The Heck is going on with Steem?
From a community standpoint and the way things work here, Steem was never a perfect place even if the technology is working perfectly, it’s a finished product, but the community still has issues. We have a lot of people investing their time, the most crucial resource, into building communities, helping others and just having genuine conversations with people for fucking nothing but they are outshined by those powerful ones that handle the money.
If you take a look at the Trending page right now it’s filled with shit, anyone that has even a bit of common sense will realize that many of those posts are overvalued and not deserving to be there and even more than that, some don’t deserve a dollar. Of course, the quality of a post is subjective, but I think we can all conclude to the fact that some posts are just not worthy enough of their rewards.
Disclaimer: This is just a rant, I have no idea what I’m talking about, do your research.
I wanted to make this post for a while, and with the latest things happening in this space, I realized that it is about time. I truly hope that @BernieSanders after writing this post will start flagging more trash because, for fuck sake, nobody deserves that many rewards for contributing with nothing through their post.
The BidBots
I think we can all agree on the fact that the upvote-selling bots are cancer for the platform because a dollar bought by someone else on their posts it’s a dollar less for another person since the money is being taken from a common reward pool. It is a zero-sum game; if someone abuses the reward pool the whole platform suffers to some extent, it’s a bigger deal than you may think.
I bet that when @Dan designed this platform, he didn’t visualize people buying/selling upvotes because the whole fucking idea of Steem was that people are rewarding other people through upvotes if they find value in the content they provide. But if even one person is buying votes, then the whole system is rigged because it is not organic anymore.
Of course, I’m not that naive to think that this whole issue will end at some point, the bots may remain here forever, we won’t be able to kill them. The best for everybody it would be if someone would create a bot that rewards quality content and it’s run by humans. But, we’re still far from that.
Coming back to reality, as @Steeminator3000 said, the whole fucking Trending page is for sale and that is damn sad and all that is thanks to the people powering up the bots. But of course, they don’t mind the fact that they are hurting the platform as long as they get their buck and everybody else is doing that; it slowly becomes the norm.
But the bots are not directly the issue they are the symptom of a rigged system since many minnows and dolphins can’t earn shit if they are not using the bots thus that’s their only option. Sometimes I don’t even blame them since many whales decide to keep the VP for circlejerking instead of helping the overall community, but almost no post is worth fucking $800+ especially if most votes are bought.
The (Lack of) Flagging
Flagging is not an issue, but the lack of flagging on this platform is a big issue because when people are posting worthless shit and are getting paid for it, they are getting paid from the money that someone who’s helping the community could receive, from your potential money.
The whole purpose of the flag button is to take away the rewards from shitposts since there’s no central entity on the blockchain that can delete a specific abuse post. Flagging is very healthy for the whole community because the money removed from the posts go back to the reward pool and are eventually spread to more deserving people.
In fact, there’s an interesting experiment started by @abit that I know of from @exyle, that you can read more about here but the idea is that if whales started flagging instead of voting, the minnows and dolphins would have a significant influence on the platform. What I took out from there? If people start flagging more, everybody else wins. I was chatting a bit about the experiment with @whatsup, and she said that it was one of the most peaceful times she experienced on Steem and that even the minnows had influence, an opinion shared by @exyle too.
Source
But of course, why would people flag and earn nothing when they could just upvote and earn rewards either through curation or post rewards, so there needs to be a separate VP for flagging, you can read more about this idea initiated by @Transisto here.
In a utopian world, there would be no need for flagging since no one would be abusing the platform and be posting worthless crap but we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where people are abusing the reward pool in all sorts of ways, and the flagging is a much-needed action.
Conclusion
The overall idea, I think we need more people to start flagging the crap, it’s healthy for everybody especially if the content flagged is only upvoted by bots and is complete crap. Nobody deserves an $800 post, besides maybe the big projects that help the community. Most issues Steem has are from a community point of view, and that is because people are people, people like instant gratification, they think are entitled to huge payouts and forget to think long term.
Many people are looking forward to @Dan’s new social media platform based on EOS thinking it will solve all the problems and as far as I know, it may solve a lot of stuff, but I’m afraid that people will fuck it up regardless. Anyway, this whole ecosystem is still new, and it has to grow up, to mature and I still think we have a long way until we get there but in five years we’ll all be looking back at this moment laughing, hopefully.
