STEEM's Biggest Villian
We have to settle this once and for all. There's been a lot of big talk, a lot of shit slinging, and a whole lot of grandstanding, but there can only be ONE.
Who is STEEM's biggest villian?
You can nominate anyone for any reason. Did someone downvote your post? Did they blow you the fuck out in your own comment section? Did they passive aggressively talk shit on their own blog about you without mentioning your name, but you know they were talking about you and they were just too chickenshit to say anything?
Now is your chance to get back at them
You may nominate ONE, only 1 person in the comment section below. Let's end the debate for good and find out who wins STEEM'S Biggest Villian.
I have a list.... But srsly, why has no one nominated @markymark yet? Or @berniesanders? Or @therealwolf? I just dunno... Imma take back @markymark because he never flagged me, neither @therealwolf. @smooth is just too reasonable, and @sneak inconsequential. @pumpkin is only in charge of who gets to be witness, so, again, inconsequential. We all know witnesses don't matter, eh?
Ok, here it is: @bloom, the first paid flaggot. It's a sign of the apocalypse. Let the flagging begin!
I nominated marky in my reply to whatsup. This because he seems like the ringleader of the downvote posse. Steem is already too niche as it is. Having someone like him running around turning stakeholders against each other and souring people to the platform seems like a terrible idea. What it does is discourages those folks from HODLing their steem in favor of an alternative investment. Over time, this kind of behavior will have a real impact on retention of stakeholders. There are not enough altruistic capitalists that will keep this strange platform afloat, so by chasing off the capitalists (profiteers or what have you) that we do have invested in the platform will only end up hurting the market value of Steem.
When they are cashing out faster than people can generate value, it's a problem. Profiteers are great when you actually have businesses and an economy.
What capitalistic thing has these profiteers done besides cashing out faster than people wanting to buy?
Did most of them run businesses? If you call a bot a business I guess. Did they offer products? Not really. They are just glorified "mining rigs". Steem Monsters is probably the only legitimate business you have on the chain. What else is there to invest on this platform? Nothing.
When the purpose of having stake is "be your own mining rig", that shows how little this platform offers. Steem is just that, "poor man's mining rig". No fancy tech or knowledge needed. Just have some stake and click buttons.
I see Steem as the foremost product to consider. A stakeholder secures the value of Steem in the marketplace. This is because, when stakeholders dump to market, it causes downward pressure on the prices. However magnificent or minuscule the selling, it causes the market to respond in kind. So when someone like Marky says a massive downvote on a whale is like a mini upvote for everyone else, what I think he does not consider is when he drives this money away from the platform the market will respond in kind by downgrading the value of steem. There are not that many altruistic capitalists in this world, let alone ones you can sell on blockchain social media. So when profiteers are part of a select few who prop up the main product, can beggars be choosers. Or should we respect their stake and appreciate what they do for the value of the token?
This is factually correct, and you do not address that fact. You bring up another aspect of such acts that @markymark did not address instead.
Steem does not need profiteers. It needs investors that seek to build value into the endeavor, and this is done by encouraging creators that market Steem with their posts and comments. Profiteers are poor substitutes for that. In fact, they are not similar at all in their effects, and should be eschewed even absent angel investors. Sucking value out of the platform does not benefit it at all.
Okay, so let us assume that it is correct. Let's assume that a massive downvote on a whale is a dusty upvote for everyone else. We don't know what the size of this dusty upvote is and the people who receive it aren't going to notice because it doesn't register on their account as an action. Even if it did, it would show as less than 0.01.
So, in essence, he's going around and bullying large stakeholders for using their stake on their posts. I'll tell you one thing, one of the few motivating factors causing people to buy a larger stake in Steem is to have a more powerful vote, and this gives them access to distribute more rewards from the pool than if they invest less. In this, the coders convey that because of the amount of steem you hold, your vote is more meritorious than someone else's.
I'm not talking about moral merit either, I'm speaking to fiscal merit. These investors in the blockchain chipped in more for the pie. Ergo, they get more slices. Now that makes sense to me. It is logical, and it is sound. Yet, it is only within the realm of upvotes that this is logical and sound. John and George both invested $5.00 in a twenty-dollar pizza. They can take their slices and give them away, or eat them, and that makes sense. However, when you throw downvotes into the mix, you're saying; Or they can have a pizza fight, ruin each others respective day(s) and make a mess of things.
