Responding To An Open Letter Addressed To Me

I surprised to notice someone (@sukhasanasister) had written an open letter to me on the Steem leadership question. I'll respond to it here. I'm responding to it to provide education to new users.

Dear @markkujantunen,

I was very interested to follow this discussion regards structure/leadership (elsewhere prior to this post of yours on leadership) and noted how much bitterness there is towards so many of us Steemians for reasons hard to fathom. Can't we all brainstorm about essential issues with a bit more stretch to our frustrations? (I found your comments reasonable and understand your desire to write your own well-argued post.)

Thank your for your feedback.

Every Steem post needs a picture, so here goes.

I can only write as content writer and commenter. I find interpreting the wallet-side of it not worth my while at this point in time. I have witnessed much grief come of it. The battles often appear to financial twits like myself to have been pre-arranged looting expeditions cloaked as banal vendettas. I never took it very seriously until I discovered people with real money invested got really damaged by this game. Getting flagged myself now, since this new fork allows for pain free downvoting, makes no sense to me unless it can be backed up by constructive criticism, and allow me a chance to defend/explain my post in the attempt to reclaim my reward as yet.

You are getting downvoted by tiny accounts that downvote users at random such as @camilleresteemer. Such tiny downvotes are of no consequence. Pay no mind.

Downvotes in general are an integral part of Steem. Steem has stake-based voting to decide rewards a piece of content will earn inside a seven-day voting window. Votes are a way for stakeholders to add or remove pending rewards from a post or a comment. They are also used to remove financial rewards from spam and other types of abusive content.

Abusive downvoting by large accounts happens but downvotes on specific content cannot be used to loot anybody. The protocol does not award the downvoter with any financial awards. Abusive downvoting is best countered by the community doubling down on their upvotes on content they see as under-rewarded because of abusive downvotes. That is being done by the curation projects @curangel and @ocdb and also by individuals such as myself.

It feels to me that it is all one none-too-sophisticated set-up by a bunch of techies who aren't very clever really. Not clever enough anyway to make Steem interesting and profitable. There is no plan or projection clearly. Maybe they are only ex-gamers who have got bored of gaming? What goes on here resembles school yard fisticuffs.

When you have stake-based voting without any centralized control, conflict is one of the things you can expect. It's up to the community to organize itself and develop ways to counter abuse on a voluntary basis. That is what we've seen.

If you don't like this set-up, there are plenty of centralized platforms controlled by a single entity for you to choose.

So, you consider curiosity as motivator to stick around in a Mad Max kind of ecosystem. Possibly. Desperation and misinformation otherwise qualify. There are bloggers here who hope to find serious sponsorship for their outside life.

What I wrote was that the current Steem user base tends to be made up of pioneers who have sufficient curiosity, ability to think in terms of potentials and tolerance for discomfort to put up with a very immature platform. Steem as it is not for the majority, yet, because the masses want a smooth, frictionless experience on a polished platform that allows them to use the platform for whatever they enjoy doing.

Otherwise, there are wise old birds, who have been around the block a few times and have become investors here precisely because they are both in for an adventure, but also value independent free expression on a human scale and of a generous nature. They understand Steemit can only work if external sources are invested (both financial and some kind of content quality control, impossible to manage by bots: so intelligent/professional people). They have left after having been robbed blind (of their fiat coin) by downvotes based on nothing. In the more ugly cases, their sense of justice will dig them in deep in the trench warfare of trolls and it will leave them resentful and scarred. Hope in a better world dashed once again.

There is no way to rob anybody's fiat by downvoting. Downvotes can only reduce pending rewards on a piece of content to be paid out in SBD, STEEM or Vests (Steem Power). I've seen content being inappropriately downvoted by large accounts but I've also seen successful efforts to heal damage done in that manner. Apart from author rewards, one can also earn by curating renting out one's Steem Power to projects or individual users.

Of course, we need greater numbers, but attracting those who cannot write blogs is pointless. It's the name of the game on a blog-social media platform. Tweets and albums of pics belong elsewhere.

You're entitled to your opinion. But stake has decided otherwise. Photography posts as well as videos are very popular and well supported on Steem. DSound is a Steem front end that allows for posting sound files. It's popular among musicians. The chain does not store binary files. For that purpose, DTube and DSound store binary files on IPFS, a decentralized storage system on the internet. Image files can be hosted on it, too, or on various centralized content delivery platforms, or on servers owned by the Steem front ends themselves. That's a damn good thing because without those front ends bring a lot of traffic to Steem.

