Honestly, there's a lot of corruption and abuse going around on Steemit. You have to be careful when speaking up much though due to the economic architecture. Of course we all know that there is a lot of 'fake positivity' going around on Steemit. It pays better to be positive than to be negative. Worse yet, you might make enemies and if you're not wealthy enough this could ruin your existence on Steemit. Calling others out could be a dangerous thing unless you have friends who can undo any damage a corrupt user does to you.
As a small minnow you're very much in the hands of the whales out there. If they like you, you make it, if you make enemies that could ruin you.
Also, I feel like calling out others for corruption doesn't do anything. There's no enforcement obviously, so at best you can start a shouting match, but essentially it becomes more of a clickbait-post which nets a lot of money perhaps, but what actually comes of it?
Just telling others to stop doesn't quite work..
I feel like the devs have sort of abandoned fixing the big issues that plague Steem/it..
"It pays better to be positive than to be negative." Absolutely. This is probably just another example of my integrity getting in the way of my earnings.
I actually don't blame the devs, I think this is in the hands of the broader community. I actually expected to see more groups forming to counter abuse and promote good behaviour, but this is where I see the platform lagging. It's on US.
I don't really blame them, but I do think the only way to fix it is through hardcoding stricter rules, or adding some kind of new mechanic. Self-policing through downvoting leads to nothing but financial warfare and I think that it's only going to get worse as time progresses. And it's not efficient in stopping anyone from doing anything.. As long as certain loopholes exist, there's always going to be people trying to abuse it. The bigger Steemit gets, the worse it becomes. It's easy to have order in a relatively small community, but keeping order in a global community is next to impossible unless you rule with an iron fist.
I do think that solutions can be coded in though, depending on the issue. These could be anything from removing the ability to downvote/selfvote, to instating a whole new class of Witnesses with moderator rights (Steemit police?) which are voted in. But without dev intervention, the only thing that 'we' can do is to have a handful of helpful whales spend all their time downvoting abusers. And with the amount of abusers increasing and the amount of helpful whales not increasing I don't see how this can be improved without implementing better tools for moderation.
I don't think I agree. With a decentralised large community we just need decentralised structure for self-regulation. Communities are able to regulate themselves and can be any size. Then you can have communities of communities regulating themselves and so on.
I think where we are now, we have some communities and some are good and some may be struggling. What we don't have is communities of communities that help guide the communities struggling.
As soon as you start re-centralising power you are opening the door for corrupt individuals to profit.