I have no idea if Steem will be like MySpace and EOS like Facebook, or the other way around, or both succeeding but one thing is certain, this thing still has issues, and we need to fix them. Hopefully, more will start taking action and stop pretending that everything is fine because it's not.
the problem is the nature of capital, not people themselves. Capital accumulation will simply find the most destructive person to lead the group.
Yeah, Capital, In-and-For-Itself, has its own self-consciousness that recognizes only those other self-consciousness that are willing to propagate its spread, increase its dominance and help defend it from those that wish to end its consciousness. It cares little of moralism, national pride and will of the people, the tyranny of capital will always favor those who help it (the ruling class being the bourgeoisie), but it doesn't care for the factionalism and sectionalism inside the bourgeois class who bicker amongst themselves to fight for the spoils generated in their ruling.
Absolutely agree, bid bots are the worst part about steemit right now, but how do we get rid of them. The separate flag power is not a bad idea, but we might see some massive flag wars if that happened. Who knows though, maybe it would work out.
There are only a few things keeping steemit from taking off:
Other than that I feel like the experience is really great and natural feeling.
The trending page sucks, and I feel like very few people who have been here more than a month use it, but when new people show up and see what terrible posts are making money it's a bad look. We need some whales to step up until we have new solutions. If you've got over a million dollars worth of steem do you really need to keep stacking? If anything the value steem gains from being amazing after we work through this BS will be more than worth it.
The bid bot dilemma continues to baffle me, there has to be a good solution, I think this is the main thing that needs to be worked on right now
Fortunately the issues you've mentioned are on the front-end Steemit level, not the Steem blockchain level. This means that even if Steemit doesn't fix these issues, the blockchain will live on and another Steem front-end service with a different curation model could take over.
Excellent point, but it also means steemit, if it stays in tact, will remain abuse-able on some level. People could still use this front end to vote themselves with voting bots. At least it seems that way, maybe it wouldn't be enough if everyone moved to a new front end.
Steemit is just a website, a door for the blockchain; it has nothing to do with the issues mentioned above. Steemit could disappear over-night, and the issues would remain the same, people can still access the blockchain through @busy.org or one of the other countless apps.
Steemit has no issue and nor Steem, from a technical point of view, the issues are at the level of the community and how they decide to act on the blockchain.
Yes, ultimately the problem are pesky humans ! :-)
Precisely what the followers of Marx and lening have discovered in their quest to build Communism, the workers' paradise !
They've discovered that humans are cheating weasels who, if an avenue for abuse is left open, will use it to perform abuse !
They discovered that humans do not in any reliable way "give according to their ability and take according to their needs" but rather tend to "give as little as they can get away with and take as much as they can get away with".
"Sad but true" (c) Metallica 1991
Could a new front end use different rules? I know steemit is close to rule free, but I'm guessing(not sure) some other front end could either introduce something to beat out bid bots or ban them(which would mean centralization in some form...)
Interesting, but isn't that just because Steemit encourages such behaviour because Capital is still privately owned?
👆
I am not sure, to be honest, I think that having a separate VP for flagging would not create that much chaos. Like with guns, people are not murdering each other every day because they can, they just keep the guns for self-protection. It would be interesting to see more flagging.
I think out of the problems you mentioned; the biggest one is the lack of support for newbies. I used to say that anybody should work for six months until they can complain but that's not enough. I know plenty of quality and persistent people that are still not earning much, and it's damn sad. Nobody wants to work for free for a huge period, once this issue is fixed, Steem is ready for mass adaption.
This is an interesting post that brings many good points, as @heimindanger said, whales should try to tighten the belts of the bot users, obligating the bots to change.
Ya, I just read that post, really cool idea, and if the flagging vp was introduced it would destroy bid bot abuse, I wonder how it would affect total payouts. Either way we need to try some things out during beta, I think the flag VP is a great idea for testing, I feel most users are honest and would downvote crap while leaving the good stuff intact. Some of these posts making bank are ridiculously worthless
Thanks for takin time and writing this we need more people like you working to make this place functioning
No problem, I really want this place to turn out great, there are a few things I dislike, but overall I see this type of platform as the future. What would really be amazing is a partnership with Medium, which might need a write-up to brainstorm the possibilities...
