The decentralized blockchain revolution is meant to align the interests of the shareholders, the consumers, and the employees. If done right, the results could be something great. Will be something great. However, blockchain technology still has some issues to work out. Steem is no exception. It is maybe even more on the fore front of this revolution.
Steem is a complicated ecosystem. Adjusting the algorithms that run it to fix certain problems, may cause problems elsewhere. These possible unintended consequences makes finding the solution to the problems Steem has all that much more difficult. I always try to see both sides to arguments. I try to argue both sides to myself to better understand opposing points of view.
To me, the issue Steem is having is a shareholder problem. In standard business model the shareholders are those who own shares and only want those shares to be worth more. They want accumulation. They prefer the company pay the least they can for the goods they sell, and the least they can to employees. This gives them the greatest returns. They also want the product to be superior to its competition, maintaining or increasing in value.
The people who buy Steem and are looking for a return on investment will find a way to make profit if it available to them. This might be upvoting their own posts/comments. Or it might be delegating that Steem Power to a bid bot in return for Steem or SBD. This is the standard business model shareholder, making adjustments in order to adapt to this new blockchain enterprise.
It seems to me that the interests are out of alignment here on Steem. Lets assume this trajectory continues. The few high powered human curators left, switch to running voting bots or selling their delegation to maximize their return on interest like everyone else. Then even all the people with 1000 SP do the same thing, if everyone else is selling out it becomes hard to resist. Or they just start upvoting only themselves.. eventually all the good content and curators will spend their time elsewhere and just let the money they have here make them ROI. This will equate to content that steadily declines inlvalue. The price of the coin will drop and all the bid bot runners, and Steem power delegators will finally see. They will adjust behavior in order to bring value back to the coin. By that time many of the good content creators will be gone and it may be too late.
How much money do all the human curators give up to reward content that deserves it now? I know many of the human curators remaining, I know they won't let the good content creators go that easily. I want to give all of you a special thank you for remaining human curators, and being the good shareholders. It is in part all of you that keep me here. You give me hope.
Something needs to be done to give more incentive to actual curation. After the last hard fork, curating became much less appealing. Adversely something needs to be done to make running voting bots and delegating out Steem power for SBD less appealing. I am not saying I have the answers, I only know I would like solutions to be discussed and for something to be done. A user agreement or a blockchain constitution that can help us address bad actors in a civil decisive manner. A decentralized blockchain like this with such a robust ecosystem, could benefit from some form of guidelines or a constitution.
I would like to end evoking a Lysander Spooner quote that may come to apply to this great experiment.
Thank you for remaining vigilante human curators. Thank you to all the content creators still here, still trying. Thank you to those who take time to read articles and leave comments. It will be us who makes Steem what it is meant to be. Not the people running upvote bots, only upvoting themselves, or delegating Steem Power to bots for money.
I don't know all the answers. I am probably missing layers of the problems. I want to talk about it an know more though. I would like for the quote above to not come true here. Behavior needs to be altered, the code needs to be adjusted. No matter what the original intention is, here we sit. With a steadily declining true ecosystem, being oppressed buy a pay to play vote model that no good author wants to take part in.
I have seen enough posts about this, I just wanted to add my two cents, that usually can be found in comments surrounding these subjects. It comes to the basic philosophy that behavior that is bad for the whole should be punished, behavior that is good for the whole should be rewarded based on its merit.
Woot woot,
Steemit was never perfect. It started out as an experiment and it's a wonder that it lasted so long.
Ive contemplated so much on the issue and it seems my small mind just can't think my way out of the Steem power abuse by people that wants to outright "maximize profits". Just like shareholders.
However if there is hope, it will be in 3rd party apps and communities that springs up around the Steem Blockchain.
I believe future self voters / bid bot farmers won't be as much profitable when there is more activity on the blockchain. The sort of "earnings" we see now are not gonna last for long (assuming steem price does not go up). We are experiencing a huge time arbitrage and it won't last long. The reward pool is capped whereas the potential participation is uncapped.
Governance is tricky, how much can we control how people can vote or use their stake before we must stop calling ourselves "open permissionless decentralized platform"?
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Interesting.
