RE: The South African Border War - Operation K or Koevoet the crowbar (Warning-not for the squeamish)
Steem will be continuing to trickle down from whales to people who have less Steem. Steem is linking us in an interesting never seen way and I look forward to its future.
All transactions on Steem are voluntary and there are already mechanisms in place to curb abuse and these will get better with time.
If feel like this is a bit hijacking Gavvet comment section so I think it might be preferable if we speak on the chat of discord about this. Nonetheless I'm open to any option you chose.
I'm not looking to make myself extremely rich while injustice is rampant in our society and some people create money out of nothing while we scrape for crumbs. I'm looking to make our society more fair and thus more decentralized first and from this people will get what they merit.
Hopefully we won't leave anyone starving to death because there's no need for this. There's no need for billionaires with 20 mansions all across the globe, there's no need for people with billions of dollars "fructifying" in some offshore bank and their will never be.
I look forward to help us look for more righteous goals no matter how difficult they might be to achieve. It's not easy. We've been thinking about money all our life.
I still stress about money even thought I made more this year than probably my last 5 year combine and this is irrational and while we Steem and try to make Steem a better place there are still people dying in horrible horrible situation and there are still people printing trillions of dollars out of nothing...
Steem won't solve everything in one day nor can it solve everything but it can surely help and all this is a process.
As I've said most whales are giving more to others than themselves or close friend and sure some whales give to themselves and friends and there's people doing it more than others...
Step 1: @teamsteem, I appreciate your positive content and effort on Steemit. You stay composed and constructive when people bash based on their personal opinions.
Step 2: Some random thoughts/venting triggered by your comments above. Probably not valid for this main blog, but hopefully for this sub-string.
I think whales who want to help Steemit grow (you're certainly one of them), should be able to sign up to have a small school of minnows assigned they can get to know, support, mentor, and upvote appropriately to help build them up. Bringing the minnows up to a certain level should be nice experience, and then set them free (while having the relationships to last). This would help whales focus on growing positivity instead of prioritizing negative activities. Better yet, they'll have people looking up to them so they'd be more likely to remain professional and respectful. Maybe this exists already, but I'm new and don't know.
I hate seeing people sneak themselves 100% upvotes when it's to pad their own pockets, or to try to get themselves to the top of a chain to get more attention for upvotes on a hot debate. It's greedy and becomes a popularity contest. I upvote myself for $.01-$.04 sometimes (my puny max) to try to get noticed above someone who isn't upvoted at all, as a meager effort to say "hey, please find my post", not to pad my pockets with a penny of SP/SBD.
What's worse, I've seen upvoting of quality comments on a whale/dolphin's posts at the minimum upvote %, or none at all, and then them upvoting all of their own replies down the chain 100%. Over and over, every reply 100% to them and 1% to their "host". That's sick to me and something should be done to curb that manipulation.
People also seem to spend their 100% upvotes spread around their curation reach in slivers, when they can really make a significant impact by sharing them with a few people a day to motivate and inspire them. This circles back to how the whale/school concept could help to retain a lot of new users. It's not really costing any money, just voting power and some light curation rewards.
A lot of whales get the bigger picture that getting people to sign up is the easy part. Keeping them motivated to build on the platform and grow seems to be delegated most to bots you pay for to get a small % of profit for bought upvotes. A hands on approach while the active user base is still small, can do a world of good for raising minnows into dolphins to repeat the cycle down the line.
Also, I wish there was a way to reduce the spam of people sending out "news" videos of other people's hard work in the form of Youtube videos, and thinking that citing their source in a quick sentence is called "quality posting". People are getting paid to do it every day in bulk to get payouts and there's nothing stopping them from this lazy spam. It makes my blood boil. I won't name names, but these copycats are everywhere.
Hope this can help you at all since you have the muscle to do something! Let's not have Steem just trickle down. We can all do better than that to keep the community growing!
I also appreciate a lot of the general concern for minnows by others in this thread. Thank you.
Thank Matt. I read your recommendation and I'll take them into account for what I'm looking to build here on Steem. Seriously.