What is it with you that you cannot accept a different view on things?
You have the very annoying attitude telling me that I don't understand instead of asking me how I have understood or read your post. Assumption, no question. I have read the post and also saw the quote. I just don't share the same perspective on it. You don't have to "make me understand".
You addressed your post to small accounts. I am a small account.
You refer to the guidelines or whatever you prefer to call it but then you say "there are no rules". I see a contradiction and that is what I did, to point it out to you. No rules, no excuses needed on action or inaction.
Fables leave room for reflection and DIFFERENT interpretations as an outcome or consequence.
Besides, the same white paper also says:
Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the
community and its currency
Oh, I don't have a problem with different points of view.
What I can't stand is someone coming to participate in a system, and then bitching about important core functionalities. If you don't like the premises on which the platform is built that's your thing, but don't annoy those who try to make people understand what the whole idea behind the reward pool distribution is.
And sure, you are right. There is no rule to participate. It's just that the system can't work as it was built when people don't.
You yourself question the premises by saying "the system can't work as it was built" and so you invoke rules. I take the same freedom in questioning: Are you saying that non participating in the downvote-actions makes a person a questionable up to a bad participant? Does this imply that they will face disadvantages even though they write in high quality (whatever that might be)? Does that not translate of being in service for the readers and distract them from the exhausting conflicts?
Do you see how this "must be a good steemian" leads towards corruption if someone even thinks (even if he is reassured otherwise) that he will be left aside when he is not a "good steemian, fighting for the good"?
To take part in actions which require detectives investigations skills to find out about using bid bots and multiple accounts requires totally clean records and credibility on the side of those who want to work on the regulations. So far I have not seen one big account "A" not voting for himself on "A".
Correct me, if I am wrong but that is the role modeling with a very high impact on how people perceive a system. Otherwise, they leave in masses and note it as "hypocrisy" in their minds. Even though, they have done it themselves. But from what I think it's like advertising for own content, not paying for the ad, but compensating for it instead. Which is the strangest thing.
No, I don't. I say it helps the system to work as intended, but I don't judge. There are many reasons to not participate in it, and I accept that decision.
My upvotes distributed by curangel don't depend on having used the downvote power. That'd be silly ;)
And our downvotes don't target people who upvote themselves once in a while, or even daily. It's always a decision on the individual case. The infographic above shows what clear abuse looks like. People trading votes on a constant basis, giving 50% and more of their rewards to always the same users. And again, we don't ask everyone to agree with that being worth a downvote, everyone should make up their own mind what kind of behaviour they want to see on here. As I wrote, it's provided as inspiration, not an order.
So 50% is the arbitrary cutoff then? Anyone that gives 50% or more of their votes to the same people is an "abuser". Hmm I actually see a lot of accounts that fall into your arbitrary definition on here.
By the way, people forming groups and mostly interacting in those groups is normal human behavior. That's pretty much what a community is. Expecting people to scour the site and vote for 10 or more 'quality' (whatever that means) posts each day, mind you by 10 different authors so we aren't voting the same authors on consecutive days, isn't.
Yes, it is arbitrary, and not a fixed number. And yes, a lot of users could improve.
Forming closed groups is not how you build a big community. If we want steem to grow, it's important that a lot of people look outside of their group. Especially the ones with a bigger stake - if they group up with other big stakes, there won't be a community except these groups.
And past experience shows that very clearly. We had thousands of people join over time, who left again because they didn't feel like valued members of the community, because of group behaviour. Retention is the number one problem, and the only way to improve that is to break the circles.
I'm absolutely aware that it's not a realistic expectation that everyone scouts the blockchain all time. I don't do that myself. That's why I started a curation project that makes it easy and still profitable to distribute to the wide userbase for myself and every other stakeholder. They can still keep some for supporting their group directly. But as someone said earlier today, at some size you have to stop being a boat and become the tide, or there won't be enough water for all the boats.
People are always welcome to buy more steem, power it up, and form their own "groups". In fact one could argue that kind of activity would be more beneficial for prices than arbitrarily voting as many authors as possible, like the 2k you mentioned in the post.
One thing that was interesting was that you didn't mention anything about the quality of the posts of those users you call 'abusers' (again whatever that means in an open system without rules), yet later you talk about upvoting quality content. Are we about quality or are we about spreading the wealth? There seems to be some contradiction there. Your arguments lean more towards the latter, and if that is the case then yes we should just be a true POS blockchain, where stake determines reward.
That's short sighted. Buying is beneficial for the price on the short term. As soon as they feel like their group is big enough, that stops and turns. We need growth and a big active userbase, using steem for more than handing out rewards, to become sustainable.
The whitepaper gives guidelines, and colluding groups are mentioned as one of the main forms of abuse. The quality of their posts is irrelevant as long as it is evaluated by their group only and not all of the community. This is how the concept of proof of brain works.
It is about both rewarding quality content and distributing wealth, and there has to be a balance. Downvotes are the tool we have to move some from the latter to the former. The goal is not to get to "only quality", as it shouldn't be "only distribution" either.
The creators we upvote are not randomly chosen, but by a big group of curators. The downvotes similarly are decided on by delegators using their stake to use the function of downvotes as it was intended. Standards on quality and what is overrated obviously differ for everyone, and that's good because it makes the community varied.
After last SteemFest I actually suggested to give stakeholders the possibility to opt out of the reward pool to receive their share of the rewards without having to find ways to farm on posts. I would be fine with that, and still support the content creators with most of my stake.
