Have you seen the top trending post right now?
https://steemit.com/steem/@smartsteem/two-ways-to-earn-with-smartsteem-do-the-smart-thing
Now I shouldn't even have to explain why this is awful. But, I do have to. So;
Every time someone buys a vote, the greedy cunt selling you the vote gets more powerful. You see, that greedy cunt gets paid a significant amount in curation rewards to incentivize fair voting. Is selling votes fair? No.
What do you get from buying a vote?
an upvote from a whale that allows you to break even, or earn a little profit.
a guarantee that I and many other long-term Steemians will not vote on your post.
What does the greedy cunt selling the vote get?
your liquid SBD that you earned.
curation rewards on every sale
Now because people are so fucking dumb, I need to go a step further here.
What were both parties getting before the inception of vote-selling?
the whales were getting their curation rewards. But to earn more of them, they had to vote on good content, or at least content that would then be upvoted by more in the community.
the content creators on STEEM were getting FREE UPVOTES, because the whales HAD TO CURATE in order to earn their rewards if they were not posting.
So back to where we are now. What do the whales get again?
the liquid SBD or STEEM you send to them.
the curation rewards from the votes they sell.
AND
- due our acceptance of vote-selling, implied through the continued use of these services, the greedy fuckers are now able to post stupid fucking nonsense posts and pay their own services to upvote them. Now that means they are getting not only curation rewards for selling votes to us, but they have also found a way to self-vote without it appearing like abuse.
So. Vote-selling is extremely short sighted and only makes the ones who have proved themselves unworthy of power more powerful.
Back to the point.
This SmartSteem bullshit wants to make it easier for people to buy and sell votes(apparently). So that is already reason to flag it. But, if you look at who upvoted the post...
Fucking craigrant is upvoting this post! If anyone does not know who that is, it is the first person I ever called out as an abuser on this platform because he was attempting to scam his followers. Well, not attempting..
Then he was one of the major promoters of that bitconnect scam.
His upvote on this ought to be enough for anyone to realise they should flag it, but if it is not enough for you, consider what I said about votebuying, and go do the right thing- the only thing that can send a powerful message that this type of shit is not going to be accepted.
Or, you can ignore this. Decide not to flag it because you don't want to make an adversary of someone who thinks of you as a lactation device to help them better milk the profits from this platform. You can go back to buying your votes and living your knees, feeling as though you accomplished anything beyond hurting all our futures. That's what you always fucking do anyway.
To those of you with a spine, you can find the abomination here, and flag it. A resteem of this post is obviously helpful too.
I expect by tomorrow we will either have realised that we "little people" do have some power, as made evident by this post no longer trending. Or, we will have gave the final nod that it's okay to sell votes- something that no human would have said openly in any context only a couple of years ago. But, we will still pretend to ourselves that Steemit is a force for good in this world, even if it is normalizing cuntish behaviour.
I have been let down by this community more times than I care to recall, and yet I am still spending most of my time trying to help you. How about you give me something in return this time around, and conquer your fear long enough to plant a flag where it belongs.
Without the vote selling, we simply have circle jerking and puppet accounts where the 'whales' upvote themselves while attempting to appear not to.
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@ura-soul
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Steemit has not seemed to care much about payout rewards and some sensible equitable way of doing it properly. Don’t tell me it’s hard. What has been cared about is numbers. A moron like me can realize that if it was more equitable, it will actually bring in more quality people. Then it will throw out one kind of investor, that is people like @haejin who are profiting enormously. People with concerns for Steemit such as yourself certainly seem more genuinely concerned than steemit itself. Just look at bullies like @grumpycat. Look what @bellyrubbank did. Nothing ever happened from the steemit business end of it. Steemit has taken a path of no return to its own mediocrity. Nothing can change it now. I don’t enjoy my own feed now because the stuff is so boring. Nobody is even looking at the posts anymore. There are so many and to find a good one, you may waste hours. The trending page is a great display of how bad the platform is becoming. When real value is not appreciated, corruption thrives.
I looked at smartsteem. I had a few questions. If I write something fantastic and no one looks at it and I get nothing for creating it but some pretty girl makes thousands for a minimal worth travel post, then I must find ways to do better. Yelling for justice will not work. It has not. It is not in the design of steemit to be what most would consider fair. So I can spend time reading posts, upvoting them and blah blah blah for what?. For my post to make 30 cents? Smartmaeket may offer me a solution. My votes are not being reciprocated, so why not sell them? I know this whole system is a problem. Vote buying and selling should be banned, Bots should be banned. All in a perfect world. Steemit is not interested. Whales run bots. No one with any say in the matter is willing to change. In this environment, perhaps smart market is a good thing for little people like me.
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I and a few others, well, quite a few now actually, are trying to offer an alternative. It will be a lot of work though, and so we can use all the assistance we can get. If you are interested in helping us, yourself, and everyone else who will arrive here in future looking for an example to follow, then let me know.
