RE: War on Fiction?
And after all that discussion, your latest posts are still getting flagged. Even the one about your posts being flagged got flagged and is now hidden even though it had over 300 views and 86 votes, all but a handful of which were upvotes.
I stand by my opinion that when wealth is attached to voting you get a system that prioritizes wealth and the preservation of wealth, not quality of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Someone should go and do a calculation of the Steem community Gini coefficient which measures how equitable the wealth distribution is in a community. I'm pretty sure we'd be doing really badly - much worse than the US as a whole.
My idea is that transisto's vote is fundamentally a vote against the "vote up or down as you please" system we technically have, even if I think the majority of us seldom if ever downvote unlike on our namesake Reddit. I think he'd like to see most rewards go to those who bring most eyeballs to the system because that will bring more users, which will drive up the price of Steem and increase his investment value. Like I said, that's what you get when you tie votes to wealth.
How about a system where users with the most reputation - which has to be earned and not bought - have more say in what good posts are? They curate with a power proportional to their reputation and not with their Steem? I don't know exactly how that would work but for surfacing quality content vs. just that which is favored by the rich and whale-sized popularity contest, it seems like it would be a better system... And quality content is what we are after right? Not a dissent into a tabloid hell. I mean what if a random whale or consortium shows up and dumps a few million Steem into their account, and decides to promote and upvote the crap out of adult posts? Then what? Are we to become an adult site just because some rich minority deems to in their best interests? (Trust me there are many mediocre porn sites that have a far higher Alexa rank than Steemit so someone might deem that a great way to make money).
As someone said on my other posts about this - people can vote up and down in whatever way they want - but I say it makes no sense to justify your downvote by saying "I don't like they way other people are voting!". That's a vote against voting itself to me. Why not focus on positive actions and if you think there is content better than Michelle's go use your voting power to promote it instead. For every giant downvote on Michelle I bet they could find ten new and upcoming Steemians who'd love a boost of a few bucks!
This comment is right on the money - but for one thing. Reputation, in it's present form, is able to be bought. Just buy upvotes from whales with higher rep, and you will gain rep.
Other than that, that reputation needs to be 'degamed', the delinking of SP holdings from VP weighting is exactly what I've long advocated. Vested interests, from Stinc, top witnesses, and various whales, whom I've discussed this issue with, on and off chain, do not want to dry up their tried and true profit mechanism. This despite the fact that the perception of oligarchical concentration of wealth is killing Steemit, the goose that lays the golden egg, and thereby causing Steem to fail to appreciate, which is both the traditional, tried and true, mechanism by which investors are rewarded, and a vastly more potentially emunerative mechanism.
Further, stake weighting extends to witness votes, and because of this, witnesses are completely vulnerable to simply being bought, and thus the blockchain, and Steem itself, including SMTs, completely controlled by someone with enough cash.
These transactions needn't even be delayed by powerdown and sale of tokens, as the accounts can be transferred off chain, covertly, converting the mined stakes that represent the majority of Steem in existence into golden parachutes for the account holders, and transferring Steemit to the hands of Zuckerburg, Murdoch, or whatever wealthy cabal decides it's worth the investment.
A couple hundred million $ is lunch money in some circles, after all.
Lastly, the white paper envisioned flagging as the communities ability to counter rogue whales, and despite the fact that ten thousand minnow votes would be required to counter @transisto's flags, I reckon that some few dolphins and whales would side with a concerted initiative to stop such censorship, and this would dramatically improve the odds.
Also, I don't think such overwhelming force would be required to cause @transisto, or @berniesanders, or anyone, to back off, as a show of economic force would impact their ROI dramatically, and, since that's what they really care about, I reckon they would quite quickly change their ways.
Thanks!
Someone actually did this calculation a few weeks ago. I can't remember who the author was, but if you search gini you might find it. From memory, steem gini was significantly worse than US gini.
Good memory... And here it is: https://steemit.com/steemit/@doodlebear/the-gini-coefficient-for-steemit-is-not-just-bad-it-is-getting-worse
Even ignoring the top 100 accounts we are still worse than Panama. Looking at the top 1000 alone we are would be one of the worst countries in the world.
"I don't like they way other people are voting!".
-This is exactly what a flag means. Flagging content based on disagreements is purely gatekeeping by someone who knows what's better than the voters. Depending on the final outcome this maybe either good or bad.
Flagging plagiarized content is good as it create negative feedback for such behavior. Flagging original productive content is a discouragement on original content which certainly doesn't give good results. Steemit shouldn't be another publishing company with editors. If anybody thinks voting against writers is good for steemit, that person isn't thinking right.