Thoughts on Trolls and Vote-Buying

These are my thoughts about trolls and vote-buying (I do not mean trolls buying votes .. two separate issues). Steemit seems to have solved one, but not the other.

Trolls

As far as I can tell from my vantage point in the minnow pond, Steemit is structured in such a way that trolls are almost completely absent. If you want to troll, you're just not going to be successful here and you'll end up leaving. I don't think this can be attributed just to the type of good people in the Steemit community, although that must be part of it. It seems that the very nature of the platform greatly reduces the trolling behavior. Am I right? I don't quite understand the dynamics of this yet, but it must be a function of both down-voting and the fact that real money is involved here (... if crytocurrenices are "real" money is the subject for a different post). No reasonable person is going to pay a troll for trolling. This is all very good. Or, have I just not encountered the trolls yet?

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^{Photo by Sandra Carmen Maschke (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) via Flickr found here.}

Vote-Buying

Unfortunately, vote-buying seems to be rampant on Steemit. Full disclosure: I am engaging in vote-buying currently, as you will see from the replies to this post and some of my other posts. I acknowledge that this is not great behavior, but you know what? It is fun. Also, am I missing something, or is it free too? I have not been using the platform for long, so correct me if I have misunderstood how this works. In some recent posts, I spent about 7 SBD on buying votes. I am seeing about a $10 return (before dividing 75/25 between author and curator), almost all of which came from vote-buying. As an author, I can expect to receive at least $7.50 back in rewards (with $10 showing on the post). At worst, I'm breaking even, but more likely I am slightly ahead because I will also get some of the curation rewards if I upvote my own post. Interestingly, it's not even about gaining followers so your posts are popular. Rather, the activity itself is profitable, even if no real people view or upvote your posts. Under these conditions there is strong incentive for vote-buying to run amok. Is that not what we are seeing on Steemit now? To eliminate vote-buying, the platform needs to be tweaked to make this activity unprofitable. Perhaps, there are technical reasons why this just is not going to happen. Thoughts?

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^{Photo by Dean Terry (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) via Flickr found here.}

Yes, call me a hypocrite ... I will be buying votes on this very post. My new motto "Shamelessly buying votes until further notice". To make this more interesting, at the bottom of each post I will show the amount I spent on vote-buying (I will update each post after-the-fact with this info). I think this might be interesting and maybe even spark a healthy debate on how to deal with this negative aspect of Steemit.

I would certainly like to hear your thoughts on both of these issues. Quite likely, these are subjects that have been discussed ad nauseum elsewhere, so forgive me if that's the case.

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@banjo, I look forward to your comments which always spark riveting conversations. Hey, you've had a bit of an attitude lately. Don't make me switch to a nicer bot.

My motto: "Shamelessly buying votes until further notice"
Amount spent on this post buying votes: 12.001 SBD

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Edit approx 1 hour after initial posting:
When I posted this initially, I sent money to 6 different voting services totaling 12.001 SBD. The post now shows $16.82 in rewards with 4 of the 6 voting services having responded. My author reward should be about $12. I'm breaking-even already with two of the services still pending.

Have real people looked at this post? Not very many ... 7 so far.

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Cheers!