AND IT IS FATAL

It is killing the Steemit platform day-by-day, inexorably murdering the platform we misguided believers thought was nirvana to publish and to preserve our creative writing. We mistakenly thought this was the prefect, final resting place to be ever so slowly rewarded the pennies per minute on good productivity days.

To make it far worse, my Steemian friends and I are the ones who have caused the problem! The better we get and the more we grow in number, the more deadly we become to the organism of which we are an unwelcome part.

All you now-and-then bloggers, all you Steemitbloggers, and all you who just enjoy collecting thoughts and organizing trivia; all of us are the direct cause of the cancer. I am guilty, along with a few hundred others.

It's the quality we foolishly thought was appropriate to create and to get better at as we learned the "how-to" of the platform, and as we tried to expand our contacts and talk with like-minded Steemians. All the while we were adding more fatal quality.

That is the kind of thing I learn when I get away from my familiar stomping grounds. I learned that quality is looked at by the main body of the organism as an internal cancer that is preventing the beta organism from thriving; that if it cannot eliminate the cancer, it cannot survive. It needs to eliminate the anchor of quality to make welcome the Facebook and Twitter refugees who are fleeing censorship and are looking for a more crude atmosphere with zero quality than Steemit offers.

A few sentences ago, I thought I was making light of the problem, but now as I see the words form in front of me, I realize that I'm not. Better minds than mine have opinions on the matter and have diagnosed the problem and the cure. To wit:

I am certain everyone already knows about @taskmaster4450's well-presented posting on the subject. Finding it and reading it has greatly lowered my energy level with my realization that I am in a place where not only am I not welcome, but where even my best intentions are causing harm. The obvious question now is: What's the point in staying?

My only real complaint with Steemit (the platform) has been with the bid bots. I often feel like I am sitting at a small table with a few other writers in a saloon in the old West, writing, and everyone else in the room is gambling for the pool of money in a big bowl on the bar while the fat guys in the suits sit in the corner watching. We have seen enough movies to know who is in charge without even asking who is who. The guys in the suits are the ones running the games.

If that's the way it is, okay. I did not come here to make money to begin with, although many of my new friends work very hard to be successful because they were not here for the pre-mining of Steem when the saloon was first built. There are also many compatriots in other parts of the world finally have an opportunity with Steemit to create an honest way of generating income.

The gambling is okay, too, because it is built into the foundation of the platform.

^{From page 12 of the Steemit White Paper:}

So it is with people. If one tries to do something different, get better grades, improve herself, escape her environment, or dream big dreams, other people will try to drag her back down to share their fate. Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.

The goal of building a community currency is to get more “crabs in the bucket.” Going to extreme measures to eliminate all abuse is like attempting to put a lid on the bucket to prevent a few crabs from escaping and comes at the expense of making it harder to add new crabs to the bucket. It is sufficient to make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping.

I assume that means the Steemians using the bid bots will someday see the error of their ways and give them up. It alsp seems to imply that it's okay to rob the bank because it is doing a service by spreading the money around.

I don't see how the few guys scribbling away in the corner are going to drag the (perceived) miscreants back down into the bucket. Write them a memo, I suppose. (Short, no quality)

Besides, when you think about how the reputation score is supposed to be the reflection of your worth to the platform, it does not appear to matter much what you write because you are measured by the number of contacts among a variable mix of other Steemians, the number of follows, the number of comments you make within the measured time when they actually count, how often you post, and not a word about content. Not to mention that everything you wrote is buried and non-productive after a couple of weeks.

Steemit simply was not constructed to care about content. That is not a fault; just fact. Our basic misconception was that it was a comfortable nest for bloggers. Nirvana, it is not.

Steemit was designed like a video game: keep you at the keyboard, keep your fingers busy and build up the utilization per user number. Quality really does not matter. Monkeys would probably do as well as a blogger at a Steemit keyboard. (Not by blogging and no insult intended for bloggers or monkeys; I like both.)

It appears that the gauntlet has been thrown.

