I type this I am remembering some other things, one being there were no nested comments, so there was NO chance at having a decent dialog in the comments as you would have to tag each person you were responding to, then for them to respond to what you said they would have to make a new comment and tag you back, and so on....ridiculous.
Oh, one more thing, one of the big things the "team" would say (not directly but in the advertising and on the site, was that WE were in charge, that it was a "member-governed platform". I can't find it now but in all the advertising and such it was always, "you, the narrator, is in charge, it is your site". But, of course, we had no actual power save for posting, commenting and voting. I actually called Rosemary out on this in a post she made but she sidestepped me in her answer. Let me see if I can find it...OK, here is her post. This is also a good example of how non-nested comments are dumb as hell. I mean, why would you NOT nest comments? I just don't get it.
Here is my comment:
@rosemary, I am a realist. I like optimism too and even feel optimistic at times, but I strive to "keep it real". We all have emotions, good and bad, positive and negative, and I agree with your sentiment here so I am trying my hardest to check my emotions at the door of this comment.
What's going on? Behind the scenes I mean. It's obvious to most that the team (as you four or five are often referred to as) is struggling. You say it is a "member-governed platform" (or whatever the tag-line is) but that is not true or at least is a convoluted way of stating it. Narrators have no power here, if we did there would be many improvements that we are all in favor of and are not that difficult. Sure we can post, we have that choice, to post or not but that's about where it ends. I can't even change the description of a niche I OWN without approval from the team. Unbelievable really.
Let's chat about the fundraising thing for sec, from a realists point of view. I have been here for a while and posted/read daily for a spell too and I do not recall hearing/seeing anything about this. Now it may be in the map somewhere or something alluded to long ago but the way it came out of nowhere to me in me EMAIL SERVER SPAM FOLDER was odd and did not feel right. You guys OWN a blogging platform yet you are almost silent while we are left to guess at what is happening backstage. Obviously this leads to vitriol, here and anywhere really. I cannot understand why everything from the team is sugar-coated unless it's also sour.
Some folks here gave you money in exchange for the dream you were selling, others came when they heard the same dream and began to believe it.
You and I have chatted on STEEM and this is not meant as a personal attack. I just thought you would like to know how it looks on our side of the fence.
and here is her response to me buried in a long reply tagging many people...
*We are legally constrained from comment on the Wefunder campaign and fundraising; that conversation must take place on the Wefunder platform according to SEC guidelines. Further, we were prohibited from letting the community know about the Wefunder until the papers were filed. We put out the news at the first moment we were allowed to do so (although we definitely should have been more forthcoming about the general financial situation earlier, so that the community wasn’t blindsided by this whole thing). @summertooth
I don't know man, it's too bad they had no idea what they were doing.
So what I'm getting from everything you and everyone else said basically there were inherent design flaws that were never corrected and people who wanted to harass others ended up exploiting these flaws. And the team forgot that they had clients to respond to or to do their job.
Bingo! Great distillation @guiltyparties! You could maybe even cut it down to that last sentence. :)