Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Today I would like to share with you this most useful guide on "How to Commit Mass Steemicide." Enjoy!
Step One
Create Steemit.
Obviously no one can commit steemiticide until steemit exists.
Step Two
Incentivize fair voting and rewards distribution.
This can be achieved by offering curation rewards to the largest stake-holders who ultimately have the power to decide where the rewards are going.
Step Three
Make step two entirely redundant.
Continue to offer curation rewards to the largest-stake holders who ultimately have the power to decide where the rewards are going-- even after those large stake-holders decide not to vote fairly, and instead start selling the rewards pool.
Step Four
Start recentralizing all of the power to a select few.
Have an overwhelmingly blind community pay for the rewards that are already allocated to go to them through fair voting, which is why the curation rewards were introduced in the first place. Watch the large-stakeholders who are now selling the reward pool also continue to make curation rewards.
Step Five
Force others to have to pay for votes too.
Wait until the largest-stake holders have reserved a sizeable portion of the rewards pool for paying customers, and then act surprised when everyone isn't earning as much anymore. Wait until the largest stake-holders are selling so much of the rewards pool that they no longer have any need to curate decent content because they are earning plenty curation rewards still, but getting paid to do so. Watch as established members of the community, who have put in a lot of work to help Steemit get to where it was two months ago, have to resort to paying for upvotes too.
Step Six
Watch it go up in flames
Grab some popcorn and watch as the largest stake holders start increasing the disparity between STEEM distribution at an astronomical rate. Don't power down, because the largest stake-holders are not doing it. So everything must be good. Observe as the largest stake-holders siphon their account values out of the platform using the liquidity received by the selling of votes, yet never have to actually power down. That, or watch as the largest-stake holders become so much larger that no one will ever have the ability to negate any of their abusive actions. Enjoy Steemit's new slogan which is advertised in 2018 to the global community.
All hail stinc!
Screwing up a good thing since august '16!
Haha!! Nice ;)
LOL should of known I would find you here.
Well, i do have a reputation to protect!
you bro, watch this, every time I send a message or put a post up Justinadams upvotes me lol
Hi There! You have just been upvoted by @justinadams Witness. You will always recieve a free upvote on every post you make on steemit as long as you keep your witness vote. Thanks For Your Support.
Wow, thats quite a hook!
I should vote for him!
:-)
You have neglected steps seven, eight and nine.
You don't plan for step six and just stop there.
But things aren't going to go the way they planned.
The tables are shifting.
Still, i consider it a good experiment.
Are you suggesting that Steemit is on the way down, or that Steem itself is on the way down? If so I'm curious what your prediction is as far as time. My personal belief is that this platform has a good 18 months left in it, at least. However, I do believe that the other platforms that are being built on the SMTs will probably overtake Steemit although Steem will still be relevant because they will be based on that.
I think STEEM may survive in some regard, but the Steemit aspect of it will have to change dramatically in the future to adopt an entirely new, mostly automated economy. I do think, however, that STEEM has not yet peaked in terms of its value, and will next summer, or perhaps the summer after, reach something ridiculous like 0.1 BTC. However, that will coincide with a crash in bitcoin's value, with it probably dropping lower than five years or more.
After that I suspect most altcoins will die as BTC climbs back up to dominate, and it will be during this time that I think Steemit will have to adapt to survive.
A crazy prediction to you perhaps; but you did ask.
That's not a crazy prediction at all. It's exactly what I was looking for. So you're thinking Steem has got something like 2 years in it, depending on what happens with other factors not related to this particular platform and BTC has maybe 5 years but those will be in decline for maybe the two of those five before it comes back.
I'm in line with those ideas.
For the record, in my opinion, anyone investing in alt coins that are not in the top 100 with the thought process being these coins could possibly go up like 10,000 times is taking a gigantic chance on throwing money in the toilet.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I agree with the analysis.
Think of SMT as an admission that the first draft is fatally flawed and is not going to survive, and so the powers that be are hoping to avoid the collapse of STEEM by creating the very platforms that will "get it right" thereby killing steemit as a platform. IOW, STEEM might survive the demise of steemit as a platform.
This is all just me thinking out loud. I'm still a newbie so don't have much familiarity with the relevant facts and history yet.
I am starting to think the promises of SMT may be a ploy to retain users especially the many plankton and minnows that haven't drank the bid bot Kool Aid. Giving something to hope for seems like it would be a strategic move.
You are thinking like an economist. Keep thinking! My goal is not to create FUD; I think that STEEM and steemit are brilliant. But selfishness ruins everything. Can selfishness be prevented from destroying these wonderful initiatives? I don't know.
I don't have fear of disappointment. Just plain disappointment. ;)
Never have I been more of a cynic than after having access to and really examining this public ledger where the greed of people is on full display.
There are a few outstanding people left and, if it weren't for them, I'd probably be long gone.
I also thing Steem is brilliant but the creators may have been just a tad too optimistic about the intentions of the users to work together vs eat each other.
