RE: STEEM's Biggest Villian
So when someone like Marky says a massive downvote on a whale is like a mini upvote for everyone else (what I think he doesn’t consider is when he drives this money away from the platform, or when people sell their steem) the market will respond in kind by giving the value of steem a mini downvote. The #newsteem culture has been live for about 3-4 weeks. So far, the price went down two cents. I’m not saying this is only because of you per se. But are you also taking responsibility for the harm you may cause to Steem’s value in your “virtuous” flagging adventures?
What if the main condenser or exchange conducted anonymous exit interviews asking people why they powered down and sold, maybe we could nail down the retention problems to a handful of reasons? If you learned that your actions are causing people to sell, would you be willing to change your behavior to accommodate disenfranchised stakeholders? When all is said and done; Which is more important? Who rewards go to, or that people are willing to HODL? Is there anything meritorious about being a stakeholder [/FULLSTOP]? Or, does steem only have room for the stakeholders who upvote according to your standards? These are some honest questions rolling around in my head.
You can call me crazy, but I don’t think there are that many people with large quantities of cash willing to invest in exchange for the honor to be a full-time blockchain curator or reward poolice officer. God bless the people who are HODLing and positively curating; these folks are angels. They don’t have to do it, but they choose to of their own free will and accord, that’s what makes what they do special. You seem to want this special attitude to be the prerequisite, and I think this mentality belittles the efforts of those who are already doing the thing.
Besides that, it’s a big ask when the platform needs new investors. It wouldn’t be a bad idea at all to hammer down how you plan on pitching the new money before you drive away all the old money. It was after rumors of mobs and pitchforks that caused STINC to sell to the market, and now you’re just going to double down. Keep in mind that whales like yourself will end up holding the bag, so I hope you know what you are doing.
If the people I flag sell and leave, GOOD.
I flag spammers, plagiarists, scammers, and abusers and in the rare case people who libel me.
I don't go around flagging people for opinions or because I don't like their content, I have far more control with my flags than most people on the platform but I will flag abuse.
The price went down because BTC dropped 20% in a day. All altcoins are bleeding as a result.
I take your point on the BTC plunge, that is likely the reason Steem dropped as much as it did. The notion of abusers is the questionable one. The blockchain affords people special privileges based on their investment in Steem. When you prevent people from exercising SP to their benefit, you give them a reason to dump to the market. The big question is, which is more valuable; Retaining them as stakeholders and allowing them to draw the rewards that the coded rate-limit voting allows for, or send them packing in hopes that someone more virtuous will take their place? I know your answer to this question, and I'm only guessing that it's predicated on the idea that these folks are replaceable. So surely you've found a way to pitch the virtuous capitalist, yes? You can chase away "the profiteers" all day long, but if they're not replaced, the platform loses investors, and as selling happens prices trend down.
What do you think the price of steem would be if we continued to have $200+ shit posts on trending.
See? You make way too much sense. At least you're using your SP to try to build Steem into a better place for people to associate with your flags. Doing that promotes capital gains.
It’s tough to say; Trending is a problem, I think it’s solvable with creative coding. If the size of an investment doesn’t add to the value of the crypto; Then why are larger stakeholders afforded a bigger vote?
Does the math need to change to accommodate thousands of years of human evolution? Or can we drum out self-interest via operant conditioning? I think the most natural systems are those that account for human behavior. If Steem doesn’t take that into account, in the code, then what are the chances it will thrive as opposed to dying on the vine?
If I buy 1k steem and give myself an upvote at 100% how does that make me any more or less moral than a guy who does the same with 3 million steem? Does the amount of stake a person holds have any merit in and of itself? If not, does the rate-limit voting need to be adjusted, perhaps on a sliding scale based on stake weight?
If self-voting is discouraged after a certain threshold, maybe this should be fixed at the level of the code. Why not find a way for the blockchain to police the blockchain? People can respect that and live in harmony with others. Anything has to be better than pitting people against each other and relying upon the frailty of human subjectivity.
It isn't just trending. Seeing stuff like this (previously with $20-100+ rewards before I started flagging the account) makes people on the outside think this place is a joke. There are tons of this going on.
If you think flagging shit like this is bad for steem, we have nothing to talk about.
Yeah, that is spam. It’s the same 7 minutes, and 54-second video posted every time. I think an algorithm should hide it from trending, but STINC is a slow evolving platform, perhaps another condenser will need to solve it? One thing is certain, showing people posts based on value and or based on the number of votes doesn’t cut the mustard. This is because people can manipulate it with voting trails and stake weight.
The bot armies are real, and so is the stake-weighting. Therefore, nothing we see on trending can be an accurate gauge of whether people like it. It’s a sad state of affairs, but I think we need to admit to ourselves that the system is broken. Imagine a condenser that has algorithms which judge an article based on its uniqueness. This has the potential to eliminate spam automatically. Other parameters can get programmed in there too; The quality of spelling and grammar, readability, and originality, etc.. etc..
Imagine a trending page which shows the top articles from either the most active or popular tags on the platform. We may be collectively suffering from either a lack of ingenuity or creativity. I’d like to see STINC set a new standard and pave the way for more radical change. This will cause the other condensers to get bold and experimental. We can’t do any of this until we concede that the system is broken. The only way for crowd wisdom to work is for equal votes and no duplicate accounts. We know that this will never happen.
I know that you've got good intentions. However, when all we've got to work with is a hammer, it turns all the problems into nails. The truth of the matter is that life isn't that simple, and some problems require a bit more finesse to resolve. Steem is that problem, and the sooner we can admit that the whitepaper failed us, the sooner we evolve from that mess and transform Steem into something that will draw the eye as opposed to the ire of would-be investors.