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I will do all I can to help you help steemit. I never blogged. As a full time physician who also teaches students for free, I rarely find time. I am not even sure how I got on to Steemit. But since being here, I love the fact that I am blogging here and there. Adds a dimension to my life. Without steemit, I will likely never blog. So I want to see it thrive. I will help in any which way I can.
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You are pretty brave to share this, at the moment I just don't know what to do about vote selling and buying. I mean I will have no visibility posting something, unless I buy some votes. I can post a thing and expect around 3 people if I am lucky to read my article with a return of 0.06$. Even after 140 days here I still have so low visibility and this is the reason why I buy votes.
Your article right now made me wonder if this is right again and I think about it for some time. I guess I will just give up on it, especially as lately I haven't even get the money I have invested in return...
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Hi there. Your parting line is what caught my attention- this is exactly the problem with these vote buying ventures, they are designed to make those at the top rich, they are not designed to actually help people like you. I was here many months before I started to do well, I will tell you this- if I had chosen to use bots when they came out instead of continuing to work hard and network, I would never have done well. I haven't used a single one, you can look at my account and see where that got me. I didn't pay for one sp of that.
If only everyone would choose to give up on them, then people might have a real shot again here.
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Me too. Following the recent post from clayboyn and then this, I'm convinced that voting bots is a complete waste. I'm gonna rather use the SBD to buy Steem at the market place.
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If you are going to stop then this post was worth my time, even if you do not flag the post I speak of.
I understand that it is difficult for new users. It didn't used to be, before the vote-selling. And it will only get worse in future if it continues. But, I and some others are working on giving people like you an alternative option to what has been laid out for you.
You can be dancing monkeys, or you can be humans. I know which I would prefer.
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I think it's pretty clear that very few people from healthy economies deal with the bs and unless they hit their stride early they just leave without saying such things, so as to not damage the chance that they can silently return in the future if it ends up being a profitable venture yet again.
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Yeah, you are right, I will stop using voting bots and encourage others to do so. I will resteem your post for visibility (even though I only have 500 followers) and tomorrow I will make a post about voting bots too. Thank you for having the courage to share this with us!
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He is not right. If you look in trending there are without the bots only accounts with a rep of 70+. The bots are the only chance to get somewhat seen. I do not use bots anymore, but I used them for a couple of months to help me grow.
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Don't listen to this person. They don't even know what they're talking about.
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I'm sure that I know what I'm talking about. You try to force people into not using bots anymore, I'm poiting out that this is a free market and everyone can do what he wants and if a bot helps why not use it.
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It is not because of the bots harder for new user but because of the amount of new users that registered 1 year ago there was a post every couple of minutes, now there are 10 posts a minute. It is mathematically clear that chances to be seen are so much smaller. Bots only help them be seen. Without the bots there would be 4 times haejin post daily in trending.
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If the whales had continued to vote on the best quality content, as intended, then there would be far more dolphins able to reward those newcomers, especially because our power has also increased with the value of STEEM and with the linear reward distribution.
I do not want to waste much time on this comment because I am about to address it in a post anyway, but I think that you ought to refrain from telling people I have just convinced not buy votes that I am wrong, because it is evident to me that you are blind to a significant part of the picture. I hope that my next post may serve to enlighten you.
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Okay, I am really waiting for your next post:)
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I'm only telling that trying to convince people to stop buying votes is wrong. Every indiidual is different from another and everyone has his own way of approaching things. You exposed your view on the matter and I expressed mine. I'm for the free market as Steemit is only a part of the blockchain. The platform needs investors to grow and one way to attract investors is by bots where they can store the SP and let it work for them. This is why I invested in SP for example. Half of my SP is bought. I'm not powering down and every Steem is used for a power up. SBD I take out and invest in either other accounts or other projects.
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Why is it?
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I agree with you on this 💯... Upvotes should never be sold.. It should be earned freely, because it was gotten freely.
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This is an incredibly simple way to put it. I may have to steal this for future usage.
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Posting again because apparently my comment was too real for the Wolfie.. he flagged me without commenting.
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I don't think it evidence of a scam, but it certainly shows that the support it has received is mostly from himself.
I think his flagging of your comment is actually better evidence of it being a scam.
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Agreed on the flag comment. In all my time here, I have only ever been flagged by scammers... hmmm
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What can I say man, you've got a lot of balls for doing this...
For someone without whales friends to cover my back, planting a flag might not really be my best move.
I'm gonna resteem though
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I appreciate the resteem. That takes a lot of balls too.
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I gradually stopped buying votes from buildawhale etc... It was fun when whales were active almost a year ago ... to counter this we must have a bigger number of good whales...overall the system needs a tweak or two regarding these matters..."what makes a user Not buy a vote?" that is the question...
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I appreciate your approach, though that is somewhat narsacistic because it was mine also. My answer was to provide them the feeling that their work has a fair chance of being rewarded. Of course not all would stop, there is always apples too rotten to recover; but they won't be enough for the whales to make as much as they would have made by simply voting fairly, and thus, we may even see change.
