I write about markets professionally, I tend to make about $75 AUD an hour if I've had enough coffee that morning. I make a little less than that for my posts on Steem, even with the help of profitable vote buying from MinnowBooster. If I was unable to give them that extra boost to the hot section, it probably wouldn't be worth me posting here.
Unlike other voting bots, MB has strict quality controls in place: they work actively with SteemCleaners, blacklisting scammers and have just implemented the new whitelist feature for manually verified quality content creators.
Though I largely use MB to boost my own posts, I've often done charitable things with it too - I've gifted Minnows thousands of SP and bought them solid upvotes on intro posts. When I read @evelynbelle's introduction post, I was really impressed and she mentioned she was in a bit of financial trouble so I bought her a ~$17 SBD upgoat. I checked back in to her profile yesterday and was stoked to see her earning 30 SBD on her recent posts. That is decent money in Nigeria. @Bania is another Nigerian success story helped along by myself and Reggaemuffin from MinnowBooster.
Reggaemuffin is by far the coolest guy I've met on this platform, he really cares about it and I reckon it sucks he struggles with witness rankings just because people disagree with the MinnowBooster project. Considering his love for the blockchain, technical wizardry and support for worthwhile community projects, this guy deserves to be top 20. When we were having bandwidth issues months ago, he was one of the few witnesses talking about it and pushing for action.
Yes MB is a profitable venture, but they also have thousands of happy customers they've helped and continue to help. I see a lot of people throwing stones at projects making a difference, but what do the stone throwers actually do to address the obvious hurdles new Steemians face?
If MB means just one more quality content creator stays on the platform, I think it's worth it.
this was a great response. maybe you can write a post about reggaemuffin, and i will resteem it. I have worked with him in spaminator and he is great person, deserves to be in top 20.
Thanks @Stellabelle. Yeah Reggae is a great guy and I'll seriously consider writing a post in honour of his greatness! I'm still waiting for him to an interview with @Scaredycatguide on MSP-radio which I think would be very interesting ( @reggaemuffin - give the people what they want!)
I'd happily host that interview on YouAreHOPE radio, and if you recall, I am the guy who built and then resigned from MSP Waves. :D The new station is just getting started, but we do plan to host @anarcho-andrei's witness interview show in the coming weeks, and I love @reggaemuffin as well, so we should do the thing here you are asking for @bulleth and get this show on the road!
I am just old and maybe not the shapest pencil to reply, but to me it is very important to just enjoy writing on steemit even if I dont earn much, but I still love it. It would have meant I had so sit and knit or do something that I always did. After retirement steemit just gave me that little extra use of my brain. So if there is a way I am sure there are clever people who will come up with some idea. Loved your post.
That is where I was, just happily posting and commenting then steemcleaners stopped by to accuse m e of spam tag, and adm stopped in to upvote the bot.
I suffer anxiety attacks. Getting "triggered" by a brainless and heartless bot was not funny. What happened was NOT acceptable to me. I flag and mute bots now and am just waiting for a platform where bots are not allowed to join. Feel free to look at what I WAS posting to decide if I am a "quality creator" or not. I have been told all of my life that I am an excellent writer, but maybe all those humans were wrong and the damned bots are right, I am just a spammer.
But we could not hide the fact that MB was created for profit because if not, why sell upvotes when it can use to directly upvote people's content. Beside, there's a curation rewards which is considerately huge in proportion to its SP.
I'm not against MB, I'm also not attacking anybody. Just expressing my thought as @stellabelle wanted in this post.
Of course, I don't think anyone here or from the MB team has ever tried to hide the fact that MB is profitable enterprise. I don't think there's anything wrong with running a profitable enterprise on chain either :)
I didn't say its wrong either :) its just that the essence of what has been started in the community are now gradually gone. Unless it was built for that purpose.
@Steemcleaners aren't bots, they are people and they are awesome. With out them, this platform would suck. Robots are here to stay and as the future nears we'll be seeing a lot more of them, both on social media and IRL.
Oh my... You folks who are so young that you never lived without technology in your face all the time just have a total blind spot. Not, "bots" are not here to stay. The earth is not "under control." There WILL be natural disasters, at some point humanity will likely be sent back to the stone age, even if we avoid nuking ourselves there. Allowing AI to become a lynchpin to your life is going to leave you pretty screwed when the lights go out. And there will be a split in society, I am not the only one who will NOT allow AI to be part of my "social" life. YOU will choose to see more of them, I will choose to see less of them.
Now you are being unkind to a genuine human so that you may extoll the virtues of a bot. That is the exact sort of nonsense I will not toleate. I have been upvoting cryptopie whenever I see his posts. I actually read them, try to know him as a human rather than just let a bot go "virtue signal" for me. You, like the bots, are now muted. I do NOT play with AI, and I do not waste time with people who cannot understand that HUMAN interaction is vital to a peaceful world. Bots feed the divide and conquer folks. I am not irrational, I made a very rational decision, just different from yours. but that does not make me less of a human or stupid or any other insults you care to hurl at a SENSITIVE HUMAN.
There have been times when I was so pissed off about this website I wanted to punch my monitor and there have been times when I would wake up and jump out of bed and run to my computer to start working on stuff here. So I have seen the highs and the lows.
The highs mainly seem to correlate with a huge surge in STEEM Price and for a limited amount of time we are in a somewhat gated community because others can't get in fast enough to tap into the wealth that we are sitting in. Once things level out with more people eventually getting in and the price sinking then things get a lot tougher and then most people start falling off the bus and getting upset because they can't see a clear vision to it being "worth" their time to be on here.
From my perspective who is what I would call a mid level content creator on here (Someone who has invested a ton of time gets some decent payouts but actually can't live solely off this platform) there is always the fact that by doing a calculation for how much STEEM power we would have to buy to have a certain influence the investment still doesn't make sense in a lot of ways.
The only way we can do it is by STEEM dropping to about $0.25 or lower and everyone being super pissed off and most people giving up on the platform. Then we would have to commit substantial amounts of capital. Like $30,000+ and then STEEM would have to make a big comeback to $2 levels or so for our investment to be worth it. It makes it a tough play and the question when the price drops is WHY is it down that low? And also there is always the worry it would just keep going lower. When it went to $0.07 I thought that it was likely finished and the founders had screwed up the platform with the most potential.
The biggest problem with STEEM all along was the distribution from the beginning was totally messed up. And like we have seen with other projects they have done air drops and with EOS the ICO is lasting an entire year because in crypto you have to have a wide distribution. STEEM never properly addressed the situation so a lot of people feel like it is a hopeless effort. @rulesforrebels has 68,000 YouTube subscribers and has put in a massive amount of effort on here and hasn't given up but he is lucky to make $0.25 on each post. To me that starts to be a red flag. He has invested in some STEEM Power as well. It just isn't enough. There have only been a small handful of content creators who were able to build anything significant here. You, @rok-sivante , @pappa-pepper and a few others. All great content creators.....etc. From new people coming in it seems like a very tall order to really build anything. Even for myself I can't spend as much time as I do on here and not use some of the money for bills. If I can make $200+ / day on here then I can skim half of it and keep the rest building. When it dips way below that then I'm losing ground on the account and can't really maintain any kind of power.
