I'm leaving the Whaleshares platform. Whaleshares is completely closed source.
Hello all,
A while back, Steem had a messy hardfork with lots of problems, and at the time it seemed like things were going no where. A whole host of Steem clones seemed to spring into existance, and to diversify a bit, I decided to dip my toes into Whaleshares.
Big Mistake
Take all the things you hated about Steem. Well, nearly all of them exist in much worse and bigger in Whaleshares. In Steem, one might argue that the trending page is just circle jerked voted up by bid bots and/or whales. In Whaleshares, instead of bid bots, it's Whaletokens. Same fucking results.
Whaleshares removed their trending page
Yep you heard that right. Let that sink in. Whaleshares doesn't even have a trending page anymore, derp.
Whaleshares added their own RC system
Did you hate the new RC system in Steem and come to whaleshares to escape that? Well guess what? Whaleshares has it too now. They call it DaBa.
But on to more important things
Pro-tip: Don't piss off your large investors
I've been treated with huge amounts of disrespect by some of the top Whaleshares witnesses. I guess they think I'm evil because I have the gall to charge interest for my loans. Yea, because my time is worth nothing apparently.
In particular, the ignorant fuckhead @bushkill. He once said to me (paraphrasing) "We don't want your kind here". Oh..my kind. I'm literally a crypto-currency multi-millionaire. You don't want my kind in your system, buying up the tokens I love? Well ok, dumbass, wish granted, I'm leaving your retarded platform, and you can dance your victory jig as the price of WLS crashes to the floor. You win...idiot.
Whaleshares = amateur hour
Most of the top whaleshares witness are lacking in technical skill, and are clueless about money and economics. Not all of them are bad, there are a few good ones, but it's not enough.
The last hardfork was handled poorly. It came with little announcement and broke nearly all the services that relied on the old apis. This even included the Rudex gateway, which is only way to buy and sell WLS on a market, oh oops! There are still many services that still haven't been fixed yet as of this writing (Afia-bot and steem2wls).
Closed source: the straw the broke the camels back
You know, I was still willing to put up with all the bullshit above, but then today I learned that the Whaleshares blockchain code became closed source. I was reading this post here:
https://whaleshares.io/@steem2wls/update-on-steem2wls-and-questions-that-need-to-be-asked
And there was this interesting quote:
On Steem, most consensus witnesses check the code of a hard fork before updating their witness and approving a hard fork, but the recent Whaleshares HF2 was never published as source code, only as a compiled version. This requires witnesses to trust the developers and eliminates the decentralised nature of blockchain development. A malicious hard fork could do anything from forking out individual accounts over introducing backdoors to altering past transactions and balances. Even though Beyondbitcoin performing an exit scam can be considered unlikely, centralised development without oversight is a danger for any Blockchain and discourages potential investors.
Yes as a potential investor, consider me discouraged. I looked into it further found this:
https://gitlab.com/beyondbitcoin/whaleshares-chain/commit/59c39355a17ae87bdc376d66c56a911195f724ca
Right from the horses mouth, regarding version 0.2.8:
(source of this version is in private repos)
The front end UI had already gone closed source a few months ago, and now blockchain itself as well. What is the need for this? Are they worried about Steem stealing the changes? Come on..
The system being closed source is a deal-breaker for me. I'm not going to pour thousands of dollars into a closed source system. God knows what's happening under the hood.
So I'm Leaving
- I shall no longer accept whaleshares accounts as collateral for my loans.
- I shall no longer accept WLS as payment for services. The only exception would be for existing whaleshares loans.
- I shall no longer be supporting whaleshares in my City of Neoxian discord.
- If you owe me money on the whaleshares blockchain, obviously you still need to pay me. (Do I really need to say that?)
- I shall no longer be running a Whaleshares witness. If you are voting for me, then cast for your vote for someone else.
- To my whaleshares vote subscribers, I shall do my best to finish up your subscriptions. If I can't, then you shall be refunded.
- My Neox token shall no longer be redeemable for whaleshares votes (only Steem votes now).
