The negative feedback loop of little to no payouts most of us are experiencing here TODAY is taking a toll on every single one of us. Some even get so discouraged that they give up on Steemit and never come back. Thinking that our work isn't good enough and feeling bad about ourselves because of it is not a good place to be in. I'm here to tell you that it's not your fault. The quality of the content you are producing isn't the problem but something else alogether. Today I'll share one of the biggest reasons to why we are struggling to get upvotes from Steemians.
A group of influential whales are plaguing the whole ecosystem with their GREED
Causing an imbalance in the reward distribution that is so huge it affects everyone that uses Steemit.
WHERE DID THE UPVOTES GO?
A year ago you could easily get some upvotes from doplhins, orcas and ocassionally, even whales but today everything is much different. For some reason we are getting less upvotes from real Steemians (not including projects like @curie, @dlive, @dtube, etc) as each day passes by. I was wondering about why this is for a while and I even asked the community about it in a post a couple of months ago, but no one seemed to have a good enough explanation for what was/is going on.
Couple of months down the road I noticed this trend of high SP accounts (whales) upvoting each other to effectiely only votefor themselves 10x a day by exchanging votes with other Greedy Whales. Colluding with other whales that have this twisted idea that their Steemit account is a Money Making Machine. These people are reducing rewards for everyone else while getting as much as they possibly can for themselves.
Some of The Plagued Whales of Steemit that are poisoning this place are:
@adsactly @cryptopassion @kingscrown @gavvet @exyle @jrcornel @vcelier @rea
Just to name a few.... These are just the CREAM of the la CREME. The top level ABUSERS of the Steem Blockchain and everyone that uses it. Most of them are in the top 20 accounts by SP and already having that much money in the first place obviously isn't enough for them so they must gain the system as much to further increase their enormus wealth. All on the spare of EVERYONE ELSE that uses Steemit.
By being in such a corrupt state of mind, not thinking/caring about the consequences of their deeds, they are not only reducing your potential rewards but they are also decreasing the value of your upvotes!
B,b,b,but how do you even know they are abusing?
Looking at the upvotes they get a blind mand would see what's going on. Just look at the top 10 people upvoting any of the mentioned accounts. Check their posts for the top 10 upvotes they received and you will see the same people there.
Another good way to figure this out on your own is to check out
SteemReports - Outgoing Votes where you can see a sweet pie chart of your faovurite abuser to see where their votes are going. Just type in their name and find out how corrupted they are!
If any of The Plagued Whales are reading this
I'm not afraid of your downvotes. Go as hard as you want, I'll gladly take them. By doing that you are only confirming my statements further and showing how upset you got for getting called out so publicly like this. I know, no one likes that, but people deserve to know the truth.
If that is something that upsets you, I don't gieve a fuck! You are the biggest scumbags on Steemit and everyone needs to know it.
By being good role models careless abusers
These high SP circle jerks have not only efectively reduced our income, but they have set a standard for how to make the highest possible ROI on the SP you own by doing as little work as one can. Because their posts are always trending and they have high reputation (most over 70), this kind of corrupted behaviour has rubbed off on the rest of the community, and now everyone is doing it! Ok, not everyone, but a good 30% of all accounts on Steemit is abusing the system in this fashion. Only for their personal profits.
Instead of setting an example of exceptional content quality and responsible behaviour, The Plagued Whales are doing the exact opposite. Daily raping the reward pool and inviting thousands to join them!
AND THAT'S WHY NOWADAYS YOU WILL RARELY GET UPVOTES FROM STEEMIANS
Going in more detail about how to fix this kind of behaviour is a topic for a whole nother post so I won't go into it now. I'll write more about this in the near future. I just wanted to finally get this out of my mind and on the digital storyboard you are using right now. I wanted you to know my honest opinion about something that has been bugging me for a while now. Currently, this is the biggest problem of the platform, and the scale on which this is happening now is insane.
