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I hear you, I spent way too much time and energy trying to preach to people that their greed was destroying a potentially world changing technology, but none of them gave a shit as long as they could get theirs. There's no doubt why people left and it's not just the price. Whale games are whale games and if you didn't get in first or fuck people over for stake you ain't getting shit out of this place. Unless you live in Nigeria, Venezuela, or the Philippines (or somewhere equally impoverished) this technology isn't changing your life and empowering content creators. The greatest lie ever told on this platform was "bid-bots are for promotion." Why the hell would anyone come here and promote to a community of a couple thousand people that are pretty much smart enough to avoid the trending page unless they had no following to begin with. I literally don't even care to rant about it anymore, but I'm right there with you, we tried to stop this shit and the people that had the power to change it did what was in their best interest, just like they always do, and got rich off the illusion we (the community) were pedaling for them.

I hear you, I spent way too much time and energy trying to preach to people that their greed was destroying a potentially world changing technology .. and the people that had the power to change it did what was in their best interest, just like they always do.

Are you really surprised that people did what's in their best interest? Humans always do what's best for them. Greed is pretty much a natural incentive. Similar to the need for power. From my perspective, what you're doing is shouting at the water for being wet, not seeing that it could be poured into a glass and shaped. Or in relation to Steem: you want people to behave in Steem's best interest? Then align the incentives that Steem's best interest equals the individuals best interest.

Humans always do what's best for them.

This is an entirely false statement.
The true statement is:"People generally do what they THINK is best for them and people are generally idiots."

There is a huge distinction here.
For example:

A vote seller thinks that he is doing what is best for him but the fact is that by acting in such a way he only achieves a short term perception of gain while in reality greatly hurting his investment.
If the time frame is long enough the person will be unable to even realize that fact due to seeing his stake increasing.

Quite prescient. You denote the difference between profiteers that dismantle businesses to sell the parts for profit and investors that grow the investment vehicle to produce capital gains.

Cash is king all too often, IMHO.

I flag trash. You have received a flag.

not really possible, greed and best interest for community does not go together in whatever combination.
who can imagine a whale that is selling votes or just selfvote, looking through steem posts to find good content? I can't.

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This is exactly why tweaking curation and author rewards and splits won't work. Nothing makes curation - actual curation for content quality - more important to substantial stakeholders than their stake. As long as profit can be extracted by corrupting curation for financial maximization, @therealwolf will do it.

We need to eliminate mechanisms that create financial incentive to corrupt curation completely. Tweaking them won't ever work. We need to create a dividend stream from funding development of Steem and the ecosystem that will provide better profitability to that ilk, while making curation unsuitable for extractive profiteering.

I flag trash. You have received a flag.

Agreed but waiting years to do that BECAUSE it was in the self interest of the people that had the power to change things (vote out witnesses/fork the chain) didn't leave the majority of users with much of a choice now did it? Yes we could have all just been independently wealthy and paid whatever ransom to liberate a system from the control of the people keeping it that way, but it literally makes zero sense as I'm pointing out now, because they didn't do anything to deserve the wealth but pay themselves for the privilege of being wealthy. Easier solution, fuck STEEM and fork.

I hear you, but the problem isn't precisely greed, it's designing an economic system that's more resistant to game theoretical pitfalls like the prisoners dilemma or tragedy of the commons.

It's not that I don't understand if we all stopped and voted honestly, we're all better off, but individually I know that if i did that, everyone else would still just keep milking. So the options to me are join the milking or abstain and lose your share but not make any material difference to the failure of the platform overall. I bet many other stakeholders are in the same boat.

Good news is different economic incentives vary in how resilient they are against these game theoretical pitfalls. This is fixable :) I finally got Inc to listen to me, so that's a great start