AskSteem: Are you going to make use of the downvote pool? Why or why not?
What many, me included, are seeing as something we desperately need on our chain to mitigate abuse and misused bids seems to be something others are completely not interested in using and feel like we don't need it and it just brings "negativity" onto the chain. So I thought I'd make a post asking people's opinions on it and briefly give my thoughts on the matter.
For the longest time there have been accounts who may or may not have bought stake or come in control of a lot of it and used this chain like a proof of stake chain where the content was just a placeholder and the care of it to be any good or to interact and use the chain as it has been intended went quickly out the window. Sure many attempted to downvote these users but the cost of it became quite big over time and especially compared to others only focusing on curation or selling their votes and growing through that. It was pretty much a lose-lose in many ways.
In my opinion there are a lot of authors and posts that deserve these downvotes, I see a lot of "guilds" that constantly reward the same users over long periods of time, autovotes that do the same thing, votetrading that does the same thing and all of it lead to low quality content. I see a lot of users saying that they will not use the downvote pool because they don't "believe in it" or that they don't want to face the consequences of retaliation. Is this really what we want Steem to be though? A safe space of vote-trading let's continue growing forever until the next bull run where we dump most of our stake and see to it that our distribution is crap compared to what it could've been if we hadn't just relied on not caring about it ourselves and letting others do it? It seems there are a lot of people here who just keep passing the "work" to others and riding on their efforts while they themselves continuously just keep passively earning and earning + dumping.
I'm personally looking forward to break up a lot of these cliques and safe spaces as the more I make use of the downvote pool the more rewards everyone else will earn. Of course I will be mostly focusing on the real abusers at first but I have a feeling a lot of that will quickly be removed and we'll be moving up the ladder and make earning Steem through post rewards at least require some effort than a selfie with a sentence. I'm mostly planning on retiring from posting or just post to burn some of their free downvote pool if they feel like retaliating but I have a feeling there will be a lot of accounts retaliating the retaliation too or at least countering it. I am hopeful that we've learned what just remaining passive has brought to our chain and that we'll act a lot more upon what we objectively consider needs to get downvoted a tad to be downvoted and not just pass on the work onto others while attempting to keep our hands clean. It's going to be an interesting experiment and I'm sure it will cause a lot of fuss and a few new enemies all over the board but hey, this is decentralization and the rewards aren't yours until you've received your payout. It's time those wanting to remain authors actually care about their posts, their commenters and other people on the platform than just jerking eachother's upvote buttons off constantly.
What are your thoughts on the 25% downvote pool?
I am an opponent of downvoter !!!
If you do not agree with the opinion of another whale, then these are your problems and keep them with you)))) I think so. Unless of course this does not apply to plagiarism! I for what would be downvoter only those users who are not honest with Steemit!
What are your thoughts on accounts like @haejin that bring no real value to our blockchain, has no interaction and possibly no views either. All he does is take part of the reward pool for himself without proving anything of value to anyone on or outside of steem and taking part of your and everyone else's rewards.
I would address the haejin problem myself by ignoring it.... in that, whatever haejin staked himself... he's basically just a speculator when he self-votes... it's the reward he gets for staking his money. If he posts garbage content, then no on else will upvote his material and he'll simply be treading water in the long run because the constant creation of Steem is built in inflation and he'll just keep breaking even on his stake if he continues to self-vote. Thus, he doesn't do any real harm... because only his subscribers actually have to see his posts (so it's not spamming me for instance). If some weird people actually find value in his stuff, well, that's fine, let them upvote and he gets paid just a little bit on top of his gigantic stake... drop in a bucket.
The problem happens when some other whale comes in and decides to create some drama by unleashing a bot army on any one who even has an opinion that differs slightly... such a whale using the excuse of "fighting bad actors" to justify actually being a bad actor. This supposed do-gooder whale has driven more people off steemit through his downvoting and account crushing actions than Haejin ever did by stupid market analysis posts that I never bothered to read or was ever troubled by... so what if he self-voted... the whole game is based on inflation so he's not actually making any money from self-votes. In fact, anyone who self-votes... should be justified in doing so to the maximum level they desire... since they "earned" that right.