If nothing is done about this issue, a year from now no one will be getting any upvotes, unless they are in their own little circle jerk.
What do you think?
- Have you noticed this negative trend before reading this post?
- How to eliminate this ind of behaviour/thought process?
- Opinions? Ideas?
Read my other Steemit related posts
- CREATING NEW STEEMIANS - STEEM Evangelism Through Apps Like Steepshot, Dlive or Dtube
Why LOW Steem Prices SHOULDN'T Discourage You From Producing Content But SHOULD Motivate You Instead
Posts Gaining/Loosing Value Without Aditional Upvotes/Flags? Find out why!
Understanding Full Potential of The Steem Blockchain And Why To Power Up
Steemit related posts I'll write in the near future
- The Struggles of Low Payouts and How to Overcome Them
- Beating the Greedy Whales
- Steemit 101 - Beginners Guide -
I'm glad I caught this before it becomes invisible ;-)
I was surprised to see a couple of the names you listed.
It was good to see Bernie wasn't on the list, I would have been disappointed. Perhaps he really is 'The Good Whale' !
haha, I don't think they will flag it as it just proves my points even further. You would be surprised to see how many other high whales do it. These are just a couple of the top of my head. Who surprised you the most? @adsactly? They annoy me so much.....
I didn't see bernie do that but I've seen him upvote his stuff in the past. But not like this. Never seen him collude with others to upvote himself 10x like that. Yeah, I think that he actually is. He lost way too much money on flagging @haejin and other similar abusers to care about money enough to do something as stupid as these guys are doing.
Yeah, it's pretty depressing. I'm sure you are probably aware of haejin and his antics. The reward pool rape going on there is obscene. Not that this should surprise anyone, as this is just the regular financial world playing itself out here in the less regulated crypto world. The only hope we have is appealing to other whales to correct these sorts of imbalances with their own up and down votes. I wonder if @berniesanders would be up for correcting this example. Although, I don't know where he sits on this sort of thing (but he did hammer haejin for a while).
Yeah and what's sad about that situation is that the whales have given up on him and how he is still doing the same shit he did before.
Yep, just like IRL. No one gives a damn about anyone or anything except making as much profits for themselves as they can.
We can surely stop this but we need support of a god whale that will delegate a ton of SP so that we can counter their GREED with flags on their post. In end we can either keep flagging or they can capitulate and give 25% of their votes to @curie or a simmilar project. That would even up the playing field a bit and even though they would still be doing it at least 25% of their 100k+ would go to a honest project curating quality work.
I am doing my best to organically grow my steemit blog and have recognized all of the problems you've mentioned. I also recognize the fact that the topics I discuss are unpopular, which certainly contributes to the slow growth of my blog, but I digress.
It's funny... the potential rewards are the main attraction to steemit, not the opportunity to produce quality content.
If the steem currency's value is based on the value of the platform itself, this behavior is definitely 'shooting yourself in the foot'.
Another problem I would like to add is that whales make gigantic payouts for well written, yet useless posts... $350 for your trip out for lunch? I think some with a high number of followers pretty much make posts about anything as every post makes them a decent payout, both due to the problems mentioned above as well as over-glorification of whales. This results in new users expecting to get 100 upvotes for a picture of a sandwich - promoting the idea that short meaningless posts deserve payouts and corrupting the pool from the other direction.
How many people upvote and comment on irrelevant posts from whales hoping to one day get a high paying upvote in return from the whale?
Thanks for the truthful perspective! I wish my "real" vote was worth more than under 1 cent.
You have an interesting blog, see you around!
Hey man, sad to hear you struggling, but everyone is! Check me out, I got almost 5k followers and I still struggle. The problem is that there is no real curation here and it's hella hard to get on the top from all of the 300+$ whale circle jerk posts.
I see you write the most about cannabis. There is an audience for that here. You just need to find it.