@valued-customer, I do realize that you're stuck on the notion of morality as it pertains to stake-weighting. It's a fair thing to consider, and to some degree, I see and respect your argument. However, keep in mind, I'm thinking from the perspective that the value of Steem is only possible because of investors who create demand and value when they both buy and hold steem, this is why I believe the coders gave larger holders more access to the pool.
However, if you want to get into the notion of morality; You must realize that all of this bickering is over an inflation pool. If it's not right or moral for the federal reserve to inflate, or create fiat currency, then what are we fighting over? A corrupted pool of wealth of which each newly generated steem further goes to devalue every other steem already in existence.
Is the reward pool the swamp? Are we like congress critters bickering over pork-barrel spending? Can anything be moral in this regard? Can the use of the currency itself be any more moral than using any other fiat in existence? If you have a million bucks in a high yield savings account and collect a generous APY, because that's how the system is set up, is that moral?
What if every other customer at the bank had a balance that doesn't exceed 50k; and then suddenly they were informed of how much your APY is in comparison to theirs? Does that make you the bad guy for doing business with the bank? If you uproot your money and leave after the mobs get their pitchforks and force you out, that'll be fewer loans that that bank can lend to that community.
I very much appreciate your considered and substantive reply. However, you have misapprehended my purpose. Money has no value intrinsically, at all. It only has value in relation to people. People are generally morally motivated, with ubiquitous tendencies to vices, I do admit.
Considering Steem only as a financial mechanism renders it devoid of value. It is the people that use Steem that give it value.
Who cares if they self vote? Stake weighting enables substantial stakeholders to manipulate the rewards pool and take from it for themselves. This does not increase the distribution of Steem and does not put upwards pressure on the price of Steem. The reverse is true, because users that post and see @berniesanders self voting an insulting and inane comment for 30 Steem (Bernie, don't pretend you don't) while they get nothing, or only pennies for an hour or more work go away mad.
That decreases the market for Steem, and puts downwards pressure on the price.
I am not extemporizing morality. I am advocating sound business practices. Chasing away the market is not a sound business practice, and user retention to date reveals that Steem is not executing sound business practices in this regard. [@smooth and I discussed retention. He feels it is 7% or more, and I feel it is 5% or less. Either way, it sucks]
Build up the people using Steem, and you will build value into the price of Steem. HF21 does the opposite, and we are observing the results today. I elsewhere (replying to another comment of yourse) discuss how investment and profiteering differ. The former is a tide that floats all boats by increasing the value of Steem, while the latter only profits the profiteer, while decreasing the value of Steem, decreasing the ROI of the entire community as a result.
As to morality, I account the former good, and the latter evil, but no one cares what I think is right and wrong. The concept of fairness exists, and is not merely a human cultural construct. Octopi, crows, and dogs act way out of proportion when tidbits are not fed fairly to them and their peers. Hell, dogs will fight to the death over scraps - because it involves their social standing.
Steem is primarly a social media platform, and social media has proved to be the most profitable business model on Earth, so the FAANGs demonstrate. Steem, due to the encouragement of profiteering and focus on financial rewards, has failed to benefit from the socia media business model nominally, and here we are.
Build up the users, and you will increase the value of Steem. Put the horse before the cart and we'll get somewhere. It is people that have value, and money is worthless without people to value it.
Let's assume that is correct because it probably is to one degree or another. There is no promise of rewards, and the Steem white paper pokes fun at that suggesting that people will get under-rewarded in comparison to the work they put in because it exploits human psychology in the same way that gambling does. However, wouldn't it also be true that if we had 5 aspiring whales who bought into Steem today at 500k each, just so they could self vote, that that in and of itself would drive the market value of Steem upwards?
What did I not address?
So when someone like Marky says a massive downvote on a whale is like a mini upvote for everyone else (what I think he doesn’t consider is when he drives this money away from the platform, or when people sell their steem) the market will respond in kind by giving the value of steem a mini downvote. The #newsteem culture has been live for about 3-4 weeks. So far, the price went down two cents. I’m not saying this is only because of you per se. But are you also taking responsibility for the harm you may cause to Steem’s value in your “virtuous” flagging adventures?
