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I joined the trail discord group because I am genuinely interested in helping undiscovered content creators grow, but after seeing this and doing some digging I'm kind of disenchanted. It was my understanding that bitshares were distributed to all the voters on the trail, but it looks like rewards haven't been paid out for a couple of months.

My GF's intro post was featured on a @steemisbeautiful post, they posted her photo without permission and that seemed kind of weird. Think the post has over $300 now, and it's kind of sad to know that won't be shared with all the new users they profiled.

Tried asking on discord, but it seems like no one is really interested in serving the community after all, just their wallets.

I was under the impression that I would be rewarded for my vote, but I guess they stopped doing that.

Thanks for bringing this to light, @berniesanders, I'm no longer a supporter of steem-trails.

As a new user, its kind of discouraging to see so much circle-jerking and meta content trending/hot. I'm just gonna keep my head down and keep post weird art and music experiments.

It is one of the reasons I was away from the platform for 6 months. Got tired of circle jerking and exploitaition of hard working content creators and artists...

Hey logic is back, time to bring in reality and we will be fine :)

sorry I'm just joking, who are you and what are you up to?

Who are you?

guy having fun on steemit, I'm me what who do you want, I think this is the first time I've brushed past you.

I see. No problem.

there was a "sceptic" around later he named himself reality, you are logic you must be related somehow :D that was the "joke"

Yeah, I saw that user. He is more of a science confusionist and troll.

I called these guys out months ago and was told "we aren't here to add rewards to people's undervalued posts." I was like, well then what do you do?

The answer, obviously, is to add rewards to their own posts, then funnel it through the main account and send the earnings off the platform. That's how you apparently support the user base.

SUPPORT FOR RANDOM PIC @randompic

Hi, my reply is now hidden because of a cyberbully.

So, @donkeypong is flagging all of my blogs and replies to intentionally ruin my rep score.

If anyone likes to stand up to bullies, go and flag @donkeypong as much as possible and lets ruin a rep score that deserves to be ruined.

If you are against censorship, tell @donkeypong to stop acting like the censorship police .

@donkeypong is a cyberbully, stalker and harasser.

https://www.steemnow.com/

PLEASE UPVOTE RANDOM PIC AND RENEW HIS REP SCORE THAT WAS UNJUSTLY DESTROYED BY CYBERBULLIES

SUPPORT FOR RANDOM PIC @randompic

Hi, my reply is now hidden because of a cyberbully.

So, @donkeypong is flagging all of my blogs and replies to intentionally ruin my rep score.

If anyone likes to stand up to bullies, go and flag @donkeypong as much as possible and lets ruin a rep score that deserves to be ruined.

If you are against censorship, tell @donkeypong to stop acting like the censorship police .

@donkeypong is a cyberbully, stalker and harasser.

https://www.steemnow.com/

PLEASE UPVOTE RANDOM PIC AND RENEW HIS REP SCORE THAT WAS UNJUSTLY DESTROYED BY CYBERBULLIES

I appreciate your effort flagging this #rewardpoolrape.

I have seen the phototrail rake in some 100 $ for 5 photos and the original posters of the pictures got some 5 $.

What is most disturbing to me is that some witnesses are following these trails with their vote, too.

The times I've noticed these trails is on their short comments with 100+ votes where they leave the actual post they comment on without votes. Way to make the platform look shady... and every time I've asked they go self-defensive and tell me to join discord.

No, I'm not going to join discord for this, just be more open about it and there wouldn't be an issue.

I agree. The only useful trail I've ever seen is @aggroed minnow support.

Because discord doesn't have a blockchain where what they say is in stone.

...and half of Steemit misses out on the discussion , or fight, or lies or ....

SUPPORT FOR RANDOM PIC @randompic

Hi, my reply is now hidden because of a cyberbully.

So, @donkeypong is flagging all of my blogs and replies to intentionally ruin my rep score.

If anyone likes to stand up to bullies, go and flag @donkeypong as much as possible and lets ruin a rep score that deserves to be ruined.

If you are against censorship, tell @donkeypong to stop acting like the censorship police .

@donkeypong is a cyberbully, stalker and harasser.

https://www.steemnow.com/

PLEASE UPVOTE RANDOM PIC AND RENEW HIS REP SCORE THAT WAS UNJUSTLY DESTROYED BY CYBERBULLIES

I'm curious what purpose these trails serve. Would the same funds not be better going to actual authors. I would be interesting in hearing what the community thinks.