Followers mean nothing here, the only $ they get is from their "friends" who jerk their cocks
Np bud (pun intended) , I'm awlays truthful with my readers. You will never fin no BS here. Only my opinions based on facts. The $ of your vote doesn't mean much to me, it's the intention that counts. Thanks for that!
Glad you like my blog! Cya around :)
I'm not too concerned about struggling as I am producing posts which are about important issues that need to be addressed by humanity, not necessarily to earn anything (luckily lol). Cannabis is not my main focus, Freedom and Truth are!
I chose steem because of the (supposed) focus on quality content and the lack of censorship that is plaguing mainstream media, social and otherwise. If one or two people can take something away that they can then apply to increasing freedom in their own lives I feel I have succeeded.
The lack of exposure is really what makes it tough. I would rather see my post make $5 and get 100 upvotes than make $20 and get 25 upvotes.
There is some great content by some awesome people on here, it just takes a while to find, and of course everything produced is submerged in this pool.
Cheers!
Hehe you prolly won't get flagged as that would only make you right!
But yeah, thanks for writing this.
Restemeed for vision
SteemReports make me right but the flags would confirme it further, yeah. But tbh I would kinda like to see them flag me here. Would be fun.
Np, thanks for the exposure!
dude, you deserve to get flagged for postying bad ideas, its a downvote, we get to up and downvote. You should post good ideas not whine and complain about nonesense
you cant STEAL what you DONT have, its a STAKE you can ONLY eat YOUR piece of the cake
So it's ok with you that this platform is getting systematically ruined in front of our very eyes?
Man, there is no reasoning or comon sense with dope addicts. You know how it is.
The only plus side to this is that their power is reducing over time. The more active users that we have and the more people that power up means that numbers will take their toll. When you see the whales and others continously upvote themselved it is sad to see. But we outnumber them. 1000 users with 500sp can outvote or outsay most accounts on the site. As time goes on their will be a lot more 1k sp accounts putting the power in our hands. Its just a matter of how we operate ourselves. Do we follow the whales example or do we steer the site in a better direction? ? ?
It would be really a hard to collect the SP delegation from thousands of accounts like that but we could find a Good Whale that has enough to delegate 100k or something like that. 500k would be ideal though as some of these accounts could counter the flags and start attacking us. I'll see what I can do about it and start creating a service to counter what these guys are doing.
ok so youre gonna fucking combine your money to flag a whale? no sorry, people dont irrationally combine money like that
we start a flag war against them and make them capitulate 25% VP daily to projects like @curie
Not what i meant at all. What i meant is that combined we can have a much bigger say on how the site goes forward. Not even by physically combining the money but by using our votes the right way. If we as a whole push the right content to the top and vote down shit en mass. Combined we have much more power than any whale.
Im just saying that we dont have to copy what the whales are doing but that we can do better. And as time goes by our sp is increasing a faster than theirs which will make it easier going forward. Ive seen posts in the past with the different sp numbers for each level and the whales percentage is constantly reducing.
These whales are just focused in speculating on STEEM, pumping and dumping it here and there, making sure their wealth is well established and keeping the vicious cycle on repeat until maybe one day steemit gains more traction and more people increase the demand of the token. I can only think but in proposing lists of people that abuse the system, because they are a few, we have to think as steemians that we are more than them, so having that in mind, we really have to encourage the community and everyone involved in the steemit ecosystem to contribute in detecting and enlisting these abusive people, and flag them so their reputation gets to the ground. The more people engage in this, the more the flagging power we all accumulate to overpower the greed and not well deserved "reputation" of the whales. Its not an easy task, but its a much needed one, specially when everyone here is affected by it and there's a lot of money being poured in the hands of a few, because the majority can't prevent it? That is a flawed system.
