To start off, I don't take the downvotes personal (even though they do trigger me like crazy wanting to go on a retaliation rampage just like everyone that gets downvoted) and do in a sense believe they come from a point they are done with good intentions. I also am open to change my opinion if any solid arguments are actually presented for these downvotes.
So basically I've been on Steemit for over 2 years investing in Steem because I see (saw) some potential (most at 0.80$-1$ price), powering it up growing my account now to 10k+ SP. I pretty much bet on sports for a living and have been using my blog as a tool to stay sharp during the entire season forcing myself to make previews on every single match in the Belgian League while keeping very close track of my results while also sharing the bigger bets I take. I know this is a very niche topic which to some is highly valuable while for mosts it's probably like any other post2mine content on this platform.
Why I am on STEEM
Having a blog on Steem has done great things for me. Most importantly, my betting results clearly benefitted and actually enjoy the daily writing / having a blog aspect despite the average post taking at least an hour to make. I managed to make real friends and connected to some like-minded people in the process. Recently I also started to make my content into something of a small business as the bets I'm sharing are making people money to the extent that they are willing to pay for them using the copytip platform. I guess not many people on Steemit can claim that people actually pay real money for their content. I also put up some affiliate links from the bookies I personally use and trust trying to make it all more than just about the post-earnings.
Why I Buy Upvotes
I am not always the most engaging person on Steemit (most my engagement is on Discord), I blog about a very niche topic and don't have many upvote4upvote operations going on. This makes my average post payouts quite low given the fact that I have 10k SP. Most upvotes are self-empowered and I even have my own curation project (@upvoteshares) which is helping many get some consistent upvotes. This is what the average post payouts look like 23 hours after it was posted.
The EIP and the non-linear reward curve make upvotes worth less on posts with smaller payouts which pretty much make it impossible for anyone to vote on those. Instead, it's far more profitable from a curation point of view to go for the ones you know will get a ton of upvotes. Those that do show support pretty much also get punished for it with decreased curation rewards. This makes absolutely no sense to me and buying upvotes is just a way to both thank the ones that give me support knowing they will get better curation rewards and as a reason for people to consider putting me on their auto-upvote list. Nothing more nothing less, none of the posts get even close to trending and if they did, the quality would even be far above the average there.
big downvote using their tribe upvotes as a genuine content creator who wanted some exposure) . Blindly downvoting anything that is using some kind of vote-buying is completely bonkers.I usually get my posts to somewhere between 7$ and 10$ which isn't even reaching the point to overcome the non-linear reward curve using @sportsvoter | @tipu | @steemmonsters (which got nerfed after @transcript-junky who is in our guild got bullied with a
Unless you are inside of the 'curation circle' or making posts about Steem and how great it is there is an extremely small chance to actually get curated. I've been on Steemit for 2+ years posting consistent quality content always making a custom thumbnail but none of these posts have ever fitted the curation and I don't even mind that. I always liked the idea that its possible to empower yourself on this platform and value smaller consistent upvotes way more compared to having to hope for the rare whale upvote. "Honest Curation" is also a complete fallacy on this platform especially with the non-linear reward curve and it's not scalable (I can make an entirely separate post on that).
Just as an example of how curation groups work, making an ironic post on how great #newsteem is while what is written completely destroys the new system will instantly get curated because it's looking like another post about steem and how great it is which is the pretty much the success formula.
I can also fully get behind the reply of @stimp1024 about bought upvotes and how the aren't by default bad for the platform...
Steemit no longer my Home ?
I always considered Steemit the home of my blog and have invested a massive amount of time into it also buying quite some SP all very much enjoying it in the process regardless the price of Steem. After these ridiculous downvotes, I'm not sure if this is any longer the case now as I feel totally bullied.
