I've been following the conversation for a while, here's what I think:
Steemit is divided into three groups: those who benefit from upvoting themselves and their friends
Those who hate one above and strive to vote for good content only
Those who have no fucking idea about what is going on
Here's the problem
Those in the first group are very powerful (empowered by steempower) and those who benefit from them wouldn't say a word;
Those in the second group are few and get easily bullied or even silenced;
Those who have no idea stick with the first group hoping to get a cut of the bias likes for themselves
Solution
None in sight
I'm opened to corrections
@Iamthegray—I can't speak for everyone in the third group (I might just be permanently camped here), but I do not endorse what the first group does (let alone go begging for scraps), nor do I believe the second group "only strives to vote for good content only," unless you include in that flagging/downvoting what they consider to be trash/overvalued, while upvoting and receiving upvotes from their own people to keep the flagging/downvoting going.
Both sides are pulling rewards out of the pool, and while one may or may not be significantly larger than the other, the fact of the matter is, they're both benefiting from it. There's a pretty big principle being destroyed here, all for the sake of winning.
I've been here for just over two weeks. I don't know what the answer is. I don't even know if I fully understand the question. I do understand there's no rules governing self-upvotes or bots, so I'm not sure what people expect others to do? Live by some arbitrary code of conduct you like because you have the power and the will to enforce it?
Sounds like thuggery to me.
Believe me, I don't believe anything here is really worth anywhere near what some of it gets paid, but I also believe the market, when left to its own, will determine value. That's suppose to be an underlying tenet of Steemit, but it's being violated over and over and over again by those who would manipulate it for their own ends and by those who would defend it.
But I'm in the third group, and I'm also a Plankton, so what do I know?
At this point in time, I'm glad Steemit isn't that well known yet. We need to seriously get our act together first, and however that shakes out needs to happen calmly, maturely, and in a way that is fair to all.
Yeah, right. Good luck with that.
But maybe the defining moment for the Steemit community will be the way this actually gets handled, by us, rather than some hard fork solution, or someone else taking the power for themselves. If it doesn't, if the community doesn't ultimately come together to solve this, how's it going to resolve any other tests that come to bear, and how in the world is it going to do it with Steem "to the moon" and all the hundreds of thousands if not millions of new Steemit users that faster account approval is supposed to bring?
I just want to write. I just want to earn something for it. I just want to help others trying to do the same, because it's not happening anywhere else.
There's a lot of good people here, and many of them are found in all three groups. I have to believe that everyone can come together here not just for the greater good, but with a solution that will ultimately benefit everyone. A rising tide lifts all boats. A tsunami wipes them all out. Let the tide rise, and stop courting the tsunami.
The question which outcome you want at the end of the war? letting haejin to continue grow strong is not in our interest. He is already holding 6% of the reward pool as hostage .
What if one day his reserve is equal to 50 %? Will he stop there? What happen if one day he decide to withdraw?
Even if there is a wthdraw limit , the impact will still be great .
Have any of you hear run on bank the before?
Back than when banknote is back by gold , the way to kill a bank is to spread false news and convince the bank is going to fail. Have everyone withdraw money from the bank . The bank will run out of gold to pay back and those late to withdraw left with nothing.
One day if Haejin decide to withdraw all his reward , it will cause panic even if it is just 6 percent. Than all the other wll follow in to cash out. The moment this happen , the price of steem will drop like mad .saying steem because he have convert all to steem .
you decide how you want it to end because there is no admin in steemit .steem it is design in a way to give everyone the power to decide
One flag each day for Haejin is all it take.
Every vote matter , make every 1 cents cost him 2 cents or more to get !!! I done my share by flaging him today .
This post will go entirely for steem power if you want to contribute . All i ask is everyone of you to flag him once per day .
If you want to know why it concern you than read my other post.
Here is my proof that i flag .
With @haejin's post about SBD and Steem he was even downvoted into oblivion by @dan and @thejohalfiles
I agree that if he continues to grow, the value of steem ultimately drops as people just start cashing out as they see their growth dwindle. I believe Steem Media Tokens will provide a better solution to this problem (like a website where you can downvote haejin and get tokens), but if they don't, I will then start personally worrying.
I like boobs
I think you should sell your steem and go all in on Doge! Have fun.
