RE: Everything you need to know about potential payouts and flagging (for new users)
Thank you for this clear and very understandable explanation. Unfortunately it leaves me with yet another question...
I was thinking about the issue yesterday already and today I more or less accidentally came across a video clip, which confirms my worries. A famous person opened an account on steemit, got the word out and within a day made close to 15,000.- Dollars.
Now, please don't get me wrong, its not like I don't want that man to have it. My question is, what happens, when the real top superstars pop up here? Millions of fans upvoting most of the "pie" to their accounts? According to what you said, it looks like it will just be like in the real world then... the stars and the rich get even richer and the little guy is left with some crumbs..
Or, what if someone decides to build some kind of "vote farm"... supposedly, there are places in low wage countries, where hundreds of "kids" like away all day for fb users buying likes. Could a similar system "harvest" rewards here like that?
I hope you don't think, I'm just some greedy person who is afraid of not getting enough. Although its a wonderful feeling, to get rewarded for quality interaction, I truly enjoy all the wonderful content I find around here and the conversations are much better than on any other social media platform.
If anyone could help me with my questions, put my mind at ease or point out that I'm simply missing something, I'd be very thankful :-)
Really good questions. @stellabelle created a good post several months back talking about that - what would happen if celebrities signed up. To some extent, it is unknown. A lot of it depends on how the community handles it. A lot of what you described is a possibility though. We'll have to see.
Thank you very much for your quick reply and for not making me look too stupid. At least one is aware of the situation. I hope good and fair solutions will be found.
If it wasn't so sad, it would almost be funny how human nature seems to always find ways to ruin a wonderful thing with greed. Hope the community will find ways, to defend itself.
Trying to find the post you mentioned
Those vote farm would require participants with some voting power to have any effect. So the celebrity would need to spend quite some steem to power up his vote farm. Eventually such manipulations would drive the price for steem up. This would ultimately benefit all, wouldn´t it?
Hm... I think I get your point. I thought of the celebrity thing and the vote farm of being two issues of their own. The celebrities would likely get upvoted by a wide range of fans, with all kinds of voting power.
The vote farms I thought, would be a "business" in a gray zone market. The "employees" could upvote each other for a start... just imagine you have a few hundred "kids" doing that and then use their "power" to make money for the "business"... not sure if I make any sense..
I ike the picture, masses of "kids" sitting one next to the other in huge internet cafes and voting like crazy. Like those world of warcraft-players who dig something or earn items in order to sell them to western WoW players with less time but more money. But how to incentivize those mass-voters, when they themselve never get upvoted because they don´t contribute meaningful content? To calculate how much initial vests they need to create a self-sustaining dynamic of a revoting network is beyond my math skills :-)
And then comes in addition the issue with the voting bots which adds a level of complexity...
Understand what you are saying and it gives hope in a way, that it shows other systems haven't been brought down by similar behavior.
When I talked about vote farms I was referring to something I read, when people started to buy likes and fans for their facebook accounts. The article was about what they called "like farms". We are talking about kids in the poorest countries in the world, who'd never own their own cell phone or a computer. If they'd get a fraction of the profits they generate, I think they'd surely enough be highly motivated...
On a different not... may I ask what your profile picture shows?
We will see how it will evolve, if there is a way to exploit or abuse a system (the voting system in this case), unfortunately sooner or later somebody will find a way to do so.
Sure, it shows Takamatsu Toshitsugu, one of the greatest masters in Ninjutsu, and supposed to be the last real Ninja
http://www.angelfire.com/mi/budotaijutsu/Takamatsu.html
He is a model in many ways: self-disciplined, always modest&respectful but very skillful, and deadly if needed
Yes, we'll see :-) I have hopes, that community will "defend" itself though.
Thanks for the info on aster Takamatsu Toshitsugu... I thought it was an aikido master, but the picture is too small for me to accurately judge.
Would be a model for me to! Although I like the philosophy in aikido, where the opponent is supposed to remain unharmed