Steem is its own worst critic

First of all, I suck at giving titles to posts, I hope the readers won't read too much into it but the content of the post instead.

What I wanted to talk about today is the freedom of speech and attention to everyone's voice on Steem. Compared to other cryptocurrency projects Steem is quite different in this regard, let me explain why.

If you were to look at a platform such as Ethereum, regular users who want to bring up criticism, doubt or have other ulterior motives to say what they do have a much harder time to grab attention to themselves. They could turn to github which relies on people voting the comments but the majority would rely on the content having something to do with coding and they wouldn't give too much attention to anything else. They could turn to Reddit but the hivemind there would not reward criticism as they'd see it as a way of casting doubt at their investments which could look bad from readers and possible investors, they'd either downvote it or ignore it. While there's many ways to manipulate Reddit voting through black market purchases and only admins being able to see the details of the voting activity it is also very centralized such as mods taking down whatever posts they feel like if they feel it is hurting the image of the project.

What I'm trying to get to is that even for valid criticism someone could have a very hard time getting the attention they are asking for in other cryptocurrency projects. This can of course also be countered by paying for these actions. With the ease of paying users in cryptocurrency and being discreet about it there are many smear campaigns that can be used to reach effective results. This is of course something that doesn't often happen with bigger as the truth coming to light could backfire more than what the campaign is worth, but the imbalance in the world makes it easily possible to pay for opinions to create FUD.

On Steem right now we have a very powerful tool, freedom of speech and easy access to the majority of readers of the platform. This is of course one of the advantages of Steem but in the wrong hands it can be used for anything. While I'm not recommending that investors not reward or flag criticism, at times like these where a lot of voting power is concentrated on bid bots it is also difficult for them to act on criticism they think is unjust.

Let's take a minute and think what a bad actor could do on Steem with the power at his disposal in this time frame. Say for instance there is a Steemian that is very unhappy about something, maybe it's the way the platform works right now, maybe it's the reward curve, maybe it's the regret of having sold too much stake, maybe it's the difficulty of buying back at low liquidity, maybe it's the plan to try and keep steem down for longer while his other investments prosper, maybe it's greed knowing if rules changed he'd have it easier to grow again, maybe it's someone who has given up on the project and wants to make sure to ruin it for others, maybe he is more invested in another competing platform now, or maybe he is genuinely concerned about the future of the platform. Yes I do realize there are just as many non-negative reasons to act in the way I'll be talking about next, but let's go with this example for now.

This will still require a user that can come off as genuine and not make it completely obvious what his intentions are. If he were to go "rogue" now and become a bad actor he could easily manipulate the general view of the platform not just to current users and investors, but to onlookers and future ones as well. Bid bots.

Let's face it, trending sucks and many of us who've been around Steem for a long time have already come to terms with it. I'm not just blaming bid bots but they obviously didn't make it easier, but for this case they made creating FUD easier since bid bot votes currently work as advertisement. Bad advertisement as well considering most buyers are barely paying for it when bid bots return the rewards a week later some times even at a positive ROI due to downvotes being so expensive. Even though many users don't look at trending anymore it is still there and the face of the platform for outsiders. Someone looking at the market today thinking maybe this is the point where a new bull run is starting may check out our currency and take a look into trending only to see posts where the majority is uncertainty and doubt by their own users. How do you think it will affect this possible investor?

While I have no doubt that "clever money" will make it's way into the platform after doing more research and looking deeper into the currency and it's technological advantages there will still be many looking the other way and a portion of them may be affected by just some posts in trending. "If the current investors don't believe in the platform and seem very unhappy about it - why would I take the risk to invest in it." As we saw from the last bull run of late 2017, a lot of money comes pouring in as people don't take the time to research properly and that is understandable - there are a lot of projects and it is hard to determine which are legit and which are not.

Without getting too much into the eyes of the investor, let's go back to the bad actor example. This is why we need free downvotes which has been considered lately to be implemented. If Steem is to keep its linear rewards because it makes so many businesses eligible and a lot of math easier then we are going to have to do something about the main use of delegation and stake at this time - selling votes.

I remember when vote selling occurred for the first time and I just saw it as one of the first symptoms of linear rewards but was hoping that some better usecases for it were to come a long - I am still hopeful for that and seeing how many SMT's are popping up before the infrastructure for them is even released or ready to be viewed. I do believe that there will be a shift towards investing your voting power into something else than just receiving max returns from your current investment in the form of selling votes to content/advertisement.

Alright I apologize for sidetracking constantly and making this into a much longer post than I originally intended. The main point I want to get to is that right now it is very easy for users with ulterior motives in hopes for affecting price through the posts they promote to trending with bid bots. The one thing you could do to combat this is to downvote because you disagree with the rewards but since so much stake is concentrated into bid bots and a user can just stack them all up into one posts and the little voting power that is up for grabs is so expensive and feels insignificant to the results on the post. At the same time the downvotes can backfire and the bad actor can accuse you of "censorship" or trying to hide criticism. Meaning the only way you can get to the root of the things addressed in the promoted post is by reading a ton of comments which let's face it, not many have the will nor time to do - especially not new investors wondering if this would be a good place to put their money into.

Now to finish this off, yes there are a lot of things Steem could fix and improve. Lately it feels though that many are going into panic mode and trying to come up with radical solutions because of their investments or prices as if they've never been around these markets before. Many even seem to forget the huge advantages our blockchain has and that the Steemit team has been working very hard to get it ready for mass adoption.

I just hope people won't judge a book by its cover, since that's what unfortunately the trending of Steemit is.

Lastly, I apologize again for this post being a bit all over the place - it's quite a difficult subject but I hope my readers will get the gist of it.