HF21 Dolphin Killer) and the free downvotes along with the Non-linear reward curve are making it happen right now...The sad thing is that there is not much I can do aside from making a reply to these downvotes. I wrote about how #newsteem would be a killswitch for all small to mid-size bloggers (
I appreciate that you bring up a point that, as far as I know, nobody has ever argued with, but the #newsteem team has consistently just decided to ignore: there simply aren't enough whales with a diverse set of interests to support a broad range of quality content here. Sportsbetting, even as a whole, is a great example. I don't think there's any whale who cares about sportsbetting, much less your rather niche sportsbetting. I don't think there's anyone with a meaningful vote who knows or cares much about advantage gambling at all, the largest after you probably being either me or @gank depending on how you want to count what SP is where, and I learned long ago that voting is pointless. (Gank isn't much of a voter either.)
So the whole idea of quality content being supported falls apart, or boils down to "you should really be posting about blockchain and/or libertarianism" because those are the subjects we actually have a population of voting SP that particularly and reliably cares about. The quality of your posts on those topics is irrelevant because nobody has the expertise to evaluate them.
None of this has ever been a secret, they just decided that their thing was going to work anyway because reasons.
#sbi-skip
I hear you my friend, and I've been struggling to find the motivation to write much myself. Genuine content producers at dolphin level or below are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. If you buy votes you get downvoted, but if you don't you are stuck behind the reward curve. Either way, you're not going to earn a financial reward for your effort in this climate.
That said, there aren't many better options around the place and you have a network effect here that is hard to rebuild or transfer to a new platform. I totally understand if you power down (it's what I have done) but stick around with me and lets see if this platform can get to the promised land of genuine curation. Until then, just consider it "audience building" and work on your follower count.
You pretty much summarised it perfectly @buggedout. You won't hear me complain so much about low payouts as I do well enough on Steem in general. The downvotes really are a step too far though making it nearly impossible to get anything going blogging wise. I think the only way genuine cration could work is if it came directly out of people's pockets instead of from the reward pool. Human nature pretty much runs completely against all the current model tries to achieve.
Last month I placed a bid using Steemmonsters and a day later it got downvoted. I was surprised do I decided to go further into it and see why. That was the subject of a post I did where I realized that there is a crew going around downvoting content specifically upvoted by tribe bid bots.
If you ask me, I find it incredibly selfish that OCD are taking advantage of delgated sp to go around bullying people and most recently the SCT community who have started retaliating against OCD posts.
It makes me think that the hard fork was all about killing bots. But even then I said they would adapt to the new ecosystem which they did so the only option these people have is downvoting.
Since no curation trail actually upvotes sports related content, maybe it would be a great idea to come together and build our very own. Meanwhile, delegate to bots like tipu or smartsteem and earn passively and put your time and effort into the sports community.
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Can you explain the purpose of the SCT tribe?
It is a Korean community. Just the way Steemit is an unlikely community for English speaking individuals.They have invested heavily in Steem. There is definitely some misuse of bots in that community but OCD has attacked them with blanket downvotes. The funny thing is that they cannot even discern the quality of the post because it is in a totally different language. But who cares? Downvote them just because they are using a scot bot token bid bot.
I can read and write Korean.
The Koreans are well aware of the controversy behind vote trading and buying under new steem.
Some disagree and decided they will fight back with all their steem power.
The problem with the dcot bots is that steem or sp is involved at one end, its not purely sct recieved for an sct vote (a little sp for rc is needed but 100 is probably more than enough, they have millions) which may be acceptable to more steem users since it would barely influence steem price.
I don't think understanding Korean is necessary to see what is going on. If a post is wrongly flagged for bit bot abuse or being over rewarded, the person flagged should ask for clarification. A few members of the community can use English and so far they have chosen to revenge downvote.
It is not a disagreement over sigle posts, it is a disagreement over how Steem should move forward. Is vote trading and buying acceptable?
Some people are starting to think the only way to solve this is to eliminate the reward pool entirely so only scot tokens or smts may have it. Until then the disagreement will continue.