What a cute dog! I want one like that :)
kbye.
did you read what i type? even without those delegate steem power , those steem he get from SBD is NEARING 7 % of the total reward pool . How much steem can you buy once he start selling? the moment people can't buy the steem he sell , than it will go down. basic supply and demand rule.
it appears to be the same problem we have in the us economy with fiat.
Agreed
Why would anybody upvote themselves (there are so many good posts of other people to vote on). It does not make sense to me.. What do you think about the idea of making it technically impossible for oneself to upvote themselves?
I guess it won't really be a solution because what's stopping people from creating a second account (or asking a friend to do it) and upvote those posts instead?
The ammount of SP they have vested in their first account would stop them from creating a second account. Upvoting with a second account with very little SP in it won't yield them much rewards. Am I wrong?
On the other hand, the could transfer all their SP into this, new second account, purely for the purpose of upvoting and leave none SP on their first account.
Or, what I was thinking, they can just vote for the second account from the first one and they won't need to transfer any SP at all. Or am I missing something?
So they would have to have two account's : one only for upvoting and the other only for publishing content. But that trick is only applicable to people who are posting anything. The trick would not apply to people as myselfa, as I rarely post anything. In simple terms I rather read than write. And the majority of the users may not be publishers..
True, but even comments can be upvoted. Steem is full of spam comments that get upvoted. Anyway, let's hope they come with a solution soon.
You can have as many accounts as like like(you just need to pay the fee for them).
The number of votes matters less than the amount of vests.
Since people with multiple accounts need to split their vests, the amount of influence in the reward pool stays the same.
What fee do you mean? I don't remember paying a fee for my account?
If you signed up through Steemit, your fee is covered. But to create an account from scratch, it costs money.
Is there another way to create an account besides signing up through steemit? I didn't know but I would be very interested because my girlfriend's been trying to get an account for weeks.
You can mine a new Steem account, or pay a service to do it for you.
Steemit essentially mined your account. But didn't charged you for it.
Yes you can buy one from anon steem
... it is not about bad or good behavior, it is what the system offers: make money by contributing. Money talks is the slogan which hooks people to the platform. I asked myself too, if that problem couldn't be solved technically. No clue.
First: block all accounts at Steemit/Steem blockchain and the only way to get unblocked is by taking a course in "How to Make More Money using a Long Term View over a Short Term View".
Second: execute the courses
Third: enable accounts again after taking the coarse, BUT in a sandbox environment - this is to test if users actually learned
Forth: allow those who passed point three to come back to Steemit
Another solution would be:
Steemit Justice and Court system with unlimited SP who can FLAG users rock bottom when they don't follow certain rules and they enforce as a minimum the rule: "Steem value shall not be harmed" and "Forst Crypto Social Network shall be there in at least Five years time".
Dang! @iamthegray that was some concise wording. I am proud to be a member of group 2.
dont be, the true group 2ers should leave steem as the reward structure is flawed and build a better alternative. Group 1 is just exposing the weakness of the system and that is good. People should not waste more work on steemit.
Steem is not following the spirit of blockchain. We build trustless systems in which egoistic actors are pitted against the power of the majority. Steem is not such a system.
Yep,
We should fork the source code. Put preventions in place so that this can't happen again. And start over, hard but the truth.
No need to start over, just need to convince 17 of the 20 top witnesses to apply any solution we can think of in to the version of STEEM that they run@fechaugger
Convincing 85% of the top witnesses is easier said than done.
It's not even that easy to say!
I am in group three.... and "no idea about what is going on."
@haejin do the right thing. Thank you.
I haven't been around here too long, but I'm certainly in group two, and though I produce high quality content (relative to much of steemit) I see no traction and will soon leave, and eventually, steemit will die because there's very little quality content, and only those with high reputation will be left, mostly, posting garbage.
The solution is to just upvote good content that you like. people can game the system all they want but it won't last forever. Most viewers will care for the content and not the circlejerk.
Sadly, I don't agree. I think most people will try to make money if they can.
I agree, and it seems EOS might make steemit irrelevant very soon.
Why would you say that?
See what introvertspeaks above said. With the way things are going here, that would be axiomatic!
yeah tell me about it @iamthegray, i am in the second group for sure and I guess my rewards both in curation and posts show this !! But luckily we are all not in the first group as if we were Steemit would be dead in the water as I see it !!
