At the very top of trending is a post about a voting guild and the poster is complaining about how this guild - backed by the second most powerful whale on the platform, and several other whales - is being "attacked" and "threatened" by some minnows who actually have some legitimate criticisms about how it operates.
If anyone was actually worried about what the trending page looked like, that probably wouldn't be at the top of the list...even with payout declined. It certainly doesn't show "the best that Steemit has to offer."
I don't think @dan is trolling @ozchartart, it looks more like @dan is just trying to have posts that add value to Steemit on the trending page.
Any individual post or any collection of posts with any particular content isn't going to "add value to Steemit." The content itself is not what adds value.
I really wish you chronic troll complainers could wrap your head around the fact that the reward fund is a redistribution of whale funds. Why you think you should complain about how whales redistribute their own assets is beyond me. It is trolling.
Isn't that what this post is doing. Dan is using his vote to redistribute the rewards while berniesanders whines about it.
Dan's vote is fundamentally different from berniesander's vote. Dan's voting power comes from free steem power given to him by steemit. Steemit ninja mined (with an unfair and dubious relaunch and other unfair practices) under the pretense that their "earnings" would go towards development of the platform. Instead it was given directly to insiders like dan who use it to allocate the reward pool. The legitimacy of steem was based on a pretense which has proven to be a lie.
It may be reasonable to compensate developers from this initial ninja mine, but it is not reasonable for them to control the platform in a way that further funnels money to them. Dan is one of the biggest exploiters of the platform and has, along with his hundreds of thousands of dollars in steem power, which are ample compensation for a few months of work, has a history of enriching himself using his free voting power at the expense of the reward pool.
My steem power wasn't "free". I gambled my time and energy to earn it. Dan and Ned are doing the same. We all spend something to get the steem that we have, and while many of us are bitter about how much power the early adopter whales have those same whales are ironically bitter about how much power the blockchain creators have.
That is like telling the cast of Andy Griffith:
There is no need to ask for royalties, because there is no way for the studio to monetize on an episode after the initial airing.
There is no monetization of Steemit content. There are no "royalties." Any "added value" is completely subjective.
There is no monetization of Steemit content.
The same could be said about YouTube in 2005 and many other successful websites when they were new.
Sure. We can say a lot of things about a lot of different sites. But we know this:
There is no monetization of content on Steemit. So what we post on a daily basis doesn't "add value" or "reduce/remove value" from the site. Any claim is completely subjective and the criteria would be arbitrary.
A site like Facebook does not earn its valuation because one user posts cat memes and another posts 20,000-word essays on the LTV. The content is pretty much irrelevant. That's not how valuations are made on social media.
The difference is that the centralized, privately owned model of YouTube lends itself directly to monetization of content in obvious ways once a critical mass of users and content is achieved, which is exactly what happened. Steem does not.
No, but there is abuse, and that is exactly why @dan is flagging @ozchartart. He is a rewards pool rapist and a scammer. He tried scamming me today! Whales upvote whales, regardless of how crappy the content may be. Just my .02 dust cents!