Would the same funds not be better going to actual authors.

That's what I thought the idea was - to create trails that vote on the authors of the posts that deserve the votes based on the quality of their content. These trails appear to be sharing other people's work, then upvoting their own trail accounts...not the authors. Some have even complained about the trail accounts posting some of their work without permission, then benefiting greatly from it.

But the sheer volume of trails and the rewards that they're getting - often without many views or interaction - is a little absurd.

Even in chainbb you have the Post Rewards Beneficiaries system.

Authors that are in the featured posts made by those trails could be added to the system and it would give them the percentage they deserve. That is not that hard to do.

Maybe steemit could have something like that too.

That can be done. It's not exclusive to chainbb. Why it's not being done seems to be a mystery.

Whales should flag them to annihilation :-)

Oh look, trails-trail is still free. Hm.

I was going to create shitpost-trail ...

Be sure to include me on that,....

me too, f*ck >:(

Create it now, before it's too late! Maybe they'll accidentally vote on it and you can be part of the voting scheme...all the way to the crypto bank!

Or I could just do The Daily Trail Selection and Steem Trail News. I like to out-meta people.

Really? I'm saddened to see your response to this stuff.

I'm saddened to see what I originally thought was a good project turn into almost no control whatsoever over self-voting "community" accounts to the tune of hundreds of dollars per post. These "trails" were supposed to be about finding and upvoting quality content, not creating a bunch of different trails to upvote with whale power.

What happened to spreading/allocating rewards to users on their own posts? Why isn't that the goal, instead of funneling a ton of rewards through the -trail accounts?

i see a 'daily photo selections' post BY @photo-trail making $375 and features 17 photographers.
how much of that $375 will those photographers see?
if they aren't getting shit, do they know that?

I have a question on that post which they have yet to respond to.

I got featured as well in that trail, they made a lot of SBD by just collating all photos of the day.

Much better 😊

wrong. we are committed to building more communities...self sustaining communities. you gotta think bigger man!

how much money has been generated for the trails from content that belongs to other people?
how much of that money has been given to the creators?

I think it might be sarcasm, or irony, or something in that vein.

@ats-david you have been consistently upvoting most of my photography posts, I thank you for that kind sir, and some of those get featured in the photo-trail, where the total photos of other authors combined, get $300 plus which is good for them but I guess not good for us authors. During the last few days I was then approached by photo-trail if I would want my photo included in their post or just the link..So my answer, was the best way possible that I can reach a wider audience..which is including my photo..I didn't know this until now, it just saddens me because I have to go out in the middle of the hot sun and shoot. I need to bring extra clothes because the sun makes me perspire like I went to the shower.. My point is the original authors should also get the same treatment or attention when our work is shared to another post.

Hey, I want to be civil here so please no flagging, but that isn't the "model" of the trails. The trails do 'vote on authors of posts that deserve the votes based on the quality of their content', we upvote and support the authors whos content is featured and the rewards that go to the trails help them grow so their support to the minnows it worth more down the line. If the trails never grew, it would be impossible for them to offer any impactful support.

Even if the views are low on a particular post, does it not balance out when the trail hosts can now have a 1$ upvote for minnows and offer contests or challenges?

you guys are making your own posts with other peoples content and raking in HUNDREDS of dollars when the original posts are barely making double-digit figures.
I find this questionable behavior at best.
A percentage of the posts earnings at the very least should be shared among the creators whos content you made that money from. There is no excuse for this.

Does this mean you have talked to all the people featured to find out if they didn't have permission? A steemian will learn facts well before hurriedly concluding!

what it means is I know what i see
i see photos that do not belong to someone who made a post containing those photos, and now that post is pushing $400.
if the creators gave permission for them to make money off of their creations and not see a dime of it, then they are fucking morons.

If you are asking me, then yes. This has been noted in the trail repeatedly, to assure to ask all content creators for their feature.

No it doesn't 'balance out' you just need to take a look at the figures being moved out into exchanges from @trails and the figures being transferred into the acc from all the other -trail accounts to see something unfair is happening on a huge scale. You can see that the actual creators/authors are not getting anything like like figures, total bs about being for the community, they are for themselves otherwise why not split the rewards more fairly?

...we upvote and support the authors whos content is featured...

At what percentage? How much of your trail's influence is actually allocated to the users you upvote compared to your own -trail account?

