I could not stay away from the so called war of flags again. This is not my first post about it, I have made another one more detailed on the two sides that are fighting here, called Haejin vs Bernie - a battle of Steem. That was an analysis of the both sides fighting here, a pretty objective one and involved some efforts of mine in finding a solution about it.
Voters of a single man
These days I have seen on the other side, a post written by @jaredcwillis who did an investigation in how many people are voting for @haejin. His post was not appreciated by people who love @haejin and I can understand why...
He found out that there were 481 people who were only voting for him. They were not giving anybody else a single vote, but @haejin. It is like nobody is worth their upvote, not a single post or even comment on this platform than this guy. This is a little bit strange to me, because no matter how good you are, how many good predictions do you have, even if you can see the future for real, it doesn't mean that no one else is writing good content and nobody is worth your vote.
If all the people who have joined the platform for @haejin are voting only for him and nothing else, can we say that they really joined the platform? If no one of them is doing anything but voting @haejin, then they are not contributing to the platform, they are contributing to his wallet and that's all. Not posting helpful things, not engaging in discussion (except that about @haejin) then what do these people give back to Steem?
At first I couldn't even believe that there were real people behind this but then, talking to a few of them I realized that they have came here only to support @haejin and nothing more. Here I will include another short snap from posting my comments but prepare yourself, this is different than all those before:
That really got me badly upset, as I was reading that indeed, they find it natural to vote only for one user. You an read the whole discussion I had at that and give me your feedback. Please don't hesistate to tell me if you think that I am wrong, or if you have a different point of view. And as you can see, I did not flag for anybody for having a different opinion than mine, I accept that people disagree sometimes, this is something natural. But the following words got me:
Indeed.
I did not read anything worth my time here "so far". But i am still new to steemit. And in case @haejin will return, will put serious money in my votes.
Voting what makes you money is quite understandable ... or not ?
When he said I did not read anything worth my time here "so far". I thought about giving up the discussion, and I did it, for about an hour. Just closed my phone (I was commenting form my phone in that moment) and walked away... Of course I came back to the discussion after some time, just to see how these guys think and I understood. They are not feeling that they are part of the Steem, they are here just for @haejin, and feeling that I disagree with them, one of these guys even flagged my comment, which I upvoted back up.
Engaging in discussion with @haejin's followers enlightened me. They encouraged me to follow him on youtube in order to understand why he is so popular, so I gave it a try and watched a few recent videos of him. I think it is important to understand each side before taking decisions and this is what I am doing. In his videos he was asking for more support against the flags of @berniesanders and @randowhale and, to my surprise, they were listening and following his requests. They were making accounts only to flag @berniesanders, @randowhale (whithout knowing who and what those are) and upvoting his account on Steemit... Here are some screen shots from his youtube post:
The intent of this one is clear, not go to Steemit, make an account, join the platform, learn what it is about, engage with people, understand how the platform and the blockchain works, have a nice experience, and if you find useful upvote for @haejin. Nope, the indication is completely different than that, it has no intent to contribute to the platform, but just to a single user from here. Here is another one:
It is simple to conclude from this comment that he does not even understand well what that "Steemit" is. That made me sad... From this I simply understand that these guys are not part of Steem and even that they have all the rights to be here and take actions, they will not do anything else but supporting @haejin.
Can I use a little bit of mathematics or just some imagination to make a point from this?
In mathematics this is called limit when x goes to infinity, some of you may remember about it with joy or sadness while others may have never saw it. It describes what happens with the result of a function f(x) while x approaches infinity.
Now just to keep it simple so everybody can follow it without any lack of effort, let me explain a bit how I see it. If x is the number of people joining the platform to support @haejin and f(x) is how the platform is behaving depending by the number of users, what will be the output when the number of haejin's followers will grow huge?
Imagine for a second that @haejin becomes really successful on youtube, gaining over 1 million of followers, and as things go right now, what would happen with Steem, Steemit and the reward pool if they all decide to join the platform just to upvote his posts. Can you picture it? I don't say that this is a bad thing or that the platform is not supposed to work this way, but the outcome may not be so happy for anybody except @haejin.
Minnows that now are getting dust on their posts (less than a dollar or most of the times barely nothing), these will not gain anything. The rewards of everybody will decrease. Everything that will be featured will be market predictions of the same author and many resteems of the same platform. This could lead to huge changes, and not only about rewards, but only about visibility. We would see the power of the platform getting centralized around a single user and I don't think this is good, since we are trying pretty hard here to build a decentralized and healthy ecosystem.