On the scot bots I partially agree since I can see how that can be detrimental to the price of Steem. In the same breath I recognise that most minnows and dolphins are moving over to condensers because curation over on Steemit is practically non existent unless you are in a particular inner circle.
I have been curated twice by the people at smartsteem on non-sport related content. However, like costanza I prefer talking about sports and you never get curated for such content hence the need for the bots.
I am sure if he never used the scot bots he wouldn't have been downvoted. But if he did not use the other bots as well, how will he compete for less than a handfull of manual curators in a sea of minnows and dolphins?
Is vote trading or buying acceptable? Probably not but it cannot be eliminated. I would even go as far as to say that using automated voters is just as bad or even worse.
How many of us have our friends on autovoters? Do we even care if they are posting quality posts?
Where do we draw the line?
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Gaming curation by auto voting doesn't remove any more rewards from the reward pool than regular voting. Whether you get 200% curation efficiency or 20%, your vote removed the same amount of rewards from the reward pool. It just messes with other people who are voting on that same post and they have a choice to vote on that post or not.
Autovoting is only a serious problem if it is trading back and forth with the same people automatically.
Most of the people using auto voters are just slightly gaming curation or doing it for their convenience. In the grand scheme of things, it is not a problem at all. I hope this clears things up.
This is where we are losing each other. The vote amount is not what is in question but the post itself. Automatic votes means that the account owners are not actually going around looking for new content to support and neither are they evaluating the content they are autovoting. Everybody is entitled to do whatever they want with their upvotes though.
Here is an example. Blocktrades had to downvote their own post because it was a duplicate. But look at the number of upvotes. All that is happening because there is no actual curation happening.
My problem is when these individuals go around downvoting people who promote their content with bid bots, which is not profitable if you are bidding the right way as I would call it. They intimate that you should post good content and hope to get upvoted. But how many accounts are actively manually curating the thousands of post daily?
Are minnows meant to wait for scraps or can't we promote our content at our own expense for visibility?
Just like costanza wrote, we are slowly killing off minnows and low level dolphins and that is slowly reflecting in the price of steem.
Posted using Partiko Android
Top replies.
It seems sad they are no longer just targeting shitposts and people who are buying excessively to get onto the trending pages. I think their current approach is harmful to steem (and is targeting people, like you and I, who have invested in steem.) They now appear to be on an almost religious/fanatical/fascistic mission to change steem, and to force everyone to comply with their vision of "NewSteem". This is dangerous.
Will they target @actifit upvotes next? What about the exchange of @partiko points for steem upvotes?
I too, after investing two years and a considerable, amount of my own fiat, have considered leaving.
But I will not be bullied.
The price of steem is not affected directly by the use of bidbots. It is what people use the steem they earn for that is important.
Let's see if they downvote that.I decided that for every "Cease and Desist" message and downvote I will give one of their posts an upvote by converting my SPORTS tokens into STEEM by using @sportsvoter.
Smart thinking, there are so many inconsistencies in their crusade it's just insane. This post also got supported by a friend with a buildawhale upvote, is that also not allowed. While their post getting upvoted by sportsvoter probably is.
I guess they will have to kill the Actifit project targetting the AFIT to STEEM conversion upvotes. They likely won't do that though. All this looks like is big accounts wanting to earn more using their free whale downvotes to nuke smaller accounts to make it go back into the rewards pool of which most of it flows back to them. The sad thing is that it's a lose-lose situation because making it impossible to get anything going for new people on this platform (unless you are in the curation circle) along with no reason for passive investors to get a return on an inflating coin. What reason is there left to buy and power up Steem I really wonder ?
We'll see what happens next. I have a feeling there is going to be a backlash. There are a lot of people who think they are going too far. They haven't replied to my questions about Actifit and how that is different to Sportsvoter. I am just waiting for their next move I have responses planned. I think I'm going to have some fun!