@iamthegray I think i fall into the second category but with hopes of earning enough steem power to become a member of the first group lol
This sordid picture reflects sadly, our human condition and an honest expression of what we observe demands incredible courage. But with due respect, I think the third category of people knows a lot more than you're giving them credit for. You're assuming human beings are not the amoral greedy cowards they are which the picture suggests they are. You're suggesting some of them or most of them, are simply blind followers who don't know that what they are doing degrades the ecosystem and eventually leads to bad news for us all.
I suggested this 7 months ago. I got flagged for it, and an auto-flag bot was created and funded by Transisto to follow me around and auto downvote all my votes.
Then, Tim Cliff ripped off the idea, right down to ALMOST THE EXACT SAME TITLE, and flagged me repeatedly in that same thread.
This place is a dumpster fire of hypocrites. The problems is not figuring out what to fix, it's getting the cartel to fix it.
When in Rome...
yes that is ridiculous and sad @lexiconical ! @timcliff is an old timer here and its disappointing to hear that he has behaved like this to you ( I always saw him as one of the founding fathers of steemit !!
We really need a way to stop things like this happening.
Thank you for your story...
Any ideas on how strong folks like us can at least benefit the most from this roman system while using it? Cheers @lonestarpoet
Much love and respect for u @lexiconical for still being here. Even after those bigger accounts started to bully u. Respect!
Conceptually that sounds great, but you need to consider the mass amount of automated voting that takes place. Applying that to flagging just seems awful. Randomly distributed flags being thrown around by bots? Eugh.
Abuse would possibly be rampant. It's hard to gauge how this kind of situation should truly be handled.. I'm at a loss myself, but I'm also just a newcomer just starting out the passed week and a half.
It definitely is the system that's the problem, and not the users. People are people and you're not going to change people's underlying flaws.
Everyone always focuses on "how can we make flagging easier and more rewarding" instead of addressing the fact that upvoting good content is not nearly as rewarding as posting the content, and that is a vicious cycle that ends up raping the reward pool as whales game the system, which hurts the majority of those posting good content and takes away the reward for upvoting other people, at least without using something like steemfollower.com to at least get votes back for upvoting other people's content.
Steem Media Tokens are coming, and you can be sure that there will be tokens created to reward people for finding spam and flagging it. That is the solution in my mind, because every other solution I can think of has a loophole, and if you tighten down the system with restrictions, the platform loses it's proverbial soul. If you give people a separate pool for flagging, it will be abused in ways that would be terrible (think racism, bigotry, bullying, etc).
Then the solution for our situation is to make an upper limit for rewards you can have in a day/week/month and there will be no problem
unless someone makes a pile of alt accounts and spreads the reward between them all... yeah loopholes and more loopholes.
I get your point but what can we do about it then? You can't just sit and watch because they are when you think better stealing your money too
https://steemit.com/@steemflagrewards has been a thing for 41 days. @timcliff helped fund the creation and I am working with a number of talented community members to bring the vision to fruition.
We want it automated and it will be integrated with Discord. We currently planning the implementation of proper accounting such as through a relational database and efficient queries using mongodb/steemdata for downvote metadata and flag comment mentions.
It's not necessarily a reward pool as it depends on post rewards for the flag campaigns being pursued to be distributed to those using their voting power to flag.
We just started a small scale campaign to eliminate rewards on a comment spammer who is abused their delegations.
Besides the top level trending blockchain abusers, there is a LOT of lower order abuse and think this "crowdfunded" flag incentivization system would be a good fit.
The biggest thing I dislike is rewarding flags via SBD transfers doesn't do anything to affect reputation hits that may have been taken due to retaliatory flags. As much as I hate upvote bots, I see this as one possible good use case for one. For instance, in leiu of sending SBD to comp flaggers, instead have maybe dedicated upvote bot (a bid bot would not work due to variability of votes) upvote the flaggers in a comment on the campaign end post.
Anyways, I really want to get the word out because this thing isn't going to hbe effective without community support. I'm not just talking about upvotes either. We need people with ideas that can help this be successfully in address the abuse that falls outside of @steemcleaners scope.
The strange thing is, that steemit as social platform is marvelous, but unfortunately behaves financially like bad old capitalists. Maybe we could build on top of EOS a better social media platform.