Yeah they could be the reason Steem suddenly drops every time it goes up. You gave me a great idea. We create a wall of shame website/steemit account. A bot to recognize and screen steemit for this kind of behaviour. We give them an index of abuse and start exposing them on a daily basis. Maybe even get a couple of trending posts for more exposure. Then we ask good whales like @thejohalfiles to delegate some SP so that we can start flagging them. After some time we give them an option; either stop circle jerking or give 25% of your daily votes to projects like @curie
I'll definitely lay this on paper, write a post about it and ask for @utopian devs to help me create it. Let the flag wars begin!
Your spreading bad ideas and communism so im downvoting you
You cannot just expect to make money spreading ideas of communism on a capitalist blockchain
Stop being a altruistic socialist.
If you want upvotes you have to fucking earn them
Whales decide to vote who they want, and if they self vvote thats their choice, its called profit motive and incentive to buy more steempower you daft socialist!
Yu have NO IDEA how the real world works!
you live in ideal land!
You are a god damn fool @ackza
Wow man! How brave, congratulations! Great job!
Thanks, I'm not afraid of anyone here. Just because they got millions in SP doesn't mean we should keep quiet about the abuse they are doing daily.
You got a 11.17% upvote from @upme thanks to @runicar! Send at least 3 SBD or 3 STEEM to get upvote for next round. Delegate STEEM POWER and start earning 100% daily payouts ( no commission ).
Am glad you caught and exposed them
Thats very bad of the. No wonder most newbies give up when they cant contain with low returns after few months joining.
Yep, no more upvotes unless if you are in their circle jerk. So either buy 100k SP and jerk their cocks or be a small ass minnow that gets no votes -.-
I used to follow up adsactly and I realized they were not upvoting even people that comment on their post.
Btw, how do I buy steem power?
I've always disliked seeing the same authors on the trending place and the way they get there, by upvoting themselves with massive amounts of sp. And they always upvote their post before the 30min mark. The fastest I saw was when they upvoted their own post that's only 5 minutes old.
It would be ok if they are only upvoting themselves, but they upvote 5 friends who upvote them back and push them to trending. That shit is just not fair and should be illegal.
Its our fucking blockchain, u dont like it make your own, buy some SP stop whing, do some work liek WE did
WHALES were SMART and bought fucking BITCOIn and now they were ablew to buy STEEMPOWER
DOnt be jelous
a lot of fucking altruistic communism shit on this post
IM NOT WHINING YOU GOD DAMN TARD. Get lost with your worthless comments. I'm not taking shit from a dyslexic hobo, heroin/meth abuser. b,b,b I'm not on dope
Are you fucking kidding me? No one can look that bad if they aren't a drug abuser! Only people I know that look like this are heroin abusers / on rehab from it.
Yes i have noticed this problem a lot. But does't know want to know what to do.Waiting for your steemit beginners guide.
We will fix it! Read my reply to the first comment to find the possible solution. Great! Glad you will get some good use out of it.
We are with you man keep it up but eagerly waiting for your beginners guide.So what you think when you are gonna post it???
Just seen this reply, don't know man. Way too busy this last couple of weeks to give you an estimate. Stick around and you will see it soon :)
Does the platform have administrators? Could something be done about this?
Nope, Steemit is a decentralized platform. So no administrators here. We, the community are our own administrators. Read my reply to the first comment to see my idea of how we can fix this.
Coming to this platform, i was full of enthusiasm. Quality contents are appreciated somehow, but it has all gone to shit.
The only reasonable way of getting a 'good' upvote for your contents is now through the communities like @curie, @steemstem, @steemiteducation and so on. Many have left and mang others discouraged.
If nothing changed, we are in for stagnation (which we are in already ) and then regression. Apart from this, most people are delegating the massive portion of their SP to the bots, which is more or less the same.
It is so sad this is happening to steemit. And to think people are still voting some of these as witness is...depressing to say the least.
Resteeming this.
Projects like this will rise, more of them will come in the future and IMO, they are the ones who will save Steemit and keep people from running away.
I completely agree with you @runicar. It is disappointing that they behave this away.
But hey is their stake they can do what they like with it.