It is an interesting experiment, nevertheless.
Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. When the domain name system was set up, the people involved naively thought that people would respect the top level categories, would not speculate by squatting on hundreds of domain names, and would surrender their domain names when they no longer needed them. It apparently didn't occur to them that a market would emerge and that good domain names would sell for thousands of USD. (GoDaddy says that mine is worth more than $10,000 USD.)
I see the same naivete with the design of STEEM and with steemit. I'm willing to "invest" time into using, gaining experience with, and studying steemit, but I'm not going to power up beyond, say, $100 USD. I'm willing to spend $100 USD and not worry about losing it all. But I'm not going to get in farther than that.
I thought SMTs were a way to keep new money coming to support demand for STEEM.
That's also my understanding (as a newbie). But economists are trained to think analytically, to use "x ray eyes" to see through claims and explanations to what is really going on. This is done primarily by (1) looking at how the money flows, and (2) using "game theory" to see each person and constituency as a player in a game.
Well, I'm a philosopher rather than an economist. But I am trained in the analytic tradition, including a bit of game theory. You can't assume all the players know how the game functions, but I think it's safe to say that Ned and Steem.inc do. Once you understand that the the most important driver of the overall steem economy is more money coming into it, the rest follows pretty logically (I think).
Your vitae is impressive and makes my mouth water. Is it true that 100% human curation is critical, is essential, to both steemit and steem? I've been saying that, but what do I know? I'm just a newbie.
The same rich getting richer and poor getting poorer here.
Damn Skippy. This is why we can't have nice things.
They could have played their cards right and focused on mechanism for people to produce quality but you get one bad bid bot apple. Ruins the bunch.
I really don't want to power down but I also don't want to position myself to bring on the wrong end of a pump and dump. I don't wish that on anybody to be honest. If anybody deserves to be bag holders, it's the damn vote sellers (and probably buyers for that matter). Can't have one without the other.
LOL, nicely put. Deserves a resteem ;)
I was wondering why this had to many comments. Thanks, man.
At this point I’m just here to make likeminded friends and get as much payout as I can doing it so we can put our efforts and resources elsewhere if greed tears the community apart to the point where no true human beings exist on the platform.
I personally feel curation should have been encouraged through the upvoting of good curation initiative posts like @ocd and @sneakyninja, rather than receiving payout, since it incentived the curation of typically trending users with the promise of big curation rewards rather than real quality material.
I shared my reflections about the same subject on a sndbox quest I made like a week ago.
I see 2 possible solutions for us, and only 1 for steem.
a) the communities/hivemind feature can somehow fix this
b) we need to simply wait for @dan and his EOS's platform and hope that he figured out a way to avoid this.
That's it.
Waiting for EOS fix the problems is certainly not going to help the large stakeholders on here, because it's a completely different platform and completely different token. It would be nice to have another option because, as a fiction writer, I really like the idea of having multiple cryptocurrency based blogging platforms. However, I do hope internally we can fix our problems here without having to rely on a separate platform that could possibly interfere with viability of this one.
There's an "old" saying in the computer industry: "Never be first."
My instincts, as a newbie, are that Steemit isn't going to survive:
(1) The incentives for whales is wrong. They make more money appropriating the rewards pool (by selling votes and then double dipping by collecting curation awards on those votes) than they would make by doing human curating. It's become a game of musical chairs. If I was a whale, I would "monetize" all of my voting power and milk the cow until she is dry. I would secretly fund mouthpieces to talk up craptocurrency, especially STEEM, to postpone the day of reckoning. I would have my exit strategy all ready, watching closely for rumors indicating that it was now the time to start the 13 week powerdown. During powerdown, STEEM will probably collapse, but that's a hit that I will take because I've made a TON of money by staying in the whale game. And if I have inside information so can push that button 8 weeks before everyone else figures it out, my own hit will be tiny.
(2) The data store layer is not scalable. The entire blockchain is stored as a single file entity on a single server. Without scalability, the price of STEEM is a bubble with no future. (The emperor has no clothes.)
OK, whales. The cat is now out of the bag. Your game has been exposed. Is that sweat on your forehead? Is your finger poised over the "power down" button?
Well, that could happen. However, that could simply be the change of power. Steem has a long road ahead of it. Many different social media sites will be based on SMTs. Appics and Onstellar plan to launch in the third quarter of 2018. Communities will also be built that will make Steemit more like Reddit, which may in fact be a more popular approach than the one we've currently got going on.
Now, Steemit is great.... but Steem itself is the main concern. Steem, in my opinion, is simply one of the best tokens on the market. There's so much that has to offer that it just doesn't make any sense for not to last for years to come even if Steemit gives way to another platfrom. Hopefully that platform will be based on SMTs.
My instincts agree with you. Also, don't place too much weight on my instincts. They are well trained, but I haven't given them very many facts to digest. Wonderful instincts are like wonderful computers: "Garbage In, Garbage Out".
Do you think Steem is better than EOS mate?
