The sad truth about hardfork 19
Are you among those who got goosebumps from quadrupling the value of your vote? I was. Finally the meaning of the slider made sense. Power drunk, senseless, handing out cash.
When I started out in march, all steemit was a blur. Some things I did payed better than I thought. And some things nothing at all. My vote was a joke. "Curation is important", they said. So I voted and voted, knowing nothing about the degradation of my vote power. I could notice though that it payed very little. All that mouse sickness for nothing. My posts, in the other hand payed surprisingly well sometimes.
Time passed by and I started to continuously produce a one-cent vote. A revolution! I could actually reward someone spontaneously! I was thrilled! I got a slider that I didn't understand much of. Why would I pulverize the one-cent vote? It didn't make sense. I was on a roll. June was a very good month and I got shit done!
Enter HF 19
Things get crazy! My one-cent vote was suddenly 20 cent! What! Crazy! Yes, I even think it reached 24 at some point when the reward pool got flooded. Any idiot would be thrilled. Myself included. But something was not adding up. Here is the naked truth about HF 19 in retrospect:
Graph courtesy of @jesta and steemdb.com
You see that spike? It's actually my birthday. Which coincided with HF19. The earnings nose-dived!
Have I changed much? No! Do I shower less? No!
It's the hardfork, stupid!
Yes! And no! It's partially right. June was an excellent month. For a particular reason which is unrelated to HF 19. But boy was the return to earning next to nothing hard. Things had to be done or abandon ship. And I do reasonably well at the moment. Thanks to some proactive measures.
And this means what?
I don't have a definitive answer to it, but there is something I have noticed. The community spirit is almost gone. The people that once stopped to chat and throw some votes, they are gone. They have been replaced by scavengers begging for votes, follow and to read copy-paste recepies for curing ear infection using garlic (true!).
I'm more cynical than before the fork. I have to be. Otherwise I would have scavengers to deal with 24/7.
This is the beginning of the end!
I plan on writing a row of critical articles covering the steemit society. We are not at the end yet. But we can soon be there. The steemit that I once knew is no playground to excel. It is a cynical space where the the amount of dollars you can squeeze from your mouse defines who you are.
So sorry, @jerrybanfield fans. You are deluded. The sad truth is that a shallow YouTuber excels with a totally false presentation of what steemit is, is appalling. Jerry is selling something. Don't get fooled.
Steemit is a good idea, but it is about to grind to a halt in its disconnect from reality. The reality you can see in @jesta's graph.
This is in part inspired by @timcliff and his writings on HF 19. You get the straight dope from me, Tim. Numbers don't lie. My vote might be more powerful, but steemit was a better place. This is the beginning of the end. The beginning of tyranny and centralization.
As soon as the price of steem goes back up, so does the value of our votes! I don't think steemit is going anywhere but to the moon! People will be milking this cash cow from now until the end of time!
While I agree with you I think funkit is not worried about the value of the upvote very much and is stressing on making sure that good content will be the USP of steemit which is the only way for blogging platforms to grow. One way of addressing this would be to promote resteems and make it part of curation rewards
Keep in mind, Steemit won't be a small crowd of 10K users that get off to each other like a large family, after the first year.
Now the growing pains start and we have to find our way past the 100K user mark, to 1M. That's going to be very painful before it gets better.
Meanwhile, will people want to stick around, just to see JB videos, they could be watching on YT?
I think not.
Steemit needs to be more grassroots, than just a bunch of "key influencers from YT" stopping by to post their vids. @ned
Personally I don't think we will get to one million. Not active users anyway. The decay will see to it that they drop off before it gets fun. There will however be a growing number of middle class users that can afford to buy influence and settle in that way.
I think Jerry Banfield is the worst kind of advertising there is. Because he is portraying a disconnect from the real users reality. That reality means not understanding a thing of what is going on and wasting time that would have been better spent out in the sun.
My own little grassroot project https://steemit.com/art/@funkit/the-steemit-streetart-challenge-5-the-peoples-choice is suffering again. We can hardly decide on a winner. I have to shut it down if we can't. And I relate it directly to HF 19.
Please do not shut it down, it is so much fun, even if there are no prizes it would be a great place for people to share street art.
Please tell me about the old days of Steemit. I'd love to hear the stories.
wow that read put some different perspective over me and a bit of a dark cloud. I hope to see a turn around for the better, I dont see the spirit dead yet, but this resonates
You get the straight dope from me. And there is more shit to come. We have to stop the dumbing down of a great idea.
maybe we just need to steer the dumbing down part in another direction, there are flaws here all over the place but some very intelligent minds who I dont think are ready to cave in or lose to the shitheads!! lol
I worry about the younger generation, those who has no chance in hell to excel like I did without doping. It is the topic of a future rant.
Been here a year and 1500 followers don't mean nada!
I did a post about Jerry yesterday... I'm with you there.
I forgot to mention followers. A good topic for a new rant. I'm not used to followers and true, they don't make much noise. The vast majority at least.
I better go and read your j b rant.
Something like .1% of my followers vote, maybe my posts are crap but that's a low %!
Not so much of a rant, just making fun of his recent post series. Partly for half nakedness, but mainly that he's saying he's made 2 million selling courses on ways to make no money online!
I just joined your 99,9% dead followers. I'm a terrible follower, so I keep the followed to a minimum.
Haha awesome, looking forward to the very occasion up-vote then!
So how long left for steem then? Think we'll get to $5/Steem?
Don't hold the hopes high. I am a terrible follower. if you are a good upvoter on the other hand, I might let a machine upvote you all the time. The only reason I bother to stay is that rewarding loyalty is in fact learned quite quickly. At least for some. It's not very nice, but it is better than 15 cents for up to 3 hours work. And sometimes days of planning.
I hope steem goes to 0.5. So we get a generation that know how it was to earn it. Trouble is nowadays the kids are taught to buy their influence.
I run steemvoter from time to time but like to curate manually too - not for the pathetic rewards mind! I'll add you in, may start it up again today.
And even more... I haven't seen any improvements on the user pov. The site still looks like one that i programmed at the beginning of my studies.
With capable developers, I wouldn't worry too much about that. I think it has got better since I started. A little bit more responsive at least. But of course, we can't just rest in beta for eternity.
All efforts going into a "mobile app" that may not really serve the purposes of a "blogging crowd". (?)
@ned
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STOPDude, I've been meaning to make a video about this! But I have mentioned it in a few. I am by no means "long" on Steem at all. I don't see it sticking around. Heck, I'm more excited about Bitconnect, lol.
While I don't share your cynical sentiment, to me, it just boils down to facts. I've only known about steemit for a month and from what I saw initially, it never spoke to me as something long lasting... not in its current state. After putting over a grand into it to see where it goes, it's worse than what I thought at first notion. Mainly due to the oddly depreciating account value not in coherence with the price of steem.
I've been worried there was no place for cynicism on Steemit. I've been trying to make everything Positive with a capital P. Problem is, a lot of my humor is ironic or sarcastic, and that can come off as curmudgeonly on here.
Agree with most of your points. I think promoting resteems and making it a part of curation rewards will rebalance the things and good content will naturally float to the top.