For the trail I manage, 100%. I don't know what you mean upvoting my own account. When I log onto my trail I go to my tag, I go to new, and I start upvoting and resteeming articles that have good work and no plagiarism. I retain 100% of my vote power and usually start with NEW articles.

I understand your concerns, but for my trail (science-trail) all of my influence is allocated to the users who I upvote, and I don't feel as if I have don't anything other than try to offer support to the little guy. Even the first post I made powered up so that it would generate the most steem power out the gate, to help people down the road.

I didn't even get any payout on the 607 dollar post I created from scratch (nobody elses content), and the payout I would have gotten from the recent 350$ post, which I planned to reinvest to help grow myself as a reward for my community engagement has been diminished 150$ because of this attack. My trail isn't very old mind you, but I feel this is an adequate and fair course of action which has been unjustly harased.

So you are not one of the trails with links back to @trail or @steemtrails . You don't regularly transfer funds to either of them, then you are not doing anything wrong. There are many 'trails' who regularly transfer rewards to @trails, which is believed to be way in excess of actual author rewards that members of the respective trail receive. This is deemed an unfair 'theft' by many of the community.

Well, that isn't 100% accurate either. The owners of this system have had steemtrails in operation for months, they have other community projects to organize and other accounts to moderate. They claim a percentage of the 50/50 payouts which are the choice of the account owners.

I'm glad that you can recognize that there isn't anything inherently villainous to the project . The members of the community that deem this unfair theft by the community have to understand that the excess generated by the reputation of the trail is the same as any other steemit account. No system can operate to the size of steemtrails without compensating the users who allow it to operate, that is why many of the hardworking users part of the project are speaking out agaisnt an unfair attack on their accounts, like me.

When the community speaks and want to grow something...support happens. and this is what you are seeing. its a great thing!

Why don't you actually answer the questions that are being asked @instructor2121? You're doing nothing but beating around the bush because you know all of these funds are going straight to your wallet and nowhere else.

your not answering important questions
please pay attention

The only purpose they serve is to make the team that is publishing them more SBD to dump on the exchanges. Why else?

my photos were featured and made their post hundreds of SBD, while mine was out in the cold.

Certainly looks like that.

It appears so. Fair distribution to the real authors needs to come. This is a monopoly.

Well one way to do it would be to share the rewards with the original source authors - the last hard fork allowed that and I think people would appreciate it. I don't have the technical expertise to say how hard or easy it would be to implement but I think it should be possible.

i might even venture out so far as to say it's a "theft ring".

On the 💰

I actually found some new photographers to follow through @photo-trail, but if they don't share the rewards back to the authors, then it's exploitation at best.

Yes in fact I have found others through these kind of summary posts - I think we need to be careful that people are happy to be part of it though - I think profit sharing would help.

All you have to do is ask what we do with SteemTrail...I will be more than happy to explain. We BUILD communities, and do not charge for our upvotes.

After HF 19 we will be delegating SteemTrail voting power out to 60-70 accounts so we can reach 1K-2k users each day...again this is free, no charge.

You can chat with me on steemit.chat(the same place you send your threats to) and we can share with you the vision of SteemTrail.

Thank you

Upvoting so everyone can see me dispute every one of your bullshit claims.

How does transferring money to poloniex help users exactly? I dont want to be a part of these whale wars regardless. Im fine making 5$ on a post and avoiding the whale-drama.. but if you are transferring money to poloniex instead of the the users who make you that money. Then it is a bit fucked! I wish you guys would stop flagging each other. but if shit like this is happening behind the scenes you guys will be at war forever :( ! You both have a shit ton of steem, lets do whats best for the community and make the community better, and the price of stem higher. Everyone wins that way. These wars are counterproductive. Not saying they aren't necessary, but they aren't helping. Its like a steemit civil war :(

We build communities and are funding development of our 100+ community websites powered by STEEM....he is selling his upvotes for SBD. Now think about that for a moment. Great question!

Ya I get it. him and whaleshares have chosen to operate differently. more business like. And while he is asking theses question and showed everyone that you guys had sent money to polo. He never says where or what he does with each2 SBD he makes from randowhale. I get it, im trying to stay medium you guys. I'm just a minnow trying to make sense of these things really. And regardless of your spite towards eachother. I have nothing but love for all of you whales. I know that you are all trying to make steem worth more, its wise for your investments! Even the founding fathers had differing opinions you guys. I just want there to be some common grounds, common ground is beneficial to steem!!

why would he even charge 2 sbd for his upvote? greed,more money, and influence. SteemTrail votes are free, and will always be free.

