I'm afraid the time of me holding my tongue, is coming to an end. I would rather burn my account to the ground, speaking truth to injustice, than complacently capitulate to the will of the rich. If this causes mortal wounds to my account, I would rather suffer them now, while I have little invested. For this battle is inevitable. Would I even be willing to fight, if I had thousands of hours invested in it? For I could not bear to stand by and watch the beauty and potential this platform offers, slowly erode away, without my attempting to stop it.
So I will unsheathe my sword, as humble and pathetic as it may be and begin to strike at the root. Perhaps others will join me, and we may chop down the proverbial "bean stock" before the evil giants have free reign of our villages.
This was a comment I made recently which has lead me to create this post. It is a bit dramatic, but as a writer I know no other way.
Even though I have only been here for just under two months, lets just say I’ve seen many things since My First Week on Steemit, and I no longer fear being flagged.
Before I get into my post there are a few things that I should state as far as my thoughts on Steemit so far.
My thoughts on upvotes and flags:
Each of us have a stake of value in the community, some earned it through investment, some through content creation, others through social interactions and commenting, others still have managed to make it through plagiarizing and content thief, and the last group through the creation of bots. How we decide to use our stake in rewarding or punishing others is really no one else’s say. We are certainly able to have opinions on their actions and every action has it’s counter action. How people choose to grow their stake is open for debate(at least for the seven days prior to payout.), as to whether it is beneficial or harmful to the community as a whole.
My thoughts on rewarding friends:
If we want to reward friends, so be it there is no harm in this, but a slight risk of never growing if we never reward outside of our circle of friends. Also if others see this to often they may decide to get their group of friends to flag you and yours.
My thoughts on Self Upvotes:
If you think your content or comment is good or you just want to push it up on the screen, by all means self upvote away, but if we do this to often people may not want to upvote us, others will want to flag us. It's sort of a self balancing system. Also there is a risk to the community, of not gaining new users, or current users quitting, if those near the top seem to exclusively self upvote or only upvote each other. But at the end of the day, you can do with your stake as you see fit. Just know others with their flag button on the ready, will do the same.
My Thoughts on Bots:
Bot’s are probably the most controversial aspect of Steemit. Some are amazing without @ginabot I’m not really sure how I would be able to keep track of what’s going on without the likes of her. Upvote bots get tricky. I’m not apposed to communities utilizing them, it can be helpful spreading around a bit of love. “Pay to play” one’s I personally don’t like, and will go into a bit more details below. But I understand why they exist and why they are so widely used.
Now that, that’s out of the way, on to my post.
On Steemit these days many people are talking about “Reward Pool Rape” as if it was just a handful of people responsible for this. I have looked as deeply as I have had time into the whole situation (maybe like 20-30 hours, I probably should have been writing but I’m just to inquisitive.) I have concluded that as much as people claim it’s “This guy, or these guys over their,” I don’t buy it. It’s much bigger than that.
One merely needs to look at the silliness that seems to be on the trending page to understand that this problem is much bigger than a handful of people. When you can buy your way to the top, people will, and do.
There seems to be many people that don’t seem to understand how the reward pool works, as if it were an endless pool of magic money. I’ve read countless people say things like; “Who cares if they paid to get upvoted to the trending page, most of the time they are losing money when they buy those votes.” I think that people need to understand that the reward pool is in fact a limited supply, hence the name pool. It’s not called the reward ocean.
When people pay for upvotes it’s usually from prior rewards. This begins a cycle of burning through a limited supply that is meant to incentivize the whole community. I don’t know the actual numbers, but I would guess that the average vote buyer (unless they do in fact create high quality posts) would rarely get more than a five to ten percent return on their investment. Even at ten percent, that would mean the to make one Steem dollar it would require pulling out ten from the pool. I believe this estimation to be less grim than the reality truly is.
It would seem that the biggest winners in all of this would be those selling there votes.
I’m not trying to name and shame here. I’m just trying to inform people of the situation we find ourselves in. Informed decisions are the best kinds. If people still want to continue to use these services, that it entirely up to them. They just shouldn’t be surprised and gripe when @grumpycat or others flag you. It’s all part of the game you chose to play by buying votes.