Solution: It has been mentioned before but I think their should be a series of air drops based on people's reputation, amount of comments, etc..... The problem with the Golos drop was that if you were a God King here then suddenly you were a God King on Golos. So they suffer from the same distribution issues and they are still on a exponential curve for the power.
Solution 2: These major 3rd party developers like @good-karma and @jesta should be given substantial funding from STEEMIT Inc. Enough to be working on this stuff full time. STEEMIT Inc is holding so much of the power that one of the only ways to really get other people feeling like they are more invested in this platform is to enable them to keep spending their time here. Sounds socialist...etc but you have to realize that when a capitalist comes here they might turn around and leave because they don't see a good investment and a good opportunity for them to capitalize.
This platform in my mind is one of the most promising projects in the crypto space. From a price perspective it is hard to find that balance because while buying more STEEM Power creates demand for STEEM most new users and users spending a ton of time creating content need the money for bills for their efforts so it then weights on the price. I feel like the platform could continually go in these surge / sleeper modes but will continue on for sure.
"but you have to realize that when a capitalist comes here they might turn around and leave because they don't see a good investment and a good opportunity for them to capitalize."
Yep. I've been dabbling a bit here. And I've been looking at a way to make it profitable.
A. Ain't no way I'm going to plow tons of time and effort creating content when it's only going to earn for 7 days AND somebody with more than me can trash my account/rep/earnings for any reason he deems worthwhile.
B. I considered/did the math on renting delegated SP, to boost my visibility and accelerate growing my account/popularity/etc. But the math/investment again just doesn't work out ESPECIALLY because somebody bigger with an angry hardon about 'self voting' can 100% destroy my account and the invested $ put into renting delegated SP to accelerate my popularity and visibility.
Interesting to watch this steemit thing, but until steemit changes some things my time/effort is safer and more profitable on my own business/platform. Or said another way, steemit currently isn't a safe investment of time/effort/$.
Yeah I get your feeling for sure. The numbers are kind of hard to work usually unless you anticipate a big rise in the price.
I will say this. Steemit is getting better for sure from when I got on in July 2016. And the community effort has done a lot of good for people.
I can certainly understand working on your own business / platform instead of working within someone elses. I mean shit..... Electroneum which I just looked into last night freaking raised $40 Million and all they did was clone Monero....... I was like WTF?????
People are in it for the easy money which is why they $40 mil. A bigger problem with Steemit is that there is not revenue income to back their payouts, and until they have one it is simply a ponzi where you pay people from the rewards pool created from thin air.
Youtube, twitter, everyone has ad revenue. Here there is no revenue, except new arrivals
Yeah I get that thinking but the purchase of STEEM power as a mechanism to get exposure is the "ad revenue". Think about all the Tai Lopez ads you have seen on YouTube. He pays it to get exposure to gain a bigger following and sell his business seminars and materials.
Well the same thing goes for individuals on here or companies. Look at this account. They kept pushing their posts up to the trending page to market.
What is being sold is exposure. If you have enough power you will end up on the hot page or trending page. In Ponzi's there are fictitious returns being pitched that don't actually exist and the money is just coming from new investment. But with Steemit I can guarantee that if you purchase 1,000,000 Steem Power you will be on the trending page for every post which will get more eyes, likely more upvotes, more followers....etc. So there is a tangible result that can be tracked and seen not just fictitious returns being reported
But you can pull all of that out. It will take you 3 months, but you can. You need a revenue generation model above and beyond that. Every day Steemit prints 64000 dollars. You will burn through that million in 20 days. There is no cost, like a annual renewal fee or advertisement where the money is sunk. You are still getting Steempower for that mil, if it was the price of an advertisement you will be getting 0.
As brian said, the price of the steempower is the advertisement costs.
And that 1,000,000 SP is still in the system (even when pulling 'income' out...and some of that income would stay in the system to increase the SP count...and there are other benefits involved that are good for steem, like the upvotes to others, the delegated steem to curator groups, etc.
Yes the original investment can be pulled out after 3 months, but that's three months it's still in the system...and pulling out the original investment can lower the price (thus one gets less back) of steem, which incentivizes the investor to keep it in and use it, which supports the platform.
Steem needs investors and people that want to profit, because they drive innovation and new users to the platform.
I notice that people don't like anybody profiting from steem, but if it's not a profitabe platform/business, then it will die, and the people that will be sad/mad are the ones (partly) responsible for killing that which gave life/growth to the platform.
The more users, the more profits available, the more steem price rises, which creates more users and more investors/participants, which creates higher demand for and interest in the rising price of steem, which.....
Any support from Steemit Inc in delegated SP for example would be a tremendous support if the newly built communities would get some. In turn they would be able to do incentive moves, attract more new people there at the same time increasing number of Steemit members. All other points were also based on seemingly great knowledge of the platform.
I feel like a little bit of the delegating has been going on. I know @ned delegated his power to a few people recently but then I think he retracted it. I feel that if it looks to individualized then it looks like they are picking a favorite when doing it. If there was certain criteria determined and everyone was getting a blanket STEEM Power boost not just delegated power that would be interesting. I don't think it will happen though even though the numbers could support it. Just in the @steemit account alone there is $69,000,000 of value. Again not saying that it would ever happen but what if they took $10,000,000 of that value and blanketed the most active 10,000 accounts with equal Steem Power. That would make a lot of people really feel good about being part of this community and seriously change some lives in certain parts of the world. Yeah the price might slightly suffer for awhile if people cashed some of it out but an act like that would go a long ways.
Like you, I have almost resorted to punching a hole in the wall with my fist! It has so much potential, and when i see people crapping on it, it MAKES ME VERY MAD.
It really does have so much potential and we have certainly realized a lot of that potential and it continues to get better all the time for sure. It is a big concern of mine though the general crypto community seems to not like it for a lot of different reasons. @jerrybanfield will put up YouTube videos about it and he sometimes gets more thumbs down than thumbs up and you look at the comment section and people are hating on him and the platform really hard. It is a major concern from an investment perspective because all the negativity surrounding it can make it look like some "whale hang out" or some scammy system that people don't want to spend their time.
In reality even if people don't want to blog and all that it makes sense for every crypto trader to have STEEM accounts just to be able to run to the STEEM Backed Dollar during pullbacks and store the coins off an exchange in a location where they control the keys.
I have been in crypto since 2013 and STEEM suddenly was the realization of future crypto that certain people used to talk about then. Where you could send coins to a human readable address instead of having the long Bitcoin style addresses..., Fast transactions times, little to no fees. STEEM is an unbelievably good system in a lot of ways.