And bernie screams "scheme"...give me a break.

okay goddammit
for the last time - this isn't about the upvotes from steemtrails
its about the REPOSTS where you guys are making a shit ton of money using content created by other people.
ive asked you this multiple times today, and now I feel like your pretending not to even see me.

HOW MUCH OF THE EARNINGS FROM THOSE POSTS DO THE CONTENT CREATORS GET??

if zero, then you need to GTFO

Sorry, you're not getting a break. There's a significant difference between you lining your pockets by posting others work vs allowing people to pay for a chance to receive a large vote. You're taking funds from the reward pool without giving people a choice where I am not.

Whales should just flag it to hell until authors receive considerate percentage. Lets make the solution simple, please :-)

@instructor2121, It looks really bad when you don't respond to Moby's pretty straight forward questions.

What are the 100 websites that you are transferring money towards? What are the best few? I see that bernie gets 2 dollars for a randowhale vote. its plain as day. But I dont see how much you are taking, there is no transparency. It would be nice if you talked about it.. If you take 15% for yourself, that would be fine. Just say as much so everyone knows.. Then give the rest back to the users who make the content you use to make the money with? He showed that you transferred thousands to polo, how did you get those thousands, where did they go? Do Steemians deserve to know? I am trying to remain neutral. I KNOW that this ocean is big enough for you whales, but you keep shitting on each others doorsteps. Theres a whole ocean, how do you guys end up shitting on each others doorsteps every day?

Why not share in public, not everyone is on chat and to be fair there is no transparency nothing is recorded forever on the blockchain in a chat. Why not in the comments, or defend in a post with explanations as to the way the -trails are operating? Maybe without defending you may find all of the @trails sub trails being defollowed or muted en mass as a reaction to lack of defence.

Hey what happened to the TRAIL deposits? They were every day, then once a week, then once a month, now it's been two months since the last deposit.

You build communities by raping them for thousands of SBD each day? Nope!

Thinking small man. These communities are being built with or without you.

Your days of bullying the small users with your fear tactics are OVER! And you know this. Just enjoy your 1.6 million SP man and enjoy the ride. The community is much much bigger than you and they are speaking. Peace brother

You're the one taking rewards from the community rather than giving back as you claim, yet I'm the one thinking small?

You can build communities without pillaging them.

and you are fleecing the little guy with your vote buying scheme. Why not give your votes for free?

@randowhale is 100% transparent and people LOVE it. They also have the OPTION to pay @randowhale for a vote or not. In this case you are taking rewards from the reward pool simply to line your own pocket. There's a HUGE difference but I don't expect someone like you to understand that.

I like @randowhale, you did a great job with the last version and I am following the development you do up close. Brilliant business-strategy.

When it comes to @instructor2121 I have seen him working very transparent in building up a community of real people who read and follow different content, my impression is that his trails have a function of a good old fashion "book-reading-club" who curate very serious in a manual time-consuming way.

When it comes to "lining his pockets" and "taking rewards from the rewardpool" - that seems to be a very quick judging opinion from your side. Maybe it will do you good to come on discord and actually talk - voice with him and his community of 1000+ members on http://discord.gg/pz3UT6s when they have meetings every night.

Or join steemspeak with 1500+ members on http://discord.gg/g7amU35 and ask the always active people there what they think about this.

I´ll upvote myself right here to line my own pockets and give you something to flag for free. Remember, if anything is wrong in your world you can always come and just... blame me ;)

xoxo

Blaming you would give you credit you don't deserve.

Damn 1 vote and you get $313.99 :o

Can you please enlighten us of what's happening with these trails here instead of insisting we join discord all the time and going full self-defense mode with your "workers"?

Yeah, Bernie, you're a real hero. What is this post? It adds nothing? Are you keeping the reward from it?

Adds nothing? Whatever you say keyboard warrior. Fuck yes I'm keeping the reward.

People, look at this, he wants others to be altruistic, then makes money off of posts encouraging you to take from others.

Nobody cares what you say. Go back to writing more nonsense...

at least he wrote it himself

lol, got a chuckle out of me. So true.

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What these people? forget is that everything is public on the blockchan, anyone can check into what is going on in whatever account, rewards in, out, patterns of transfers inward/outward to/from accounts etc. It looks like all these 'trail' accounts are all operated by @trail and regularly transfers occur back to the 'holding' account before exit out to exchanges.