It won't let me upvote for some reason, reply and I'll remember
A lot of great points - BUT - flagging is being used for straight out censorship by people like vaxxers, zionists, libtards and vegans.
When there is a real circle jerk issue flagging does nothing at all.
Flagging could turn Steeemit into youtub...
It is true that lack of the obvious incentive is deters many from using the downvote button as intended but, we know of course, there are broader incentives that just aren't as apparent to most for example geneal post quality on the platform and the implications thereof.
I pitched the idea of a community flag incentivization project to @timcliff on his "Make Downvoting Great Again" post and @steemflagrewards was born.
Now, I am not one to buy votes so it's not suprisingly that not a whole lot of people know about this but we are growing. I've also started the @flagawhale project which is heavily engaged in helping to recover rewards from the collusive voting abuser Haejin.
To put it short, we pay for downvotes on abuse using Python scripts but much more. I believe we have made a significant impact in making downvoting more interesting with our rank systems.
What's missing? Community support is critical and wider knowledge of the projects would go a long way. My intent is for these projects to operate as flag force multipliers for the community and to grant the lay user ability to leverage out system once we develop the app.
@guyfawkes4-20
It would mean a lot if you look into what we are doing. We have discord, a few bots, and a passionate core moderation community and a LOT of room for growth.
You are right, using the voting bot has become the norm, even then, if you post at the wrong time or don't put too much effort into your post then you just wasted your money and will book a loss in the meantime. If there was a better way to go about things then people will use that option.
Btw what movie is that scene from? The blue guy blowing up the regular guy.
Watchmen. A wild film, that I recommend too. 👊🏾
Based on a great graphic novel btw. Written by Alan Moore who is an actual wizard, so I highly recommend it. He also wrote V for Vendetta, which seems fitting to point out.
Humans are greedy by nature. They want everything to themselves, they want it now and still come back for more.
Flagging is definitely the most obvious flaw of steemit. Before flagging can work in the system, then everybody's flagging has to be equal and seperated from voting power. I mean you can't really expect a minnow of less than 500 SP to flag a whale of over 100,000 SP.
That will be the end of his steemit. Flagging as it is like giving power to some people to do as they like. Even if they are abusing the system, not many people have the power to call their blunt...so what's the need?
I have seen a whale used derogatory words for a group of people on a chatting app. You know why he can do that? Their combined is probably not up to half of his own and they can't try shit with him.
Even if we don't have the same investment, we should have the same power to decide what is good or bad for the platform.
Yes, the abuse of power is a big problem but not all whales are like that, and if someone's doing bad shit, the other guys can just step in as it happened before. I don't think giving everybody the same flagging power is the solution both because then anyone could create multiple accounts for flagging since they wouldn't have to invest anything extra and because most minnows still have no idea what's going on around here.
That's a great idea, separating flagging power from Vests.
Couldn't agree more. But the core problem is that if upvotes are so easy to turn into real money (delegation to bots, selling votes), then upvoting good content feels like spending money, similar to putting money into the hat of a street artist. This is fine if you are taking about little money, but every millionaire/whale will prefer to keep most of the money that his upvotes are worth for himself.
The only way to keep bots away would be if a strong VP account flagged away every bot vote, but then you still have the problem of the whale circlejerk. I really want to believe in Steemit, but sometimes I think that Steemit just can't work as it was designed due to the inevitable human egoism. EOS or any other platform couldn't change this core problem.
Yes, I agree, that's a huge problem. The whales could make enough just from Curation Rewards and Post Rewards, but of course, it's human nature always to want more. They are making just decent money that way, the norm in the real world is 10% ROI per year, but their investment is already making more, has already paid them back tremendously.
One strong account is not enough, we need many more to join, but that's a hard task.
Steemit Inc would have enough SP to do that. But then there are talks about how bots are good for attracting investors, which is true. But we have to ask ourselves if attracting more investors is worth destroying this platform.
