I don't think any change we make will ever get us to perfect. We can only get close to ideal in each iteration. There is no question there are side effects we do not want in the recent changes but overall we are close to where we want to be.
That being said, I have a love/hate relationship with the curve part of the changes.
There was consensus once that we need to make small imcremental changes to see the effects. Free downvotes, maybe combined with the 50/50, would have brought us the same positive effects we see now.
I dont know where you want to be, but I dreamt of a platform where new participants can at least compete on equal grounds. The threshold is wayyy to high, and everyone affected by it said it before. They were ignored, because those who can make the decision have the stake to actually profit from it. I cant find any love for the curve favoring the bigger stakeholders again.
I was also never keen on the curve change: I'd prefer it to have remained linear.
But, IMO, this wasn't necessarily a change driven by the largest stakeholders.
It's true that kevin and traf were proposing a somewhat strong nonlinear curve (and I don't really consider them "large stakeholders") but that was mostly rejected. The current curve is mostly the brainchild of Michael, who while he's technically a large stakeholder, I don't think he even curates, so I think accusations based on desire for more income aren't fair in that case. I think it was done with an honest intent to improve things, although I do agree that the overall result was a less than ideal outcome. But if we reach a consensus on that, I assume it's not too difficult to revert to linear.
I fully agree! I do not think it was with bad intentions as many claim, to make the whales more powerful or screw over minnows. That's just an (expected but ignored) consequence.
I didn't expect my post to have much effect. Glad a discussion is going on, thank you so much for your feedback. I hope a consensus between the top witnesses is possible.
There will be no platform that new users have equal footing.
Success on social media is extremely difficult as it is ultra-competitive, Steem not as much due to the lack of active users. It is extremely hard to get noticed even on Steem with the handful of users we have that is the case. If we had 1M+ users it would be considerably more difficult and curation guilds would strive.
When you add money into it, it becomes more of a good old boys club and it is unavoidable as people tend to vote for people not content.
Perfect doesn't exist.
However, eliminating the financial incentive to mine Steem will eliminate the financial incentive to ignore more valuable aspects of society. Mike Tyson said Don King would sell his momma for a dollar. That is the kind of curation we can expect as long as folks like Don King are willing to degrade society for tokens.
There is no benefit to the platform from encouraging such actions. Capital gains alone create incentive to reward good content, exactly as the salaries of curators of museum collections do. DJs in the Fifties revealed that being availed financial incentives for curation results in profiteering. It was called Payola, and it's just mining cash: corruption of society for pay.
Since it's what you do, your business model, I am unsurprised to discover you are opposed to ending such corruption. Here's an idea: get a job and quit manipulating Steem content for money.
It's the right thing to do.
I would rather they were gone and people voted organically. But as long as that isn’t happening having me running a bid bot betters the platform as I have a slice of the sp used by bid bots and devote a large amount of times finding and stopping abuse and preventing them from using bid bots for garbage.
It isn’t perfect but we far from perfect.
Be the change you want to see in society. Apologia for profiteering falls flat on my ears. Kinder, gentler degradation is still degradation.
I didn’t apologize for anything you must have misread my comment.
I mistakenly replied to myself here: https://steempeak.com/@valued-customer/re-valued-customer-pxsg8x
Was meant as a reply to you.
Definition of apologia
: a defense especially of one's opinions, position, or actions