Steem's value will only increase when things are proportional. If you have bots doing all the valuable upvoting the ecosystem will be drained which is one reason why your votes are worth what you say they are worth. Steemit doesn't care about long-term growth. If they did, they would find a solution so new users didn't abandon after posting 1-2 times. Sites need to be sticky for new users. I wrote a hack script to see what's going on and I concluded the obvious. The imbalance of power (minnow to whale) creates low-quality content from those with power. Whales do not create anything of value. They abuse, extract, and funnel steem to put what they perceive as value into their pockets. If you don't have significant steam power you have absolutely no power so all the power is held by steem collecting voting bots and whales like @jerrybanfield who will sell minnows a post-vote in exchange 1 Steem. Shit, if someone wants to send me 1 Steem I will take the time to at least read your post and maybe vote and comment if I can add value to your post.
No steem related ICO is going to do jack shit. Why? Because this platform wouldn't do jack shit without bots. The folks at steemit know this. In some ways, this platform functions like a pyramid scheme but it's not as blatant. Furthermore, SMT's will also fail, because, again, the bots are the only thing keeping this place alive. You need to focus on new users to build anything worthwhile. Without new users, you have nothing but a bunch of money-grubbing content creators who can post complete shit and still hit the trending page. This platform has NO algorithm because the team is not capable. Writing a voting algorithm is some basic shit. But this site is not about creating and voting on good content. It's about extracting money. I would love to see Steemit close all rewards for 3 days and see how many daily active users, postings and comments the site gets. This is beta, you should experiment to learn.
Steemit calls this Beta. But beta means to iterate and change things early and often. I haven't seen much change, especially to the obvious things. I get it, they want to be the pipes, but if the pipes are corroded with slime you won't get very far when installing something new like SMT. The team has clearly lost focus. You can only do one thing really well. If you want to do many without applying what you have learned you will fail.
Want to read why the market is down? here is the real reason.
Congratulations! This comment received a 100.00 % upvote from @liveyourdream, an actual human being who appreciates other people creating valuable content and actually reads it instead of using bots or voting trails^^
Okay, so you say the ecosystem will be drained with bots doing all the valuable upvotes which sounds legit of course but what I don't understand is that since the value of Steem decreased, the reward pool itself raised according to steem.supply.
That's a phenomenon which on the other side also sounds plausible again and which we have seen in the past already according to less activity within the community. Do you have an idea how this is working?
In general I share your fears and doubts about the long term development of this platform like the imbalance of power, whales creating trash and upvoting themselves, etc.
And these are exactly the reasons why I lost a lot of trust in this platform within the last few weeks. Of course, there are some "good whales" who try to accumulate as much people as possible to fight against this abuse but it's like you already said.
As a minnow with almost no influence how can we stop them? We would use all of our voting power only trying to stop this abuse. Which would mean again no rewards for us. I have better things to do with my free time than this...
I will read through your article probably tommorow as I have to get ready for a trip. Thanks for your in depth reaction! :)
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I don't have enough experience on this platform to give you an answer as to why the "reward pool" is up and to be completely honest, I don't even know what the reward pool is. I have never heard of it because I didn't come here for the money. I came here "blind" because I invest in crypto by reading white papers, playing with prototypes, betas and researching the team. I wanted to use this platform first hand. I actually paid to create my account because when I attempted to create an account the registration was buggy. This should have been my wake up call that the team is sub-par and that the platform is not what it seems. By "blind," I wanted to experience this platform like a new user would. Why? Because if a new user has a piss poor experience, the project will not see enough the traction necessary for mainstream adoption. In its current state its just not possible.
If I were heavily invested in STEEM I would be concerned with the teams inability the execute and grow organically. When I look at investments, I view them like a venture capitalist would.... for lack of a better analogy. Due diligence would reveal all the flaws of this platform. Right now, its a shitcoin with a front end that is essentially hiding the scam if you understanding what I am saying.
By enabling voting bots and whale abuse this platform is entering the point of no return. I am not sure minnows can do anything. This platform isn't designed for minnows to gain influence organically. There's nothing organic about this platform. Read my comments on other post and you will see where I am coming from.
Trust is earned, not given. For me, this team has a lot of work to do to earn my trust.
Sorry to rant. Nobody is seeing this besides you.
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