- To those who joined my POD hoping for greatness, sorry, please consider joining my City of Neoxian Discord instead. (All those who paid the 2 wls fee have received much more in my votes to compensate)
To those who left Steem, consider returning
Steem is far from dead, and some pretty amazing things have been happening lately in Steem land. Take a look at palnet.io. Take a look at the Steem Engine, https://steem-engine.com. Read my post about it here:
https://steemit.com/aggroed/@neoxian/the-ned-s-hair-award-winner-aggroed-or-how-aggroed-saved-steem
Loans come in two types to me. One is devastating to an economy and one is the lifeblood.
When money is printed and it's issued as a loan that's terrible. It means there's never enough money in circulation to pay back the loan and guarantees poverty. That's epicly bad. I think there's a lot of informed people within the crypto and liberty movement that recognize this.
But that's not the only type of loan. Loans that happen after money has been issued, is in the hands of people, and those people are using loans to facilitate business are incredibly valuable to an economy and an ecosystem.
Neoxian does the second. Sorry to SJW a little here, but people that don't understand that are fucking morons.
Neoxian, you're a stand up dude and every time I randomly get involved with your business approach I walk away thinking "this is a stand up dude." Many blessings of peace, abundance, and liberty to you and yours.
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I just saved myself a really long reply by saying "⤴️ what @aggroed said"
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I just saved a bunch of money on car insurance by switching to walking.
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@neoxian,
What do you think about PAL and WEED? Don't you think those are better than WLS? I already left that platform! After all STEEM is better than all of those forked sh!ts!
Cheers~
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PAL is like 30 times better then WLS, and heck I'm even willing to give WEED a try. Steem is the best.
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Right with you man.
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I like PAL so far, and why not have another platform on steem for cannacontent, namely WEED 😊 I did try smoke site but couldnt join anon so I didnt bother 😂
Kind of funny to read how WLS went, I think I had a sell order on bitshares of some tokens or something, I should go see what happened there, it was months ago 😂
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Not only could such a hardfork do bad things to the network, it's possible they're putting actual malware on WhaleShares nodes. It's possible that WhaleShares nodes are mining cypto without the owner's consent, or stealing private keys.
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I'm still at Whaleshares and will remain for awhile longer anyway - and see what falls out of the tree. But yes, I've also had serious concerns with the way Whaleshares is run and I have been vocal about it at times too.
DaBa is a serious obstacle that I think the platform was better without - or maybe a steeper (positive) curve so that as people prove themselves, they can go about their normal activities. As "bandwidth" was here on Steem. RCs may be better, may be worse, hard to say, but I know they stymie good newbies.
The value of any platform will end up being dependent on consumers. Right now, there's so much emphasis on creators also curating. It's all well and good, but to get better content, we need to (as a platform) be able to better support authors. A steady (small) income should be achievable for anyone with the will and the drive. (I'm hopeful that HF21 will actually bring some of this about.)
Closed source is a disadvantage, for sure. One of the things that's really worked on Steem is all the other front ends, vying for attention - striving to be better. I use Steempeak mostly, because of the templates and scheduler, but I value the variety available. wls.fintehru.org was a lovely alternative to version2 Whaleshares - it was still a little buggy, but not as bad as the new mainstream. Now, with 2.5, I don't have that choice anymore. Competition breeds excellence... monopoly breeds complacence - not a good business model.
The weird "pod" thing on Whaleshares could be a huge blessing... but considering I had to come over to Steem to be able to upvote/comment on your post just shows some of the limitations of it. If I can read it, surely I should be able to upvote it!!! That could very well scupper the whole thing right there...
BUT.. there's always HF3... and HF4... maybe the necessary lessons will be learned.
I'll keep crossposting for now - running my second-run of my books there... (First run is here, simply because it was started here first...) and see what happens.
In any case, it's not worth breath-holding unless you like blue skin. ;-)
I do thank you for opening up the dialogue on this issue again.
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I don't know how they intended to succeed when they literally became crypto-marxists. I understand the appeal of taking care of the little ones, but rejecting investment because capitalism is "evil" is so myopic.
It's sad to see them fail so miserably at this, like you, there's a few people I like who are there still. But, I would lie if I said I didn't see this coming.
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One even told me exchanges are evil and you should instead use WLS as in house area. It just ugh...