Would I be right in thinking the following?
At present the 100 highest SP accounts (or the one's that are active and/or have delegated SP to bots) of our approx. 65,000 total active accounts, collect a lot of the reward pool. The same top 100 accounts, when they are in a total participant pool of say 1,000,000 active accounts, will be collecting less of the reward pool than they are now
Actually, when you put it that way, it's in the interest of the most vested self-upvoters to make sure participation doesn't grow too much.
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Yep.. But the value of steem lies in the utility that comes with greater participation/adoption, and so though it seems so in the short term, they are killing their portfolio in the long term.
It's actually in their best interest to earn less from the reward pool but have their holdings increase in value as adoption drive the price of Steem.
If only these people are willing to see it that way.
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Thanks @drpuffnstuff , I enjoyed, and resonated with your article. As I am still dipping my toes in the shallow end, I enjoy gaining a deeper perspective from members like yourself.
Many community, or contributionism type movements, like Michael Tellinger's Ubuntu movement have discovered that large governmental changes need to start at a local government level.
I believe (from my limited experience thus far) that forming solid mini communities within the blockchain would also be a progressive solution. As these communities grow, individually, eventually, like minded groups could pool together.
As an aussie, I was fortunate enough to find such a group in @teamaustralia . This community is all about quality curration.
Those within the community, with solid SP, delegate to bots (and this is where the true potential of bots may be found) the bots then upvote minnow team members posts. All posts tagged with teamaustralia, and thus which come up in teamaustralia feed, are humanly monitored for quality.
Over time, these individual communites will carry the torch of quality, regardless of what others are doing. So if we who share the same dream, form similar communities, eventually, these combined communities will have substantial weight within the blockchain.
Just a newbies perspective :)
Peace.
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when i joined steem i had the notion that my content will be upvoted and i worked hard to make sure i write great content but alas i was wrong, most content that trend or are on the hot tab are all sponsored or voted by bots, what happened to the original idea as speculated on the white paper? steem is begining to look like a bot centred platform than human centered, humans working for bots and this is not good
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That is the nature of social media. When you upload something to the older social media without any form of marketing, without engaging the audience, it is unlikely that people will notice your work too.
You need to take into account that information and media is getting increasingly saturated nowadays and will only be more so in the future. Everyone of us is adding our noise to the crowd.
It is not enough now to just stop by and plonk your stuff and leave it be. You need to build your audience, join a community, build your brand.
"feed me" mentality will not work in an environment where attention is scarce. It's why we call it the Attention Economy.
P.S. Bot abuse asides, this platform is still undoubtedly the best for content creators, even if you made 1 cent on here. It's 1 cent that you'll never make in any other place by the virtue of your content alone.
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Prior to delegation being enabled, I remember thinking it was going to be good at first, so that guilds could reward content creators for quality.. boy was that short sighted as the guild issues developed at the end of 2016 early 2017.... I then remember being told and also thinking that delegating power would be a problem, where people can funnel power into one account of vice versa with many accounts holding the power and obfuscating a single users ability to allocate rewards.
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When I read your title, a song came to mind, called "Where did all the cowboys go" or something like that. So take the tune and replace the words with "human curators".
I agree, human curators are rare, but they still exist and they are nice to have on the platform for those of us who wish to grow organically. It's sometimes tempting to go towards bots, but I've not been tempted enough to do it yet and I have strong feelings that we need to hold strong and not give into temptation of the bots. I'm not saying never, but as a regular occurance, I don't do it. Actually, I go to human curators and will give the few SBD for many upvotes from humans from the Steemit Resteem group, which is fun interaction of humans. No bots there, really. Hopefully we humans can rule over the bots :p
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My upvote is not worth much but I prefer to manually cast my votes. The way some people want to automate this place it seems they just want to go on holiday for 5 or 10 years and hope when they return they get to retire.
The human element is slowly draining away from society. It will be a very cold day if all I ever have left to talk to are the bots.
You would think their main priority would be empowering those that would increase their Steem value in the long run. Instead they wish to sell to highest bidder almost no matter what that is. It’s be like buying stock and being happy it plummet 90% but boy you get to have that 1% ROI from dividend so that somehow makes up for it.
