Well here are some more facts...
A lot of people disliked the free downvote mana bar, but they weren't powerful enough to stop it. A lot of people believe Steemcleaners is corrupt, hypocritical, tyrannical and the opposite of decentralized. A lot of people found the #NewSteem movement to be aggressive and ugly. A lot of people left due to #NewSteem or are here but only half here, emotionally.
The Korean community is a large part of that group of people, but not alone in that sentiment.
Many people, I included, feel that Steem has been dominated by a small crowd of anti-business tyrants that ruin the whole blockchain and screw Steem's future.
How do they screw its future? Compare the rewards distribution of major stakeholders on Steem vs the Crypto Youtubers. The Crypto Youtubers are famous among the whole of the crypto industry with many followers on Youtube, Twitter and Facebook. But these people barely make anything and rarely touch trending on Steem.
Why is that? Because this place is nothing more than a big circle-jerk, wherein the key players keep milking the reward pool in hopes that it won't end soon. They know they are not rewarding top talent, which is bad for Steem in the long term, but they are really about the short term gains. Instead, they keep upvoting each other, people that are nobodies on Youtube or Twitter with subscribers only in the hundreds at best.
Justin is not probably good for Steem, but a lot of us are at least glad to see the old hierarchy getting broke up. And if he sells off his stake it will mean low prices for a while, but it could also mean much more decentralization.
Thanks for throwing us all under the bus with your disgusting attitude.
You're welcome! :)
OMG! You actually spoke to me? A nobody who doesn't vlog about crypto on Youtube? Are you feeling okay? I don't deserve this honor, your highness. Please waste no more time on me and carry on about your important and meaningful existence. Thank you.
You know how us elites do things... We always have to kiss a baby or two. You're a rather big baby, but let no one say I am not a man of the people.
Thank you for insulting me, your highness! Keep it coming! Show everyone your true colors, so I don't have to.
I don't judge people by their color, @nonameslefttouse. Shame on you...
You shouldn't have to, when you paint them all with a broad brush like that.
Yep. I don't agree with all of this, but there is a lot of truth in there. Steem has mostly had the same groups of people calling the shots. They have gotten steem from a top 5 coin to a top 80 coin, not entirely by their own fault, but they have been a big part of it. For whatever reason steem has been very anti-business. When new people have shown up and not played exactly by the community rules, they have been run off, and people have high-fived about it. I think many here in the broader community would love to see things shaken up on here.
It's not anti-business. It is anti businesses which seek to generate revenue and profit by directing chain rewards to themselves. These are the exact same self-voting, vote selling, and vote trading (all equivalent) that isn't a sustainable use of the reward pool when individuals do it, and still isn't even if you slap the label "business" on top of it.
Businesses which generate revenue from paying customers like any legitimate business are more than welcome and always have been.
I agree with you, @hobo.media!
This stalemate, despite the votes to regain control of the TOP20 potentially exists, demonstrates the discontent of much of the community.
Would the circle-jerk be decreased as people join Steem to vote to balance or counter-balance and better compete with the whales, the dolphins, the sock puppet accounts, the duplicate accounts, bots, etc? I would say I hope so. And that is one of the problems, that Steem has only around a million people or a lot less active users each month as opposed to like billions like Facebook and YouTube got.
Definitely! If the supply of stake was more spread out then the winners and the losers in terms of content quality would become a true "wisdom of the crowd" experience. But right now, its a buddy system, which hurts the chain over all.
If the core members of Steem really wanted it to succeed they would be putting out an effort to drive youtubers/tweeters here. The only way to do that is curate their work, but we see that people like DataDash don't do well here. Tim Pool came here, but he stopped coming here because he wasn't rewarded enough or something. But Minds.com have attracted big names like Joe Rogan and Tim Pool, people with subscribers in the millions. We need those people if Steem is going to succeed.
That's because the reward pool just plain isn't nearly big enough to compete with revenue share that comes from selling advertisements, even if all of it went to successful youtubers. Trying to come up with ways to direct more rewards to that sort of thing is ultimately futile and prevents the reward pool from being useful for cases where it is practical, like encouraging new users who aren't famous and appreciate even modest rewards as being more than what they get on most free sites.