It certainly seems like these 'trail' 'services' are all designed to garner upvotes for those who participate....but if you look at where the rewards are being transferred to @trail @uwelang and others ( go check wallets) in very large amounts which do not reflect the authors rewards at all.

Perhaps if they truly wanted to help the community they would redistribute the rewards to the 'trail' community. instead of keeping them. Perhaps it's time to MUTE these 'trail accounts and support authors directly?

I think they are successful because the newly joined members on Steemit are so desperate to get the big rewards they believe the hype of the 'trail' creators.

SteemTrail is one of the oldest and largest projects on STEEM... We are successful because we work hard and fought through the bad times. We are still here, and with a growing and excited community, we will stay.

So, dont think for a moment that we have just popped up....we have been here grinding it out everyday. never left because we believe in the platform and the community.

SteemTrail is one of the oldest and largest projects on STEEM..

this means nothing. if religion has taught us anything its that the age and popularity of a concept has nothing to do with its accuracy or level of morality.

Sorry, but this doesn't begin to answer what has been questioned here, so it simply comes off as entitled avoidance.

The accusation wasn't that this was some fly-by-night scam, but specifically that lately this model, absent any changes, inequitably benefits older members feeding the trails with lower-effort posts versus the newer content creators, for the latters' more substantive body of work per topic.

Answering the legitimate concerns raised, as other trailblazers have done here, would have been a better use of today's "grinding", in my opinion.

No one's automatically entitled to the benefits of anyone's hard work because you've been "grinding everyday for years" for your own wallet, waiting for this exact scenario.

Some people here seem to be forgetting whose hands are actually feeding them.

Give some link for reading about project?

What happened to the TRAIL coin deposits? I will unfollow at Streemian if this goes unanswered...

There was some discussion under one of the postings by photo-trail about copyrights to photos, see here.

Photo-trail's main counter-argument was: "I'm a lawyer, I know this is OK, who are you?", plenty enough to irk me, but maybe my fuse is too short.

He has since given the option to be quoted by link rather than by transcluded photo.

Still, I don't like all this meta-stuff much.

I think Nspart was telling me about this a few days ago and I misunderstood what he was talking about!

Nspart was the one who brought up the question of legality and payout sharing for these photo-trail posts that consist mainly of other people's work, copied without prior permission.

I hope you didn't misunderstand in dangerous ways 8-).

No I can understand his point of view. If the trail is getting larger payouts than the original posts it can raise some questions.

Wait so I don't see whats wrong, please could you explain to me

I know better... lol great name for it!

How do you figure? We are free to transfer to anyone we want and that's money that was already out of the pool. I think you're missing the entire point.

Hi bernie. I like that you give me the opportunity to defend myself, since you name me on your list. I am going to speak for myself and those who lead steemtrail. Steemtrail gave me the opportunity to help the Spanish-speaking community when no one else did. If you check your steemitchat, I wrote you asking for help. You never answered me and it's perfect, I really understand. You did not have to answer me, you do not know me. But instructor did answer me and helped me with the spanishchallenge which was my personal contest. At that time it was the beginning of HF 18 and the posts were not worth anything.

In that list I only appear as a number, but I invite you to see the #spanishchallenge tag and see how many users are participating. The spanishchallenge is like a baby for me, born of a prize that I win and with no future prospects. And I am proud that today is 13 weeks. You can think what you want, but that pride nobody takes it from me. You can ask all the members of the Spanish speaking community what they think of me. I kill myself for growing my community on steemit. No one can deny me that.

The subject of rewards is very delicate Bernie, I imagine you see the trending and there is post with a single paragraph that collect $100. I never complain about this and I'm not going to do. I have nothing against you, I congratulate you when you fixed things with htooms and I think if you take 5 minutes and check the tag spanishchallenge, you will notice that I really work for my community.

You received a mere 100$ - you're definitely not an insider there, anyone can see that.

Maybe that's why he only got 100$. :/

Even though I haven't really understood the trails fully, I believe that the Spanish trail (only one I've engaged with by being a part of the Spanish speakers community) has kept a lot of the steemians to keep posting even in hard times like HF18 was, besides that I don't really get the trails, but I think in a way they unite people with likewise interests. I do not support flagging of any kind on Steemit, but I understand that the rewards can be a little more generous to the authors, but I also remember when all the trails started those posts were getting a very little rewards and most of the rewards that were given to the authors were not given on SBD but by open ledger.