We just keep having to fight for it. I would like to say it is ours now but that day hasn't quite came for someone like me. I'm more like a little puppy scratching at the sliding glass door wanting in.
I was thinking... I know we have steem whales where we can see those that hold the most SP; is there a way we can see the top 500 most prolific users on Steemit? Then we can match them with a whale that could delegate them SP for 30 days and that gives them time to build a following then they can move on to the next user for 30 days, etc. is there already something like this?
I think there are many good points in this post and the replies that could be compiled and put forward - who and how is the next stage. I did try with my 'delegate' post a week ago but we need someone with a bit more ooomf perhaps?
Yeah, I definitely think we need to come together as a community and prepare for the worst. I think the only thing that will help Steemit survive is if whales delegate so @ned should be getting on that ASAP or All is lost. In the meantime if anyone here has ties to whales they should reach out and plead the case.
There is SteemWhales.com I believe and I'm trying to go there but it isn't coming up. But I think on there you can see who has the most comments and highest reputations look at a lot of data. There are certain projects out there like @curie where being a newer user you have a good chance to get upvotes and this a trail of bots will upvote you as well but a lot of the upvote bots and delegation of power is done individually.
SteemReports.com is a great site for checking people voting habits. I don't see why the whales don't analyse some of the curation of users and decide who brings the best value to the platform through their CURATION and not their own posts. And check periodically that they are still voting in ways that are good for the network.
If I were a whale I would seek users who don't vote for than 5% (of their weekly total) on any particular accounts including their own. Then I could take a VACATION knowing my capital values are growing because I invested in the right people!
Thank you for the information! I think it would be great if we could reach out to those people some way, and ask them to join the movement. Maybe @ned can help?
"One thing is clear though. In Steemit's present state, it functions like a caste system."
Great, thought-provoking point.
"The ones who want to amass great wealth are not always the ones you want to watch the sheep at night."
This could not be more true.
I personally think one of our greatest problems is that the system with linear voting rewards provides huge incentive to hoard the maximal amount of rewards votable by your stake for yourself. This creates a whole culture of vote-trading, vote-buying, back-room deals, and unspoken vote-for-vote. If these are going to happen, the more transparent and public the better. That way, political will for consensus changes can hopefully be reached.
Because of the relative anonymity of the internet, you cannot create a typical system to combat this "abuse", if the community can even collectively define it. As a result, scattered community enforcement only shames the few willing to follow the rules, leaving the egregious to reap the rewards.
That's what I was getting at today in my post where you mentioned some of the ideas you expanded upon here.
I have been work-shopping an idea to align selfish (or amoral) game-theory with desired behavior, and it involves rewarding everyone directly for every vote (imagine if every $1 vote also sent $1 to your wallet, in 7 days, though voting power would probably be roughly halved), but vote trading will still require an algorithm to identify and regulate "abusers" and that algorithm will be programmed subjectively.
I don't have a solution to that yet or I'd have posted about the whole idea. I'm open to suggestions. Anyone?
I see a platform that is in beta where a lot of things are not perfect, just like in life. There are many proponent and opponents of the vote buying and other reward-for-hire schemes. I think everyone has a point to what they think is real. I see steemit as a microcosm of the real world, though I know most of us, I included wants an utopian setting. In the real world, few still controls the wealth of billions. The only difference is in steemit you get to see how it is done. I think if the problem of reward for content is solved once and for all, that steemit would be approaching utopia. I don't even know if what I just typed now made any sense.
yeah, it did make sense. Because of your astute observation:
"the difference between here and the real world, is that you get to see how it's done."
Wow! You're right. In here, you get to analyze how the super rich create more wealth, and how people react to that transparent analysis. It's true! We've never been able to see this before!
I believe we know how it's done in real world too :) The difference in real world it's being done in a more subtle way as disorder is expensive thing to control. As here disorder or uprising is not a threat at all as it can not happen :)
One of the most simple things to do would be to hide easily accessible wallet information. As now most post are voted per wallet size not the content. But on the other hand we have to maintain incentive for people to stack up SP. It will get better, trust me. If not on steemit then some other front end application that comes as a successor. Somebody will crack it, will find a perfect click and build on it. Trial and error. That is how all discoveries are made. Do not be sad :)
I get you. We are still in development phase, there are suddenly in the last months multiple apps and services being created. They can't be perfect in the start go. It is interesting how it will evolve on Steemit.
Hi @stellabelle. Brilliant post with things that indeed need to be said. You have asked so I will answer, long one I am afraid. From my point of view (a relative newbie) I found the whole thing a bit difficult to maintain and due to the pressures in my life, I do not have the time to invest that others in this platform do.
I have also struggled to create meaningful relationships with people, because I do not know who is genuinely interested in what people write and who is just upvoting for the financial gain. I seem to come across an awful lot of brown nosing, and that makes me feel uneasy. The fact that curation rewards are linked to the amount of steem a post gets seems a bit of a flaw. Those that get upvoted a lot will continue to get those upvotes even if their content declines in quality because many just do it to leech from the rewards.
I have introduced other people to the platform and they are doing okish with it, but they are the artistic types and it seems that sort of content is definitely more sought after, or better rewarded in any case.
I keep trying to draw parallels with other social media platforms I tend to use a lot more, and I have spotted a couple of differences. Facebook for example allows me to join groups so I can seek the type of info I want depending on my needs or mood, and the people in those groups are familiar and on the same wavelength. Here you can use the tags but you have to wade through so much trash sometimes! And the tags are just not specific enough. There is also a healthier mix of agreeing and disagreeing narratives. Steemit seems to be a place where disagreeing is undesirable because you might get flagged and obliterated as a result, affecting your bottom line.
In terms of my own content, I just think it is sad that you put a certain amount of work into something and you can only get exposure for a week, tops. After that people rather not waste their SP so it does not get shared or show up anywhere again. Yes you can wade through someone's old posts, but it is rather downheartening that they do not get the support for content that continues to be relevant and useful.
Now, what do I want out of steemit? I want a place where I can meet people with similar interests where my appreciation of their work becomes more than just a 'like'. Rewards are good things. Unfortunately the platform lends itself to just being a faucet for some, and there seems to be no way of stopping that.
I also want a platform that is decentralised and 'democratic' to some extent, so rules and processes are flexible depending on users needs. However, this requires people with knowhow and their time.
Potential solutions (disclaimer - I have some basic understanding of the workings of the creation of Steem, SP and SBD so I understand some of these things might really not work within the current framework);
Make groups a 'thing' where the creator/s can administrate, veto members and remove spammers, scammers, beggars and brown nosers. We need safe havens from all this trash.
Stop linking curation rewards to post earnings.