If you want to compete with youtube, you need a business model that attracts outside revenue, e.g. from advertising, which scales with viewership and then directs that revenue to creators. The Steem reward pool isn't that and can't be that.
YouTube is a video website on steroids. Do you recommend Steem find some Steroids to help pump up Steemit, I mean the blockchain in general? Too many millions of people got hooked on the Fast Food equivalent of social networking on the Internet. Google came out of DARPA. Many things in the world have been dominated not by free markets but by corporatism, monopolies, cartels, agencies, organizations, fascism, tyranny, etc.
If I am following the point you are making accurately, I think it is a mistake to believe Steem can succeed by trying to be quality content first. Quality content will come eventually if the world values Steem enough for it to survive to that point.
Steem is not really needed for solving content quality. Youtube and Twitter have "fast food" content and high quality content, Steem can never be just quality content because it is meant to be used by everyone. Steem does not solve any problems related to quality content, on the contrary, the most talented content producers are more interested in the audiences of Youtube, Twitter and Facebook than Steem.
So, what does Steem solve? Censorship resistant information sharing. I believe Steem is most successful as Twitter's counterpoint. Twitter is heavy on the censorship, which is good for those that want a "safe space" so to speak. But journalists, political commentators and provocateurs struggle on Twitter despite the fact that they love the platform for their work. Steem can solve their problems.
Also, as Smooth said, Steem currently does not have the capability to adequately reward long-form content. But content the length of a tweet? Sure, $5-$200 earnings for a simple but viral message within 150-250 characters sounds very fair, and $0.05-$0.50 on a good comment sounds cool.
Art:
Also, quality can be subjective as well like art. Agreed that Steem serves as a safe space like you said. So, I archive my work here as a way to keep backups online. That is a priceless feature. I would add a donate button on posts to allow people to send their favorite artists some tips, some money, and not just an upvote button.
Steem Upvote Add-ons
I would also encourage people to develop Steem apps and specifically add-ons which can offer different upvoting systems that do not depend completely on the Steem pool or even at all.
Decentralize Pool Systems
I would seek to decentralize pool systems as opposed to only being limited to the centralized upvote pool and also the downvote pool of the Steem blockchain. For example, Busy.org could have an independent pool system that could be added through a web browser add-on or some other method. That would add increase competition in the money systems or pool systems that could simply incentivize innovation in all of that. And it seeks to minimize cartels and especially monopolies which could plague pool systems.
You have some nice ideas.
You might not know this, but Steem doesn't actually protect your artwork. Images and Audio are not immutably recorded by the blockchain, they are stored on private servers. Only the text can actually be censorship resistant on Steem.
That said, your posts cannot be deleted by someone else, so even if the artwork is not actually stored on the blockchain, nobody can ever delete your posts that direct people to that artwork. :)
Yeah, I've heard about that. Is IPFS the best way to store images, video, etc?
Fighting abuse is not anti business. Take a closer look and you'll see which side the legitimate businesses are on.
We disagree with each other. Plain and simple.
Most of them just share their YouTube links just to earn some extra crypto and pfff, they are out. They don't engage, they don't build, they don't even reply to those who take the time to watch their vlogs and drop comments and they definitely don't shill Steem...
Those are the Youtubers you are referring to?
If we were to behave like savvy business minds we might ask ourselves why they don't do those things we want them to do. If we're not getting the result we want it means our platform is flawed, not the users.
Steem does not attract content consumers and content producers through rewards and referral programs such as BAT, Minds, Publish0x and other platforms do. Instead, from the beginning Steem has always been about only attracting investors and not talent.
Rather than make Steem this exciting and fun place to hang out at and view or create content like the other social media platforms, Steem was all about shilling to stakers who then in turn reward starving-artist sycophants that will jump through hoops to get an upvote.
Stakers are important, very important. I get that. But there has always been an attitude that content producers are secondary, which is insane unless you're just looking for that swing trade. I find many people on Steem to be anti-business and unreasonable. Steem has to become the it place before it will succeed, and its the talent that makes it happen.