What if the main condenser or exchange conducted anonymous exit interviews asking people why they powered down and sold, maybe we could nail down the retention problems to a handful of reasons? If you learned that your actions are causing people to sell, would you be willing to change your behavior to accommodate disenfranchised stakeholders? When all is said and done; Which is more important? Who rewards go to, or that people are willing to HODL? Is there anything meritorious about being a stakeholder [/FULLSTOP]? Or, does steem only have room for the stakeholders who upvote according to your standards? These are some honest questions rolling around in my head.
You can call me crazy, but I don’t think there are that many people with large quantities of cash willing to invest in exchange for the honor to be a full-time blockchain curator or reward poolice officer. God bless the people who are HODLing and positively curating; these folks are angels. They don’t have to do it, but they choose to of their own free will and accord, that’s what makes what they do special. You seem to want this special attitude to be the prerequisite, and I think this mentality belittles the efforts of those who are already doing the thing.
Besides that, it’s a big ask when the platform needs new investors. It wouldn’t be a bad idea at all to hammer down how you plan on pitching the new money before you drive away all the old money. It was after rumors of mobs and pitchforks that caused STINC to sell to the market, and now you’re just going to double down. Keep in mind that whales like yourself will end up holding the bag, so I hope you know what you are doing.
If the people I flag sell and leave, GOOD.
I flag spammers, plagiarists, scammers, and abusers and in the rare case people who libel me.
I don't go around flagging people for opinions or because I don't like their content, I have far more control with my flags than most people on the platform but I will flag abuse.
The price went down because BTC dropped 20% in a day. All altcoins are bleeding as a result.
And what product is that? You mean the tokens? Like every bloody crypto project? Wow, Steem is so special.
There's no such thing as altruistic capitalists. Everyone is here for their own benefit. Period. Capitalists actually build things for profit. Simply holding tokens is not being a capitalist. Simply stacking coins is not being a capitalist.
Again, what is that product? They are here for themselves, not for whatever altruistic reasons you keep citing, but not providing. Oh? You mean propping up tokens? They bought in once. They started non-stop selling. That's not propping up anything. That's called priming their own pump. Or in crypto terms, priming their own mining rig.
And what type of whales was he speaking? All whales or just some bad ones? Because I don't see him openly tell people to take on @theycallmedan or @acidyo, etc. You know who he's referring to.
Respect what? Your right to be the last bag holder?
I can concede that the initial distribution and reward mechanism favor those unsavory behaviors. The way Steem is set up, it makes no sense to vote for anyone else.
That’s pretty much my point, there are no, or very few altruistic capitalists. The combination of the two words is mostly an oxymoron. So, what reason does any capitalist have to buy into Steem? When you buy Steem and power it up the math dictates the influence your SP has on the reward pool. If people like Haejin are doing something wrong, then maybe the math in the blockchain didn’t adequately account for human nature. Why not consider human nature and the fact that some people will capitalize off of their stake to its maximum potential and then work to get the numbers right? Having the coding accommodate for human nature makes a helluva lot more sense than trying to get people to change their behavior to accommodate some random coders failure to predict the inevitable. People with a low stake upvote themselves at 100% all the time, I do it. So if someone gives up their standard APY to invest in the blockchain in a large quantity, then isn’t their stake in and of itself meritorious enough? At the very least, shouldn’t they too be able to upvote themselves at 100% if they value their posts? If not, please show me how you plan on pitching new capital investments.
Instead of posting nonsense just to vote for themselves, what they need is an option for them to burn VP and receive the equivalent in rewards.
It’ll look less spammy and ridiculous that way. It doesn’t sit well for any content creator or potential investors to see whales posting nonsense just to reward themselves in public.
There are ways to do things without a complete overhaul, but STINC and the witnesses aren’t in a hurry it seems.
Yeah, I suppose if everyone had that option, in theory
it would clean up a lot of the spam. Disingenuous
posts might become a thing of the past.
I recommend capital gains. That mechanism has caused investment to build businesses since time immemorial.
Hmm.. does that mean that when a whale engages in stake weighting, the net result it is not a capital gain?
Well, good on ya mate. Personally it's his bidbot that offends me, as all do. Society is not bots, and buying votes is not curation. If Steem can empower people to interact while enabling them to reward one another with votes, Steem will succeed. It has not, and bidbots - and flags - are a big part of why it has failed to do so heretofore.
People have social value, not bots. Social value is where financial value comes from. One without the other has no value.