Stop the lending of SP or maybe put a ceiling on it, so we don't have superwhales or people punching above their weight because they have more money to burn.
Allow rewards after 7 days, even if they just reflect on the reputation or some other marker.
Do not allow upvotes without opening the post.
Maybe create a bartering system where services/information/advice/support can be sought and given using Steem as the currency. This could relate to the groups. The more useful you are to others in real terms, the more Steem you get.
Those are my very rough suggestions. Some of them might be impossible within the platform but this is just my opinion.
Hey @olayar, rephrasing the first couple of words in your comment toward @stellabelle for her post... ¡Brilliant Comment! mate. I concur fully with what you've said in your comment. But I agree even more with your bulleted points. Actually, very glad to find another steemian with quite the same viewpoint of potential solutions for the health and prosperity of our community. Subject about which I have also written frequently.
Thanks @por500bolos, and sorry for taking so long to reply... life just got in the way. Glad you agree because it means there might be some consensus for some of these things to happen. I really do want to keep this alive we just need people with the perseverance and know how! Thanks again for your support. :)
Hey @stellabelle, you called for newbies so here I am! Currently 3 weeks on Steemit, I sure do have quite an opinion about things here...
#1 Steemit is in beta, but it is essential for users like ourselves here to point out why we believe changes need to be made, and the developers should figure out how and what changes can be made.. I honestly feel that many use that excuse of 'we're still in Beta so cut them some slack' or 'why don't you tell them exactly what needs to be done' that it's cock blocking this platform's progress. Example: Facebook didn't just sit back and asked their users what they wanted to see on the platform, instead Facebook tried different features and built based on the users' response.
#2 Why is everything about money on Steem blockhain? Maybe because that is WHY we use Steem blockchain in the first place? Because that is HOW Steem blockchain was marketed? According to Steemit Inc (as pointed out by @onthewayout previously:
Steem is a blockchain-based rewards platform for publishers to monetize content and grow community
The primary value of Steem has always been about money. Logically, users that are attracted to the blockchain are about money first before anything else! I'm a new user here, and I admit - it is the monetary rewards that attracted me to try this platform. However I promise you, there is nothing in this world that is sustainable when profit is put before anything else. It's similar to how modern businesses that rack up billions of profit today are all focused on impact first, profit second Example: Facebook (to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected), Amazon (to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online) and Tesla (to create the most compelling car company of the 21st century by driving the world’s transition to electric vehicles).
#3 Because of #2, majority of users get on board to earn money - because they perceive the platform to be an investment opportunity for attractive ROI. This leaves us with an environment that is built to facilitate money making, such as bot voting, vote selling etc.
Bloody hell, why did we use social media platforms in the first place? Wasn't it to connect with our friends and family? Wasn't it to keep in touch with those that we don't get to hang out with often? Wasn't it to keep one another updated about our lives? Since when did social media platform became about money money MONEY??
#4 On social media platforms using Steem blockchain, we have more content focusing on how to make money off the blockchain than content that actually adds value to the blockchain. Imagine Steemit as an online game: where you can make real money by selling your in-game currencies and item (similar to the SBD shit). But then the gameplay is all about making money - what the fucking fuck? This sounds like bullcrap, it seems to be full of shit and most certainly, it's distasteful for genuine gamers who are here to play the game (in our context, distasteful for genuine users who are here to produce and consume valuable content).
#5 When you have a shitty environment for genuine users to utilize the platform, they leave. When genuine users leave, guess who's left in the platform - users who are here for the ROI. These people will only care about their returns, that few are willing to bring up genuine new Steemians who write good shit because they are new and there isn't much ROI to help them. This builds a viscious cycle of genuine users coming and going, and eventually there will be no longer anymore genuine users.. and when that happens, there will be no audience in Steem blockchain and when there is no audience, how is it a social medial platform anymore?
#6 We ARE in the midst of this viscous cycle - it's already happening!!! Unless the team behind Steem blockchain is doing something really strict about this, the cycle is just going to continue. We can discuss all day long @stellabella and fellas, but in the end of the day - it's a matter of 'Steem improving for us' or 'us leaving Steem because it's too shitty to bear'.
#7 A genuine yet potentially-offensive-so-please-explain-to-me-thanks suggestion: Why don't Steem developers make selling of votes illegal? Like account-ban-worthy? Or rewards-stripping worthy? Or frozen-wallet-worthy? Like how Maplestory bans selling of power leveling services or mesos sales... Why can't we do that too?
I agree with your synopsis on why the current iteration of Steem is currently in decline. The signal to noise ratio of genuine users is frankly too low. There is simply too much noise with so much focus on making money rather than content. And those making quality content are being ignored.
There is so much meta discussion about the platform which seems kind of absurd to me. What we are missing are those passionate builders. Those people willing to build skyscapers for nothing. We need those adventurers who take us to the next level. The way YouTube was in 2005. The way several Subreddits are today.
But the marketing is completely wrong. Rewards shouldn't matter, at least not at this point. The biggest reason I write on the site today is not because of the paltry rewards, but because I see the potential of the platform. Sure, the money aspect still influences some of my judgements, but when I get into the zone, writing (at least for me) is fun. And being part of something that has the potential to be huge is exciting.
Mindset is important. So sure those who will help this platform are being ignored. But if you are truly in it for the long haul, you don't need rewards. You just need to do what you enjoy doing.
So, to put everything together. Yes, Steemit has problems. Yes, the genuine creators are being drowned out and tend to quit. Are there things that need to change from the top? Certainly. But to the new creators out there. Forget the money. Do what you love. If there are enough of you on the site, then things will slowly correct themselves and "hope" will be restored on the blockchain.
I'd love to see some stats on the relative numbers, but it seems hard to believe that if most of the whales did the right thing - i.e. curate good content, and output quality content themselves - that their collective SP power couldn't overwhelm the spammers and vote farmers.
In a way, this place is like a perfect example of the Prisoners' Dilemma. And to throw another thought experiment into the mix, it's like a Tragedy of the Commons. While everyone thinks that the other is taking advantage of the system, they lose out if they don't likewise take advantage of it. Perhaps the whales need to go on a team-building retreat where they all catch each other while falling and crawl around in mud together, to build some team spirit... ;)
Hi Stellabelle,
I write about markets professionally, I tend to make about $75 AUD an hour if I've had enough coffee that morning. I make a little less than that for my posts on Steem, even with the help of profitable vote buying from MinnowBooster. If I was unable to give them that extra boost to the hot section, it probably wouldn't be worth me posting here.
Unlike other voting bots, MB has strict quality controls in place: they work actively with SteemCleaners, blacklisting scammers and have just implemented the new whitelist feature for manually verified quality content creators.
