I'm afraid the time of me holding my tongue, is coming to an end. I would rather burn my account to the ground, speaking truth to injustice, than complacently capitulate to the will of the rich. If this causes mortal wounds to my account, I would rather suffer them now, while I have little invested. For this battle is inevitable. Would I even be willing to fight, if I had thousands of hours invested in it? For I could not bear to stand by and watch the beauty and potential this platform offers, slowly erode away, without my attempting to stop it.

So I will unsheathe my sword, as humble and pathetic as it may be and begin to strike at the root. Perhaps others will join me, and we may chop down the proverbial "bean stock" before the evil giants have free reign of our villages.

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This was a comment I made recently which has lead me to create this post. It is a bit dramatic, but as a writer I know no other way.

Even though I have only been here for just under two months, lets just say I’ve seen many things since My First Week on Steemit, and I no longer fear being flagged.

Before I get into my post there are a few things that I should state as far as my thoughts on Steemit so far.

My thoughts on upvotes and flags:

Each of us have a stake of value in the community, some earned it through investment, some through content creation, others through social interactions and commenting, others still have managed to make it through plagiarizing and content thief, and the last group through the creation of bots. How we decide to use our stake in rewarding or punishing others is really no one else’s say. We are certainly able to have opinions on their actions and every action has it’s counter action. How people choose to grow their stake is open for debate(at least for the seven days prior to payout.), as to whether it is beneficial or harmful to the community as a whole.

My thoughts on rewarding friends:

If we want to reward friends, so be it there is no harm in this, but a slight risk of never growing if we never reward outside of our circle of friends. Also if others see this to often they may decide to get their group of friends to flag you and yours.

My thoughts on Self Upvotes:

If you think your content or comment is good or you just want to push it up on the screen, by all means self upvote away, but if we do this to often people may not want to upvote us, others will want to flag us. It's sort of a self balancing system. Also there is a risk to the community, of not gaining new users, or current users quitting, if those near the top seem to exclusively self upvote or only upvote each other. But at the end of the day, you can do with your stake as you see fit. Just know others with their flag button on the ready, will do the same.

My Thoughts on Bots:

Bot’s are probably the most controversial aspect of Steemit. Some are amazing without @ginabot I’m not really sure how I would be able to keep track of what’s going on without the likes of her. Upvote bots get tricky. I’m not apposed to communities utilizing them, it can be helpful spreading around a bit of love. “Pay to play” one’s I personally don’t like, and will go into a bit more details below. But I understand why they exist and why they are so widely used.

Now that, that’s out of the way, on to my post.

On Steemit these days many people are talking about “Reward Pool Rape” as if it was just a handful of people responsible for this. I have looked as deeply as I have had time into the whole situation (maybe like 20-30 hours, I probably should have been writing but I’m just to inquisitive.) I have concluded that as much as people claim it’s “This guy, or these guys over their,” I don’t buy it. It’s much bigger than that.

One merely needs to look at the silliness that seems to be on the trending page to understand that this problem is much bigger than a handful of people. When you can buy your way to the top, people will, and do.

There seems to be many people that don’t seem to understand how the reward pool works, as if it were an endless pool of magic money. I’ve read countless people say things like; “Who cares if they paid to get upvoted to the trending page, most of the time they are losing money when they buy those votes.” I think that people need to understand that the reward pool is in fact a limited supply, hence the name pool. It’s not called the reward ocean.

When people pay for upvotes it’s usually from prior rewards. This begins a cycle of burning through a limited supply that is meant to incentivize the whole community. I don’t know the actual numbers, but I would guess that the average vote buyer (unless they do in fact create high quality posts) would rarely get more than a five to ten percent return on their investment. Even at ten percent, that would mean the to make one Steem dollar it would require pulling out ten from the pool. I believe this estimation to be less grim than the reality truly is.

It would seem that the biggest winners in all of this would be those selling there votes.

I’m not trying to name and shame here. I’m just trying to inform people of the situation we find ourselves in. Informed decisions are the best kinds. If people still want to continue to use these services, that it entirely up to them. They just shouldn’t be surprised and gripe when @grumpycat or others flag you. It’s all part of the game you chose to play by buying votes.

Even @curie, the best known and much loved human curation team, receive such a meager curation award compared to four unnamed upvote services. If @curie gets so little of the curation reward pool(with her team of curators), what hope do us normal users have in getting a bit of the pie?

I don’t blame the sellers and I don’t blame the buyers. It is, what it is. Steemit is a perfect example of the free market. This action is going to continue as long as the code permits it. People will sell votes and people will buy them, others will flag those they see as “raping the reward pool.”

Where does that leave people like myself, who do not want to “pay for play?” Sadly there are not many options for us. That is why I am hoping to get those with the means to start a human curated voting bot. Rather than buying a guaranteed vote, participants could pay a fee to have their work reviewed, if it is seen to be of value than a vote equal to the content would be applied. In fact It would be amazing if several of these were to pop up over time. I know that it would add a tremendous amount to value to the site and would afford people who are apposed to “pay for play” to “pay to be seen” with a change to be rewarded for our quality. Isn’t that what all of us who strive for quality and want to organically grow our accounts want?

I may be chasing a a pipe dream, but I really would like to see this idea implemented. I made a comment to @themarkymark concerning this on one of his recent posts, where people were complaining about garbage being so highly rewarded. This situation was the brain child of my idea.

Well thank you all for reading this. If you got some serious SP and the know how I personally believe that this platform could make a good account to do well as a Witness. If done correctly It could be of game changing proportions.

For everyone who would prefer to just get a guaranteed upvote regardless of your content, there are plenty of places to do it. I don’t think they are going anywhere.

Remember don’t hate me, imjustsaying.

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