LOL,
I think you make some good points Sir, but if the community decides where the reward pool is distributed, and you "ban" something; isn't that kinda like "Centralized Gubment" ???
I mean, would you rather see someone who gives back 50% to the community get the rewards or someone who simply powers down every week and never even reads anyone else's post ??
I don't have anything invested in Steemit so I don't feel I have much of a say to be honest, I am perfectly willing to go along with the flow...
Thanks for the post...
We as a community have to ban it. That is decentralised. The reward pool comes from the blockchain. Going through steemsports first means losing 50% of that. Everybody who plays steemsports wins a penny. But everyone who authors a post in competition with steemsports loses their silver. With each vote piled on them, they suck rewards from those rewarded less than them. This would be OK if their votes weren't bought with the promise of a penny to those who play the game.
You win a penny if you succumb to them. You lose much more than a penny by not playing the game.
On top of that, we are powering up an account holder who threatens people, tries to turn us against the steemit developers and is blackmailing the steemit community.
We cannot afford to power up an account holder who does not have the best interests of steem at heart. This person clearly does not wish for the success of our blockchain. They are a danger to the nourishment of our community growth.
Read comment here bad-mouthing steemit developers in attempt to break us
There is a reason stakeholders used to protect us from vote-buyers.
Now we know why.
Well, being I am an anonymous foot; I don't expect to be taken too seriously.. BUT..
I can't believe the trending page is the issue here. It seems more likely the major issue is the so called draining of the reward pool.
The reward pool is going to be drained every day any way, and if the Steemit population were to double over night.... Or perhaps half of the registered accounts actually made a post...
What ya gonna do then, ban new accounts ?
It reminds me back in the days of torrenting we use to have server races. We would compete on how much our servers could upload in 24 hours... Then someone discovered uploading porn would get a lot of attention lol..
Same thing is going to happen here very soon. As interesting as what you had for breakfast or how cute your poodle is, it isn't going to get many votes compared to the latest porn upload....
I hope an answer can be found because I do enjoy Steemit, but I honestly haven't taken it very serious for these reasons...
Happy Day!!
The last time we had a boom in new users the price boomed. For some time people were raking in thousands of dollars from posting. New users is what we want to help improve the price of steem as this increases demand for steem. Steemsports discourages that by discouraging competition.
I have no problem with porn doing well as long as people are not upvoting it in order to get a penny back from the post. That incentivises people to upvote it for the wrong reasons. But if they are voting for it because they want to reward somebody for putting it on the platform and encourage others to do the same, that is fine. That will encourage growth. We can still compete with that.
I would like to see the actual 'press release' that was mentioned. Does anyone have a link to it? I can't find it anywhere on our official @steemsports, @steemsportsfund blogs.
You would have to ask Dan or Ned.
I'm still opposed to naked vote buying which does not add value. If someone makes a shitpost that says little more than "half the reward on this post will be paid to voters" and adds no more value to the platform, then it is worthy of downvoting.
Steemsports is not that. It is participatory content that has a small element of vote-buying (implemented in a manner as to be focused primarily on stake redistribution), but also with significant effort/work toward: developing the brand and concept, bringing sports writing and coverage to the platform, and finally driving a significant effort/work in building a business and various marketing and promotional plans that bring additional value to the ecosystem.
I'm also not sure where you get the idea of steemsports or its supporters discouraging competition. I've also supported the bacchist's fantasy hockey league and ats-david's sports contest posts. Those are direct competition which also get my votes. I don't see any issue with competition.
When you used to flag these games @smooth they were very often interactive and engaging. There were lotto games and competitions that you down voted because the rewards would be used to "manipulate voting"incentives. Now maybe your subjective opinion was that those games were "shitposts". But suddenly when YOU LIKE the content you chose not to ask for the removal of the vote buying aspect. (Despite the fact that you often flag a post just to have one sentence removed before you will up vote it)
Your SP is for manipulating the reward pool. It is abuse to manipulate the users to use their votes in favour of YOUR SUBJECTIVE VIEW. Can you seriously not see how incredibly selfish and hypocritical it is to go from down voting these games one minute and then turn around and up vote the ones that YOU like, to manipulate the votes yourself?
By supporting those vote games YOU are buying the votes of the minnows. As if you don't have enough SP to vote with. By doing this you are making the system less decentralised because you are using more than your own SP to distribute the rewards.
Imagine if the co founders were to do this! It would certainly then be seen as taking more power from those of us with the least power.
If you want to use my SP to vote for the things YOU LIKE you can buy my SP and power it up but I will not be selling cheap!
And the way that it discourages competition is because only the games YOU SUPPORT will be played by the minnows because the rewards for the others are low. So again it discourages competition because even more power than the SP you hold is being used to manipulate the reward pool!
[I'm replying to your later post]
We will have to agree to disagree that the early vote buying posts were anything like Steemsports. However:
First of all, my SP is not "manipulating" the reward pool, it is expressing my opinion on how the reward pool is to be allocated (in this case to sport-related content and a game/initiative that distributes a small amount of reward and stake to users who decide to participate, which I find to be a use of reward funds that brings more value to the platform as a whole than rigidly demanding that all rewarded posts conform to a narrow view of blogging or content). Is my opinion any less legitimate than yours or anyone else's? I certainly would not make that statement about your SP and your votes.
Second of all, even if there were no differences between the posts, and I think there is, no I do not think it is hypocritical to change one's view on something. Are you claiming you never change your views?
But again, I don't think any of those earlier posts were as substantive nor well-developed a concept as Steemsports, which came to the platform from the very start having done a significant amount of development of the concept, idea, branding and plans to promote and expand the platform (which are being carried out). I see a hell of lot of more effort having gone into Steemports and value being delivered by it. That's why I vote the way I do.
By manipulate I meant determining where the rewards are allocated. That was not intended to trigger you or to say you don't have the right to express where to allocate the rewards. If you are using your own SP you have every right.
But by voting for a vote buying post you are buying the votes of others who may not agree with your subjective valuing of the game as many people on the platform have expressed they used to play these games (didn't read the posts) before they realised it was having a band wagon effect.
This kind of interaction will not be attractive to future investors who can see that those who vote are not even paying any attention. Future investors want to know that we ARE paying attention, not just grabbing pennies where we can get it.
[replying to your nested comment]
Future investors will be interested in what is going on with their investment in the future. It may be that different types of content and interaction are more valuable in the future, but for now I firmly believe that the the greatest value-add to this community is expanding the user base by making the platform more accessible with more ways to interact, earn (even small amounts), and distribute stake.
One comment on something you said earlier:
This is true, to an extent, with Steemsports specifically, but if someone else were to compete, there is no reason they couldn't offer to power down and return 50% or more of the SP received to players (for example on season-long contests or special events). The question is whether this provides enough incentive for the person running the operation to put in their time and effort. Steemsports' business model is based on distributing most of the liquid rewards to players and writers and keeping the SP as gross margin for the rest of the business. Anyone is free to try something else and if it works for them, great. There is no hard and fast rule that says the poster needs to keep the SP.
As I said earlier, I've already upvoted other games and contests if I felt they were based on a significant and credible effort to bring value via an interesting and promising concept and not just empty paid voting that adds nothing more. So I'm happy to see people try other models besides the specific one that Steemsports uses.