RE: Correcting Bloomberg's Wrong Interpretation Of Things: Steem Doesn't Have A Content Quality Problem!
Great post, Marly. I couldn't agree more when you said,
It's only the evaluation mechanism as well as the way of sorting and displaying the published content that could be improved.
Also, when he said
"evaluating the content objectively"
I do not believe objectivity can ever be totally achieved, because let's face it we are all subjective to varying degrees at different times.
The real quality content often gets buried in the system here due to a real lack of visibility (probably the number one fault of steem), the way the system is structured, and Ned probably failed to defend that fact because he doesn't see much of the quality. That is, in my view, because of the very faults of the system itself and also in part because up until a week ago he had gone 2 full months without a single comment and 6 months without a single post. It's one thing for a CEO to manage his business with many things going on, but another when a CEO completely abandon's his own platform and it's users for such a long period of time.
Here's the interview, BTW:
I noticed @Ned state at 4:35 said,
"but there's total liquidity at the same time - so as you're earning these tokens it's like earning money"
This is simply a misleading statement, because a larger and larger portion of rewards paid out is in SP, which has nothing even close to liquidity. SP takes 13 weeks to pull out all but 5 steem and that 5 steem it will not allow us to pull out is a real issue as the value of steem goes up.
I honestly worry, Marly, that we may be close to, as you said,
"come a point in time when we can't turn back "
This is why I have an eye also on @Dan, the technical creator of the steem blockchain and steemit, as he rolls out EOS and his stated plans to create a sort of steem II platform with an eye on fixing the many issues of this first try. Also Minds.com looks to be giving steemit real competition too. A little competition always helps us all in the end.
Great comment, @positivesynergy! Thanks for taking the time to put it all together.
I've never really understood why the CEO of decentralized social media network prefers using Twitter instead of his own platform in order to communicate. Maybe he's tired of Steemit.com and that's why all eyes are put on SMTs as the new profit centre.
If this was the case, they'd make one important mistake: steemit.com as per default will always be the no. 1 gateway app to Steem. It's been the first app built on the Steem blockchain, it's got reached a top alexa ranking. If they really give up on Steemit.com, then everything else will fail as well. That's at least my perspective.
Is there anybody not having an eye on @eosio? :-)
I assumed he's looking for retweets to get the word out, instead of preaching to the converted, here.
The best of 60,000 users is never going to be the same quality as the best of 600 million users.
Maybe scaling should be a priority after all.
Well currently there are 940,000 dead accounts and 60,000 active accounts. Is that what we call scaling and growth...? :-) It's actually just an inflated number.
In fairness, 3 of those are mine. Registered for later use, and I know several others who've done the same.
But I prefer to use active users for this very reason. If we can get more people onboard, the best of the best will be better :)
From my point of view we shouldn't focus on getting as much people as possible on board, but keeping those that are coming. Let's say all of these 60,000 have an average of 4 accounts, then we're still far away from 1 million.
The problem is not the acquisition, it's onboarding, education, expectation management and working on an improved user experience.
If you earn money on Steem you don't care about a user interface from 1980 or a design (algorithm) that keeps other users away. But if you're new and that design is all you've got, then it matters.
It's absolutely logical that the number of active users is decreasing at this point in time. Everything else would be a miracle. If we don't change the design and make Steem more attractive, it will go down to a couple of thousands - those who're here since the very beginning since they're the only ones profiting from the eco-system.
Guess why the top witnesses don't say anything in public about the current issues? They're comfortably sitting on their monthly income - so why should they change a thing? :-)
They're only earning steem, though. I'm sure they don't want a return to 7c steem any more than the rest of us.
I'm glad they're being paid in the same currency I'm hodling; means they help me by helping themselves.
Let's see how they will help us to fix the issues.
I don't think there are 940,000 dead accounts. Active accounts refers to how many accounts actually did something on a given day, like post, upvote, etc. The 60,000 accounts active one day are not all the same accounts that are active on another day. I think weekly or monthly active users would give a better picture.