Indeed, Steemit has enough SP, but as @Ned said at SF2, he doesn't want to get involved, so people don't think he has favorites, so I don't think there's too much hope to see any flagging from their side.
It's sad when the investors hurt the community through their practices because they would not earn anything without the community.
There will for sure by no flagging by Steemit Inc (I mean, c'mon, Ned doesn't want to play favourites but then he decides to delegate to dMania instead of to a curation project?). And no witness could ever become a top20 witness without the support of huge vote sellers like freedom, so the Steemit oligarchs won't change the system - the only way would be to start a revolution, but historically we know where that would end!
Well, I have staked my ground, my stake, my reputation and my rewards on this for months now... The only result has been my rewards are suffering. No noticeable changes otherwise.
Ditto.
My rep hasnt moved in months and i never did get much in rewards because just after i got here curie began rewarding asskissers and ignoring dissent while taking from the rewards i did get by their advantage in the math using @ned's posting key. (Whale votes take from every other vote.)
All while voting themselves hundreds of dollars on crap posts.
If you disagree with tptb you can forget being rewarded on steemit, they only circle jerk the sycophants.
Bring back the n(something) and the whale experiment at 100mv!
Not sure if the n2 will help anymore or make it worse considering who is now 'up there'. Wouldn't mind the whale experiment being applied to the whale bots.
Vote selling wasnt a thing with the n2 and dan, it wasnt until he was forced out that that started.
Now the 'good' whales just need to down vote the bs until we can reverse that fork.
But i dont see it happening, the folks with enough stake to force the change knew what they were doing, and did it anyways.
It was the introduction of delegation and beneficiaries at the same time as straightening the line that made it possible i think.
Yes,delegation allowed idle whale sp to vote on the favored few to the detriment of all minnows.
Linear rewards made choosing popular material irrelevant, self voting paid just as well, and voila!
A trending page full of crap and reward raping whales. Roi, ya know?
@dan had already been through this once, its how the n2 came to be in the first place.
So, the folks that ousted dan wanted things this way, it favors the wealthy at the expense of the minnows.
You know, just good crapitalism.
I think that the anarchist / volantarist preachings here are much like those of catholic priests who have a thing for the alter boys, hypocritical at best, harmful to the innocent entrusted to them at worst.
Yeah, I know the feeling but we can still hope for better days, and I do think they are coming. :)
Most of the vote bot power is owned by @freedom.
https://steemit.com/busy/@fow/freedom-original-steem-miner-is-a-major-vote-bot-investor
Agreed mate, that's why I don't post any more. Countless hours go into posts and I see one dude post pic of a plane, no commentary, just a plane. And it was a nice plane, if you like old planes, I guess. It had over $80. Check out his blog and its the same everyday and sometimes, 2 or 3 times a day, hitting anywhere between $70-$140. Just ridiculous.
Stop playing the comparison game. Do your hard and smart work and you will do well in the long run.
Yes, I know the feeling, it fucking sucks. The worst part is when known users start doing the same shit; it's just sad. Steem still has a lot of potential so you shouldn't give up on posting entirely, even if I know how frustrating that feels.
I somewhat agree with your post here.
I don't necessarily believe voting bots are a negative thing; they do contribute to the overall ecosystem here on Steemit.
As someone with <500 Steem, I've worked towards my balance through writing, and delegating my Steem power to such bots; the amount I've made from general curation is miniscule in comparison. The bots really do help a lot of smaller people build their Steem on the side.
I definitely agree that the trending and hot posts are mostly undeserving of their rewards. There's a plethora of pure shit that ends up on there, mostly dumb drama and overvalued meme posts. That's once again where bots do help smaller people, when so much of the good content gets unnoticed.
It's worth noting that I've attempted to constantly curate tags, upvoting content and flagging those who are leeching via stolen content.
The bots in the form we know them, are doing more bad to the platform than good. Besides the fact that the posts with bought votes are outshining the posts with organic votes, which means that you either pay to play, or you're left behind, all the rewards are coming from the same reward pool. So, if someone's buying, it means that there are fewer rewards for the organic posts.
Yeah, curation and flagging is not an easy job regardless of your SP.
