My Concerns With Vote Buying Projects
With the introduction of @randowhale. Now we are seeing some similar projects such as @booster and @whaleshares where you can pay for a vote on posts. I am not saying I am against these projects because they are clever ideas to generate profit but I do have concerns.
We dealt with a similar concept in the early days of Steemit with @steemsports. It was considered vote buying and the community rejected this project where @steemsports branched to their own frontend but is also back around Steemit.
What will this do for content creation?
We create content for our blog posts and if other's like the content, it's rewarded with votes. From my understanding, the better and original your content is, the more likely you're rewarded on a post.
With the creation of these vote buying projects, does this cause content creators to really focus on creating original good content or does it create the mentality to post whatever they can and just buy upvotes? This is exactly what I am seeing happening and makes me confused a bit on the direction this platform is heading. These posts can be downvoted and earn less rewards but what if an individual pays @randowhale, @booster, @whaleshares, and so on?
The platform is growing and I wonder further down in the future, will it require to buy votes entirely? Perhaps this is something inevitable to happen.
Is this even a problem?
Some would acknowledge that this is a problem but others wouldn't consider it a problem. Something like the way the flagging system works, there's those that think it is a problem and needs to change, and others that think it works just fine the way it is.
There is the possibility of those that paid for a vote will not get their money's worth if their post does get downvoted and rewards go back to the reward pool to be re-distributed again.
Can this be changed in a way to create a better incentive to content creators? Maybe this will evolve on it's own over time and there is nothing to be concerned about.
If this is a problem, I don't have any solution to this at this time or if there is a solution at all but in my opinion, I could see this getting out of hand and cause some issues in the future towards content creation. I am not trying to attack those that run these projects but just addressing some concerns and to get some feedback.
What are your thoughts about this?
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Where will the social media be when it's not votes judged by humans with SP to gain visibility and popularity, but votes gained by buying for them... a pay-to-play buying votes system where more people want to sell their SP rather than give it away for free. There is already the autovote and bot thing where it's not even human consciousness voting on many posts, and the curation where people vote to get curation rewards, now this makes it even less about human consciousness actually evaluating content for content. Social media? In this direction? LOL
That's where I got confused on the direction of content creation and social media on here.
I think it dilutes the idea of rewarding content because we will just have to buy their votes. They are earning triple. Well I guess this is what business is all about.
That's what I am thinking... but it could work out well too. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
But they are giving too small rewards for a price of 2SBD just because of the intention of extending the service to wide range of authors. What if all the whales will be doing this business. What will happen to community?
My concern about these types of things is disclosure. As long as the “service” is disclosing this as a comment I do not take issue with it. It creates transparency, and it’s an interesting business model. A lot of people use this as an advertisement in getting attention to their post. Others use it as a way to reward an outstanding post they felt was undervalued. While even others use these types of things as a reward for a contest. Many interesting uses the community gets from these types of things. These people have found a way to add enough value to warrant what they are charging.
I can start to see this type of thing be an issue when there are hundreds of accounts doing this and those who can pay to play will. Until then it’s just something to keep an eye on.
Well you already see users that just write a few sentences and throw a pic and use these types of services to vote their posts. I do see the it helping others get noticed and reward contests but it is money we're talking. People can just put up a photo or write a few words and pay all these services at once to get a vote.
Yea we'll have to see how it goes.
Mostly definitely and then I remove my follow hehe. How many people are investing in SP just to self-vote only, or to run a service like these? That I find to be a more interesting thing to know more about. At what point will people start flagging because someone is just spamming out content to take advantage of these services. I feel there will be middle ground somewhere and the community steps in and deals with it. Just likes the people who spam out comments in their own blog just to upvote them all. With the last hard-fork it also slowed down things like this as well. These services had to readjust, and maybe that’s the way to resolving out things like this if the community speaks out against it.
Is there cool down on how fast you can upvote after upvoting?
Well said.
Yea since the latest HF, you only have 10 votes perday till your vote power drains dramatically if voting at 100%. The recharge time was 20% every 24hrs I think.
I understand that part but do I need wait 20 secs or 30 secs between doing upvotes if I have the voting power to do so?
should only be 3 seconds between voting. You usually see a notification when you vote too fast.
So there are two possible solutions down the road at least then. 1. Increasing the cooldown between upvotes. 2. Increasing the minimum the slider can go down to say 5%. While I don’t necessary agree with these those are two extreme ways of dealing with this if it gets out of hand.
Don't think we could increase the time between votes, They would have to change the transaction time since when you vote, it's a transaction and the Steem blockchain has a 3 second transaction time and I don't think anyone wants to make it slower.
I'm not sure if I understand what you're saying. The slider can go down to 1% and you can vote down to 0.05% straight on the blockchain...
I don't understand how or if this is a solution for anything...
-"We create content for our blog posts and if other's like the content, it's are rewarded with votes."
That's not what i see. What i see is whales posting content, any content and it gets instantly up voted to the sky.
On the other hand, you have new users trying their best, posting amazing content and it gets completely ignored.
Most obvious way to see this is to check the HOT section, you see some posters there with rank in the 60-70 posting 15 minutes youtube videos that get up voted in the hundreds of dollars within 5 minutes. They are instantly getting up voted without anyone even looking at the content.
Seems from my point of view that steemit is more like, scratch my back and i'll scratch yours. When you have thousands of followers it doesn't matter what you post it seems, you automatically get up voted.
I understand everyone started a newbie and build their following over time but that doesn't excuse the facts that some of the higher ranking member of this site are just up voting their friends without even looking at the content.
I don't think that's fair.
Well the thing is this system is Proof Of Stake(POS) so the more stake you have, the more influence you have on the platform. If large stakeholders want to vote their own posts and vote a select few, they have the right to do so. It is within the limits of how the system is designed.
You wouldn't just give money to someone you don't know in real life right? You would build a relationship and trust with a person before you give them money.
They can give a boost to what people see are good posts not getting much attention, but they can also be abused as well and encourage simple vote-buying.
Yea it can go either way.
I am kind of concerned about the same issues, but being new, I am just going to focus on writing the stuff that I wanted to write!
Yea just do your thing @stover.daniel.
We need a bit more time to see the consequences. I was excited to see these projects in action, however I still haven't invested a single dime in any of them.
Yes, we'll have to wait and see. Thanks for the feedback.
I use randowhale, I can see where you're coming from but I don't think it's harming the steemit community in any way.
I didn't say it's harming the Steemit community. Well the thing was in the early days of Steemit, the community was against vote buying. Now I see less effort in content creation and people just paying for votes. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this because like I mentioned in the post, these projects are clever ideas to profit from. Just sharing my concerns.
I think it's the same as paying Google for ads. I still have yet to learn how things work here though so my opinions don't really matter.
By the way, I have found a few plagiarised posts. Is it a good idea for me to flag those down? Thank you.
Yes, flag those and tell everyone.
A lot of people are buying upvotes atm. And more so during these down times. It is not a totally useless strategy, but should it be done right now when the SP is so low and the reward pools are so drained?
There is a huge discussion on this thread. Come and give your point of view :)
https://steemit.com/steemit/@yoda1917/randowhale-booster-worldclassplayer-users-just-halt-for-a-moment
Well, currently most of those vote buying gives a negative ROI and My concern is that people will spam posts and not focus on content creation or only comment a few words and use these services(which I currently see). Most of these strategies is money focused and little to do with value focused.