Even @curie, the best known and much loved human curation team, receive such a meager curation award compared to four unnamed upvote services. If @curie gets so little of the curation reward pool(with her team of curators), what hope do us normal users have in getting a bit of the pie?
I don’t blame the sellers and I don’t blame the buyers. It is, what it is. Steemit is a perfect example of the free market. This action is going to continue as long as the code permits it. People will sell votes and people will buy them, others will flag those they see as “raping the reward pool.”
Where does that leave people like myself, who do not want to “pay for play?” Sadly there are not many options for us. That is why I am hoping to get those with the means to start a human curated voting bot. Rather than buying a guaranteed vote, participants could pay a fee to have their work reviewed, if it is seen to be of value than a vote equal to the content would be applied. In fact It would be amazing if several of these were to pop up over time. I know that it would add a tremendous amount to value to the site and would afford people who are apposed to “pay for play” to “pay to be seen” with a change to be rewarded for our quality. Isn’t that what all of us who strive for quality and want to organically grow our accounts want?
I may be chasing a a pipe dream, but I really would like to see this idea implemented. I made a comment to @themarkymark concerning this on one of his recent posts, where people were complaining about garbage being so highly rewarded. This situation was the brain child of my idea.
Well thank you all for reading this. If you got some serious SP and the know how I personally believe that this platform could make a good account to do well as a Witness. If done correctly It could be of game changing proportions.
For everyone who would prefer to just get a guaranteed upvote regardless of your content, there are plenty of places to do it. I don’t think they are going anywhere.
Remember don’t hate me, imjustsaying.
Congratulations! Your post has been selected as a daily Steemit truffle! It is listed on rank 24 of all contributions awarded today. You can find the TOP DAILY TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.
I upvoted your contribution because to my mind your post is at least 24 SBD worth and should receive 59 votes. It's now up to the lovely Steemit community to make this come true.
I am
TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigThis bot is a super cool idea. Good job @smcaterpillar. Kudos for you contribution to Steemit.
Thanks a lot. And according to your nice post above, yes, voting bots are indeed controversial. I have to admit I sometimes use them myself to promote posts. It's hard to gain any traction if you can't make into the hot category. So I hope to mitigate this problem to some (tiny?) extend with my curation bot.
Don't worry, most everyone has, I'm just new and since I havn't yet I can still say I havn't lol. I'm just hoping for a better option. I wish I has some extra SP to donate to your bot. I'm primarily concerned with the "pay to play" just seen way to much garbage on the trending pages. If your little guy thought My post was worth that much, we are in agreement, lol I would have like to put more into it but it was like 6 hours or researching the vote trails and took me a couple nights to finish the writing. Babies are hard to work around and I'm easily distracted. He would do well with a bit of SP. Maybe some nice whale will donate some someday.
Well Stated. Good Luck on your Venture.
Thank you for the read. I doubt that in my current situation I would have the time or resources to pursue it. I'm mostly just trying to get the idea out therein the hopes that someone will. But who know what the future holds.
It's good to do that. Open Up Possibilities. You are not alone...
If you ask me Steemit started off as a human curation platform to begin with; but after someone programmed the first vote bot, and released it into the wild so that whales could profit off it, that’s what completely changed the dynamic and made Steemit more of a pay to play situation. I guess the tricky part is coming up with a bullet proof plan to provide incentive to get people, or whales to start manually curating again. Automating the process would be the tricky part, and having faith in the curators, that they are doing their job, and not helping out their friends. I think the problem is streamlining a process that works. Once that can be done, I’m sure if the idea is good enough many whales might be interested in something like that. Just to benefit the platform. Unless of course the benefits of the bot rewards outrank the benefit of the curation scheme. Keep thinking about and jot down as many things as you can. Hell, maybe propose your idea to programmers. Or ask the inventors of one of the bots to invent a competing system that could promote manual curation. Interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing!
Sadly for auto upvotes bots, the money will always be better than a human curated system. In the prior the user is paying a premium for a guaranteed vote, so they get the payment and the curation bonus. But it does cause a lot of drama when rubbish gets to over paid. In the latter users are only charged a viewing fee with no guarantee of a vote, but those whom's Steem Power has been used get to sleep well at night knowing they are only rewarding quality. I'd like to believe that there are at least a few whales that are more concerned for the long term health of Steemit and the value of Steem, as apposed to maximum profits in the present, at the expense of steem's value in the future.
