Intense Steem Weekend

I don't usually do "metaposts" where I talk about some other post, but holy damn, I didn't expect anything like this: finding my own face on top 10 Trending, 100% organically, and still hanging there around #30 after 48+ hours of posting it. The last time I was on Trending was over 2 years ago with my introduction post – also with a thumbnail of my face (although with a shitty iPhone camera).

Maybe I should post more pictures of my face.

Like I said, I knew that Haejin might retaliate my downvoting, but I also had a feeling that if that should be the case, the community would have my back, because I knew I had been a decent community player, even though saying that myself. But the degree of "counterstrike" I definitely didn't see coming, raising all my pending posts greatly above zero, and upvoting "the post" to 70+ dollars. I'm not the best content creator out there, but I guess I've done something right during these 2 years to end up there, since I don't believe that nothing in this life is given free, that's what I try to embrace at least.

Ironically enough, part of this is thanks to Haejin. Hopefully I will not develop Stochkolm syndrome with him.

^{Want to give me another round? XD}

Ok, let's not get cocky...

Preference falsification

When flagging cost voting power, it lead to a situation where people, despite holding the opinion that a user x should not receive an y amount of rewards because of reason z, it wasn't prevented because there was a direct loss associated with the action. When there is too much preference falsification – people not being able to express their private preferences without negative consequence – it easily leads to a system where only a minority is happy with the current system, because the majority is disenfranchised of their opinion. A recipe for authoritarianism.

In Steem's case the expressing opinion doesn't mean "loudly ranting about bid bots", I'm talking about the voting over reward pool – downvoting especially. Because in #oldsteem for an individual to perform a downvote to redistribute a perceived abuser's rewards, it would've required purely altruistic behavior and self-sacrificial from the profit of curation rewards. With #newsteem in post-HF21 and 2.5 free downvotes per day though, people are no longer discouraged financially to express their negative opinion on some user, except indirectly off the fear of retaliation flags, which can still lead to some users implying a different public preference than what is held privately. However, observing how the community comes to back users even in the most extreme of retaliation, it raises my confidence for the honesty of opinion – which is vital for proof-or-brain to be realized. We already saw in #oldsteem how proof-of-brain didn't work, because expressing honest opinion was discouraged on infrastructural level, luckily all we needed was just a software update, and we are headed to a much healthier direction quickly where we are free to express opinion, downvoting being an important part of that process to really direct the reward where we think it should go.

What I really enjoyed besides the big upvotes, was the incredible amount of engagement down in the post with over 170 comments thus far – more than I could find on any other post in Trending. I almost forgot eating altogether on Saturday when I was looking at my post like an :eyes: when observing upvotes stacking on top of each other and making dozens of replies to comments.

It's been amazing these past few days, and these events have only made me more bullish about Steem, and I cannot be but grateful. Makes me want to go poetic af and say "it feels like I'm embracing angels right now."