Though I largely use MB to boost my own posts, I've often done charitable things with it too - I've gifted Minnows thousands of SP and bought them solid upvotes on intro posts. When I read @evelynbelle's introduction post, I was really impressed and she mentioned she was in a bit of financial trouble so I bought her a ~$17 SBD upgoat. I checked back in to her profile yesterday and was stoked to see her earning 30 SBD on her recent posts. That is decent money in Nigeria. @Bania is another Nigerian success story helped along by myself and Reggaemuffin from MinnowBooster.
Reggaemuffin is by far the coolest guy I've met on this platform, he really cares about it and I reckon it sucks he struggles with witness rankings just because people disagree with the MinnowBooster project. Considering his love for the blockchain, technical wizardry and support for worthwhile community projects, this guy deserves to be top 20. When we were having bandwidth issues months ago, he was one of the few witnesses talking about it and pushing for action.
Yes MB is a profitable venture, but they also have thousands of happy customers they've helped and continue to help. I see a lot of people throwing stones at projects making a difference, but what do the stone throwers actually do to address the obvious hurdles new Steemians face?
If MB means just one more quality content creator stays on the platform, I think it's worth it.
this was a great response. maybe you can write a post about reggaemuffin, and i will resteem it. I have worked with him in spaminator and he is great person, deserves to be in top 20.
Thanks @Stellabelle. Yeah Reggae is a great guy and I'll seriously consider writing a post in honour of his greatness! I'm still waiting for him to an interview with @Scaredycatguide on MSP-radio which I think would be very interesting ( @reggaemuffin - give the people what they want!)
I'd happily host that interview on YouAreHOPE radio, and if you recall, I am the guy who built and then resigned from MSP Waves. :D The new station is just getting started, but we do plan to host @anarcho-andrei's witness interview show in the coming weeks, and I love @reggaemuffin as well, so we should do the thing here you are asking for @bulleth and get this show on the road!
I am just old and maybe not the shapest pencil to reply, but to me it is very important to just enjoy writing on steemit even if I dont earn much, but I still love it. It would have meant I had so sit and knit or do something that I always did. After retirement steemit just gave me that little extra use of my brain. So if there is a way I am sure there are clever people who will come up with some idea. Loved your post.
That is where I was, just happily posting and commenting then steemcleaners stopped by to accuse m e of spam tag, and adm stopped in to upvote the bot.
I suffer anxiety attacks. Getting "triggered" by a brainless and heartless bot was not funny. What happened was NOT acceptable to me. I flag and mute bots now and am just waiting for a platform where bots are not allowed to join. Feel free to look at what I WAS posting to decide if I am a "quality creator" or not. I have been told all of my life that I am an excellent writer, but maybe all those humans were wrong and the damned bots are right, I am just a spammer.
But we could not hide the fact that MB was created for profit because if not, why sell upvotes when it can use to directly upvote people's content. Beside, there's a curation rewards which is considerately huge in proportion to its SP.
I'm not against MB, I'm also not attacking anybody. Just expressing my thought as @stellabelle wanted in this post.
Of course, I don't think anyone here or from the MB team has ever tried to hide the fact that MB is profitable enterprise. I don't think there's anything wrong with running a profitable enterprise on chain either :)
I didn't say its wrong either :) its just that the essence of what has been started in the community are now gradually gone. Unless it was built for that purpose.
steemcleaners sucks, they are why I will be seeking a new platform. NO BOTS on social media for humans.
@Steemcleaners aren't bots, they are people and they are awesome. With out them, this platform would suck. Robots are here to stay and as the future nears we'll be seeing a lot more of them, both on social media and IRL.
Oh my... You folks who are so young that you never lived without technology in your face all the time just have a total blind spot. Not, "bots" are not here to stay. The earth is not "under control." There WILL be natural disasters, at some point humanity will likely be sent back to the stone age, even if we avoid nuking ourselves there. Allowing AI to become a lynchpin to your life is going to leave you pretty screwed when the lights go out. And there will be a split in society, I am not the only one who will NOT allow AI to be part of my "social" life. YOU will choose to see more of them, I will choose to see less of them.
Bots are great, you are being irrational. I just used a voting bot to help this little girl who needs spinal surgery https://steemit.com/teamaustralia/@bulleth/a-fellow-team-australian-s-little-sister-needs-our-help
cc OP @stellabelle
Now you are being unkind to a genuine human so that you may extoll the virtues of a bot. That is the exact sort of nonsense I will not toleate. I have been upvoting cryptopie whenever I see his posts. I actually read them, try to know him as a human rather than just let a bot go "virtue signal" for me. You, like the bots, are now muted. I do NOT play with AI, and I do not waste time with people who cannot understand that HUMAN interaction is vital to a peaceful world. Bots feed the divide and conquer folks. I am not irrational, I made a very rational decision, just different from yours. but that does not make me less of a human or stupid or any other insults you care to hurl at a SENSITIVE HUMAN.
Bots are not great - they suck balls and are totally fucking up Steemit...
There have been times when I was so pissed off about this website I wanted to punch my monitor and there have been times when I would wake up and jump out of bed and run to my computer to start working on stuff here. So I have seen the highs and the lows.
The highs mainly seem to correlate with a huge surge in STEEM Price and for a limited amount of time we are in a somewhat gated community because others can't get in fast enough to tap into the wealth that we are sitting in. Once things level out with more people eventually getting in and the price sinking then things get a lot tougher and then most people start falling off the bus and getting upset because they can't see a clear vision to it being "worth" their time to be on here.
From my perspective who is what I would call a mid level content creator on here (Someone who has invested a ton of time gets some decent payouts but actually can't live solely off this platform) there is always the fact that by doing a calculation for how much STEEM power we would have to buy to have a certain influence the investment still doesn't make sense in a lot of ways.
The only way we can do it is by STEEM dropping to about $0.25 or lower and everyone being super pissed off and most people giving up on the platform. Then we would have to commit substantial amounts of capital. Like $30,000+ and then STEEM would have to make a big comeback to $2 levels or so for our investment to be worth it. It makes it a tough play and the question when the price drops is WHY is it down that low? And also there is always the worry it would just keep going lower. When it went to $0.07 I thought that it was likely finished and the founders had screwed up the platform with the most potential.
The biggest problem with STEEM all along was the distribution from the beginning was totally messed up. And like we have seen with other projects they have done air drops and with EOS the ICO is lasting an entire year because in crypto you have to have a wide distribution. STEEM never properly addressed the situation so a lot of people feel like it is a hopeless effort. @rulesforrebels has 68,000 YouTube subscribers and has put in a massive amount of effort on here and hasn't given up but he is lucky to make $0.25 on each post. To me that starts to be a red flag. He has invested in some STEEM Power as well. It just isn't enough. There have only been a small handful of content creators who were able to build anything significant here. You, @rok-sivante , @pappa-pepper and a few others. All great content creators.....etc. From new people coming in it seems like a very tall order to really build anything. Even for myself I can't spend as much time as I do on here and not use some of the money for bills. If I can make $200+ / day on here then I can skim half of it and keep the rest building. When it dips way below that then I'm losing ground on the account and can't really maintain any kind of power.