Well, maybe someone can take this model and since it is open-source, fix it. It inspires a lot of creativity, but also plenty of discord too.
@l0ki started to do exactly that, but @berniesanders was part of preventing him from succeeding. Personally, I think @l0ki was the biggest opponent of his success, and @berniesanders just had some fun while he blew himself up.
I actually don't mind disagreement. Disagreement can result in discussion that revolves around facts, and that can be a very good thing. Enabling people to just financially crush those they disagree with doesn't improve society, and stake weighting does not promote prosperity as a result.
But, yeah, I agree. It might even happen here on Steem, if the code promotes society instead of draining it.
Yeah, disagreement is fine but the unclear rules of this system are strange. For example, the code encourages both stake weighting and downvoting by not disallowing these operations. It's all very subjective and open to interpretation.
Your nomination of @bloom has been accepted. And on a personal note, good taste VC.
Snibby the Cat
The first nomination that I want to pet, interesting choice of villain. What are sniibby's superpowers?
He is a master escape artist and thief of catnip.
Oh this is tempting, i feel like flagging the whole bunch here! Trying to refrain! lol
Good guy, bad guy...
I'll be the first to nominate the obvious...
Haejin, with his constant self voting, scammy dstors, dcommerce, extracting Steem value to whaleshares, revenge downvoting, but all off that aside the most frustrating part is how much he sells. I would be willing to put up with the rest of it.
Anyhow, totally buying into this drama post and I'm not afraid to be the first to say it.
Relevant data
What site is that? Looks useful 😀
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It's one of my private dashboards.
https://dashboard.usesteem.com/dashboards/614149/5d8236dd74f50101421189855757
And a strong nomination from the Steem Drama veteran, WU. This Could be a winner, but we'll have to defer to the wisdom of the crowd to see how it plays out.
LMFAO, how much he sells? Oh snap, I get a kick out of the downvote posse and how they get perplexed by revenge downvotes, and stake selling done by those they target. Did it ever occur to you that respecting the upvotes of large stakeholders would cause them to hodl more and sell less, effectively securing the market value of Steem? Oh and don't bring up the nobility of it by pointing to trending. Yes, trending needs to be fixed, but it doesn't need to be fixed by turning everyone into a bunch of psychopathic downvoting brownshirts.
Steem is niche AF and almost impossible to explain to the uninitiated. So how are you going to CONvince capitalists to invest when you won't let them eat their own stake? It's like a BYOB party but if you bring too much beer you'd better share with everyone else. Fucking commies. And don't even bring of PoB we know this thing has been proof of wallet from the jump. PoB was the pipe-dream and then reality happened.
I give you the #2 spot, we all know Marky is das fuhrer.
After the initial rumors about a new Steem government, I was against this centralization effort immediately. This is because I knew that it would in some way shape or form translate into new taxes. I don't know if the alliance is responsible for it. Or if they are in some part responsible for it, but after that happened, we content creators got hard fucked by another 25% tax on the fruits of our posts. In addition to the new taxes, you've got the downvote posse, because that'll make steem great? Seriously, if I wanted to destroy a blockchain social network, I would do all of these things. But keep calm, carry on, things will happen, people will post less, perhaps a blockchain will get it right some day... Or maybe the game was honked from the start.
I agree with everything you said here. Proof of Brain would require a system sort of like Minds.com has where every account is tied to a phone number that is anonymously turned into a hash and so is able to do 1 account = 1 vote.
Steem is not and never has been "proof of brain" but more proof of stake. Then, it turns around and alientates its stakers and its authors (which it already severally lacks).
Then comes free downvotes, which is a terribly stupid idea. Now every account has more power to do harm than it has to do good. In the past people had to ask themselves if it was worth it to them to take a hit in order to be a dick to someone, but no, now the dickslaps are free. We just made it so accounts can put more negativity into the environment than they can positivity, great plan...
The value of Steem, as I see it, is the immutable blogging space available to a person online. I think the more logical path for its design is to give SP a cap on all accounts, and that SP is not reclaimable. This means that for an account to have SP you are effectively burning that STEEM, or at least making something fungible into a non-fungible asset.
That way no single account could be 1000x the vote influence of another account, and owning STEEM would be more about owning decentralized "digital blog property" rather than some currency. The currency could be like potential parcels, very much similar to Mana/Land with the Decentraland project on Ethereum.
