@acidyo hey, the most staked members of this community are welcome to choose whatever direction they want for Steem. If you folk really want a flag-friendly place that is fine, I will simply view STEEM to be a shitcoin and focus on quality SMTs that plan to build a following and then eventually migrate over to being their own blockchains.
One of the cool things about SE tokens and SMTs is that they are a great way to engage a community and test the waters for adpotion before becoming a separate chain. Once a project has proof of interest in their project a Steem clone or a Loom dapp is not that expensive to get going.
Steem as a blockchain has good bones. Still, a system with downvotes, especially one in which each account has more access to downvotes than they do upvotes is not useful as a universal currency or curation platform.
For extremely niche topics such as a Chevrolet classic car collector forum you can have upvotes and downvotes and it work. However, if the system is universal the Ford classic car collector community could go militia on the Chevrolet community's ass and go in guns blazing just for the fuck of it.
That is the real reason downvotes don't work. They are a weapon for the internet. If the upvote/downvote system of Steem were universal across the web you would be seeing a level of ideological warfare online like never before.
Steemit Inc. understands this and realizes that it was all an experiment that has been proven to not work. That is why they are changing their narrative of what Steem should be/do now. And there is talk of eliminating the reward pool altogether and replacing it with a mere RC system. At this point, that is probably the thing to do, but its still likely a losing strategy.
However, what I would like to point out is that everyone here that is so strongly advocating for going after the bidbots and the bidbot users is that you all quite hypocritically just ignore or join in on the madness that is @burnpost.
There is nothing more anti-POB than the burnpost project. There is nothing on Steem more selfish and personal ROI-driven than that project. Authors are being completely negated while the curators are stuffing their pockets with a larger share of the network value for spam. Why no downvotes on that?
Do you know what @burnpost does?
Yes, I understand it. I believed in it until I looked into it. It is not really helping the SBD peg, after all, is SBD $1? Nope, last I checked it sits around $0.61. So maybe you can say that the burnpost project is only 39% bullshit...
It also burns STEEM, but only on the author side, not the curator side. That is why what it does is horrible. This system, having several witnesses and whales participating is draining the reward pool, essentially stealing it from hard working authors while boosting the overall network ownership for those curating the posts. It is absolutely terrible.
The plan is to siphon rewards away from authors that might add to the sell wall on exchanges and burn those author rewards. It is a complete abandonment of the POB distribution system in favor of whale ROI. You have to understand how scammy that is, we tell everyone the rules, that 50% go to authors and 50% go to curators that have invested, then the authors give their time and effort, but because the pool goes where the votes send it, and much of the vote weight is being sent to a spam post + spam comments to be burned it kinda makes that false advertising.
The burnpost project is nothing but spam, spam that has reached trending. Nevertheless, Steemcleaners does nothing, while it will go after anyone small it wants. This thing spams every day with posts and comments and Steemcleaners focus on others that do not get a fraction of the rewards.
I have tried to point this out to them and they don't respond. Steem has rules put in place by whales, but the whales do not obey these rules themselves. The crony capitalism needs to stop.
I also think @burnpost should disallow curation rewards