I started to type here, but it ended up WAY too long, so have actually made a post.
Basically, sneakyninja seems to do part of what you suggest, by allowing people to suggest others posts for promotion for the chance of a bit of personal gain. That's a great idea.
Unfortunately though, I can now see the repetition in a Mandelbrot kind of way of our own world. There are those who create the world with the best intentions, those that try and follow the creators idea and plan, and those that stand on the backs of all to reach the highest fruit and then take it for themselves.
With the influx of more users every day, some with a large backlog of creation and followers, and others just copying and pasting for the money.... I can see many talented people will be left to be lost in the quicksand of memes and others work.
I'd better stop now as this is threatening to get WAY too long again.
Good post!
You are on the right track but you stopped following the trail of money too soon. The vote sellers don't actually make much. That may come as a surprise to you when you see the incoming payments and curation rewards. However, the vote selling services RENT the Steem Power they use to upvote. They rent it from some of the largest whales on platform, who delegate their SP to the vote sellers in return for weekly payments. These whales receive the vast majority of all profits from selling votes. Without specific numbers, the basic idea is: vote buyers (can) make a small profit (can - if using an ethical vote selling service. If using a bid bot, users can actually lose money); vote sellers make a slightly large profit per vote; the whales who delegate the SP take most of the cut.
@freedom is one of the biggest whales selling delegations to vote sellers - just look at the wallet transaction history if you want your jaw to drop to the floor.
All the issues you bring up are of course real issues and problems with vote selling. They just aren't the biggest problem. Vote selling serves to increase the single biggest problem facing Steem, which is the incredible wealth inequality. The biggest whales already control a staggering amount of the total STEEM out there, and the % they control is growing fast because of the rise of vote selling. This is a real long term danger to the platform. It scares off other large institutional investors to see the STEEM concentrated in the wallets of so few. On top of that, these whales are already proving that they are willing to grab the short term profit - they are obviously not in it for the long haul, or they would be trying to grow their investment by increasing the value of Steem blockchain. They will bail and dump their Steem on the market, and when the price of Steem crashes can anyone claim that they really benefited by buying votes? If you grow your account by some small amount of Steem and SBD by buying votes, but you contribute to the ultimate downfall of the platform and your Steem becomes literally worthless, have you made a wise choice?
I actually did see that, and I 100% agree with you. My problem with this post and most all of my posts is I just seem to run out of time. It would have taken me two weeks to compile the post I really would have liked to create, and since I have such few eyes on me I decided to just put out an abbreviated version of it. I probably should have mentioned the SP renters/loaners in with the bot owners, as they would be getting the main stake of the profits. In my mind I grouped them together, but the reader probably wouldn't see that. So thank you for pointing it out here.
My whole point is I'm hoping that enough people will start to see that they are not providing a valuable community service but in fact devaluing the platform when these services are being used in such high numbers. As concerning the vast wealth up at the top, it's not something I would know how to remedy as the same situation has occurred in the real world. Lets hope that some of them decide that perhaps for the value of their own investment they should slowly begin to sell some of it, or at least delegate some to services that help benefit the "value" and appeal of the platform, For doing so would further increase their own wealth in the future. But I'm just a poor man giving my two cents.
Thank you for reading my post and adding value to the comments. If your interested, I did a bit of a follow up post to this one... It's more of a satire based one... perhaps a bit on the profane end of the spectrum. As I was trying to recreate that sick feeling we all get when we see a massive paid out trending post that turns out to be pure bs. Have a lovely day.
Hey there imjustsaying, I think we both started on here around the same time and I've seen most of what you're talking about. It can be frustrating for people like us trying to build momentum on here with our content going unnoticed. I would like to see some changes but that would be doubtful. On this site if you get enough steem power you essentially no longer need anyone and can just print money. So, it's a race to the top. Unless they completely change around the steem power format there is no incentive for people to do things any other way.