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I am really sorry WLS turned out this way, @neoxian. I myself participated in the development of it and believed all the lies in which this platform was conceived. Worked on it for over a year and brought ideas and A LOT of art and design onto the project, just to get back-stabbed for no smart reason by the main figures a month after they opened it.
I feel you. They have no sense nor vision about business or any reliable skill (except for a handful of them) and I think that if you been disrespected as you did even by the core members, there is nothing else you should do but what you did.
I am with you.
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Tell us more please!
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I pretty much checked out once downvotes were removed there.
Those guys were celebrating the Pods in Discord, saying how they could now "shut the abusers and farmers" out of their groups with Pods. I was just sitting there like...lol so they still farm?
Now, I just continually vote for the same people there each day and log off.
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I don't know why, but something about it rubbed me wrong from the beginning. I brought up the web site a couple times, but never claimed an account. As I've seen more and more people talking about posting there, I was wondering if I should rethink that decision. Guess not.
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I was never much into the clones anyways
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steem for life
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Thanks for your post. I have learnt a lot and it makes me very sad.
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Glad i missed that boat. I had the impression that the project was dead for the longest time.
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The people at WLS don't understand economics at all. It just ugh. I been just waiting out there to powerdown and leave the hell out of there.
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Damn, don't scare me. I'm already having unnecessary anxiety with HF21 as it is.
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Finally some one has seen the wat I saw at the beginning. It was all the clones of steemit that drop the price of steem down diverting funds meant to go to steem to other useless centralized cloned half baked blockchain thinking this will change still scrapping my steem although am holding most in exchange but better steem than those useless clones
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Happy to see you are back at STEEM and forgetting about shady HF clones.
We are living in a very interesting moment here and it deserves to be closely watched.
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well said Neo sir i dunno much about such things but if i can notice that then it is obvious. Awesome write up gonna do same. Thanks for letting us know about hidden realities
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Steem is the best Sir.
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I couldn’t comment on your posts over on Whaleshares, but I just wanted to let you know that it sucks to see you go. Right now for me over there, the future is uncertain, but I will agree with you that Palnet is amazing and that Aggroed, Shane, Crim and everyone else has done an amazing job with it.
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I am with you. The recent fork made me disgusted even more with the system they built. Pods are a serious joke. The UI is looking like fb, and the daba is, well, a copy of steem. I personally feel they have about faced from fuzzy's vision and are now the antithesis. There is a superiority complex that has grown to be unbearable. I'm powering down myself in hopes of having some way to sell the token in the future.
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Good to have you here on Palnet Neoxian. Whaleshares has seemed rather dead for a while now.
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Hmm, I tried it shortly after it opened.. cross posted one article and got nothing... not a stitch! I shouldn't expect anything of course, but this is worse than my 2nd post on STEEM that got 3 votes and $0.00! LOL.. the days...
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I'm glad you're back to focusing on Steem! In fact I saw the same thing coming a couple of days ago and started powering down my WLS, I only have a bit over 1500 but I'm going to invest that into Steem anyways :^)
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I am So Looking Forward to Independence Day from The Evil Cabal. I am Glad You Stepped Away from the the Circle Jerks @neoxian. I Love What You Do and how You Speak your Mind.......
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Reading this reminds me weku... If you think whaleshares is wrong then you will think weku is all whats bad in all the blockchain existence! Basically whaleshares is a booby baby next to weku! The problem with steemit clones is that they suck big time! Steemit is not perfect but damn, at least witnesses do their job properly and there are devs making dapps to make our lives easier.
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Very shocking to hear of your disappointing and terrible experience! Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts and reflections!
I have always been amused by your contracts’ name and your service has helped many people in time of need!
Hope you’ll have a happier time!
Cheers.
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Sorry to hear that sir,the world of crypto are round like globe it has a lot of changes.but what ever channges are is we are still moving for another positive way.
God Bless!
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You got a 66.67% upvote from @minnowspower courtesy of @theguruasia!
@minnowspower is a hardfork of well known bid bot @postpromoter developed by @yabapmatt!
@minnowspower accept min 0.01 - max 0.03 STEEM/SBD bids only!
@minnowspower owned by @theguruasia - TGA Network!
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