I don’t think I’ll ever hold enough SP to care much about curation rewards unless it comes down to my only source. Far too many people are already chasing after and trying beat out auto casted votes for their “curation rewards.” I don’t consider that curation at all that’s just chasing after profits.
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Incisive commentary as always! And, as I'm quickly discovering, I'm in furious agreement with you.
There's a lot in this post, but I'd like to pick up one idea and smack it with a hammer: That Steemit, and the Steem blockchain in general is some sort of ruler-less system, and that no one has ultimate control over it.
Paul Atreides/Muad'Dib was right. And here, we have lots of people who can potentially destroy Steemit, and/or render the blockchain so worthless that it may as well have been destroyed.
Sure, enough minnows could create serious havoc. But really, it's the real heavyweight stakeholders - those whales, who have the power to undo everything that we see here today. The could do this by selling off their Steem at bargain prices and crippling our economy, or they can do this by sitting on their hands when actions that incrementally damage the long-term future of the blockchain are occurring.
My points? The holders of these accounts can change what is happening if they so desire. But also while it's true that the blockchain has decentralised many interactions, power on the Steem blockchain (and power over the Steem blockchain) is in fact highly centralised.
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I'm glad you put in that you may be missing some layers. I'm not sure if you are but at least you are open to that. I have given up on creating content for awhile because I am frustrated but I do enjoy sharing news through zappl. While I follow your logic completely I don't understand why the value of the coin will drop if we stay on the current trajectory. Can you explain? I'm heavily invested and I'm very active so I'm concerned about the future as much as anyone. My thought is if whales learn to devote a portion to minnows that we will onboard more users and the "whale" content wont matter as long as the incentive for content creation trickles down. I too could be wrong so who knows lol.
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My take on this is that are (at least) a few things that could cause numbers of users to stagnate or even drop.
Numbers of plankton/minnows etc. matter. Established authors/youtubers etc. need an audience, and won't come across (and stay) without them. If numbers stay too flat for too long or go backwards, I'd begin to wonder about the future of the platform, and I wouldn't be the only one.
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I think you are right @samueldouglas but I would add that steepshot is making a dent. It's exactly like instagram and people can bring their entire network over and share as they currently do but earn rewards. I think it has a strong appeal and blogging will become less of a "thing" on steem blockchain. I'm not sure that social media requires 100% good content but we will see.
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I wish more people were aware of what your just touched upon.
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Hey thanks TeamSteem, you are one of the ones that truly gets it. As a large minnow in this community, all I can do is to talk about the issues and hope it gets other people talking, and thinking about it as well. In all honesty you are one of the reasons I am here, and still here.
Seeing strongly libertarian leaning people who generally want a better world in our witness pool, gives me motivation. I appreciate everything you do for this community man. Krnel made a post about this topic the day before i made this one, and I mentioned you and the few other last great human curators we have on Steem.. and how it gives me the hope to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
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As far as I know, no one on steemit is actually breaking any steemit laws. We don't have serious competition yet. But that may come soon on the EOS platform. There may be a competitor coming soon that will address the distribution issue. But that will require central control.
Content creators , IMO, would move. Without whale behavior modification, steemit is in trouble. As long as Steemit distribution methods stay like they are, small accounts are going to leave. Whales can continue to rake in large amounts of steem, but if the price falls, they may consider changing their behavior. A whole lot of nothing is nothing.
I think steemit will survive, but it may have to take a big hit to actually learn behavior needs to change.
I focus here on behavior rather than regulation because that is what I hope for.
What I really think we are witnessing is typical human behavior. Greed comes first. Some content creators, those not motivated by money, will continue to post.
Steemit is an experiment, it's going to be an interesting ride. So don't quit your day job....-:)
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Always good to view from both ends of the spectrum, perspective proves to be a very important piece to the puzzle I might say.
You bring a valid point to light here with this post. Steemit really is still in the early stages of development for the most part so it should be now that we begin to form a strong and supportive community, which will grow itself organically from the ground up, not the reversal...
