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RE: Correcting Bloomberg's Wrong Interpretation Of Things: Steem Doesn't Have A Content Quality Problem!

in #steem7 years ago

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? :-)

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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,

"Could you see something like what you were building fitting into Facebook"

And his reply after several seconds of thinking was,

"absolutely and Facebook in the last several months ZuckerBerg actually came out in his yearly address and said that they're looking at cryptocurrency and how it can be used to positively impact community building.

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...

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".

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:

Tokenize the internet.

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:

A man was walking along the beach and saw another man fishing in the surf with a
bait bucket beside him. As he drew closer, he saw that the bait bucket had no lid and
had live crabs inside.
"Why don't you cover your bait bucket so the crabs won't escape?", he said.
"You don't understand.", the man replied, "If there is one crab in the bucket it would
surely crawl out very quickly. However, when there are many crabs in the bucket, if
one tries to crawl up the side, the others grab hold of it and pull it back down so that
it will share the same fate as the rest of them."
So it is with people. If one tries to do something different, get better grades, improve
herself, escape her environment, or dream big dreams, other people will try to drag
her back down to share their fate.

Then it states:

Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.
The goal of building a community currency is to get more “crabs in the bucket”. Going to extreme
measures to eliminate all abuse is like attempting to put a lid on the bucket to prevent a few crabs from escaping and comes at the expense of making it harder to add new crabs to the bucket. It is sufficient to make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping.

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.