Great point, @surfermarly. His use of twitter over his own platform would appear to say a lot about his own faith in the platform itself, as well as the people who use it. I suppose he's trying to promote it, as he was doing on Bloomberg, but in my view, as the saying "if you build it they will come' could be retooled to say, "if you fix it, they will both come and stay".
As with the many problems it has, it seems most come and go because they see it's flaws and that the hype is in many ways just hype. Then there are those fools like me (LOL) who invest here, only to find out that to pull the funds back out takes like forever in a time of how blockchain technology is growing and changing so fast. Those people who come and go do far more than any Bloomberg broadcast or twitter tweet to folks who to a large degree are very skeptical to begin with. When a CEO of a company he owns 51% ignores his company's investors and customers, you have to wonder if he is considering going the way of Facebook, especially given the way he first replied to the question near the end about Facebook.
At 4:47 She asked,
And his reply after several seconds of thinking was,
So the real question I have is... is Ned using Bloomberg and Twitter to promote the sale of steemit all together to Facebook and/or for some sort of partnership? That sure is what it sounded like he was implying. Please have a listen and let me know your perception of that Q&A given. You gotta wonder...
Well that reminds me of the following quote which is so absolutely true:
Who needs a platform with 940,000 dead accounts? You can't sell them to anybody.
With regards to 51%: Have you seen the following video? There's one point where Ned says that Steemit.com is a centralized app built on a decentralized blockchain. I wonder why the CEO of a company that is part of the crypto market underlines the fact that his flagship is actually not decentralized? Does that make sense? Many people are only here for the decentralized idea, so why challenge that?
When I asked Ned Scott at Steemfest² what his vision for 2018 was, he replied:
Maybe that vision is a bit too big for them. Maybe they should successfully implement the idea in one eco-system before they start to sell it to others...? Who would want to invest in a SMT after having had a look at steemit.com?
I agree, Marly. That's quite revealing in and of itself that he said that. When I first started seeing the issues here, I researched and discovered it is a for-profit corporation with a CEO who controls 51%. That to me in and of itself says a lot - that it doesn't seem very decentralized. Most of the top decentralized cryptos are run by non-profit foundations for that very purpose of making them as decentralized as possible. I always liked the way Jed McCaleb, who basically co-created ripple, before breaking off to co-create Stellar says, "imagine the internet if it were created and run by one for profit corporation. It wouldn't be anything like it is today."
These are very wise words.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons why Steem has never been a top cryptocurrency.
I've had a bad enough day without seeing this. Powering down will be agonizingly slow! FTS and the greed of bastards that think they will live forever.
There must be a lack of morality in these people! It must be! How can you put your greed above thousands that trust you through the promises you have made.
Again poor will take the hit like it's always the case!
The rich never change. They just learn new ways to bullshit people. My biggest question is whether it is money that turn them into this or is it only a certain kind of person lacking empathy and morality that end up in those positions? The latter a perfect explanation of the flawed system!
The whole steem project seems almost to be a social engineering experiment. Take for example the Steem White Paper (https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf), which interestingly appears to have been rewritten in August 2017 after Dan's departure as CTO. If you look under the "Voting on Distribution of Currency" heading, under the subheading of "Voting Abuse" you find this really stage "The Story of the Crab Bucket" that states the following:
Then it states:
It sounds to me in many ways like social engineering and/or socialism where human jealousy and greed traps them into in a worst-case dog-eat-dog scenario.
And then there is the whole @Dan thing. @GuiltyParties told me it was Dan who nuked @BernieSanders to that -16 rep he has and he also told me other times that Dan has been doing a lot of downvotes on others too. So last night before leaving I did a search and found that to be true too, with posts just on Dan's downvotes. That puts a little doubt on his whole idea of making a sort of steem II on EOS that fixes the problems, if he starts abusing the same fault in the system that he so resonantly pointed out Ned and others were doing.
I recall Bill Ottman, co-founder of Minds, said several times in interviews how research has been done on such cases as that girl who felt cheated by YouTube and went into their offices shooting, which shows that mistreatment and abuse on social media platforms creates violent behavior. Thus, the bot wars and downvote wars of steemit.