That may be, I just hope that someone would take my idea and run with it. I think that it could really help people who would rather not pay to be upvoted. Curie is an amazing benefit to the community although it's more designed for promotion of unseen creators. I wouldn't mind paying a small fee to have someone look over my stuff and see if it's worth an upvote. I think many others would be of the same mind. I know that it wouldn't make as much money as a pay to pay one, but it would add much more value to the site. Let's see if the big wigs will put their money where their mouth is. That's all I've heard since being here value value value but what I see getting rewarded in paid paid paid.
I heard all the same about value value value but you know that everyone is here to make money. If Steem went to zero I don't think you'd have many people sticking around.
Then I could get the whole reward pool with one self upvote... Oh the dream...
Great post I to have mostly avoided the majority of upvote bots and seldom ever use them i do occassionaly wonder if that is the right shoice and use them for a day or two on one or two posts but then feel I dont like what I am doing and stop using them
I don't have an issue with people using them as there is no other "options." I don't have hate for people who do. I just want a shot at something, that doesn't feel "dirty." lol Thanks for reading.
ROFL, That about sums it up. Sort of the same feeling one gets after procuring h##kers and c#caine.
Sorry I couldn't resist.
LMAO I left myself open to that didnt I LOL
Definitely a tricky subject to talk about. I've been on Steemit for over a year and just started using bots like 4 days ago, just out of curiosity more than anything.
Unfortunately, everything good will be squeezed of it's goodness until it starts to dry out. Steemit has become no different. That's not to say that I don't still love the platform, but I find myself relying on 'who' and 'what' I know within the platform, the same way I do in the real world. It used to be more focused on content.
I do miss the days where a quality post could get $40-50 just because it's good. Now it requires knowledge of the inner workings of bots and communities - not to say that's a bad thing, but it makes it very difficult for newcomers that would have no way of knowing that out of the gate.
I love to see newcomers creating great content and succeeding, because to me that's what this platform is all about. It shouldn't matter how much SP you have, but just what you have to bring in.
As you said, it is what it is. I agree with you wholeheartedly, but like any social construct, status and power will develop inevitably one way or another. To an extent it's important to fight for this idea of quality over status, but also, the community is built by it's own.
Just keep doing what you're doing!
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. It may be that someday I may "need" to use paid upvote bot's, but until that day I'll prob grumble and complain about the abuses of them. I do hope that someone would create the sort of human curated upvote system that wasn't guaranteed. But I know that there isn't big money in it so it may never happen. But I can dream can't I? lol thank you so much for your support. It really does seem to be a lot of who you know, and quality work certainly doesn't hurt. I think I'm going to try to just have fun for a while, and not put my heart fully into it. Perhaps once I know enough of the right people then I can go back to what I love.
Totally would like to do some music stuff though. If you have an old piece lying around and would like. I may be able to come up with some lyrics and lay a vocal track down for it, all depends on if it the inspiration comes. If you would be interested in something like that possibly let me know and we could meet up of discord. Sadly I have no musician friends in New Zealand, so it's hard to do anything like that here.
Totally hear you - I'm never going to put an abundant amount of energy into bots, but it never hurts to know how they work. I've gotten this far without them and I've been just fine. Success is relative - I don't need to be a whale to be a part of a great community.
And of course man, you should join our 'Steemit Local Music Society' Discord. You'd be very welcome and I'm sure it would help you find a musical outlet (I'm always willing to help). I'm one of the co-owners - we've got lots of heads in there who are making music and livin' the dream lol, myself included. I'll leave the join link here:
https://discord.gg/zku8RFM
LOL. And pay for honest curating... sounds good. I hope those people are right who say: good content will win anyway. At the moment I am glad, that there are people here, that just don't see everything positive. Being positive is fine, but we should also be aware of developments going in the wrong direction. At the moment I think the community is strong enough, that everything is going to be alright. I can't wait what will change when they implement SMTs and communities. I guess that will make a major difference to now.
I would love to be able to just submit my work that I think is worth it and pay a fee to be read. hopefully the fee wasn't to high, although if it was to l think they would just be spammed with rubbish. I don't know it we will ever see it but I think that it would be a huge hit. If there were a few of them then people could switch or use all of them if they wanted.
It just wouln't feel so much like bribery, because it would be reliant on our quality not the amount you gave them.
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