I don't know, I guess I have a little bias towards upvote bots given I've used them in the past to reward posts of others that I felt deserved much more than they were getting.
I think Steemit in its current state is mostly pay to play, rather than a more balanced approach. You either make your way up from nothing, or pay up for the Steem Power.
It's definitely not great, and I do believe a few changes should be made to balance things out for smaller users a bit more.
"The best for everybody it would be if someone would create a bot that rewards quality content and it’s run by humans. But, we’re still far from that."
I think that this is what gonna make the difference, if voting services can evolve from shitty content pushers to supporters of only quality content, then they can be an important part of the future of Steemit.
I agree with your post except for the idea that "no one deserves and $800 post." If you're a rockstar and post gold content that gives people orgasms just from reading it, then by all means the free market should provide you with enough upvotes/power to earn your $800, but obviously the $800 posts of today are mainly paid for by bot services.
Hello @guyfawkes4-20, nice to Steem you! :-) I essentially share your point of view.
Ah, regarding your wish: "The best for everybody it would be if someone would create a bot that rewards quality content and it’s run by humans. But, we’re still far from that", actually there's at least ONE community-managed and altruistic-oriented bid bot, the one engineered by the Spanish-speaking @reveur community and its main promotor, @nnnarvaez. As far as I know, it has worked for some time and met a couple of issues, but it'd be worthy to study it closely :-)
Yes, but that one is for a community, is not what I had in mind, but it sounds like a cool project.
In my opinion, each vote should have the same value. That will place everyone on equal footing. As it is now, where vote value is relative to your "wealth", it's a system designed to benefit the rich.
It's the same with flagging. Flag strength is relative to wealth. So it's pointless for guys like me to flag the "rich". My flag will serve no purpose other than to piss off some rich user who can then turn around and destroy me.
As long as the system gives power only to the rich, only the rich can sort out the issues here.
While the issue with the voting bots is the lack of correction from flags, I’m still not incentivized — not that I require it — or monetized enough to even dole out any flags. Although I detest spammy comments on my posts and I address those heartily.
fantastic post !!! i could not say it in a better way !!! i am new here on steemit but know how it works so i totally agree about bots and obviously about the flagging since i am seeing a lot of shit posts out there !! keep it up !!
Bots, bots and again bots!!!
It's simple it's all about human nature and the main bad thing behind it... GREED!!!
I notice so many shit blogs making so much and really amazing blogs doing almost nothing...
Same like in my case i worked like 5 hours for my last blog and only few real votes.. i am not complaining but i notice that Steemit becames more and more a playgroud where people buy a lot of Steem Power and then just do whatever!
I just hope that maybe one day quality posts will rule and honest to be all that we have to do till then is Steem On!
Flagging should be rewarded as well?
This is so right. Issues has to be fixed and changes has to be made for a better community.
I wonder if I am the only one that finds more valuable content in the hot section as opposed to trending.
As for upvote bots. They are fucking everywhere. I really don't know how this will work in the long run but it will probably not be that good for Steemit.
Werd. I'm sleepy right now, and just wanted to say I agree with you.
@steemit has more than enough power to do all those that were mentioned.
I agree, I hate the voting bots on Steem. But it's like buying Twitter followers, it won't go away.
Minnows and Dolphins are slowly getting more support from initiatives like @sndbox and @minnowsupport. These initiatives help surface out young authors' content.
Also Steemit's curation model itself could be flawed because of pages like Trending. Another Steem front-end service like Busy or insert Steem project here could use a different curation model which could rotate out new content.
I couldn't describe it better myself - but that's pretty much what i've been feeling all along.
A new user comes along and their vote is worth less than a cent - and their content is never seen regardless of how good it is. So how is somebody supposed to grow here?
I do agree that flagging is probably a way of defeating the problem. But it needs to be done responsibly.
ie. if a post has $100 of rewards on a crap vote - flag the post so that it has $5 or so left over. That will hurt the hip pocket of the poster who purchased votes and they might only buy $20 votes next time, or the voting circle jerk might be harmed.
the platform needs to find an equilibrium. a better one anyway.
