Clash of Steem
Knowledge + Time = Acceptance
Whenever I need to accept something, I have to understand it first. For me, acceptance is difficult without knowing exactly why something happened or how something works.
This is especially true with the design around the rewards pool and its distribution/governance functions: upvotes & downvotes.
Frustration Everywhere I Look
Wherever I look on Steem, I can see confrontations between Steemians as well as frustration, especially from people who feel they've been treated unfairly: "I bought 50,000 STEEM when STEEM was at 4$ and now I'm not even allowed to vote for myself or my friends? How dare you!?!"
And I get that point of view. I really do. I've been on Steem through thick and thin (more thin than thick tbh) and having a huge stake in a currency that has lost 98% from ATH, that really stings.
However, I also get the other point of view.
Rewards Pool? Confrontation Required
Would you believe me if I were to tell you that confrontation is placed right into the design core of the rewards pool?
Similar to our night/day cycle on earth, the rewards pool has two opposing forces governing its core: upvotes & downvotes.
With upvotes alone, people are generally happy, but the pool has no way to be protected against abuse. That's why downvotes exist. They sting like a sword but are necessary for a more healthier distribution.
And the existence of downvotes alone on Steem is why confrontation is built into the core layer of Steem itself, converting it to a potential warzone.
Should Steem be a Warzone?
Now, obviously the question stands whether STEEM (the currency & platform for SMTs) is the right place for a warzone? (Again, that is what you'll have to deal with when having a global rewards pool.)
My personal opinion is: No!
A warzone is not an attractive place to onboard millions of users.
STEEM should be a neutral ground for everyone to come together who believes in the power of decentralised & monetized social media and who wants to build blockchain-powered apps via soft-consensus.
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 0/10)
How I visualize the pool is as a shared wallet where (based on stake) users can direct STEEM toward something, kind of like a purchase. For the next 7 days, other owners of the wallet can negotiate and direct more toward or redirect away from the purchase and this negotiation decides how much of the contents of the shared wallet will go toward that purchase, if anything at all.
This happens often in any household, and normally, the wife negotiates better than the husband.
good explanation :)
People got very comfortable for a long time watching that reward counter under their post only move in one direction. Now that the opportunity cost for downvotes has been removed, they are in shock to see more downvotes. I don't think less downvoting as many appeal for will actually help the situation. I think time and normalization of the practice is the only remedy.
Yep. Perhaps one day there will be enough distribution that the balance makes it less extreme.
That's how I understand it as well, but the difference is, that the wife and husband have a dependancy on each other, as well as leverage. On Steem, most people are anonymous and this just makes it so that the urge to be egoistic in the voting behaviour is increased. I could see a difference with communities, as they are probably smaller and more like a big family. And if you're sick of a community/SMT, you can always join another. On Steem, it's one main currency or sell for bitcoin/altcoins, which sadly too many people did.
It is definitely a complex, estranged and highly dysfunctional household :)
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I'm thinking right now about this and even think how to could be implemented but let's see..
How about to stop the "downvote for free" and with this the "war" and implement a kind of null bot. If people want to boost their posts, even if some can consider shit, they bid Steem (like earlier) but for a null bot, and Steem is burned or goes back to the reward poll.
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A kind of Blockchain bid-bot with good SP (maybe permanent delegation), where Steem received goes to reward poll a curation to his own SP.
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Well would basically be like before the hardfork and before other frontends.
You can still promote your posts via steemit by burning steem. Problem was that nobody actually looked into the promoted tab and therefore this was really useless.
Also you can't force any of the frontends to actually rank these posts higher.
In my opinion steem right now is a much healthier place as opposed to before the hardforks.
I think "nobody" really want to promote their post, people want to see good rewards.
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yeah but how would there be good rewards for your proposal?
This is not a proposal, I even think if and how is possible to implement... This is an idea.
Good reward is (I know you gonna understand) the same photo in two different accounts post can generate 50 Steem to one and 0.05 to the other. This will never end because some have whale friends and some are just trying to be happy and enjoy the Blockchain.
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I get what you are saying, you want a fair system, where the same amount of value give the same amount of reward.
However I would say that the way it works is already pretty fair. If more people vote you you get higher rewards, but you also reached more people and brought more value :)
Of course one can argue that because of different amounts of power this isn't strictly the the case. As maybe you brought one hundred people joy who don't have a lot of power vs. bringing only one person joy who has massive amounts of sp and receive the same value or even less
.