Solution: It has been mentioned before but I think their should be a series of air drops based on people's reputation, amount of comments, etc..... The problem with the Golos drop was that if you were a God King here then suddenly you were a God King on Golos. So they suffer from the same distribution issues and they are still on a exponential curve for the power.
Solution 2: These major 3rd party developers like @good-karma and @jesta should be given substantial funding from STEEMIT Inc. Enough to be working on this stuff full time. STEEMIT Inc is holding so much of the power that one of the only ways to really get other people feeling like they are more invested in this platform is to enable them to keep spending their time here. Sounds socialist...etc but you have to realize that when a capitalist comes here they might turn around and leave because they don't see a good investment and a good opportunity for them to capitalize.
This platform in my mind is one of the most promising projects in the crypto space. From a price perspective it is hard to find that balance because while buying more STEEM Power creates demand for STEEM most new users and users spending a ton of time creating content need the money for bills for their efforts so it then weights on the price. I feel like the platform could continually go in these surge / sleeper modes but will continue on for sure.
"but you have to realize that when a capitalist comes here they might turn around and leave because they don't see a good investment and a good opportunity for them to capitalize."
Yep. I've been dabbling a bit here. And I've been looking at a way to make it profitable.
A. Ain't no way I'm going to plow tons of time and effort creating content when it's only going to earn for 7 days AND somebody with more than me can trash my account/rep/earnings for any reason he deems worthwhile.
B. I considered/did the math on renting delegated SP, to boost my visibility and accelerate growing my account/popularity/etc. But the math/investment again just doesn't work out ESPECIALLY because somebody bigger with an angry hardon about 'self voting' can 100% destroy my account and the invested $ put into renting delegated SP to accelerate my popularity and visibility.
Interesting to watch this steemit thing, but until steemit changes some things my time/effort is safer and more profitable on my own business/platform. Or said another way, steemit currently isn't a safe investment of time/effort/$.
Yeah I get your feeling for sure. The numbers are kind of hard to work usually unless you anticipate a big rise in the price.
I will say this. Steemit is getting better for sure from when I got on in July 2016. And the community effort has done a lot of good for people.
I can certainly understand working on your own business / platform instead of working within someone elses. I mean shit..... Electroneum which I just looked into last night freaking raised $40 Million and all they did was clone Monero....... I was like WTF?????
People are in it for the easy money which is why they $40 mil. A bigger problem with Steemit is that there is not revenue income to back their payouts, and until they have one it is simply a ponzi where you pay people from the rewards pool created from thin air.
Youtube, twitter, everyone has ad revenue. Here there is no revenue, except new arrivals
Yeah I get that thinking but the purchase of STEEM power as a mechanism to get exposure is the "ad revenue". Think about all the Tai Lopez ads you have seen on YouTube. He pays it to get exposure to gain a bigger following and sell his business seminars and materials.
Well the same thing goes for individuals on here or companies. Look at this account. They kept pushing their posts up to the trending page to market.
https://steemit.com/@bookingteam.com
What is being sold is exposure. If you have enough power you will end up on the hot page or trending page. In Ponzi's there are fictitious returns being pitched that don't actually exist and the money is just coming from new investment. But with Steemit I can guarantee that if you purchase 1,000,000 Steem Power you will be on the trending page for every post which will get more eyes, likely more upvotes, more followers....etc. So there is a tangible result that can be tracked and seen not just fictitious returns being reported
But you can pull all of that out. It will take you 3 months, but you can. You need a revenue generation model above and beyond that. Every day Steemit prints 64000 dollars. You will burn through that million in 20 days. There is no cost, like a annual renewal fee or advertisement where the money is sunk. You are still getting Steempower for that mil, if it was the price of an advertisement you will be getting 0.
What? No.
As brian said, the price of the steempower is the advertisement costs.
And that 1,000,000 SP is still in the system (even when pulling 'income' out...and some of that income would stay in the system to increase the SP count...and there are other benefits involved that are good for steem, like the upvotes to others, the delegated steem to curator groups, etc.
Yes the original investment can be pulled out after 3 months, but that's three months it's still in the system...and pulling out the original investment can lower the price (thus one gets less back) of steem, which incentivizes the investor to keep it in and use it, which supports the platform.
Steem needs investors and people that want to profit, because they drive innovation and new users to the platform.
I notice that people don't like anybody profiting from steem, but if it's not a profitabe platform/business, then it will die, and the people that will be sad/mad are the ones (partly) responsible for killing that which gave life/growth to the platform.
The more users, the more profits available, the more steem price rises, which creates more users and more investors/participants, which creates higher demand for and interest in the rising price of steem, which.....
So you are saying any Steem I buy will be worth less in 3 months, because i leave some of this income in the system
I would love do see delegated air drops.
Any support from Steemit Inc in delegated SP for example would be a tremendous support if the newly built communities would get some. In turn they would be able to do incentive moves, attract more new people there at the same time increasing number of Steemit members. All other points were also based on seemingly great knowledge of the platform.
I feel like a little bit of the delegating has been going on. I know @ned delegated his power to a few people recently but then I think he retracted it. I feel that if it looks to individualized then it looks like they are picking a favorite when doing it. If there was certain criteria determined and everyone was getting a blanket STEEM Power boost not just delegated power that would be interesting. I don't think it will happen though even though the numbers could support it. Just in the @steemit account alone there is $69,000,000 of value. Again not saying that it would ever happen but what if they took $10,000,000 of that value and blanketed the most active 10,000 accounts with equal Steem Power. That would make a lot of people really feel good about being part of this community and seriously change some lives in certain parts of the world. Yeah the price might slightly suffer for awhile if people cashed some of it out but an act like that would go a long ways.
He had to retract because all of them apart from @surpassinggoogle were selling their votes...
I like this idea a lot!
We have the tools to monitor these accounts for activity/vote spread/etc.
I wish the idea could be put to @ned - and we have an account called @mrdelegation (or something like that...)
Like you, I have almost resorted to punching a hole in the wall with my fist! It has so much potential, and when i see people crapping on it, it MAKES ME VERY MAD.
It really does have so much potential and we have certainly realized a lot of that potential and it continues to get better all the time for sure. It is a big concern of mine though the general crypto community seems to not like it for a lot of different reasons. @jerrybanfield will put up YouTube videos about it and he sometimes gets more thumbs down than thumbs up and you look at the comment section and people are hating on him and the platform really hard. It is a major concern from an investment perspective because all the negativity surrounding it can make it look like some "whale hang out" or some scammy system that people don't want to spend their time.
In reality even if people don't want to blog and all that it makes sense for every crypto trader to have STEEM accounts just to be able to run to the STEEM Backed Dollar during pullbacks and store the coins off an exchange in a location where they control the keys.
