RE: Bot's are Destroying Steemit?

[dickturpin]

I keep asking this same question over and over again: What is Steemit?

A. Is it kind of Cryptocurrencies mining service that generates, in this case, steem?

B. Is it a blogging platform that rewards its authors?

Sadly, from what I can see, it's a mining service. Just look at the large amounts of posts that actually seem to get the most rewards and they're all about the crypto market or how well steem is doing on the markets. Sure there are a few of us trying to build traction by posting stories on as wide a subject base as possible, and most of us subscribe to this idea of "Quality posts" but until we can break the mentality of "This is the place to make money!" the situation can only get worse with people creating hundreds of accounts that only upvotes a single account that they own, automated bots that generate curation rewards, I even heard about people creating multiple accounts just to receive the few steem you (used?) to get on first signing up. (People should checkout @sherlockholmes who is doing awesome work in this area revealing inappropriate behaviour.)

I don't own or run any bots, I have used @randowhale in the past but after being on Steemit for a while now and I'm not totally happy about the Minnow supporting services that ask you to pay especially when you may only have a few cents in your account. Having said that I have joined @shadowbot

1. You don't have to pay anything other than allowing it to vote for you.

2. You're a member of a powerful club that basically looks after its members (so far).

I suspect the only way to stop all these bots and shady goings-on is to remove the rewards feature, trouble is, I suspect Steemit would lose 85% or more of its userbase overnight if that happened. #TwoPenneth

Comments

[rmz]

Okay, steemit if not a mining service.
It's just one of the frontends for the steem blockchain.

The steem blockchain generates a certain amount of SP and SBD per amount of time. This rewards pool is partially used to pay contributors to steem, that can be via steemit.com, busy.org, chainbb, or you can even have a wordpress plugin that automatically adds your post to steem (and thereby to steemit).
You cannot "mine" for SBD or SP (anymore, you could when it started), you can get rewards by posting, commenting, being a witness.

This means that removing the rewards structure is impossible, it would become just another blogging platform and quickly die.
The fact that crypto posts get a lot of traction is probably due to the fact that the early adopters were crypto-savvy, they gained a lot of power and followers, and by that also rewards.

The steempower you receive when signing up is delegated steem, not useful unless you participate. You cannot power down that SP, and even if you could, it's virtually nothing.

We need a different approach without being to restrictive.

[dickturpin]

I mine steem on EBOT I used the term "Mine" in a loose explanation sense not an actual act of mining. Just to clarify. :-)

This means that removing the rewards structure is impossible, it would become just another blogging platform and quickly die.

Yes, that's what I said. It's not impossible just undesirable for the very reason you mention.

The fact that crypto posts get a lot of traction is probably due to the fact that the early adopters were crypto-savvy, they gained a lot of power and followers, and by that also rewards.

Na, people upvote those posts because

A. They are more interested in what the markets are doing rather than who posts the best article.

B. They know that those types of posts generate a lot of dollars. If you get in early enough your curation reward (If you're lucky enough to receive those) will be greater.

[distress2success]

It's the bitter truth, if Steemit made no money at all most of the users would leave. To be honest the parable of Steemit to mining in fact does feel accurate , If you look at old posts from a year ago they would make over $10,000 from upvotes. It feels like mining becuase when the difficulty was lower the rewards were higher and similar with steemit. The more users we have and the more the platform matures the lower the upvote value and posts make. I have seen posts by Jerry Banfield mentioning 35,000 SP upvote is worth almost $30 and today its only a dollar.

[dickturpin]