But on the other hand these whales got the "right" to be more influencal because they already brought more value into steem in the past.
At least thats the way I see it.
And I can't think of any better way to handle this for now :)
A fair system can be an utopy because what is fair to me can not be to you and this is ok, I'm not utopic :)
I guess a... less unfair (which is different from fair)
I quickly pick an example of unfair (and look I don't know blocktrades guys and don't have nothing against them I maybe they deserve this rewards)
https://partiko.app/blocktrades/poloniex-being-sold-off-and-new-company-is-dropping-us-customers (yesterday) - $57,047
https://partiko.app/rusli17/bittrex-international-halts-service-in-venezuela-and-30-more-countries-bufyxq4n (20h ago) - $0,092
The problem is that 90% of bidbot usage was not to boost their posts but to increase the reward from the rewardpool... especially since due to the ecosystem bidbots could even give a profit to buyers.
I'm thinking about a new bid-bot system not the old bid-bots
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Yeah, but that doesn't work like that. The moment you remove downvotes, people will bidbot for profit, and there is not much we can do against that.
My focus is not in remove downvotes, maybe remove free downvotes... maybe. But what I mean (and again, is not a long time think, it happens just right now) is let people bid in a "Blockchain bot", if bid (Steem) return to reward poll or burned, why not?
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We have that in "promoted" already and I believe they want to improve that in the future.
Right :) but let's face, promote doesn't give you rewards..
Anyway... I just hope this "downvote war" don't become a Steem war.
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yeah but people didn't use bidbots for promotions, or only rarely did, the vast majority did it for rewards
Non-ROI bidbots are cropping up. I'm waiting with popcorn to see if anyone actually uses them.
I never really looked at this place warzone, even back in the day when it was really bad. When I look around, all I see is people busting their asses. Steemit INC is crushing it lately with updates (I remember when people were up in arms that INC was not helping)
People use their downvotes, I remember when everyone was up in arms about people not using them.
People are getting paid, organically, for great content. One just has to click the photography/trend tab to see how far we've come, before it was all bid botted crap.
I think its easy to see the bad in anything, and vice verse. As a stakehodler, ive never been more excited about the future of Steem.
ANd SMTs and Communities will not remove "war" - you know who stops wars? the owners of the website, this is a decentralized place, so you need to clash sometimes if you want balance.
The next bitching you will here is about "elite communities" and SMTs that are controlled by overlords. Giving people power over who does what in a community is great, but that doesn't not come with 100% peace.
This is definitely going to be the case and already happens on the S-E tokens where there are stakeholders and owners who are policing, and some stakeholders trying to undermine the site.
The interesting thing is going to be when essentially anyone can start a community and will be responsible for managing and making it valuable. I think at this point, the real businesses will develop and grow to provide value for their endusers.
The successful will always be blamed for their position ahead of others.
How long has it been since the HF, 6 weeks? The effects still haven't fully shaken out yet. We have oldsteem programs and organizations still retooling. It could be another year or more until this all shakes out. But I take a look around, and I think we are off to a great start here.
Points and facts everywhere. But, a little wrong could cause havoc. While we are fighting for the growth, and the success of this Blockchain we all need to be reasonable in everything we do. I have been here for years, and I have invested my time, money, and energy to work with many nice projects. I launched a project less than 2 weeks ago, and I clearly started the purpose and how I planned to bring more people here with it. I couldn't think of anyway to get it to seen than to use a Bidbot. I did and many people love the idea, but it was amazing to see that I was faced with many DOWNVOTES( After stating in a comment that part of the payout will be burnt). This is where I know some people do things unreasonably. The post was not for gain it was for visibility of something I think could drive more folks here. If we are building we should build well.
The problem is, that the improvements regarding the trending page are subjective and that too many people were thrown under the bus. And not only people, but stakeholders.
With bid-botting, the difference was that most people buying votes, were simply doing it to generate more money and to sell it. Most of those users weren't big stakeholders, mainly leeches to get the most out of the reward pool, so it's fine if they're gone.