I have been in crypto since 2013 and STEEM suddenly was the realization of future crypto that certain people used to talk about then. Where you could send coins to a human readable address instead of having the long Bitcoin style addresses..., Fast transactions times, little to no fees. STEEM is an unbelievably good system in a lot of ways.
We just keep having to fight for it. I would like to say it is ours now but that day hasn't quite came for someone like me. I'm more like a little puppy scratching at the sliding glass door wanting in.
thanks for your epic post. I will respond soon when my energy is back up....this post wore me out...and i tried to respond to everyone...
you just made over $10 in comments, because your reply is here twice! ha ha, i just noticed...
I tried to reply on Steemit and it gave me the broadcast error. So I replied through ChainBB and didn't realize it went through twice!
I was thinking... I know we have steem whales where we can see those that hold the most SP; is there a way we can see the top 500 most prolific users on Steemit? Then we can match them with a whale that could delegate them SP for 30 days and that gives them time to build a following then they can move on to the next user for 30 days, etc. is there already something like this?
Yes we can get a hold of this data.
I think there are many good points in this post and the replies that could be compiled and put forward - who and how is the next stage. I did try with my 'delegate' post a week ago but we need someone with a bit more ooomf perhaps?
Yeah, I definitely think we need to come together as a community and prepare for the worst. I think the only thing that will help Steemit survive is if whales delegate so @ned should be getting on that ASAP or All is lost. In the meantime if anyone here has ties to whales they should reach out and plead the case.
Yes I think delegation is key for growth, especially if the whales are sleeping!
There is SteemWhales.com I believe and I'm trying to go there but it isn't coming up. But I think on there you can see who has the most comments and highest reputations look at a lot of data. There are certain projects out there like @curie where being a newer user you have a good chance to get upvotes and this a trail of bots will upvote you as well but a lot of the upvote bots and delegation of power is done individually.
SteemReports.com is a great site for checking people voting habits. I don't see why the whales don't analyse some of the curation of users and decide who brings the best value to the platform through their CURATION and not their own posts. And check periodically that they are still voting in ways that are good for the network.
If I were a whale I would seek users who don't vote for than 5% (of their weekly total) on any particular accounts including their own. Then I could take a VACATION knowing my capital values are growing because I invested in the right people!
Wow, somehow I didn't know about SteemReports.com This is awesome!
Thank you for the information! I think it would be great if we could reach out to those people some way, and ask them to join the movement. Maybe @ned can help?
Possibly. It looks like he currently has 500,000 Steem Power delegated to others
"One thing is clear though. In Steemit's present state, it functions like a caste system."
Great, thought-provoking point.
"The ones who want to amass great wealth are not always the ones you want to watch the sheep at night."
This could not be more true.
I personally think one of our greatest problems is that the system with linear voting rewards provides huge incentive to hoard the maximal amount of rewards votable by your stake for yourself. This creates a whole culture of vote-trading, vote-buying, back-room deals, and unspoken vote-for-vote. If these are going to happen, the more transparent and public the better. That way, political will for consensus changes can hopefully be reached.
Because of the relative anonymity of the internet, you cannot create a typical system to combat this "abuse", if the community can even collectively define it. As a result, scattered community enforcement only shames the few willing to follow the rules, leaving the egregious to reap the rewards.
That's what I was getting at today in my post where you mentioned some of the ideas you expanded upon here.
I have been work-shopping an idea to align selfish (or amoral) game-theory with desired behavior, and it involves rewarding everyone directly for every vote (imagine if every $1 vote also sent $1 to your wallet, in 7 days, though voting power would probably be roughly halved), but vote trading will still require an algorithm to identify and regulate "abusers" and that algorithm will be programmed subjectively.
I don't have a solution to that yet or I'd have posted about the whole idea. I'm open to suggestions. Anyone?
I think more in terms of helping to lead a revolution.....which actually has more to do with waking people up to their own potential.
I see a platform that is in beta where a lot of things are not perfect, just like in life. There are many proponent and opponents of the vote buying and other reward-for-hire schemes. I think everyone has a point to what they think is real. I see steemit as a microcosm of the real world, though I know most of us, I included wants an utopian setting. In the real world, few still controls the wealth of billions. The only difference is in steemit you get to see how it is done. I think if the problem of reward for content is solved once and for all, that steemit would be approaching utopia. I don't even know if what I just typed now made any sense.
Genius observation:
Thank you very much for being so kind and understanding and for the upvote too. It's a skewed world. We just try to balance it out every now and then.
Great point!
yeah, it did make sense. Because of your astute observation:
"the difference between here and the real world, is that you get to see how it's done."
Wow! You're right. In here, you get to analyze how the super rich create more wealth, and how people react to that transparent analysis. It's true! We've never been able to see this before!
I believe we know how it's done in real world too :) The difference in real world it's being done in a more subtle way as disorder is expensive thing to control. As here disorder or uprising is not a threat at all as it can not happen :)
One of the most simple things to do would be to hide easily accessible wallet information. As now most post are voted per wallet size not the content. But on the other hand we have to maintain incentive for people to stack up SP. It will get better, trust me. If not on steemit then some other front end application that comes as a successor. Somebody will crack it, will find a perfect click and build on it. Trial and error. That is how all discoveries are made. Do not be sad :)
I get you. We are still in development phase, there are suddenly in the last months multiple apps and services being created. They can't be perfect in the start go. It is interesting how it will evolve on Steemit.
I have faith that we can work it out eventually.
@futurethinker lovely username, also I think you are really thinking for the future. Thanks for your wonderful input.
Hi @stellabelle. Brilliant post with things that indeed need to be said. You have asked so I will answer, long one I am afraid. From my point of view (a relative newbie) I found the whole thing a bit difficult to maintain and due to the pressures in my life, I do not have the time to invest that others in this platform do.
I have also struggled to create meaningful relationships with people, because I do not know who is genuinely interested in what people write and who is just upvoting for the financial gain. I seem to come across an awful lot of brown nosing, and that makes me feel uneasy. The fact that curation rewards are linked to the amount of steem a post gets seems a bit of a flaw. Those that get upvoted a lot will continue to get those upvotes even if their content declines in quality because many just do it to leech from the rewards.
I have introduced other people to the platform and they are doing okish with it, but they are the artistic types and it seems that sort of content is definitely more sought after, or better rewarded in any case.
I keep trying to draw parallels with other social media platforms I tend to use a lot more, and I have spotted a couple of differences. Facebook for example allows me to join groups so I can seek the type of info I want depending on my needs or mood, and the people in those groups are familiar and on the same wavelength. Here you can use the tags but you have to wade through so much trash sometimes! And the tags are just not specific enough. There is also a healthier mix of agreeing and disagreeing narratives. Steemit seems to be a place where disagreeing is undesirable because you might get flagged and obliterated as a result, affecting your bottom line.