They will eventually downvote everything, until they get to the point where all they can downvote is each other, and then they will eat themselves, because they convinced themselves so thoroughly that #newsteem would bring value to the platform that they cannot bear stopping until it does.
Since the mechanism for that to happen is imaginary, they're going to be at it for a while.
Steem might become usable again once they're done, who knows.
#sbi-skip
I am struck by the fact that this dilemma is caused by the underlying monetization by whales of social interactions of ordinary folks. Presently this causes EIP to create the returns wasteland below ~$20, which seems to be the threshold whales find nominal to financially encourage extracting rewards by using the weight of their stake. It's why you need to use purchased votes in order to get a nominal financial return, and why user retention is dismal.
Most folks don't have substantial stake, and don't get curated by whales manipulating the rewards algorithms to extract the pool to their wallets, so have no financial incentive to be here. This may be the worst financial algorithm Steem has suffered since it's inception in that regard, as you point out.
Social media is THE most profitable business model in the world today, as the FAANGs prove. Steem is doing it wrong, despite most of the code being intended to do it right, because the ninjaminers personally seek to get rich and were not seasoned investors when they wrote the code. That ninjamined stake is a golden parachute they will ride away on when investors buy it, and they appear to no longer care what happens to Steem thereafter.
This is actually the most charitable view I can take of the situation, and it would be easy to claim that the aspects of the code that potentiate Steem to serve as a basis for volutarist government were little more than a fraudulent ruse to attract rubes that would buy the ninjamine and fill those golden parachutes. I am not actually confident so little ethical purpose actually underlies Steem, but the ninjamine sure makes it look that way.
Sadly for you, and your initial interest in Steem, profiteering from stake weighting is the underlying problem that prevents Steem from growing a market that enable the token price to rise. Steem has a vast potential market of folks that see the truth that centralized social media platforms exclusively profit from their posts and comments, want to speak freely, and that can see the value of discussion of issues and policies on a decentralized platform that inherently enables projects to be funded. Were their posts actually organically valued by virtue of their merit by their peers the user base would be growing virally, and the rising price of Steem would provide far better ROI to investors were they content with capital gains as the mechanism for their profits.
The extraction of those rewards incessantly by profiteers discourages them, and the dust threshold prevents newbs from getting rewards at all almost ubiquitously while preventing capital gains.
Separating the functional aspects of Steem would be a reasonable compromise, but that would reduce the ROI of the ninjaminers, and will not happen. Profiteering could be eliminated almost completely via the Huey Long algorithm, but that will not happen for the same reason. Were you able to build audience via your posts, and develop a market through Steem for income from your sports related mechanisms separately from your author rewards, that might make it worth your while to have enough Steem to blog and upvote your followers, but the rewards curve and dust limit make that impossible, and the vote buying solution that has arisen is now being destroyed by flaggots.
It's sad, but it is apparent that the ninjaminers are so focused on their own ROI that they are killing the goose that lays golden eggs. It's happening more slowly than I predicted would result from HF21, but as long as the user base continues to decline, it's happening all the same. I am only consoled by the fact that no one at all cares about my disappointment, and it only has meaning to me. I wish I could help, but all I can do is acknowledge that you are left without good options regarding Steem.
A couple dozen whales can't curate at scale, and are unwilling to decline to maximize their ROI nominally to allow the potential community to do it for them. The slope continues to get more slippery with every Hard Fork, and we are left feeling like we should have been liquored up, lubricated, and loved before getting forked so hard.
100% agree
The thing that really grates on my last nerve about this situation is that the whale's ROI is improving - in Steem. It's crashing in dollars or other currencies because they're crashing the price of Steem. If they'd back off the rapine and focus on growing the social media as strongly as possible, they'd get a rapidly rising token price resulting from viral social media growth, and they'd make a lot more real money when they cash out. They're stuck pulling tokens off of exchanges presently to try to keep the price from crashing now or at least that's how it looks based on the Poloniex delisting.
