Buying votes is mostly enriching a few whales, but there are some schemes that promise to support the community more. @isotonic is a good example. I'd like to see the vote sellers setting limits so we don't see $100 votes flooding the trending page with low quality content.
I'll keep selling more of my SBD, but I'm also looking out for stuff to buy with it.
Without the bid bots, the trending page would be smooth and Haejin.
I support using your vote for any cause which builds the economy of Steem!
There are many bidbot owners that are not whales, although they are growing they are the new upper middle class and more involved and active in the current economy. They in turn are spreading Steem around to those who wouldn't have been able to pry it out of the hands of the original and mostly inactive mining whales. I realize there are pros and cons.
I'd to see more flagging of Haejin to reduce his rewards. Smooth could make his posts decline rewards, but have a comment people can vote on to burn the rewards on. There are bots we can support to do that. As it stands it's hard for any posts with real community support to get high on the trending page and that's a shame. I don't have the answers for this, but I think it harms Steemit.
I think the flagging of Haejin should stop. He drives a lot of traffic to steemit and I think he makes less than most whales if you go by page views. The page views are gone now though. :( I think instead of flagging Haejin people should use their vote power to support newbies.
My issues with him are his greed and his bullying. He's not a good member of the community. He rarely gives votes to others, but he's free with his flags. He doesn't deserve his rewards
Someone else mentioned that it would be cool if when payment is declined it actually burns the rewards. I like that concept, but we don't have it.
Until the average users begins to use flags we will see spam, abuse, and bad actors.
There will always be a few, but part of the problem IMO is everyone wants someone else to do the dirty work of cleaning the site as we go.
I think upvoting myself is a better usage of my voting power than flagging someone.
Well I don't need to vote on your comments then :)
We need to invest in dealing with abuse. This will pay off in the long term. My influence is not great, but I'll keep on doing what I can.
Me too. I agree. I also want to figure out how to reward other end-users who are flagging/cleaning as they go.
I disagree. I think steemit users should focus on saving the newbies instead of tagging possibly the most popular user on steemit and someone who could help make us all richer.
Well, I said unvote me mostly joking! I also specified that giving that same vote to anyone who is actually curating and reading would have the same impact. :)
That can be done at the blockchain level by specifying the @null account as a 100% beneficiary, but there is no UI support for that.
Do you think that would be better? I could see a case made that doing it that way could be seen as trying to hide the rewards, since there is no way for voters to easily view high-paying comments (if we had a global "Trending Comments" page that might be different).
I do understand that people want to see 'quality content' on Trending, but at the same time it also serves to make visible where a large portion of the reward money is going, even when it is going to posts which serve as fundraisers and aren't necessarily entertaining. I would think that stakeholders having a clear view of reward allocation would be considered important.
I'm interested in other views though.
Trending is pretty useless these days as it's mostly promoted posts using paid votes. Trending comments might be interesting. I know there are people milking the system my self voting junk comments to stay under the radar.
If you are referring to @burnpost, declining rewards would entirely defeat the purpose. If you are referring to my other posts, I generally burn the rewards, which I prefer to declining for the same reason I'm supporting @burnpost (and explained in the posts on my blog). I don't expect everyone to agree with my point of view.
The burnpost posts could say 'vote up the top comment' or something so the effect would be the same. Just my opinion :)