I don't think that curiosity factor can ever be stimulated by upvoting. Some things I wouldn't read for love or money. I also don't think Steemit stands strong by its tags or tribes or whatever categorises us into communities that are most likely to commit to eachother and the Steem Mission (otherwise undefined, to be honest, for most of us out on the platform doing our humble social thing wondering almost always: What am I doing here?).

It's clear that the money can never be the main attraction for the average user in the future. There can simply never be enough of it to go around. The future average user will have to be a consumer whose time spent on the platform will be what is monetized.

Can we have mediators who are not leaders and don't set trends? Who merely encourage the human momentum which otherwise, as everything else on the Net, is going to be taken over by robots and programmes? There are some maters here, but I must say, once they hit high reps (70 or so), they tend to all become ever more commercially inclined or covertly operative. Hmmmm....good thing? Inevitable thing? More pressing, however, is my question how is a reputation made and broken: what can one do to deserve a ranking promotion? And inversely, how to avoid ending up with minus rep?

Reputation is simply a function of upvotes and downvotes received. It depends on the reputation of the upvoters and the downvoters, too. Too much attention is paid to reputation. Prior to Hard Fork 21 in August, bid bots would give a lot of very large paid upvotes which distorted reputation. My advice is not to take high reputations too seriously.

Reputation is initially set at 25. Reputation below 25 or particularly negative, is indicative being a heavily downvoted abuser. I would never click on links posted by someone who has a negative reputation. A lot of phishing scammers have been downvoted to oblivion by the anti-abuse projects.

The community impetus, surely, can only be crafted in a forward-thinking fashion out a genuine belief in people and their community building and maintenance skills (human kindness) not financial gain? Anyone who doesn't understand behind the scenes people could get very rich from our simple writings is naive. But the world needs a bit of innocence, meekness and simple paddling about for R & R. The only structure I am interested in would be one that makes being on Steemit even doable: i.e. minimally rewarding in the sense that you have a loyal membership/audience to whom you start to tailor ever better. Must we all form our own tribes, perhaps? I don't think the illusion of tightly knit families is going to move us away from that mobster vibe that tends to hang around here on Steemit.

It's entirely possible to stay away from drama on Steem. (Again, Steemit is not Steem.)

If you think you're getting exploited here (how?) by the very basic mechanisms of this platform, I think you on the wrong platform. But I will ask you one thing. How much do you think this post of yours could've earned on Blogger or Medium, for example?

We don't need another shark pool, I don't think. People have to make up their mind if they want to connect or get rich. I was hoping there might be some kind of morality code amongst Steemians ruled predominantly by the belief that Free Will is holy. Not the kind of freedom to manipulate others (which cannot be a free idea in the first place but is always a response to restrictive personal negatives).

One difference between Steem and centralized platforms is that this is a blockchain where the results are visible to the whole world. Everywhere else, everything happens behind the scenes.

Many like me plod on very happily just doing what we love to do: share our lives in the hope to support, uplift, exchange energies, shake up to wake ourselves up and then shower ourselves with kindness. Until an invisible management and unforseen activities disrupt our kindly mood. I hope them upstairs don't forget that you don't want an angry mob with pitchforks on your hands... If Steemit collapses it will be because of the users refusing to be used any longer.

I would like to see creative writers and community facilitators get something consistent for our time as loyal product creators in our own right. 277 votes on Friday night mean nothing if you get 7 every other day of the week. It tells you that your are insane to even be here. I won't buy exposure (curation trails) because how would that tell me what I am worth as a content provider; how does that form a true audience off which I can spin further material? As a creative writer/artistic wordsmith I was hoping to find a community that would organically create a journal of its own existence.

Then create a community. The blockchain protocol does not stand in your way. If being voted on by curation trails every now and then is an offense, you can ask them to never upvote you.

Instead you end up feeling dissed in a system that does not aid you to stay in touch with your willing but forgetful readers (the feeds are too long);

The upcoming Communities feature will make it easier for users with shared interests to discover each other and be discovered. For further information, read @steemitblog.

and also toyed with by management.

What management?

Recently, anybody and everybody has taken to flagging the most innocent or seriously crafted (entertaining) posts. Can't say I am curious about the motivations behind such human (amoral) behaviour.

That's hyperbola.

If you're talking about microscopic downvotes from @camilleresteemer or accounts like that, just ignore.

Generally, I advise everybody to accept downvotes as an integral part of the decentralized decision making process as to how much a piece of content should be financially rewarded.