But its current roadmap makes no sense to me. Why do SMTs at all? From the standpoint of any reasonably funded project I would expect companies to fork Steem rather than make an SMT. Steem accounts are a barrier to entry and if a project wanted to create Steem-like token it makes much more sense for them to fork Steem, ninja mine like Steemit Inc. did, and use their god-like SP to generate the most amount of accounts per day just like Steemit Inc. does.
Steem is not a huge community (when counting active accounts) to tap into, so I see no incentive for serious, well-funded projects to buy a ton of STEEM to power up to make their SMT when they can fork Steem for so much less and have a much easier time onboarding users.
I don't make the decisions I just react to them and adapt.
blah, blah, ... Taxes. that's hilarious, you can't be taxed on money you never owned.
I submit you do not grasp the governmental mechanism: inheritance taxes. VATs. etc... Almost all taxes are on money you don't - and more to the point, never will - own.
So according to your own logic then, retaliatory downvotes shouldn't be an issue?
Agreed. Downvotes are a normal part of the system. It matters a bit more when the big guys use them.
However, in general I agree.
I think they became more normalized when Steemit added in "reward disputes" as a reason to flag. They did this knowing full well that they couldn't control the abuse of the flag mechanic. So basically, they washed their hands of the problem by implementing a top-down culture change.
Besides that, changing the GUI to show the flag function as a downvote on par with upvotes was also a move to change the Steem culture. It's clear to me that they're trying to control our ethics to accommodate the inherent flaws in the platform. This isn't necessarily a good thing. If a system is broken it should be fixed, you shouldn't break the way people behave to accommodate a broken system. I mean you can try, but in the end, it won't work.
Now because of all the downvotes, it appears that Haejin is flagging people with his full steem power. He was just minding his own business before, but the system turned the people against each other and have divided and conquered. For the "greater good" of course, that's how it always starts. That is almost always the beginning of the end. Better on the blockchain than IRL I say, lets see the experiment out to its inevitable conclusion.
This place is so dumb and doomed. ;)
Everyone else is dumb...
I got it. I've heard it. I stay because of accounts like yours. :)
Moon Soon, doesn't matter about the petty.
Bahh, my FUD is so much
more classy than everyone
elses. You know you love it!
;-)
Check the time stamp on this post.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-there-is-no-communism-in-russia
haha
@jerrybanfield anyone...?
Surprised it took that long to mention him, but I believe he's starting to be less of a villain and more of a distant memory at this point.
This should stir up some shit.
!dramatoken
*damn Marky beat me :D
Already like 3 drama tokens on it haha
I nominate @mack-bot and that cute little bitch narcissist chick that runs it, what's her name again? (can't flag her cause she don't post) lol!!
Our first robot villain nomination. I for one welcome our robot overlords.
I welcome them, just not so much on my ass!
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We are all equally guilty.
Bottom line is there is no common goal community. There are many individual communities all seeking to grow. No one is doing anything that will accommodate for future needs. Blinded by what is now.
I have stated for a long time here on Steemit and on Discord, Even in the PAL server and in many DM's to many there and other servers. I have talked about this openly and various ways it can work to benefit the Steem chain and Steemit platform 1st and then proceed to assist others.
None of you can hear what I try to say or simply. just do not want to listen to someone who has a smaller stake.
We are all as guilty as any other.
why do we always need more? My answer would be. Cause we did nothing for the future or others, everything was for individual or group benefit.
We should have created a demand for Steem each month of 2K minimum, just over the last year. It does not do much at 2,000 a month, What about in another 3 years when that amount would be closer to 7,000 a month, and then turn to 7,000 a week. Then keep growing.
Just what if something like that could be achieved. But yup every seems to think that would be bad for some reason.
I'm the new villain it seems.
What? Because you don't believe the global warming hoax? That shit's weak.
Pirate's are natural villains...... right? :)
You were definitely the person I was thinking of nominating.
Avatar checks out!
Upvoting this cause of the engagement it is generating.
I'd nominate bid bot owners still clinging to their "business". ;)
Anyone in particular come to mind?
Nobody has said @sammosk.
Why?
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Because you have to be relevant to be STEEM's Biggest Villian.
That is true. Maybe he will ask Partiko to ban me again.
That was fun. Lol
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