We are essentially building a divider wall between ourselves that will keep us from getting to where we are trying to go as investors in the steem blockchain. If we don't change our behavior, we will begin to see a decline similarily to what we see in a centralized world.
Decentralization must be our answer, and I can willingly say I am going to continue my time here as a human creator/curator
~Respect
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Highly rEsteemed!
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I think what fulltimegeek did was a step in the right direction. I think the delegation that he did was just about right without being too excessive like some of the previous examples.
I know some rely on autovoting good authors but that's another problem because sometimes you just want to post something frivolous. Not every post is going to be a masterpiece :)
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I'm proud to say I'm a manual curator and seldom use bid bots, sometimes we have to do what we have to do to even remain remotely relevant and it sucks. It sucks to see someone spend 200 bucks to take a 20 post to the mooooon but such is the system......hopefully the manual ones of us can standout in the end
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It is kinda a three legged stool,and some of the legs are shorter or longer than others...
It will either get better or something better will come along and replace it.
We are in a big or long beta stage,still.
let hope the next tweak or two fixes some of the problems.
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@sndbox-alpha is keeping it human!:D
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I'm going to take this in a slightly different direction. There are two reasons to use an upvote bot: 1) visibility 2) ROI.
I think there's UI things that we can do to improve visibility - but these will take time and programming effort. Probably the biggest for me would be to make a feed-type that is like trending, but more personalised to the reader's interests. I hardly go to trending anymore, and I imagine I'm not the only one, so Trending probably a feature that should be removed, demoted in importance or radically overhauled.
Speaking of overhauling: I'd personally accept promoted posts being inserted into my news feed - particularly if there were also matched with my interests. The reason for this is that using the promoted posts feature burns the amount used to promote the post and that reduces the amount of steem in circulation and thus raises the value of steem that remains.
Anyways, if the promoted posts feature worked properly for visibility then there's less need for upvote bots.
The ROI aspect of upvote bots is different. If people feel strongly enough about it, there's nothing stopping them putting together a bunch of SP and going after the posts that use upvote posts. I'm not going to outline a complete playbook for how this might work, because my preferences are we go for improving post visibility via better feeds and better content discovery tools.
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They are planning for their own SMT, which may be we will be able to buy :)
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I think what would help is a max cap on what a post can earn, anonymous downvoting so people with low sp dont have to fear retaliation and a higher reward for curation, maybe 60% post and 40% curation.... but yes currently the STEEM blockchain is an investment for the wealthy who don't have to do anything except collect payments from their delegations/vote selling/self voting... basically that is how most economies work, those who have the most use their wealth to earn more wealth for themselves without having to work, the only thing you can do to ensure a more equal distribution is to create rules that make sure most of the wealth goes to people in the middle.... but alas as we look at the failure of the global economy, we have the highest wealth inequality in human economic history... so rules/laws don't really work when the wealthy can buy governments... but there is still hope for the STEEM blockchain ;)
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I guess others chosen to go or used bots for Vote Buying, Selling Upvotes and Delegations of Steem Power because Steemians felt that some human curators do not really care about the good quality of articles but rather upvote or curate and supports only their friends, group they belong, or their allies. They will reserved their Voting power, Bandwidth and delegations of Steem Power to those they only wanted to support... We can't blame them if they only want to upvote and support their group of friends or allies, It's their choice and that's what friends their for..
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though there is indeed a bot problem , i believe steemit has brought a new frontier in the new economic insensitive, more people around the world are much better economically because of steemit ,i believe bots are good the only problem that comes when it comes to steemit in the huge difference btwn those own the steem power and popularity but that's how free market fictions when it comes to popularity.
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Thanks for sharing us a huge information & It's interrelation with steemit.
It is a well-known for us.
Thanks
@resteem & follow done.
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So true. Take my money. Nice job on the piece 👍🏽
When life gives you lemons make lemonade! 😃 @swt3df1
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Maybe it is a split across the two of manual and automated curating. I know when I am struggling with time to spend on steemit I sell my upvotes so that I gain some sort of value even without spending time on steemit. The platform automatically inflates the amount of steem so why not earn more if I can? While when I do have time I read others' posts and respond and upvote accordingly. Sort of working for me right now Thanks.
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