I'm a nobody plankton (or whatever) and I don't have ANY spam in my feed because I don't follow spammers. So I have trouble seeing how downvoting spammers or plagiarists.. or whatever, does any good at all?
I feel like upvoting is the only valuable thing that happens on this chain. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how it looks to me after a little bit of time around this block.
I will continue to lease SP and start downvoting not only abuse, but also selfies with a sentence and highly overpaid content.
I hope bidbotted posts will be brought down to 1$ max, but I am quite sure that it will take months before bidbotted posts start getting regular attacks by the downvoters.
I wish Stinc would put an automated label on all bitbotted posts and a search function for that too.... that would help
I notice you do not speak of the fact that you got to where you are, SP and Rep, partly through leasing SP from MinnowBooster - how does that differ from buying votes through a bot? As a matter of fact, looking at your wallet, all I could see is those kinds of rewards, very little honestly earned through your posts and your own SP
Throwing stones at others when you live in a glass house is not very smart of you. ohhh...should I have flagged your comment? Aren't you lucky I hate flagging?
LOL. I honestly don't know why I am going to answer you about your ignorant troll post, but I will.
Buying huge upvotes on shitposts seriously hurts the platform and the reputation of steem, because all outsiders will see is the trending page filled with garbage.
Please tell me why leasing SP (while not selfupvoting 10 times a day) is harmful to the platform in any way? Am I upvoting shitposts for 100+$? No! Am I only upvoting myself 10 times a day? No!
Rep is not worth anything on this platform and will be reworked in the coming months anyway according to comments by STINC employees...
Maybe you hate flagging, but I don't.
I also will not comment on the rest of your reply, but, I am curious:
I have not seen any mention of this. If they are about to remove or alter the way it presently exists, then I feel both pleased and sad - sad because I have made delegations to help newcomers so as to raise them to over 50 rep (plus enough SP for them to make at least one or two posts a day), thinking I was helping them.
Oh well...ce la vie
I have been tempted to flag a number of unworthy posts in trending for a while now. I’d rather give those votes to more worthy authors instead.
With a downvote pool people will be able to hide better in numbers. Sounds kind of cowardly but it’s true. Sure everyone will have the same ability as well. I would not be shocked if my hatters come out of hiding and zero me out.
At least abusers if they are getting flagged by the masses won’t have the ability to fully retaliate without draining themselves and putting more effort into dealing with that then the posts they create.
The biggest issue I see is curation guilds/major projects not wanting to get their trails involved in down voting. So downvotes could become quite powerful with less people using that voting pool. Add in downvote selling and now revenge is easy to carry out.
I just hope this platform doses not turn into one massive witch hunt after another with its new downvote pool powers. Where the 1% zero out the other 99% as a way to make more money themselves and to force people to pay for “protection.”
Here's the deal most of us don't see that world of abuse that apparently some of you do.
Not sure if that says something about our exploration patterns on Steem.
I often wonder why is it some people seem to think Steem is so rife with abuse and then others just wonder what the heck they're going on about?
Also most people don't have a big enough vote to worry about "loosing a vote" to a downvote. I can see how the rich vote may feel about that. But for most people it's not really an issue.
And then even so if our vote isn't large then what is it gonna do to a highly voted post? Nothing... except make us an enemy? (And of a person that either has influential friends or the person cares way too much and probably knows they're doing something controversial so they're very on edge and ready for a fight... and most of us came to steem to escape the drama and stress we had elsewhere)
Personally i see abuse sometimes and i think hey i should downvote, but...
A. oh wait it's a new user and that would suck for many obvious reasons.
B. Or I think they have 0stu on their post so why bother?
C. Or I think maybe I'm in the wrong for downvoting and I should think about this more. If no one else is downvoting then what is it that they know that I don't? It's true many people can rush to assumptions and yet be wrong. I hope people think about it and accept that they can be wrong.