They're making lunch money and losing lambo money.
Lmao last line
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Well, I feel I should be loved and lubricated every night, but usually I just get so liquored up I can't even manage a soft fork with any dignity.
Here is some !BEER to start the evening :)
LOL fair do!
View or trade
BEER.BEERfor you. Enjoy it! Hey @valued-customer, here is a little bit ofWell said, sir!
Liquor, lubricants and a few choice words before each hard forking would be much appreciated.
I have to restrain myself from issuing comments full of choice words after HF21, or seeing serial flagging like it seems to be designed to encourage.
You're the third person today that I'm really upset to see having really negative experiences with this new downvoting trend! I commented on a very similar post from @felt.buzz earlier. I feel like you both are very respected bloggers and bring a lot to the community. I wish that people would see the whole of someone's behavior before making a downvote based on one action. I've been lucky enough to get curated well since the fork, but it makes me question my dedication to the platform when people who have been just as dedicated as I have (if not more) are feeling bullied.
Posted using Partiko Android
Well, things are the way they are. It was only a matter of time before the free downvoters were going to cause a way more toxic environment. They started out properly targetting shitpost that were botted into trending along with pure farming. They are not tickling down to fighting every kind of bid bot. What's next? nuking anyone who dares to do a withdraw. I am glad you are doing great with the new system! Keep it up and thanks for the support.
THIS
Is the next logical step for them and I have been sick since I came here of hearing the 'hodl' snobs telling us to buy and hold. Where's the real-world use case of Steem if no one uses it in the real world?
If the fucking bid bot owners had done a decent job of stopping shit posts on their bots in the first place (off which the bid bot owners made a fortune in profits), we wouldn't have this current problem.
#newsteem is nothing more than old bessie mate members taking care of each other.
It's refreshing to see an opinion in support of downvoting that isn't purely based on greed or trying to promote some scheme. It gives me a different perspective that's worth thinking about.
I'm still getting decent rewards from posts that aren't about Steem. Maybe I'm in one of these curation circles? I normally blog about my life and most of my upvotes are random trails or curation projects.
To be honest I don't think the people you tagged will stop downvoting bid bots. They are after vote trading next.
I can't see why they wouldn't allow someome to create a tribe bidbot that is purely centered around those tokens and only accepts and votes in those tokens. The issue with tribe bidbots is they were taking Steem in exchange which seemed wrong.
The issue with bidding on Steem is everyone uses it amd they had three years to fix things with bid bots and vote selling and trading, but the price kept declining. I say we give it at least a year before concluding this destroyed Steem. In the meantime, it will be sad to see some people who were honest, but still affected like you go.
I think you should just lower your rOI expectations for awhile until you find a new niche that works.
If a tribe bot just has like 100sp to get sufficient RC for accepting and bidding in its tokens only, I'm sure no one will bother it.
I don't really agree with much of what you said here but this:
It would be nice if you folks stopped spreading that myth. My highest curation rewards come from posts I vote late on, without knowing if the post will do well after my vote, and many of them have low rewards when I vote.
That's how it is for me all the time. My biggest rewards come from taking a gamble. Honest curation is a thing. You don't need to be in some kind of a circle either. You don't need to post butt kissery. All this whining is annoying.
Why are you buying something that is free? I've been here three years, never purchased a vote. What for? That does nothing.
Upvotes are worth less on small posts. 100% on this one gives 0.08$ (on higher voting Power) 100% upvote on a big post adds 0.13$...
I agree with this! Math is math. Even so, I vote for a lot of people who never break the reward curve so I know I'm losing to the maximizers in the long run despite a few lucky curation picks here and there. Hope you don't leave steem though because serious sports gamblers here are a rare breed.
I know that, but if the post is worthwhile and you're curating honestly, there's a strong chance that vote value goes up, once more votes come in, if they do. The low value initially isn't permanent, unless nobody else was interested.
