"If your business model relies on charging people for ZERO services, you are running a scam."
But isn't that exactly what Steemit is doing? What benefits (or services) do the vast majority of Steemit members gain from their investments? I would venture to say...Nothing! No other significant public forum requires members to invest money in the platform. True, you can get most of your money back, but only after waiting a total of 13 weeks, and only then if the value of your Steem investment does not drop significantly before you have a chance to trade or cash it in.
Is Steemit a a ponzi-scheme? Perhaps! Different people no doubt have different views on that.
Is Steemit a Scam? I believe that it is because the vast majority of members do not fully understand what the platform entails, primarily because that is not clearly explained for the layman to understand. Sure the facts may be embedded somewhere within Steemit's FAQs and so on, but as I am sure you will admit, they are not spelled out in plain for most to understand, and certainly not for those whose first language is not English.
Is Steemit an unethical business model? Absolutely! Most certainly! There may be no other platform like it, and I think that is for good reason. First of all, no honest person or company would ever develop a system like Steemit has done. It just would not happen! And secondly, it is simply not a sustainable business model. You can;t keep paying out money (no matter how small) without incoming revenue. Even Steemit has been forced to admit that with it's near bankruptcy last year, and the layoff of 70% of its staff, and other cost cutting measures, such as drastically reduced payouts and so on.
Permanent web hosting.
Even if your post is heavily downvoted and your rep is (-77), your posts can still be viewed.
Nobody can erase them, they're coded into the blockchain.
You can't make money with upvotes, but there are other ways to make steem-money. People run a lot of contests, photography, creative writing, that kind of stuff.
No capital investment is required.
No other significant public forum offers free permanent web hosting and 100%transparency (blockchain FTW!!).
Sure you can get downvoted, but you know who did it.
If you get flagged (insta-banned) on yo.tube or fa.cebuk or pa.ypal, you have ZERO recourse.
ZERO. You don't know who did it, you have no way of asking them, and you have nobody to request help from.
You can easily identify users with high-rep and post thoughtful comments to get their attention.
I've actually been very impressed with high-rep users responsiveness.
I've received several non-boilerplate replies from ura-soul, crypto.piotr, themarkymark, and even gooddream.
Socky and me-tarzan even gave me MASSIVE upvotes!
Ok, maybe "easily" was a bit of an overstatement.
It's a roll-of-the-dice, but your odds are way better than any casino.
That's the beauty of the blockchain. Nobody can be banned. Nobody can stop you from sending or receiving direct transfers or delegations of steem.
Your bank can flag you and freeze your account (real cash-money-dollars) at any time and for any reason, they don't have to explain it to you and they don't even have to charge you with a crime.
Pa.ypal can also kick you off their platform (permanently, they have your ID) and freeze your funds for 6 months and nobody can even ask why.
"Your bank can flag you and freeze your account (real cash-money-dollars) at any time and for any reason, they don't have to explain it to you and they don't even have to charge you with a crime."
It is 100% true, I've seen it with my own eyes. And it was a "reputable bank" (if there even is such a thing) one of the "too-big-to-fail" banks. They cited the Bank Secrecy Act.
I couldn't pay rent or buy groceries or gas for two full weeks.
Put that on your list of things you'll never see in the MSM.
"Pa.ypal can also kick you off their platform (permanently, they have your ID) and freeze your funds for 6 months and nobody can even ask why."
They permanently ban people for no reason.
Pa.ypal is one of the biggest ponzi-schemes on the planet earth.
If you are currently using pa.ypal, I'd recommend exploring a backup-plan in case you get insta-banned with zero notice.
What would be your wish-list of key design features if you had the resources to design your own social-network with exchangeable value-tokens?
What enforcement mechanism would you propose?
How is flagging superior to downvoting?
I've had pages get flagged by competitors for the sole purpose of sabotaging me.
Even big yo.utubers complain about getting demonetized (even temporarily can be a big deal if it keeps you off the trending and recommended lists) by bogus flags.
There it is. Where can we find one of these mythical "neutral bodies"?
Articles cannot be downvoted by others, regardless of reputation (sounds good but we need some enforcement mechanism to remove scams and illicit material).
All votes carry equal weight (this should be a no-brainer, but we would need some sort of automated "proof-of-brain" and protection against people controlling hoards of sock-puppets).
Curator payouts are equally divided among all curators (lowering the minimum payout to 0.001 steem and removing the "timing" bonus would fix this).
Good ideas!
"but we need some enforcement mechanism to remove scams and illicit material"
Who would make such a decision? And how would you mitigate the damage potential of a "rogue mod"?
I heard an interview with a fa.cebuk flag-checker recently, they were paid a fractional wage and worked from the Philippines. They said that they were so overworked and borderline traumatized from viewing all the horrendous flagged content, and under pressure to review 1000 flags a day, that they ended up just clicking "denied" repeatedly on all their cases.
Yeah, but that New Zealand shooter, "subscribe to pootiepie" video took them several days to clear out... AND they're literally rollin' in cash-money-dollars.
Yo.utube BY ITSELF is raking in more profit than either VIACOM or COMCAST.
What are your "clearly defined violations"?
4 minute story about fa.cebook moderators
This is a non-trivial problem.
Many users have access to hundreds of machines with unique ips and have the scripting resources to automate nearly undetectable sock-puppets.
The one thing they can't fake is steem. So, under the current system, they can't amplify their vote with multiple accounts (well, except for the free steem delegation and (25) rep that each new account automatically gets, which is sort of a problem of its own).
Some people have access to hundreds of computers with unique ips and unique hard-drive serial numbers.
Yes, you can reduce the number of accounts operating from one computer (hypothetically anyway), but that's not what I'm talking about.