Hey Joe, I was there at Steemfest too and I'm not sure how exclusive your post is given the dozens of others by other attendees. I think it's great to have people like you on Steem who are into marketing, but I wonder if your strategy is really working. You have effectively bought yourself a high reputation and 13000 followers by buying votes on your posts. I've no idea how much profit you make from that, but it doesn't seem to gain you massive engagement. I get as many comments without buying votes.
I know you also sell votes, but how do you feel about having your name on posts that frankly make Steem look bad? There's plagiarism and just low quality there.
I happen to think that vote selling is bad for Steem as it skews the rewards away from genuine users and sets false expectation. POB stands for Proof of Brain, not Proof of Bots ;)
I'm not looking for confrontation and that's partly why I didn't really talk to you at Steemfest, but is it working out as you hoped? I wonder what reactions you got from other people there as you are pretty well known now.
Love and peace.
Hi Steevc thanks for your comment! I wish you would have talked with me about this at Steemfest! You would have got a better flavor of my personally for sure! But here is an answer to your questions
"You have effectively bought yourself a high reputation and 13000 followers by buying votes on your posts. I've no idea how much profit you make from that, but it doesn't seem to gain you massive engagement. I get as many comments without buying votes."
I have invested in steem and sbd you are correct, but I have also earned thousands of steem / dollars in rewards organically from the community (dtube upvotes, whales, ect). I then take those rewards and put them back into the Steem ecosystem (AKA using the upvoting services, powering up my account, ect). As for the engagement -- im not overly concerned to be honest. If you want to engage with me, great, im happy to engage with you, but most people see the numbers, rewards, lifestyle, and just get jealous / hateful. Also, I did not "buy" followers... they all clicked the follow button on their own free will...
"I know you also sell votes, but how do you feel about having your name on posts that frankly make Steem look bad? There's plagiarism and just low quality there."
My understanding is that there are spam and plagiarism filters here on Steemit. I cannot control what another user posts and or if they choose to use my service. My service offers excellent ROI if used correctly 50+% sometimes). This is my way of giving back to all of my followers instead of manually upvoting. I run an online teaching academy with more than 400,000+ students, I honestly just don't have the time to manually upvote everyone and everyones posts.
"I happen to think that vote selling is bad for Steem as it skews the rewards away from genuine users and sets false expectation. POB stands for Proof of Brain, not Proof of Bots ;)"
I agree with you and Steemit Inc is working on this with "destiny". For now however, this is the current system they have in place and bots are allowed.
I hope you are able to see both sides here and I hope to chat with you at next years steemfest!
Sincerely,
Joe Parys
Narcissist much?
Edit: 100% flag delivered. You're a stain on the Steem ecosystem, Joe. No one is jealous of you, many of us simply despise your selling of scammy courses and Banfield like behaviour.
Really?
Is that so...
I see someone buying votes. Anyone can do that and no jealousy is required. I don't even hate them, just wish they could see the bigger picture of the harm they do.
One must first view others as lesser beings in order to make a statement like Joe made there. He believes others see him as superior, apparently, otherwise what would make him believe MOST are jealous? Realistically, I think the jealous types would be a minority and uninformed. It's almost as if he truly believes pushing a few buttons to get to the trending page actually does make him successful but in reality, that's one of the easiest things to do here. Since he's believing his own lies, I don't think there's any way to get through to him. He won't be able to see the harm. I don't think someone with a brain like that is capable of it. That would take years of professional help, and maybe a few pills.
He's coming from a different mind-set. Maybe there's some hope for him :)
Just be gentle.
I can see you treat it as a business and your experience will be very different to mine. You might want to consider working with the @steemflagrewards team who can let you know of people who are abusing your service and ought to be blacklisted for the good of Steem.
I realise people chose to follow you, but new users see the Trending page first and many will follow any users they see there. It doesn't mean they will actually look at your posts or ever comment, so the follower number is not an indication of quality. I accept that most of my followers are inactive, but I value those who contribute and they get votes from me.