-followed.
Yes, there is no rule against what they are doing but it's morally wrong. They will drive potential users away and decrease the value of our platform by doing that.
So, yes they can do it, but the community can rise against them and flag them out of existence! We just need a good whale to delegate 500k :)
Greedy people are the ones who create moss in this beautiful platform.
I believe there are several reasons for not gaining organic/ or say friendly upvotes. Everybody is busy selling their votes. It was few months back when I finally realized everybody cares about only earning here then I also started selling my votes rather than curating manually, that ultimately decreases my overall time on steemit by large margin. Sometimes I forget to come and check or 2-3 days or I feel lazy to do so.
Have a good day!
Agreed + the fact that low payout posts literally dissapear and you can't find them because there are thousands of higher payout posts on top of them.
Get back to curating! I bet that you can earn more by curating only dtube content to get the extra curation rewards than you would get by selling votes. Not sure though, never sold mine.
very honorable and brave to share this and pillory this abusement.
I think they should use the power to support new people and important topics instead making money by circlejerking..
Awsome post and good usage of graphics mate!
Thanks
I was trying to get myself flagged by one of them by mentioning them in the post but they chickened out as it would only make me right :D
Glad you liked it and thanks for reading!
Wow! What a useless, bullshit post. You can't even get the definition of a "whale" right, lol...
Where did I get it wrong? And what exactly is bs in the post? Why so butthurt?
Oh, I see. You are one of them. Sorry for not mentioning you. Might do that in a future post.
Fucker
Do you understand the meaning of "free market"? Of "Proof of Stake"? Explain to me what "quality" content even means? So, by your logic, if you make money here, you're immediately a target of hate. Seems you're making up the rules of governance for the running of this platform all by yourself. I myself could complain about a handful of "whales" above me making a shit tonne more but I don't. Just get on with my "own" journey here, which is what your narrow ass should be doing. Build a rep, not chatting shit and losing your mind. What know nothing about how genuine people have built up their stake here, "within" the rules of Steemit.
You are one of the thickest people on here I've come across. And you should see that as a huge compliment, given the context of your discussion. On some solo vigilant rampage of flagging people and spewing insult just coz they disagree with you. Nice job. When all you've done is show absolute incompetence of the technology you've apparently figured out all by yourself. Don't like it, you know where the door is. Probably the best bet for you since you're so twisted and bitter.
And no, I won't be flagging you. Good luck in your future endeavours.
I do, and I do, but the only reason you bring it up is to try to defend this parasitic behaviour you partake in. Your main source of income.
No!
The problem is not in the money. It's in how its made. If it was organic, I would care not. But colluding with other high SP accounts to practically 10x yourself is making you tards a watered down version of @haejin
Don't get me wrong. I'm not jelly or anything. I couldn't care less about how much you fuckers are making from jerking each others cocks. I'm not gay, sorry.
You couldn't, because they are the ones upvoting your shiet. The only reason they make more is because they have more SP.
There are very few whales on Steem currently that get their rewards organically.
If you can't agree with me on that using 90% to 100% VP for self-voting through the help circle jerking friends is bad, then we have nothing more to talk about. You can't be reasoned with. The only thing you care is the rewards and how to get more of them. Irregardless to ways of obtaining them and consequences it causes. If you think thats alright, then ok.
But this parasitic behaviour is something to be ashamed of yet, you seem to enjoy taking part in it. Why did you feel important enough to come here to try and defend it? Are you a spokesman for circle jerks on Steem?
A person of your attitude towards this issue has no grounds of making any statements about it. Let alone to defend such a frowned upon behaviour.
Better just go, cuddle up besides your buddies, and rub their belly.
Your statements are so wildly out of place. Ridiculous.
Stop trying to defend circle jerking just because you are doing it. I don't give a shiet about you, nor what you have to say about this.
It's like I'm talking to Hitler about eugenics. You can't be reasoned with.