RE: A Gangsta Sherlock Would Be an Awesome Dream - Steemit Sock Puppetry Continues?
The platform can not tolerate this sort of constant "investigations" and innuendo.
People are allowed to vote how they like, are allowed to have multiple accounts, and are allowed to disclose or withhold whatever information they like. They are allowed to recruit friends or others to the platform and are allowed to use their SP to promote content including their own (this is in the white paper as fundamental to the value of SP). In fact they are allowed to do whatever they want, and continuing to post about it just spreads further discord and hostility, which has already been observed to create a negative environment that drives healthy non-troll users away, harming all of us.
If you find the content to be of poor quality, don't vote for it or downvote it. Anything else that you continue to obsessively pursue and post repeatedly adds nothing of positive value and instead harms the platform.
The approach you are trying to promote on the platform, one of turning disagreements about posting and voting into a series of investigations, accusations, and innuendo is harmful and damages it. I am therefore downvoting.
I would also like to point out that @kushed’s tirade was not flagged by any whales, despite many intentionally inflammatory remarks, insults, and accusations about other users, which were factually incorrect. On the other hand, my post was flagged by multiple whales for providing accurate data –
@kushed is not the one pursing this agenda and approach, you are. If your posts stop, then his will as well. If his posts stop, yours most likely still would not. It is therefore abundantly clear who is responsible for this continued destructive exchange.
EDITS: typos and clarity
The problem is the down vote. YOU who have vastly more power than me can down vote / flag my content so I get zero pay or if you choose just reduce it because the system allows it. There are 51 Whales last time I looked at out of almost 100,000 people. If I decide I don't like something you posted or up voted it or any of the other 90,000+ people decide we don't like it we cannot down vote you to zero. It creates a caste system. For me the solution is to stop down voting things because you think it is getting paid too much, or disagree with it. As long as this disparity in power allows those with power to reduce others with power then the LOGICAL response is going to be those people are going to post about it. There is also a little bit of hypocrisy. The argument to explain why they down vote so the money returns to the pool for everyone is hypocritical when they turn around and consistently vote for subjectively average content to $1000+ which takes far more from that pool than they were supposedly returning to people. My answer to this would be to remove the down vote, and only allow the flag for plagiarism, spam, and abusive posts. Some disagree... yet if that were in place now I highly suspect you would not be seeing these types of arguments. You could not use your power to crush people. IT does become an attack. So if you expect to wield that power in such a way it should be obvious that those that cannot really defend themselves from your attack are going to respond with investigations and words. In reality the actions of the down vote of the very powerful do more harm to the perceptions of the potentially new people to the platform than you realize. It is the number one reason close to a dozen people I tried to recruit are not posting here at this point.
Or, when they vote for sock puppet accounts that they admittedly created. Yes - that is absolutely hypocritical. For someone to refuse to acknowledge that point and continue to downvote information that exposes the ones creating and upvoting the sock puppets is utterly laughable.
"I'm going to downvote your post because I don't want it draining money from the rewards pool by exposing people who are actually draining money from the rewards pool."
Yeah...that doesn't work. My $0.25 on this post did not at all compare to the thousands of dollars in rewards per week going to the identified (and even ADMITTED) socks.
There are not anything close to 100K people on this platform. The vast majority of those accounts do not correspond to people.
Nevertheless, people have unequal shares of ownership, thus unequal votes. They also pay unequal shares of the rewards and unequal shares of any market losses. Guess who pays the bulk of those?
I do not disagree that the stakes being uneven and the largest stakeholders having so much power is undesirable. That needs to be fixed with stake distribution, which is exactly what is happening with nearly all of the largest stakeholders powering down (if that were not the case, it would be something to be concerned about).
I consider constant posts harping over that fact and making accusations against people over disagreeing about the manner they choose to use their votes to be content that is not helpful to the successful the platform and rather is harmful to it. No one comes to Steemit to read about whether the largest stakeholders have too much power or not, whether they are voting to promote posts by themselves or their friends (which once again is explicitly allowed and is one of the reasons people are supposed to buy SP). I consider that directly harmful to my investment and I will apply my votes accordingly.
I don't believe you. Downvotes are very rare outside of a small number of incidents of griefers mass-downvoting, something that was dealt with reasonably effectively by the community.
The top reasons people decline to participate, not only in my personal experience by widely reported by others are: 1) too much content about Steemit itself and a small number of anarchist and cryptocurrency topics; 2) interface lacking in expected features (and too focused on blogging when the user isn't a blogger); 3) small community; and 4) more recently, hostile, negative vibe with too much drama.
@smooth Quote from Smooth above: I don't know how to do the quote thing in comments. "I consider that directly harmful to my investment and I will apply my votes accordingly."
Per usual, I appreciate your direct communication style, and I agree you can vote and flag according to your power and preferences .
I fully understand your perception that posting about how votes are used ultimately hurts the platform, but I don't understand the lack of willingness to also acknowledge, what David is posting about isn't a secret and that behavior is also hurting the platform.