It's not all about jealousy. Many of us want to see this platform grow and achieve its potential to change the world. Having a few people getting all the profit is not helping that.
I'll look you out next time for a chat.
50+% sometimes? That's like saying this parachute is 100% safe... but only occasionally. It's probably not a good idea to mix your percentages with adverbs as it is ambiguous. Food for thought.
Also, reminds me of the following clip from Anchorman. 60% of the time it works everytime.
That seems like more of a cop-out to justify an ethically dubious business model and you're obviously not giving out votes for free so not sure how you reckon selling votes is giving back to your followers. What a preposterous notion! Are you going to tell me you ONLY sell votes to your followers?
It certainly has a degrading impact on those that do not follow you and the platform as a whole. Again, I find it disturbing that you would create a post boasting about the Steem you bought when you know damn well you have reduced your risk profile by vote selling.
Great movie and great clip haha.
ethically dubious business model and you're obviously not giving out votes for free so not sure how you reckon selling votes is giving back to your followers.
This is a matter of perspective.. and I actually give back way more than most steemians do with this business model (on top of all of my giveaways, free tutorials, videos ect).
It certainly has a degrading impact on those that do not follow you and the platform as a whole. Again, I find it disturbing that you would create a post boasting about the Steem you bought when you know damn well you have reduced your risk profile by vote selling.
This post was about steemfest... not sure what you're referring to here. And again, this is your point of view. Whats has a more degrading impact on this community is posting comments trying to belittle other steemians...
Ok let me step back and try to see things from your perspective. In your mind, doing the giveaways, free tutorials, videos ect outweighs the overall harm caused by your selling votes? From your perspective, do you not believe the bots undermine curation, allow abuse accounts to proliferate mostly unchecked, and create a lot of strife and inequality on the platform? If everybody did what you did with your voting, how do you think that would turn out?
I wonder if I did an audit of your votes how many abuse posts I would find and I would like to know what exactly you are doing to mitigate the effects and ability of users to abuse your "services". I would trust that at a minimum, you have the BAW Blacklist API , right? It's certainly not an effective deterrent as users can easily switch accounts. It's something so would commend you for that as other bot owners are indiscriminate. (something should probably be done about that.)
If you really care about stopping the flood of abusers destroying the value of the token you hold, you could always hit 'em where it hurts. Right in their ROI! We've been able to flag and coordinate unvotes on abuse and have been successful in stopping it in some instances. If you were willing to coordinate, you would earn mad props from the abuse fighting community. I guarantee it.
It's Super Effective! I just modified this gif for you joe. Hope you got a kick out of it. Yes, I dad joke.
But the question is, are you the type of person to care about the broader implication about how you use your SP?
You may be busy but you could easily find a volunteer to help you use your VP to responsibly curate content that is conducive to real sustainable growth on the platform.
Or alternatively, you could maybe assist a project like @steemflagrewards to help take out the trash. Folks like us flag so you don't have to. Furthermore, we reward the activity of users finding abuse. (Check out last report. It's MOSTLY bid bot abuse which makes me sad.), we review their comments on the abuse, and have a bot that calculated ROI for the flag. That's what we are doing about the problem.
Anyways, maybe I'm wrong for being harsh with you but I grieved how working hard on this platform often is undermined by people selling votes to those that avoid hard work like a cat and water. We need to support builders if we really want to see Steem take off.
Every time, you sell your vote to an abuser, you are striving against that goal and all of us that care for a more equitable future. Hope it least part of that resonated with you. I can be a little mean at times and may not always express myself ideally but folks know where I am coming.
I understand your points above and I do agree that vote selling on the platform is probably not in the best interest of the community. That being said vote selling is allowed and I’m not the only one doing it. Also, bidbots have 10s of millions of Steem power powers up.. not selling.. keeping some Steem here and allowing people the choice to promote themselves. Why more people don’t use bidbots is honestly beyond me. From an investment in yourself they offer a unique opportunity, if used correctly. I sympathized with you on the abusers who are misusing the bid bot services. It’s my personal belief that Steemit inc should be in charge of dealing with this and cleaning up the trash / blacklisting users.