Oh look at that, it's me in a Brazilian coffee plantation picking the ripest coffee cherries straight off the tree - that's unique content isn't it?
I declined payout on this post because...you can't downvote declined payout's - well not yet anyway....
So Hard Fork 21 came, played for a while and then turned into HF22 because of an issue that took a few days to resolve thanks to nodes needing to replay as well as Witness servers.
My last Witness update was way back in June, and while the proposed changes in post rewards from 75% poster to 50% poster were causing many of our long term established content curators to leave - I still felt the benefits to curation would make up the difference - you can read my thoughts in this post
But with HF21 the downvote pool was also introduced - and on paper at least this was a good idea - to enable community control of post rewards - every stake holder on the the Steem Blockchain could downvote posts they felt had more rewards then deserved without affecting their upvote strength.
ON PAPER - yes that is an emphasis, I'm old but I still remember being at school - Education systems are similar world wide you are given a task to do, and marked on the work done. During the marking you are told what you did correctly, or if you the work was incorrect you are told what you did wrong. Learning by mistakes is the most basic educational system - who knows of Pavlov and his dog's?
So we now have the downvote pool active, but as I see it there is no benefit and all it will do is drive the last few active Steem Blockchain bloggers aways. The screen grabbed comment is a perfect example
First off, credit to @ocdb to bother commenting on downvotes - because most have no comments. How exactly are people supposed to improve their content if they are downvoted with NO comment explaining why??? When I joined the Steem Blockchain in March 2017 it was clear that you would upvote a post, and then leave a comment explaining why you upvoted - what you liked after reading the whole post. This was the process of community, of building a SOCIAL BLOCKCHAIN NETWORK. If in 2019 the decision is to make an ANTISOCIAL BLOCKCHAIN NETWORK then congratulations - downvotes with NO EXPLANATION are the perfect way to do it.
When the Downvote pool was first introduced it made sense - reducing abuse of the reward pool which was mostly caused by the growth of Bid Bot's - which to be fair was totally allowed by the Steem Blockchain - let's not split hairs here - BID BOT's were allowed to grow so the biggest Steem stakeholders could get a passive return on their investment.
After HF21 Bid Bot use significantly reduced because IT COST STEEM TO BID BOT POSTS - finally the bid bot's made sense as they were PAID FOR ADVERTISEMENT - you want to send a message to the Steem Blockchain community use the Bid Bot's and pay more Steem then you will receive back in rewards or Steem power - HELLO PEOPLE - Google Adwords is a thing because of this!
Returning to this comment
Currently there are a lot of curation groups and whales curating amazing content? Really? Any proof of that because I know 100's of Steemians that were producing incredible posts with content that is beyond belief - awesome pictures, backed by detailed descriptions - and most have left because they got nothing compared to the work they put in.
The Downvote you received is to discourage you from buying votes from bidbots...SERIOUSLY @ocdb you have 64000 Steem Power and are backed by our top Witnesses - and still you can't work out who is putting money into the Steem Blockchain and who is trying to plunder money from it.
I love the Steem Blockchain, in fact I love it so much I pay out of my own pocket for a primary Witness server and also a Backup. You might ask why would I pay money to support the Steem Blockchain? We have around 150 active Witnesses - and every one like me has the WHOLE Steem blockchain on their server - every post, comment etc since the blockchain started. That is the amazing thing about a decentralised blockchain - it is community supported and will exist while every one of of us still has a server running. I still would like to set up a Full Node - just because with a full node and my two Witness Servers - if every other server was shut down - I could still run the Steem blockchain from the servers I had online.
Where we go from here is down to individuals -but right now I feel the Downvote culture is going to destroy what little Steem had left as community. I think @themarkymark was spot on when he said to me the Steem Blockchain will grow the most from gaming - @steemmonsters - @nextcolony - @drugwars etc.
I was pretty neutral on the free downvotes... the downvote trails.. i see them being the beginning of a nasty slippery slope
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Trails really are a 2018 thing, it’s lazy curation and we should stop upvote curation - downvote trails are a horrible negative idea - downvotes should not be given out if the stake holder has no idea what they are removing reward from. And then there is a huge, potentially liable issue that “someone” is deciding the value a piece of work can have - but what actual certifications do they possess to do that? If a piece of writing is downvoted, can the down voter present a degree in literature? If a photography post is downvoted, can the down voter present credentials proving they are experts in the field with official credentials? It’s a slippery slope, and I can see it turning nasty very quickly.
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A case of two steps forward and one step backwards.
I am sure at the end of the day, like everything else in life - it is all about politics and economics. The rich will get richer. The gap between the elite and the common man wider.
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Rather one step forward and two steps backwards ;)
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I’m just upset because HF21 was a really hard sell, and against all those opposed to it I really supported the changes - there are real benefits now evident and curators are not suffering as bad as they thought. But I also told many people the separate downvote would not be abused - and sadly it looks like I was wrong to do that.
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If something can be abused, there will be somebody to abuse it. 😊
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I do leave comments when I downvote unless someone already did so. I'm still working with Steem Flag Rewards in this. There are plenty of posts gaining excessive rewards through paid votes, but a lot of vote sellers are behaving more responsibly now including using their downvotes.
I'm seeing some people get good votes from the new curation efforts, but we still see the same faces on trending. It will never be perfect, but I see it as better as less junk posts are earning. I'm doing what I can to support worthy content, but I can only add a few cents.
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My main issues are first - bid bot use has dropped because it costs more to bid bot a post then you get back in rewards - so people don’t use them now because they loose money. Of course if you want to pay to advertise your blog, post, project they are there - and that makes sense to me. But if you pay to advertise your content - and then have the reward removed because “someone” thinks your content is not worth the reward - and they don’t have to say why - then quickly the few people we have active here will leave.
HF21 has cleaned up the trash posts, but it feels to me now they have driven away the quick buck people, all that free downvote power is burning holes in the holder pockets and now they are just going after anyone - don’t like your writing style - downvote. Take some pictures of stuff I don’t find interesting downvote. Upload a 20 minute video I can’t be bothered watching - downvote. Sure it’s protecting the reward pool - but all that is going to happen is more and more people will leave or just stop posting and try to earn from curation only. And how can we hope to increase the user base if they see people are taking post rewards away with no explanation.
I know you have been putting 110% effort into bringing new people into Steem, and this is partly why downvotes abuse is annoying me so much - the negativity it is doing will drive away current users and discourage new accounts.
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There is still plenty of stuff that really does need downvoting, but I am not doing it out of spite and I will comment unless someone already did it. Some of the big accounts downvote without comments, but maybe they just do not want to get into needless discussions.
We do need to establish standards about valid paid votes. People can decline rewards or set them to go to someone else or null. They should say they have done this to be clear.
If we could ever eliminate all the abuse then we would have downvotes to spare, but I would be happy to not need to use them.
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This post has been resteemed by @witnessnews.
Follow @witnessnews to keep up with active witness updates.
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I was against it from the very beginning because I saw something like this coming about. This is where communities and their denizens will become a vital role in the lack of bot use. Funny thing is they refer to it as 'abuse' and don't really give credit where it is due. Kind of makes a person want to dump and run, also makes a person want to buy a million steem and say fuck off to those asshats. Did you notice they jumped up to to the top 20 when they created that stupid downvote trail? I mean, what kind of shit is that? Just saying. The governance here is horse shit. A whole new set of top 20's (save maybe 2 or three) need to be in play.
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