On the other hand, whether someone thinks @slowwalker's, @broncnutz's and others behaviour is appropriate for the platform, is subjective and opinionated. And I find it to be a very dangerous game to force stakeholders to have a certain belief. "Either you stop upvoting your friends, or we're going to burn your rewards to the ground". This mindset is harming the bond between stakeholders, which should normally be as positive and neutral as possible. With Bitcoin, Ethereum and most other coins, there's just one direction: forwards. But on Steem, it's super opiniated.
And if I were to be treated like @slowwalker, I would wonder whether my stake in Steem is appreciated enough. If it were an SMT, he could simply sell it and buy another SMT, all based on Steem. But with the main currency, he is forced to either adapt or to sell it for bitcoin/another altcoin.
I agree with what you're saying but I am not in the reward pool being taken away and forcing SMTs to be the only PoB on Steem. I will make a video explaining my thoughts better then I can in the comments. But you are exactly right at naming the issues, I just think the solution, while sounds great on paper, I don't think will work well in practice.
Now, if we are talking about removing the reward pool down the line, as the inflation shrinks and SMTs will be forced to step up. But I am not a fan of removing it until both SMTs are mature, and the reward pool inflation has become so low, that people are naturally forced into using SMTs more.
I understand your point and removing one of the key strength of Steem at this time is not the correct move. However, I think we're under-selling the passive inflation and we should increase the incentive for people to stake their Steempower. In the best case, with a dynamic staking period and increasing potential APR. (https://medium.com/@bytemaster/blockchain-governance-proposal-470478e42686)
I was looking over Dan's proposal. Was wanting to get thoughts from Steem witnesses on it. I don't agree with all of it but there may be so useful things we can pick at for Steem.
And this is the problem.The vast majority want absolute decentralisation based on themselves. No one cares about social media or use cases or creating a fairer global financial system, they just want to make as much money for them selves as possible. It's the greed and selfishness that's causing warfare as big stakeholders who don't understand that risky investments can fall as well as increase are too busy dictating to the rest what they will accept or not.
Your upvote/downvote analogy only holds true on a level playing field when both sides are evenly balanced.
Isn't personal sovereignty via stake actual decentralization? Atomic persons acting independently is the ultimate form of decentralization IMO. What else would you base decentralization on?
They can dictate all they wan't, it doesn't mean anybody has to listen. There are only two sides? It seems to me there are multiple camps, and balance gets achieved by various stakeholders coalescing in support of this and that. Sure there are a ton of rent seekers out there awed by wallet size who choose to coalesce with the group they feel will reward them the most in the short term, rather than taking a long term investment view, but that's a matter of personal integrity.
Short term or long term views are nothing to do with personal integrity rather personal circumstance.
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I agree with you @nathen007
Every flag against an account that others have rewarded increases the eventual payout to the largest Stake holder. Its no wonder they went to so much trouble to create the flag war mentality complete with Chain of Command.
It amazes me that so many people are still falling for it. Protect the reward pool lol
In addendum, what I deducted is that downvotes are used to marginalize users. And existence of downvotes is not necessary or needed.
Just like my first Post as minnow that went viral/trended and I got 434 votes or more which uplifted my spirit. But down the line, someone with a huge reward pool gave me 51% downvote
that drained the payout. And this account has no activity since it's creation.
Nevertheless such action won't waver my actions on this platform but motivate me to contribute more.
Well tell us the account name so we can see this wrong that has been done to you!
Account name @edriseur
Agreed on the no part. Voicing an opinion should be an accepted part of life. Sadly, we all have egos and that means we protect our tiny piece of the pie..
But on my good days I like to believe humans got to where we are today by a healthy dose of community, humility, and sharing resources.
As they say: it's not money that is the root of all evil, but the love of money..
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Knowledge + Time + Trust(!) = Acceptance :-)
You're not looking everywhere. Frustration exists, but it's not everywhere. I think the use of the term 'warzone' within this context of yours only adds to the sensationalism seen here today in this post, and as well as a few others here and there.
A small group of disgruntled members does not speak for everyone, they speak for themselves, and they speak loudly to garner more attention, so others join their point of view, bolstering their agenda. Not only do they want their way, but they will manipulate others in order to get it. That's how it all looks to me, as your typical outsider, looking in. I also see the other side (which really only exists within the words of the manipulators), and everything in between.