There's no way to survive here without bots tho. After posting quality content for 3-4 months and barely get a single comment (never mind a penny), I get lonely and sad lol. I'm glad we got minnowbooster. On the other hand, downflagging is a whale/dolphin game. There's no way I'm going to disagree with anybody on here because they'll just revenge downvote you smh. I came here to get away from capitalism and now we're here.
well there's a few different issues you've touched on there.
you do however end up with all the "good post" comments, which is just crap.
downvote censorship - disagree with a whale, or offend them in some way with your opinion, then you're at risk of that whale taking action with their downvotes and ruining your account rep. A whale can be very offensive and if their holding is big enough, they'll get very little resistance (i posted about this exact topic a week or so ago)
The relationship between voting power and SP - It's one of the core components of steem - and i think it needs to be adjusted. For example - if somebody holds 1000SP - which is not a huge amount by the grand scheme of things, it will take 65 votes with the minimum 15SP delegated to new accounts to equal that one vote. Technically i'm not even a minnow yet and it still takes probably 20 new accounts to equal my 1 vote. So how about people with 10k or 20k SP? is their opinion worth that of 1300 new accounts? or is a 20k SP holder's opinion worth the opinion of 65 people that have been around for a few months and hold 300SP? I'm not against the concept of higher SP resulting in higher voting power, but I believe that somehow the SP - VP return should be diminishing.. I do know that would cause other issues however, ie. the lack of incentive for big money to come into STEEM which would affect the price.
It's a tough formula to get right..
People really need to flag I think less than 10% flag! I know their is a huge community for flagging haejin
Shit I wish i could flag - but i don't have enough SP ;(
I'm getting close though
i believe, im getting to the whole idea of flagging. I love reading these articles. I am getting enlightenment. I admit I was really against flagging before but through these articles, now I know the importance of it.
Thanks a lot @guyfawkes4-20
Yeah, glad to hear that it helped you. The flagging is part of this ecosystem as much as the upvoting; people have to use it more.
This is so ironic for us in the sense that even though in crypto we are seeking for decentralized governance and content publication without using centralized interface we have @Dan and @BernieSanders. Not an huge upgrade. We need to come together as a community and have voting done by the people who are on the platform or off the platform supporting and trying to make it a better place. Being decentralized doesn't mean there is Anarchy all around like the place is fucking Mad Max we still need the people who have actual knowledge to vote on some essentails because the reward pool is fucking us and all these bots are fucking us. I hope we can create a way of having a free system which also has a way of protecting the pools and getting rid of bots or worst case minimizing their impact because the only reason people are upvoting is a few bucks.
For example this post seems like there was so much effort put in compared to other shitty one letter posts that make 500 dollars. Really bothers me.
I agree with points above. I feel pressured to use bots not necessarily for the upvote but just to get seen! I’ll create an image and it gets 100+ likes on Instagram and maybe 15 VIEWS here on steemit and I have included behind the scenes or a written aspect. Once I shared the link of one of my steemit posts in a Facebook group, while the post didn’t have any spectacular upvotes, the views were WAY higher ( people coming from fb) and there was again 100+ likes on the fb post and a few comments on fb, meanwhile hardly any comments on the actual steemit post. My personal guess is that many people here are not looking for content. People on fb and instagram don’t get rewarded to be there, they are more motivated to engage because the content IS the reward.
She. :)
Cheers for that, I suck at genders.
Test: You got a 10.00% upvote from @jga courtesy of @fukako!
This issue has been overflogged with no concrete solution in sight.
Are there no regulations for these bots?
Regulations? Haha, this is crypto, no regulations. :))
I know but the behaviors now call for regulation
Freedom.
It is either that or different criteria is used to determine what appears on the trending page. Instead of using worth of upvotes to determine what is trending or not, they can share the criteria to get on the trending page into three parts; number of human upvotes, number of comments, number of Resteems. The number of upvotes will determine how many persons actually like your blog, the number of comments will determine how many persons engaged with your post and the number if resteems will determine how many persons found it interesting enough to share.
This system will build community and also money will no longer be the factor to determine visibility but rather interaction and quality will be.
In this solution, those who came to make money at the detriment of the platform and those who came to grow the platform will be separated.