That proposal didn't get a lot of traction, the general consensus was to try improving Proof of Brain. The EIP is all about that, and all I do is participate in the way the system is set up.
Regarding the edit and the other quote: yes, it's not possible to completely eliminate it. Not using downvotes is giving in though, and when we do that we could simply switch to pure PoS where everyone gets a share of the inflation depending on their current stake.
If we want to have the best content rewarded, we need to do the work.
I think there might be a miss interpreting in "giving in". Nobody, who is not taking part in downvote is necessarrily giving in. He serves the crowd with other themes and thoughts by adding variety and abundance. It's more of an indirect influence.
Maybe this makes more sense to you: in a democracy, there is no rule to use your vote either. If only the "bad guys" (whoever you see fit there, don't know your political alignment) do it though, what will happen?
I don't understand. I have no chance to talk to "bad guys" which are out of my reach. I can only partake in a democracy by using my voice in the local realm through my work and moving in public and private space. Talking and interacting from person to person. Whenever I want to give power to my voice in elections I have no other chance as to make my cross on a toll. As you already know, I'd like to change the "yes or no" options into systemic consensus methods. It's the only chance to talk about themes, not people.
The serial abusers here don't talk to you either when you criticize them. At least not as long as you don't have an option to make them lose rewards when they don't. As in politics, you need to vote for others to make the ones you think don't act in everyone's best interest think about what they do. A downvote is just a much more direct way to vote for everybody else.
This post is asking people to make use of their votes, like many campaigns in real world politics do too. I don't understand why you see a reason to come here and criticize me so hard, blaming me of making up rules and shit.
You mix feedback and questions as blame and interpret it as bad criticism. If you act as a community driver, I suspect you are available for being questioned.
This post of yours clearly uses pictural methods of warfare. What am I supposed to think? I see it as a call for battle, is it not meant in that way?
Then why tanks?
I never have seen on the platform the strongest actors coming to negotiation and consensus in a peaceful way. What I observed instead is building up hard-lines. From my perspective, this is also "giving in". It's acceptance that battle has to take place.
But so far there is no open sign of dialogue and negotiation. Nobody has ever said it's easy to talk to "bad guys". You need all your skills as a mediator and negotiator to solve a conflict between the parties. Battle seems the easy way but in fact, it's not as long as an enemy is not defeated. This has a strong pull towards the whole channel here and that is what I see and disturb people once in a while with my perspective.
The comparison with real elections in politics does not fall on my ground as I see the weakness in majority voting principle.
You misquoted me in your first reply. I didn't say "no excuse", I said it's "the worst excuse I ever heard".
It is a call for battle, definitely. The circle voters do not stop by asking them nicely, that needs pressure. I'm happy to talk and negotiate, as my hour long discussion with dobartim yesterday and today should prove. And we actually came to a conclusion both can live with (I hope, too early to tell). Without ongoing pressure that wouldn't have happened though, as the talks the days and weeks before showed.
And ... ? Who are you to judge what kind of argument someone uses? It's an individual decision and not up to you to call it an excuse, may it be the worst one you've ever heard or may it be understandable. He gave you some deeper reason afterwards.
Your encounter with @dobartim proves that you use your higher stake and power to pressure him. This could be perceived as manipulative and also abusive. When dobartim gives in and plays according to the rules you want to sell him, it's of course his business. There are always two in the game.
But there is no fairness between two people who do not talk with the same strength. That is obvious. The one with lesser power is clearly in the weaker position, if he is not realizing that he can't be pushed towards a behavior you want to see from him. You are going for weaker accounts than yours - that makes your actions highly questionable. Stay in your own rank.
You are out on a mission to set examples and then you want to mobilize the minnows as you realize how much work it is to talk to single people. You let them tell you their stories on which you can give thumbs up or down. You are going around and letting your ego being stroked by using the might making people their goal what is your goal? Visiting to check if they got it?
What you deceive yourself with, is being the good guy. Everyone here is corrupt. Me, you and all others. No other people than saints can be described as non-corruptive. Exactly where one does not recognize one's own corruption, it is contained as a blind spot. As long as you walk around and make others aware of their blind spots, you could want to see your own as well.
... The more I think about it the more I could call you receiving upvotes on your constant same themes about steemit, steemit, steemit, rewards, votes, user-retention, numbers and ROI's as abusive and give you downvotes.
I don't do that because I know that you even have a hard time to bear my feedback. You are good at giving downvotes but not receiving them. From life experience I'd say there is nobody who can take a red flag with dignity and not with a raging or sad heart.
I will not give you downvotes because that would be acting as if there were rules agreed upon through consensus in this realm. But there aren't. There are rules outside the Internet and there I can speak my mind and tell some rude gangs on the bus to stop violating the space of others. I have full certainty in doing that.
You enjoy your power and hopefully learn something in the long run.
I judge arguments by their logic. He gave more reasoning which didn't improve on that, and I let him be. Evil me!
Who are you to tell me I'm not a saint? That's for a future pope to decide I would say.
About poor dobartim, here's how he got my attention
https://steemit.com/poetry/@hiroyamagishi/pynz26
A witnesses posting about steem 90 times in 3.5 years is abusive? Would you prefer me to show off my daily lunch? You're hilarious.
I receive way more downvotes than anyone else you ever talked to probably. That's a side effect of fighting abusers, they retaliate. They have a lot more power than you (and me), I wouldn't even feel yours. I don't mind, I keep going.
And that's it, I'm done talking to you. Have a nice life, Karen.