A great and thoughtful post, and I do agree with your last point having a warzone is not a good thing when we want to bring new people to the platform
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This is actually a well studied phenomenon. I wrote about it ages ago. The studies went something like this:
Person A given $10 - happy and grateful
Person B given $2.5 - happy and grateful
Person A given $10, then moments later has $5 taken away - disgruntled and annoyed
Person B given $2.5, then moments later given another $2.5 - incredibly grateful.
Human beings, we respond more emotionally to negative events than equivalent positive ones. It's built into our fabric. Some say it was a survival evolutionary trait since spotting your enemies early was vital.
I'm no exception to this of course, even though I'm aware of it. . I was pleased to be on a large Orca's auto-upvote for months, but not very pleased with what seemed like an auto-downvote campaign from a whale.
My example is not actually a great one, since the downvotes are actually personal, but you get the idea.
The thing is that people doing this vendetta also upvote themselves as they control some communities.
How do you explain that I have never been upvotes by OCD? In 2 years on Steemit? I must really suck...
And this happens to a lot of us. They say they don’t cross upvotes but they upvote their friends via their curating projects...
Sad.
Maybe back then there were more awesome content creators such as the makeup sisters for them to discover than us.
Indeed ! Maybe this is the case, but I see often the same authors being voted by the projects and the persons behind it.
Anyway ! This is life but they like to also downvote people not in their circle despite good content I.e @broncnutz, @jrcornel...
I don’t know these two accounts that well. But on my early days here, i got almost no support from either curie or ocd, i guess i’m just bad maybe. But lately I introduced some friends to join steem, who seems to get some support from different projects, which is of course a good thing to see.
That is a nice thing to hear ! Maybe they got better at helping minnows. Also I might earn too much per post now as my number of readers increased.
Well, this is life 👌
Maybe you have used tags that aren't seen by curators? Maybe there have been a lot of competitions at that time?
Curation projects like OCD and Curie have their own specific guidelines to follow. Maybe your content didn't pass the guideline. Not saying content is not good, but one of the common guidelines of these curation projects is being under-rewarded. Another thing that I know is both projects don't vote for crypto-related content and prefer original-content. We curators work very hard to spread our votes that are of course according to our guidelines. We use different methods to discover content like Steemlookup, manually looking at tags or "New" section, looking through self-promotion in Discords, looking at feeds for resteems, etc.
This is because their content still passes the guidelines.
I hope this clears it up. Cheers! :)
-hiddenblade from Curie
@therealwolf, In my opinion, no one is wrong and right here, we entered into the Highly Materialistic world and everything is measured in Monetary Ways and no matter how much we say that Rewards is Secondary aspect, it will become first at some point.
The most important point missed by many people is, no matter how much effort you put in your Content or Product, no connections then no visibility, so Steem is Social Media where connections and engagement matters and many lack it and inturn leads to the discussions towards the Bias Rewards, it's not on large scale but we are seeing Tiny War Zones for sure which shaking this Ecosystem occasionally.
And one of my experienced friend said that at this moment it's easy for Competitors to buy more Steem to spread negativity through Downvotes may be old Steemians will not bother with it but in my opinion if something like this happens then New Generation of Steem will going to feel in bad state in my opinion.
Have a wonderful time ahead and stay blessed.
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I share your summarized message but what is the solution? Currently it is a very dangerous zone - a lot good content creators - mainly smaller and mid-sized ones - leave as of frustration. I am a general "fan" of the ability to control the pool by downvotes but I am not a fan people are "called-out" as evil when they used or still use marketing services such as bid-bots. In the end the blockchain will be decided and dominated by the big boys and girls who own a lot stake or who have the luck to be honored with huge delegations. So for the time being one either has to be nice to these guys and agree with their methods aka "brown nosing" or you are out soon.
Warzone will not attract any investor or new users - but we will see.
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I guess that is why they say understanding is deeper than knowledge. Once we can understand, we are more able to accept.
War does not do anybody good. And the casualties - apart from the losing side, are the ordinary people who are doing their best to be a part of a great platform.
There are leaders and there are followers. Not all can lead and not all can follow. We need a good balance of leaders and followers on here to raise the status of the platform. Let's all be mature adults and talk things through. Let's communicate. Let's all play our part. The pie is big enough for all.
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@threespeak project gave me some hope. Otherwise i would be powering down/ cash out my Liquid rewards.
(Or finally start to upvote myself ;)
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