This is just an idea and I don't know enough about how the system works to say that this could help. I believe though that if posts that have heavy traffic and interaction, not money, is on the trending page, then the visibility excuse will become useless and then we will know who the enemies of the platform are.
These are my opinions, though.
You make some interesting points here. Bots aren't good for the ecosystem of steemit, but without them it's hard to make any kind of impact. It's a catch 22 for sure. I suppose there is no one right answer. I do think though, seeing that the platform is supposed to be decentralised, flagging only gives control to people who decide 'this content is not good in my eyes'. The problem with that is everything is subjective. And is the whole point to not allow some people to dictate whether they will allow the creativity of others? Especially as it's the people with money who decide and can actually heavily impact someones post payout. Same goes for bots too though. It's a circle. In my opinion bots and flags are equally as disruptive in some sense. If bad content was ignored and not bot voted then flags wouldn't be needed. But then on the other hand.. perhaps the people excessively using bots thing there content is good enough to be trending/making stupid amounts per post. Who knows! Good content here though @guyfawkes4-20 very thought provoking.
I think bots is here to stay. There is no way to censor people from creating and using bots. But the team can come up with a way to limit the profitability of buying/selling votes. Money is the motivation of everything here after all.
People are easily corrupt and greedy. No technology can help about that.
Steem starting already with a lie. Its said you will get rewarded for good content. And now bring me different people, all of them will have a different opinion about what good content means.
Why not rewarded for the effort you spend? This would motivate everyone to try his best. I see so many people here, it's visible that they try their best and get nothing.
At first, I have been against bots so hard, because I saw it as not right to push myself into trending or even hot. Then I saw that people always said you have to use bots, I should see it as a paid promotion, then I get more attention. But nope.
I did learn now, a new user of steem/steemit, who can spend maybe 0.1-20SBD for bit bots will gain nothing. The bid bot will earn a lot. As long I'm not willing to use maybe 50 SBD and more, I don't believe bit bots could really promote someone. So how a new user can find out what he should do better if there never be an honest response to his work? Just because someone won't or can't spend 100 SBD on bid bots?
So, the only reason why I still then use sometimes the bots is I can push my reputation and get a bit steem after paid out. But maybe even the reputation could be pretty useless and I better buy steem with SBD on the market. I'm only 3 months here now, I still have much to learn.
I don't even know how minnows can even consider bid bots as promoting tools because it doesn't get you to trending page. I guess you have to spend lots of SBD to get there.
Am I wrong? So people use it for good ROI if possible.
its so nice post
your vision of steem is so good!! i'm french , but in french we don't have post of this interest!!
You could post a translation - I'm sure you could get help if you can't do it yourself.
I couldn't agree more with what you're saying here guyfawkes4-20. I just dropped a comment on cryptoctopus post which mentioned this post, I hope you don't mind. I think that article might be of interest to you if you haven't already seen it:
https://steemit.com/steem/@cryptoctopus/finally-an-update-about-steem-community-feature-hivemind
I have been massively frustrated by bidbots and their fake returns. I used them at first just because I couldn't take seeing the low payouts on work I had taken days over sometimes. Even back then I had a suspicion that they weren't actually returning any profit on my posts. I hate everything they stand for; preying on human vulnerability and gaming people through psychology. The platform would be better off without them and that post I referenced above talks about hivemind, which looks like it could go some way toward creating a filter between great content and 'less than great' content that has just been propelled into trending by bidbots. Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts, it is reassuring to see other people who see the same problems and are looking to inspire debate around finding solutions :-)
I'm still relatively new here but have almost given up on steemit because of this issue. I've also seen a good deal of people lose a good deal of SBD to bots and not get the votes or rewards they were expecting. I figure if I can't make it on my own then I can't make it. I'd rather follow my intuition and just give whatever I got to someone that might actually deserve it or need it. Bots are like government. Promise everything and do nothing but take
I think that there are a lot of people afraid of flagging since the whales could start fagging back and destroying accounts, which is probably what would happen unless a lot of people started flagging all at once (which would need to be organized somehow).
Test: You got a 33.33% upvote from @jga courtesy of @fukako!
Until people will keep doing things only for money instead of passion and money, things will remain fucked up, no matter which platform it is!