The sheriff just came in through the swinging doors and announced a complaint about the damn writers in the corner disturbing all the paying patrons.

"Look here, you pencil pushers! We can't have that kind of behavior in here, Y'all taking up a valuable playing table and you're keeping the paying customers out, so it's time for y'all to get outta Dodge."

"But, Sheriff, we're creating quality here," Tex said.

"Well, ain't nobody asked you to do that and the house rules are against it, so y'all move on now, right peaceable like."

And the small group of bloggers and other makers of long sentences and short stories had little choice, suddenly realizing that the Sheriff was just enforcing the law.

"Where do we go, Tex?" one of the more prolific writers asked of the most experienced writer. "I really need somewhere to write," she finished with a tone of desperation in her voice.

"Well, it looks like we don't have a choice. people with the wrong political viewpoints are being kicked off other platforms and it looks like we're being asked to leave this one.

"I have been hearing rumors about a new town that was formed by writers who need a real home. An acquaintance, @jaynie, has already been there and has staked her claim for her bloggers. Some of them have already left Steemit and moved to the new place. Everything there is still new and there's a lot of turmoil in the town from all the new people joining in the land rush and staking out their own claims, so there must be something to it. It's like a no rules, every-man-for-himself atmosphere now, but citizen committees are being set up to add some policing to control all the newcomers while the town finishes assembling its blockchain structure.

"It sounds like a better option for me, anyway. Follow me and I'll tell you what little I know as we walk."

"What's the name of the new place, Tex"

"It's a strange little name: WeKu.IO"

Enter WeKu:

Steemit rebuilt for writers

The ninth word in the Weku White Paper is "writers" Weku was built specifically for creators of content..

A few items of real interest (copied or paraphrased from the Weku White Paper) to anyone thinking about going to Weku:

Weku does not allow bidbots.

Your posts will remain monetized and will not die by the calendar.

WeKu Token (WKC) is a new ERC20 based token going to ICO on Ethereum. The total amount of Weku token is 400 million and will be available to trade after a month of ICO. You can only buy the weku token with Etherium. The offering date and price have not yet been determined.

IPFS (Inter Planetary File System) will be used store massive multimedia files that the blockchain currently cannot store.

Weku will have multiple language interfaces, making it a worldwide platform.

Weku has a built-in search engine.

Artificial intelligence is built in that will suggest posts based on user interests that are determined by reading your posts. AI will provide the tools to get most values out of these data, such as matching advertisements with user behavior, content recommendations, image captioning, content topicalizations.

When there is a new article matching the user's reading interest profile it will be recommended by the Weku platform to the user according to the similarity to the users reading profile.

In the Weku community platform, original authors can get content incentives from the platform by publishing high-quality works, additionally empowering those who communicate with the platform to also get rewards. At the same time, content producers can also sell their works. Active Weku platform users can invest in the content creators' works they deem to be of good quality and earn proceeds after obtaining the creators original works. The value of an individual in Weku (post) is evaluated by the community as a whole. The higher the quality and the more useful the content a creator produces on the Weku platform the better the prospects of that creator to monetize that content and in turn to gain financial rewards.

Weku will use intelligent content filtering: Decentralization does not imply complete and unrestricted freedom of expression. Some of the remarks are very harmful (such as pornography, drugs, racism and violence) and could even need to be removed immediately. The platform AI system uses thematic semantic judgment to filter this content and at the same time the Weku platform will let readers report questionable content for review and removal if deemed to not meet the Weku platform terms of service.

It takes less than five minutes to set up an account at

https://deals.weku.io/pick_account?referral=willymac

You can repost anything from your Steemit account on Weku. You must note at the top or bottom that it is a Steemit repost, your Steemit user name, and the date of original posting. (If you don't, the plagiarism bots will find you!)

The learning curve for weku is about one minute. You can get an account and be creating a post in five or six minutes.

It may be helpful to keep your Steemit user name so friends can find you (or to keep someone else from registering it before you get to it!)

~ finis ~


_{The graphic is by @willymac, the badge is from Pixabay}
Comments are welcomed.