If you could step away from your whaleness for a minute and put yourself in the fins of a minnow who is... Unconnected. Not an aspiring Author, but a decent writer. The message from yourself and others is "write better content". When really what is creating votes isn't content, but rather networking. (not a bad thing on a social network, so let's acknowledge it)
I don't know how to say it any clearer than new users feel like they could write Shakespear and it likely won't get any of the Steem pool, because the steem pool is already allocated to the whales, witnesses and friends or sock-puppets of the whales. <---- If I knew how I would bold that last paragraph.
Thank you for taking the time to read and interact with the users, and I agree with your stated reasons 1-4 on barriers to user adoption.
Yeah, I can do that and I imagine it sucks. But unfortunately whether @kushed (along with others) supports the writers he recruits to the platform by using his SP as he deems worthy or not, the life of an unknown minnow trying to make it is still going to suck. So again, this comes down to not trying to actually make things better for anyone to any meaningful degree, but negativity and trolling rooted in jealousy (of others who are better connected, have more resources, etc. and generally have it easier).
I don't know how to fix that, other than the usual advice of hard work, self-promotion, networking, trying to find mentors and sponsors, etc. (as you correctly pointed out).
I appreciate your often critical but nevertheless thoughtful feedback.
BTW, search google for "steemit markdown tutorial". They will teach you how to quote and format.
@smooth, I agree with you regarding @kushed supporting who he wants. You just acknowledged the sucky experience of a new user. Don't we need them? As a team, can we focus on how to make it better for them? Tired of arguing and ready to look for solutions.
Oh and thanks, I will learn how to use the SteemIt markdown tool. ;)
Exactly.
In response to your "If you find the content to be of poor quality, don't vote for it or downvote it."
I would like to say to you and all whales: If you find the content of poor quality, please don't vote for it.
Yeah. What happened to just moving on? In any case, I wouldn't say this content is poor quality. He (and the obvious others) just doesn't agree with it and doesn't want it to be seen. It's the same reason they downvoted the last post. They didn't like the content - not that it was poor quality. It was not only an excellent quality, but it was accurate data. So, the argument holds no water.
Now, if you want to talk about poor quality - look no further than kushed's response to the previous post. Not only was it not well-written, but it was riddled with personal attacks and false accusations against other users. I believe smooth has mentioned "slander" in the past with other users, but surprisingly, that was absent in regards to kushed's post. In fact, smooth upvoted that post. Interpret that however you wish.
It all is dependent on how much money and power you have. That's why I find this all very telling about someone's values. The continued attempt of suppression of these posts is what's damaging, not the posts themselves. It's so clear to everyone else, except the one or few who continue trying to censor information and raw data. Just move on and ignore it if it's not something worth voting on. If only people would take their own advice....
i hope this is an relevant place for this comment. i started this here, and i thought more people might benefit from this as a post. https://steemit.com/steemit/@lifeworship/censorship-smensorship
I don't suggest downvoting lightly nor maliciously, but the system was not designed according to an upvote-only model. The downvote is an essential component and should be used when needed.
I do have some ideas for how a similar system might work well as upvote-only and perhaps someday I will put them in writing, but it would be too radical of a change to even propose for Steem anyway.
Of course @kushed is not pursuing it. He is one of the people who scammed 10s of thousands of dollars out of the system. If he admits what he has done then I'm sure this investigation will stop. "I don't want to verify because I have stalkers." And a verification with a paper and a hand with a glove on? HAHA. This stuff is comical. Who needs Television when you have Steemit? I have read all of the facts and have been investigating scams in crypto for many years. I understand there are no TOS on Steemit but what some of you are doing is morally wrong and is damaging the platform. Then you accuse this man of the same. He is only trying to help.
No. I'm the bad guy here. I'm the "harasser." The "witch hunter."
Meanwhile, the people responsible for these sham accounts continue to receive whale votes...and even started their own curation projects with their whale supporters. But yeah - these guys are just "doing what's best for the platform." The sad part is, I think they're actually buying their own nonsense.
keep doing what you do, in time you will be hailed as the hero who helped to bring steemit out of beta
This is the one most hilarious sentence that I've read on Steemit for the whole week.
Well @smooth , at least you had the decency to comment and explain your down-votes. That is not a small thing.
I think he should get a lot of credit for that. What we can discuss we can work through.
and then, he will publish a post steemit is not censorship-free.
Umm...if I did do that, would I be wrong?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
of course not. What is wrong is your investigation's "approach"
And what "approach" is that?
you are simply showing the accounts to use the same pictures, which by the way are royalty free and anyone can use them.
But please, stop pursuing @honeycribe and whomever else. there is nothing wrong to have a lot of accounts and nothing wrong if whales upvote these accounts. they can upvote whomever they want.
You need to actually read the posts. There's much more to it than just pictures.
flagging u is not a censorship. get your fact straight. ur post is still in blockchain and no one has deleted it.
Now you're contradicting yourself.
#byefelicia