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This Explains all The JUNK In The New Section with Like 0.03 votes.
I wondered If something like This Was Going On.
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nice sharing, I don't really understand this issues in full. still updating my knowledge.
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Nothing will change imo, its been going on a long time and the people in power are the ones pulling this shit.
The more interesting story is how the whales got their power. they didnt buy steem or make it from posting.
lol
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Nice you post I like
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At the inception of these vote selling bots, I was against them. Go ahead and trek back in my blog. You'll find it.
I even tried to do analysis on how much all bots were hurting the community. It was too hard to identify all of the bots back then, but there were many. And like now, nobody cared, the rich kept getting richer and the poor kept quitting the platform because of discouragement or lack of return. And some of those who quit were actually highly beneficial to Steemit.
By nature, all voting and posting bots are hurting the little guys. Because these bots are profiting the rich and giving the poor little-to-no reward while the rich reap 100+% rewards for each 5% minnow reward. It's terrible..
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People like you are always finding ways why the world is unfair!
Truth is - STEEM is not perfect but there are enough ways to earn Steempower and SBD - without the need to be a wealthy person.
Fun fact: 3-4 months ago I had less than 200 Steempower. 6 months ago I started working on smartsteem.
It took me at least 1500 hours of work to get to the point where I am now.
You call that unfair? I call that hard work.
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Unfair? Did I use the word unfair?
I looked really hard in my comment and didn't find that word once. Where did I say unfair?
No, if anything, I said Manipulative. Opportunistic. Selfish. Nope, never used the word unfair.
Maybe as part of those 1500 hours you spent, you might have tried to improve your reading comprehension?
Cheers, mate!
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i also agree with you..
thanks for this information
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As they say, the cat's out of the bag. I think you're being extra harsh for whatever arbitrary reason on this new "scheme", is it because it's as legit as you can get with something like this? I mean look at that professional ass post and their website, I doubt you went that deep but still if you did was that the reason for this alarm? Stopping the free market ain't gonna happen with "flagaton".
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If it seems harsh then that is because I have said similar shit before and too few have listened, so if subtlety doesn't work, trial and error leads me to use harsher words next. No I did not look at their website, as I have no reason to do so. I suspect it to be a scam, though if it is not, I still disagree with its stated purpose. So going to check out the site where I may or may not be successful in ascertaining the veracity of the project is a waste of my time.
I can see no logical reason for you to have left this message. It may discourage others from flagging the post, so that's a negative. What positive where you hoping to achieve from this?
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Let's not kid ourselves here, most users either want to make money, or want to make money. And if there is a stable way to generate a small ROI consistently then people are going to take that route for as long as SBD trades in a given range. Hell, SBD can go down and people will still bid, because most people have no idea how to do simple math.
It's actually very similar to minnowbooster, they're both middlemen for services that skim money from the collective everybody and hand profits over to those with capital aka SP or VP.
Rich get richer, steem's GINI coefficient is worse than most any country on earth and there's nothing in the code that would change that so we shouldn't be surprised.
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Do you want to help me provide them with a different way then?
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Provide who with what?
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Offer them this, and the may no longer do that.
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Flagging takes your ability to allocate rewards away from yourself, so I don't understand what you're saying. Flagging a post about a vote-selling platform doesn't make the vote buying and selling go away.
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I'm not sure who is missing the point here. We are not talking about allowing vote-selling here. I have never flagged someone for buying a vote, or selling one. I have merely voiced my opinion on the matter and tried to paint a picture of the future it leads to.
But this is different. This is now(if not a scam) the implied acceptance of vote-selling inviting full blown dApps that will to facilitate the process of buying and selling votes. It should not be difficult to see where this will lead. Before long, 99% of the reward pool will be voting power reserved for purchase or auction. No one will have the votes to support decent content, because so many will be reserved for sale, and thus, there will be next to no incentive for anyone to produce a post of any quality.
We have already seen a massive drop in quality, from my own blog too, because I refuse to play bingo. If this is shown as accepted, in another 6 months, this place will be a memefactory. In fact, no. That would imply people would be creating original memes here. It will be a meme recycling centre. That's why I flagged the post.
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To discuss an actual solution to this problem. Flagging won't do shit, neither will yelling about it. What would be the free market solution to this problem?
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I always smile when I see you in a comment section. But...Legit as you can get? Isn't something either legit or not legit?
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I only meant to say as the post itself and the website was "legit", but I see your point, I called it a scheme after all, simply because it errs more on "breaking" even, where @honestbot is about a positive return on investment.
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I know you are trying to take this piss, but I really like this image and think it's an awesome meme, so I shall be downloading it. And if I thought that was evidence enough of it being scam, I wouldn't have had to write all that shit about paying for votes. I do, however, know that there is some who will think that enough evidence, and thus, I mentioned it. But you have made it so much better, so this is now getting added to the post.
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Thanks for the update information😊
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