In terms of my own content, I just think it is sad that you put a certain amount of work into something and you can only get exposure for a week, tops. After that people rather not waste their SP so it does not get shared or show up anywhere again. Yes you can wade through someone's old posts, but it is rather downheartening that they do not get the support for content that continues to be relevant and useful.
Now, what do I want out of steemit? I want a place where I can meet people with similar interests where my appreciation of their work becomes more than just a 'like'. Rewards are good things. Unfortunately the platform lends itself to just being a faucet for some, and there seems to be no way of stopping that.
I also want a platform that is decentralised and 'democratic' to some extent, so rules and processes are flexible depending on users needs. However, this requires people with knowhow and their time.
Potential solutions (disclaimer - I have some basic understanding of the workings of the creation of Steem, SP and SBD so I understand some of these things might really not work within the current framework);
Those are my very rough suggestions. Some of them might be impossible within the platform but this is just my opinion.
Thank you for listening if you got this far. :)
Hey @olayar, rephrasing the first couple of words in your comment toward @stellabelle for her post... ¡Brilliant Comment! mate. I concur fully with what you've said in your comment. But I agree even more with your bulleted points. Actually, very glad to find another steemian with quite the same viewpoint of potential solutions for the health and prosperity of our community. Subject about which I have also written frequently.
Cheers! for your very rough suggestions. :)
Thanks @por500bolos, and sorry for taking so long to reply... life just got in the way. Glad you agree because it means there might be some consensus for some of these things to happen. I really do want to keep this alive we just need people with the perseverance and know how! Thanks again for your support. :)
EXCELLENT articulation.
I strongly agree on the issue of spammers and beggars commenting. That's been a huge turnoff.
Agreed!
Hey @stellabelle, you called for newbies so here I am! Currently 3 weeks on Steemit, I sure do have quite an opinion about things here...
#1 Steemit is in beta, but it is essential for users like ourselves here to point out why we believe changes need to be made, and the developers should figure out how and what changes can be made.. I honestly feel that many use that excuse of 'we're still in Beta so cut them some slack' or 'why don't you tell them exactly what needs to be done' that it's cock blocking this platform's progress.
Example: Facebook didn't just sit back and asked their users what they wanted to see on the platform, instead Facebook tried different features and built based on the users' response.
#2 Why is everything about money on Steem blockhain? Maybe because that is WHY we use Steem blockchain in the first place? Because that is HOW Steem blockchain was marketed? According to Steemit Inc (as pointed out by @onthewayout previously:
The primary value of Steem has always been about money. Logically, users that are attracted to the blockchain are about money first before anything else! I'm a new user here, and I admit - it is the monetary rewards that attracted me to try this platform. However I promise you, there is nothing in this world that is sustainable when profit is put before anything else. It's similar to how modern businesses that rack up billions of profit today are all focused on impact first, profit second
Example: Facebook (to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected), Amazon (to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online) and Tesla (to create the most compelling car company of the 21st century by driving the world’s transition to electric vehicles).
#3 Because of #2, majority of users get on board to earn money - because they perceive the platform to be an investment opportunity for attractive ROI. This leaves us with an environment that is built to facilitate money making, such as bot voting, vote selling etc.
Bloody hell, why did we use social media platforms in the first place? Wasn't it to connect with our friends and family? Wasn't it to keep in touch with those that we don't get to hang out with often? Wasn't it to keep one another updated about our lives? Since when did social media platform became about money money MONEY??
#4 On social media platforms using Steem blockchain, we have more content focusing on how to make money off the blockchain than content that actually adds value to the blockchain.
Imagine Steemit as an online game: where you can make real money by selling your in-game currencies and item (similar to the SBD shit). But then the gameplay is all about making money - what the fucking fuck? This sounds like bullcrap, it seems to be full of shit and most certainly, it's distasteful for genuine gamers who are here to play the game (in our context, distasteful for genuine users who are here to produce and consume valuable content).
#5 When you have a shitty environment for genuine users to utilize the platform, they leave. When genuine users leave, guess who's left in the platform - users who are here for the ROI. These people will only care about their returns, that few are willing to bring up genuine new Steemians who write good shit because they are new and there isn't much ROI to help them. This builds a viscious cycle of genuine users coming and going, and eventually there will be no longer anymore genuine users.. and when that happens, there will be no audience in Steem blockchain and when there is no audience, how is it a social medial platform anymore?
#6 We ARE in the midst of this viscous cycle - it's already happening!!! Unless the team behind Steem blockchain is doing something really strict about this, the cycle is just going to continue. We can discuss all day long @stellabella and fellas, but in the end of the day - it's a matter of 'Steem improving for us' or 'us leaving Steem because it's too shitty to bear'.
#7 A genuine yet potentially-offensive-so-please-explain-to-me-thanks suggestion: Why don't Steem developers make selling of votes illegal? Like account-ban-worthy? Or rewards-stripping worthy? Or frozen-wallet-worthy? Like how Maplestory bans selling of power leveling services or mesos sales... Why can't we do that too?
I agree with your synopsis on why the current iteration of Steem is currently in decline. The signal to noise ratio of genuine users is frankly too low. There is simply too much noise with so much focus on making money rather than content. And those making quality content are being ignored.
There is so much meta discussion about the platform which seems kind of absurd to me. What we are missing are those passionate builders. Those people willing to build skyscapers for nothing. We need those adventurers who take us to the next level. The way YouTube was in 2005. The way several Subreddits are today.
But the marketing is completely wrong. Rewards shouldn't matter, at least not at this point. The biggest reason I write on the site today is not because of the paltry rewards, but because I see the potential of the platform. Sure, the money aspect still influences some of my judgements, but when I get into the zone, writing (at least for me) is fun. And being part of something that has the potential to be huge is exciting.
Mindset is important. So sure those who will help this platform are being ignored. But if you are truly in it for the long haul, you don't need rewards. You just need to do what you enjoy doing.
So, to put everything together. Yes, Steemit has problems. Yes, the genuine creators are being drowned out and tend to quit. Are there things that need to change from the top? Certainly. But to the new creators out there. Forget the money. Do what you love. If there are enough of you on the site, then things will slowly correct themselves and "hope" will be restored on the blockchain.
I'd love to see some stats on the relative numbers, but it seems hard to believe that if most of the whales did the right thing - i.e. curate good content, and output quality content themselves - that their collective SP power couldn't overwhelm the spammers and vote farmers.
In a way, this place is like a perfect example of the Prisoners' Dilemma. And to throw another thought experiment into the mix, it's like a Tragedy of the Commons. While everyone thinks that the other is taking advantage of the system, they lose out if they don't likewise take advantage of it. Perhaps the whales need to go on a team-building retreat where they all catch each other while falling and crawl around in mud together, to build some team spirit... ;)
because it's anarchy here, and an open petri dish.