Don't get me wrong, there is some talent here. But if Steem's talent was compared to the competition in terms of a movie analogy, Steem is a B grade movie starring Alec Baldwin. On a rainy day you'll watch it but the general experience is meh.
A lot more people like it. Good riddance to those who don't start your own business with vote-buying enabled and see how far that gets you. Hint, you will certainly fail.
Steem is open for business as long as the business isn't exploiting the reward pool. If you want support from the community, come up with a good idea.
I've followed crypto-YouTubers on Steem. Most of them rarely engaged on Steem and just directed people to external channels. There are a few onboarding ideas to bring some of these people back, but it is either an advertisement or a 2-way street.
So you think bidbotting is going to solve this problem? The youtubers who get upvoted on Steem are focused on Steem.
A lot of the 'hierarchy' are individuals who are very good for Steem. Do you want to see them fall out of favour quickly? Well, a few just did by making really bad choices. It's not the first time it happened either. Why would we want to punish the people who have been around forever building their accounts and helping the community? Sure they have become powerful, but name me a few who didn't earn it.
Low prices are great for people who can afford to buy like me, and don't need the income. But there are a few very good and important people around here who rely on income and cannot afford to have whales intentionally manipulating or crashing the prices. I'm not talking about people who are just shitposting either, I'm talking about people developing stuff, running servers, etc, who depend on their income. If they have to leave, Steemit will be all there is left and well, they aren't doing so much these days.
Although technically correct, I don't think dumping on the market is a good way to encourage decentralization. I'd rather see it go to developers who slowly sell it while improving Steem because then we win in 2 ways. I can't believe how many people fail to see this. There is literally no advantage to us simply giving the coins to Justin. If we wanted his help, we could have made a 'pay Jusin' SPS. We would probably get their help for a lot less than 65 million Steem and none of the drama or force 'agreements'.
Are you aware that the best posts on Steem that grow organic traffic here have nothing to do with Steem? SEO is enhanced when obscure, infrequently addressed content is produced. The "I love Steem because ..." posts are actually sending the blockchain to its slow death.
I agree that interesting content that isn't for internal audiences can help promote Steem. However, we just don't have enough of that content being made and Steem needs to be distributed. Better 'I love Steem' getting the rewards than people buying and selling votes for their crypto scams or junk content.
I've seen some pretty weird stuff get a lot of rewards.
Still, bid bot services showed us the way to increasing STEEM's value and providing a strong use case: promotion.
The best way to do the content promotion use case is through burning STEEM via a promotion tool. Steampeak's tool seems to not work perfectly, but its a good start.
Paid promotions shouldn't be rewarded with votes, bottom line.
That's a philosophical argument. I prefer a promotion system that involves STEEM being burned. To me that is a solid use case for STEEM. That said, I thought of bid bot services as a perfectly fine thing.
Frankly, I never cared and don't care about paid votes. People acting as if their reward pool is being "abused" or "raped" is just dumb. Everyone staking is adding value to the blockchain and due to that they get votes as compensation for staking. What they do with those votes is none of anyone else's business.
This is what I mean by Steem having an anti-business atmosphere that will likely kill itself over time. The only thing that draws content producers here is $ signs, the only thing that draws investors here is staking ROI.
People blamed the bid bots for Steem's decline, but it was never the bots. That's why Steem is still doing shitty even after that industry is gone. In fact, Steem only became less popular after HF 22 and alienated many investors and separated the community. Post HF 22 was an ugly witch hunt of downvoters going around like a mob.
No one will pay money for Steem if it is only used to promote stuff on Steem, The only reasons bidbots were around for so long was because it took about a year to convince a majority of witnesses that if something wasn't done about the issue, the platform would die.
It's like saying people will pay money to browse ebay or amazon or to look at online ads. You need to attract good content creators and advertising before that happens isn't how todo it. It could work in the future with an SMT, but this is very doubtful. None of the content creators are going to want that.
If we have a chain split and 1 chain allows bid bots while the other doesn't we will be able to test your theory in practice.
The bid bot chain will fail hard and fast.