I think EOS will be great, but it's nothing right now. The token isn't even the main token, it's just some kind of placeholder until they release the real coin in a couple of months but everyone has already decided that it's going to be the king of the world.
I do think it's going to be good. Will it come out with a platform that competes with Steemit and attempt to destroy it? It might. That would a bad idea for everybody involved.
Now if they could come out with a complementary platform then that would be cool.
Do I currently think Steem is better than EOS, as of today? Definitely.
Idea, you make salient points on all accounts, lest one: Steemit isn't going to survive.
I do not know why, but ...I think if we are patient, its gonna work its way out of the mire of the vote greed and the self-adulation, the platform will be as big as Twitter. There are "true whales" aka sponsorship that will begin lurking, and this is the kind of platform that can and will reward in the way it was intended to be in the beginning; without manufactured "bot" hype for substandard content. That is what poisoned the well with Twitter. We just have to find that mind blowing content, and create it to bring the true whales to Steemit. I just know they are coming. Good Post sir.
I hope that you are right. The incentives for whales must be carefully crafted so that they make more money by individually behaving unselfishly (good for the platform, normal cells) rather than selfishly (bad for the platform, cancer cells).
Any system can be gamed. Economists call it "creative response". So incentives will never be enough. A real community mindedness must emerge in which unselfish people take ownership of the community and use "social coercion" to ostracize and otherwise punish those who act like cancer cells. "Evil prevails when those who are good do nothing."
Agreed Idea...following you now...I like how you think..this whale, dolphins, minnows is just too much....and we will need something when Twitter crashes... #justsaying
You won't be able to keep your intentions pure, @angelking. But if you resolve to do so, every once in a while you will forget your fear and, for a moment, be a channel through which God's love flows through you into the world. (Translate according to your beliefs.)
Well, the iPhone was the first smartphone of its type, and today about a decade later, its still the most iconic and profitable smartphone there is.
Touche. But the saying is true. It is a warning to entrepreneurs who have a brilliant idea: Make sure that you are not underfunded, because the big dogs will let you develop the market and will then come in and take it over. IOW, it's not enough to have a brilliant idea. Once you create something, you'll need to defend it. It will be war.
Agreed, if we could get enough of us large minnows and a few dolphins and whales together and organize our efforts to reward less self serving behavior and support each other we could make a dent, even if we can’t end the abuse. Thats what I’m about!
Of course not, when I said "us" I meant us as users, not as people with Steem holdings (big or small)
Steem has the first mover advantage, so that could help when the time comes to compete against others.
I’m trying not to wait for anyon to come and fix this. It may not be much but I want to help bring all us community minded people together and supporting each other as much as possible so our voice is louder.
Totally. If you want something done...
Yeah, I think that will help especially after the communities feature is released.
To be honest, my interpretation of the hivemind proposal was that it was not too different from how you started being able to sign in with facebook on other websites. This seems the goal, and did we not already establish that this was done mostly for the purposes of data harvesting? So why, just because we are on a different platform, who words a very similar proposal in an obfuscated manner, do we accept it as beneficial for us so willingly?
As for the EOS alternative, I don't doubt it will be better in one way or another. But, I suspect the cost of using the platform will be higher - again; in one way or another.
Recent analysis of the blockchain by one of the witness (forget who off hand) indicated that the disparity is lessening between top and bottom ends of the fish tank.
Interesting fact. Illigal ATM withdrawls in Singapore average about $2.3 Billion USD a month! People don't stop using their ATMs because of a greedy few. ;)
If it's the one I'm thinking of then it was deeply flawed - i.e.: yes the total SP of minnows has risen, but the per capita SP of minnows has not, and the rise in total SP for that class of accounts was due to the fact that there are 100,000 more of them than there were a year ago. It also failed to explain why we went from 42 to 36 whales, because if they were powering down enough to move in to orca, that would mean something.
Will try to track that analysis down again for a more detailed review. Thanks for your insights.
This will probably be perceived as arrogant, but I really don't even have to do any math, or any investigating to know this to be false. With the amount of vote selling going on, it's simply not even a possibility that the distribution is leveling. Whichever witness wrote that, is most likely cherry picking stats, or perhaps simply overlooking other variables. For example, more accounts does not mean more Steemit users. Many of these early adopters have a great deal of accounts, some have openly admitted to having thousands. So, one cannot be sure that the small accounts which are getting more STEEM, are not simply swiss bank accounts of long time abusers.
Not by me. Statistics can certainly be easily fudged, even unintentionally.
If the wealth distribution of America was transparent you'd be much more outraged on that front.
bid bots will be outdated by filters that can actually find good content and create custom trending tabs.
Anyone can buy more stake and increase their rewards. proof of brain is is a fantasy. whales are obligated to support no one.
The only way Steemit can go down in flames is when a superior alternative presents itself. There are currently zero alternatives.
I enjoyed your post and like to rip on Steem just as much as the next guy, but there are still a lot of good things going down here as well.