Clash of Steem
Knowledge + Time = Acceptance
Whenever I need to accept something, I have to understand it first. For me, acceptance is difficult without knowing exactly why something happened or how something works.
This is especially true with the design around the rewards pool and its distribution/governance functions: upvotes & downvotes.
Frustration Everywhere I Look
Wherever I look on Steem, I can see confrontations between Steemians as well as frustration, especially from people who feel they've been treated unfairly: "I bought 50,000 STEEM when STEEM was at 4$ and now I'm not even allowed to vote for myself or my friends? How dare you!?!"
And I get that point of view. I really do. I've been on Steem through thick and thin (more thin than thick tbh) and having a huge stake in a currency that has lost 98% from ATH, that really stings.
However, I also get the other point of view.
Rewards Pool? Confrontation Required
Would you believe me if I were to tell you that confrontation is placed right into the design core of the rewards pool?
Similar to our night/day cycle on earth, the rewards pool has two opposing forces governing its core: upvotes & downvotes.
With upvotes alone, people are generally happy, but the pool has no way to be protected against abuse. That's why downvotes exist. They sting like a sword but are necessary for a more healthier distribution.
And the existence of downvotes alone on Steem is why confrontation is built into the core layer of Steem itself, converting it to a potential warzone.
Should Steem be a Warzone?
Now, obviously the question stands whether STEEM (the currency & platform for SMTs) is the right place for a warzone? (Again, that is what you'll have to deal with when having a global rewards pool.)
My personal opinion is: No!
A warzone is not an attractive place to onboard millions of users.
STEEM should be a neutral ground for everyone to come together who believes in the power of decentralised & monetized social media and who wants to build blockchain-powered apps via soft-consensus.
How I visualize the pool is as a shared wallet where (based on stake) users can direct STEEM toward something, kind of like a purchase. For the next 7 days, other owners of the wallet can negotiate and direct more toward or redirect away from the purchase and this negotiation decides how much of the contents of the shared wallet will go toward that purchase, if anything at all.
This happens often in any household, and normally, the wife negotiates better than the husband.
good explanation :)
People got very comfortable for a long time watching that reward counter under their post only move in one direction. Now that the opportunity cost for downvotes has been removed, they are in shock to see more downvotes. I don't think less downvoting as many appeal for will actually help the situation. I think time and normalization of the practice is the only remedy.
Yep. Perhaps one day there will be enough distribution that the balance makes it less extreme.
That's how I understand it as well, but the difference is, that the wife and husband have a dependancy on each other, as well as leverage. On Steem, most people are anonymous and this just makes it so that the urge to be egoistic in the voting behaviour is increased. I could see a difference with communities, as they are probably smaller and more like a big family. And if you're sick of a community/SMT, you can always join another. On Steem, it's one main currency or sell for bitcoin/altcoins, which sadly too many people did.
It is definitely a complex, estranged and highly dysfunctional household :)
And this is the problem.The vast majority want absolute decentralisation based on themselves. No one cares about social media or use cases or creating a fairer global financial system, they just want to make as much money for them selves as possible. It's the greed and selfishness that's causing warfare as big stakeholders who don't understand that risky investments can fall as well as increase are too busy dictating to the rest what they will accept or not.
Your upvote/downvote analogy only holds true on a level playing field when both sides are evenly balanced.
Isn't personal sovereignty via stake actual decentralization? Atomic persons acting independently is the ultimate form of decentralization IMO. What else would you base decentralization on?
They can dictate all they wan't, it doesn't mean anybody has to listen. There are only two sides? It seems to me there are multiple camps, and balance gets achieved by various stakeholders coalescing in support of this and that. Sure there are a ton of rent seekers out there awed by wallet size who choose to coalesce with the group they feel will reward them the most in the short term, rather than taking a long term investment view, but that's a matter of personal integrity.
Short term or long term views are nothing to do with personal integrity rather personal circumstance.
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I agree with you @nathen007
Every flag against an account that others have rewarded increases the eventual payout to the largest Stake holder. Its no wonder they went to so much trouble to create the flag war mentality complete with Chain of Command.
It amazes me that so many people are still falling for it. Protect the reward pool lol
The thing is that people doing this vendetta also upvote themselves as they control some communities.
How do you explain that I have never been upvotes by OCD? In 2 years on Steemit? I must really suck...
And this happens to a lot of us. They say they don’t cross upvotes but they upvote their friends via their curating projects...
Sad.
Maybe back then there were more awesome content creators such as the makeup sisters for them to discover than us.
Indeed ! Maybe this is the case, but I see often the same authors being voted by the projects and the persons behind it.
Anyway ! This is life but they like to also downvote people not in their circle despite good content I.e @broncnutz, @jrcornel...
I don’t know these two accounts that well. But on my early days here, i got almost no support from either curie or ocd, i guess i’m just bad maybe. But lately I introduced some friends to join steem, who seems to get some support from different projects, which is of course a good thing to see.
That is a nice thing to hear ! Maybe they got better at helping minnows. Also I might earn too much per post now as my number of readers increased.
Well, this is life 👌
Maybe you have used tags that aren't seen by curators? Maybe there have been a lot of competitions at that time?
Curation projects like OCD and Curie have their own specific guidelines to follow. Maybe your content didn't pass the guideline. Not saying content is not good, but one of the common guidelines of these curation projects is being under-rewarded. Another thing that I know is both projects don't vote for crypto-related content and prefer original-content. We curators work very hard to spread our votes that are of course according to our guidelines. We use different methods to discover content like Steemlookup, manually looking at tags or "New" section, looking through self-promotion in Discords, looking at feeds for resteems, etc.
This is because their content still passes the guidelines.
I hope this clears it up. Cheers! :)
-hiddenblade from Curie
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Knowledge + Time + Trust(!) = Acceptance :-)
♥️ Lovely
Agreed on the no part. Voicing an opinion should be an accepted part of life. Sadly, we all have egos and that means we protect our tiny piece of the pie..
But on my good days I like to believe humans got to where we are today by a healthy dose of community, humility, and sharing resources.
As they say: it's not money that is the root of all evil, but the love of money..
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You're not looking everywhere. Frustration exists, but it's not everywhere. I think the use of the term 'warzone' within this context of yours only adds to the sensationalism seen here today in this post, and as well as a few others here and there.
A small group of disgruntled members does not speak for everyone, they speak for themselves, and they speak loudly to garner more attention, so others join their point of view, bolstering their agenda. Not only do they want their way, but they will manipulate others in order to get it. That's how it all looks to me, as your typical outsider, looking in. I also see the other side (which really only exists within the words of the manipulators), and everything in between.