This is just a vision, but it has a few chances to come close to reality, not only in case of @haejin, but in the case of any power-user which tend to gain majority of the influence of the platform and the war that is happening now is just a warning sign.
Please, don't get me wrong, I am not a @berniesanders fan, nor a @haejin predictions believer, even if all of them were true (which nobody ever can state because not even an over-advanced AI or a council of experienced economists can make accurate predictions always based only about a chart, but this is another topic). I am just trying to find the truth here and to vanish hidden facts from each side.
If you found useful this post, please resteem it to gain enough exposure and to make everybody aware of the current situation that the platform is facing. Here are more than your rewards involved, this is about the faith of the entire Steem. Again if somebody thinks that I am wrong, I encourage you to share your thoughts, I accept any kind of criticism and also if you have any suggestions or thoughts that you want to share, feel free to add them to the comments of this post. I will read each of them and I will answer to everybody, as I always do.
Thank you so much for reading, take care and don't get caught in the war!
That is more than strange it's verging on disturbing. People blindly following as a newbie it's hard not to get swept up in the tide. We almost got taken with the initial hype. We try to stay away from it but as I said some of what you outlined here is disturbing. If his following dud grow huge sbd they were 100 upvoting his 10 posts a day then the viabilty of Steemit for minnows would be non existent.
Thanks for putting out un bias information to explain some of the more complex issues many of us miss.
Thank you so much for your reply! I have made a little effort to assemble the information in this article so it can be easy understood, and still not to take each one side, just to present impartial data. But this time, interacting with the guys sustaining @haejin gave me a feeling that they are not doing the right thing. Right now I just hope not to get flagged too much :))
I think that's a real fear when posting about it. Especially when people are clearly not reading what they are upvoting and flagging. Fingers crossed no flags.
Stay Down, Stay Low!
I might have an opinion, but no one cares and it would be quite dangerous to put it out there.
Better post about kittens and flowers, or other topics no one is interested;)
I like your approach! I don't think somebody will be really upset, I did not attacked or supported anybody, but you never know :)) Kittens and flowers, here we come!
They don't care, but even a 0.1% downvote from them can break ones leg.
Be carefull, shrapnels!
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You make some good points but in the end everyone has to start somewhere. I remember prior to joining steemit there was an article I read about the fundamental failure of steemit due mainly to what you are describing. That only a few have control most of the steem and when steem evaluation rises those few will have even more while the rest stands to earn nothing due to inflation.
What made me continue is that if I do not try I will never know what will become of this. Yes there are drawbacks but what about the benefits. There are people who are making a living out of this and they are no where nearly as famous as bernie or haejin.
Steemit has a huge array of ways to earn. Find what you are passionate about and simply earn from that. If at the end I get nothing out of this at least I found some good people who follow me and have the same interests as me. Thanks.
Great comment, thanks for sharing your thoughts! This is mostly how I think too. I don't write mostly for money, of course I like to see my account growing, but I have never cashed out. I like to write to interact with people (some will say that this is a sign of loneliness, and yep, I have two cats!) help the others and gain popularity. This is what makes me happy and continue to write and to engage with others. Again, thank you for coming by. Wish you the best!
I think for minnows like us spamming clearly doesn't work which is good as that encourages not to spam I just mute them so hopefully as this ecosystem evolves it will start to ban the really obvious spam accounts!
We are not even at 1 million users yet, I will not be surprise spamming will become a huge issue when a ton of new users will join. There are many hurdles for steemit to go through but like any crypto there will always be challenges. However the benefit outweights the challenges. If steemit has more users the demand for steem will rise and steem prices will rise. :)
How would the blockchain (size) react to 1M active users?
Not sure, it could handle it.
Spam everywhere.
1GB growth a day, can this be sustainable?
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I thought about this and I started to dedicate a part of my time to creating a counter spam bot. For the moment it is not that much, but I hope it will be able to make a small change...
It seems as if Steemit is in danger of destroying itself over this issue. The concept is wonderful and it has such wonderful potential, but if it gets corrupted and hijacked by certain individuals it will be no different than everything else that is going wrong these days.
I honestly don't know if it can be fixed, but I will continue to post for a while and see how things go.
People will figure it out eventually, if it can't be resolved in a fair way for all Steemit will fade away. :(
zz
I am sure that this will be solved in a way or another. This is not that bad, there were other abuses of the reward pool much aggressive than this one. This is questionable an abuse and @haegin's contribution to this place is also debatable, while I tend not to express any opinion about it and just analyze facts. This is a fight of whales, and I am just a minnow so I am not doing anything. But it will get better, this is a fact :)
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Helpful post!