If nobody else comes along, that producer still gets more than nothing, which is why I think it's bad form to discourage people from voting with that myth you're promoting.
Congratulations, you are the worst curator on the platform in terms of gaining rewards! And I mean that honestly, it used to be me, I put a lot of effort into it, and I was really proud of it. It means your votes are going to authors they can really benefit, albeit less so than it did before hf20.
What it doesn't mean is that because your personal curation rewards happen to be reversed from the way the general math works, that the entire general math is a myth. Votes do mean more, and earn more, on posts that are voted highly. In many cases late votes on highly-rewarded posts reward more than early votes on low-rewarded posts. This is the nature of the "convergent linear" system, and your personal experience with voting on a few posts doesn't falsify it.
#sbi-skip
I just vote. I don't really care what happens. Showing my support to whoever, whenever. If things go well, they go well. If it's good for them, it's good for me. If it's not good for them, at least I tried, can't win them all.
Yes, I realize if I place my vote down on a post with high rewards, my vote gives more, or whatever you're saying.
In the past you've been kind of a jerk to me so I'm not sure if you're talking to me just to be a dick again... or what. Regardless, have a nice day.
Hi @costanza
As much as I don’t like seeing producers of decent and original content receiving downvotes, I have to agree with what abitcoinsceptic is saying.
The years of being paid to promote your own content have not been good for token price, or holding onto accounts that have not wanted to join the race to zero.
The ridiculous return for delegating stake to a bidbot and therefore ‘being paid to look away’ has to end and investors should be happy with the yearly 10/20% curation returns on voting for what they really want to vote on.
Buying votes with tribe tokens to promote your post outside of that ecosystem makes no sense to me - surely this vote needs to land as a local token vote? I don’t look at sportstalksocial content via sport related tags on steemit.com
Back to sleep, cheers.
The entire "all bid bots / tribe bots are bad and must be downvoted" idea is just extremely inconsistent. How about AFIT to STEEM conversions, those must be nuked aswel pretty much killing the Actifit project. Also the entire idea is based on a premise where honest curation can be something that works with this system. You know good that a vast minority is willing to power up and browse through all the garbage 'pos2mine' to find a hidden gem to curate it. Steemit is much more find like-minded people to connect with and support each other. With the non-linear reward curve this is pretty much allowed for whales but not for smaller mid-sized users because votes are worth less on less popular posts which makes no sense.
Also, manual curation groups are not scalable and it's clear that they aren't even reading posts but just upvoting the ones who are inside the circle or writing how great steem is. (See Ironical Post).
I agree with stimp1024 (see below) who is an investor himself on the fact that there is a need for something that gives passive investors a reason to invest and get a return as steem has a big inflation. This war of ocd is just crazy, I fully agree that there should be some rules in place but this is really getting extreme and also begs the question where to draw the line.
For big accounts this is all great because all downvotes basically flow back to them along with the fact that it's more profitable to auto-vote those posts. New and smaller accounts are just completely left for dead.
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It would be good to see you more on sportstalk. Im a gambler myself and like reading posts about betting
I'm still struggling a bit with sportstalk, it seems a bit slower to me and the fact that it's needed to have separate voting accounts really makes everything overly complicated. I have steemauto running on it but votes don't seem to be coming through consistently. I'll see if I can sort everything out and mabye start using it as my main steem interface.
@tipU voting service + profit sharing tokens | For investors.This post is supported by @tipU upvote funded by @beat-the-bookies :)
Steem is infrastructure - go for the wordpress blog, I personally am setting up wordpress as a service for people.
Then steem is an addon. We can easily port the good comments back to wordpress, and stay in touch with our friends. If the nickels from steem pay the hosting costs, we are golden - and free to grow in the most prudent direction for each person/blog/business.
Hi @costanza!
Your UA account score is currently 3.992 which ranks you at #4073 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has not changed in the last three days.Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 92 contributions, your post is ranked at #38.
Evaluation of your UA score:
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server