I tend to start with warnings. I don't follow people who have issues. I don't pay all that much attention to trending because it's not all that great of content to begin with. I don't have a large enough vote to do anything on trending besides make some enemies.
I tell you where i see crap posts that i would love to downvote... #steemmonsters or #spt hashtags. But i represent a company for the game and that would not be good for me to downvote there as a 3rd party company that is meant to support the whole ecosystem. However some of those crap posts on steemmonsters are people who feel 100% that their posts are valid and not just junk screenshots and repetitive non sense. Or someone doing a give away of a stupid 2 cent card. But they think hey people like it so they upvote their post to 10 stu which is funny to me... because again it's a 2 cent card.
But is that just my personal issue?
I'm not saying downvoting shouldn't happen... I just thought I'd write about some of our reservations.
Most of us are just not going to find clear cut examples of reasons to downvote. And if it's not clear cut... then downvoting might have the chance of making us look like the idiots.
Alone it won't do much, but if 100 dolphins use their 1 out of 2.5 free downvotes on that post there's no way the bid bot abuser is going to attempt to retaliate everyone, he can retaliate 1-2-3 people and how hard will it be for the others involved in the downvoting to counter the damage? This HF will only succeed if we all band together and downvote things that truly don't deserve the rewards they've gotten or bought their trending spot for.
No one is downvoting nowadays, there's barely any going cause most are just concerned with growing in stake through curation rewards so of course you don't see downvotes often today. That will hopefully change with the HF and normalize them a lot more though.
Of course warnings are nice "hey, do you really think you needed to buy votes from 5 different bid bots for this content?" and if they continue being the zaku or cbhartist who apparently can't get enough of the attention or are just using bid bots to somehow profit (who knows what's going on behind the scenes) then you'd move onto warning #2 which is a downvote and who knows maybe that'll create a chain reaction of other downvotes and the author will understand that in order to deserve that #2 trending spot they'll have to either try with better writing or content again.
The weird part today is that even if someone were to bid bot something super illegal/bad without every bid bot owner being made aware and removing the votes we wouldn't even have the power as a whole fucking community to downvote it. That's how much stake is locked up in bid bots.
Funny you mention steemmonsters cause I mentioned that zaku who promotes his SM tournaments before I read your comment all the way through.
I have nothing against people not using their downvotes or being the first to downvote something out of fear of retaliation, but they have to understand that them using their daily downvotes on legitimate content that deserves them to make trending and the use of bid bots better, the more they are going to be rewarded back from the rewardspool and long term as well for keeping this place clean. I am hopeful that many will become more active with their downvotes especially if they see many others on certain posts already - not trying to encourage ganging up on certain users but if it's done on actual shit posts then where's the harm in that.
I do expect there to come forward downvote guilds where you can let them use your downvotes with steemauto or the wise protocol and there may be some random retaliation going on as well but hopefully there will be some counter retaliation guilds coming up too. I know I'd delegate to something like that when I am in the position to, at least.
Sorry to get back to your comment so late, a lot of comments in here that caught me by surprise and had to find the time to reply.
I am not a downvoter. It is an option that has the tendency to be used based on personal grudges or automation instead of proper content reviewal. I've seen blogs being flagged for bitbot abuse that just gained a high reward and never used bitbots. I'd love to see a certified downvote crew democratically assigned that can downvote and just leave it to that. No more cowboys please...
Completely agree. This is the only way it would work to any level of efficiency.
This sounds like a very unique case. Also the grudges and making it personal part, why is it these special cases get brought up instead of the bigger elephants in the room that have been leeching out rewards from the pool and value from our chain in forever?
Yeah a nonbiased downvoting guild would be preferred and that each individual stakeholder downvotes nonbiased as well, similar to how curation should be they should not be votetrading with downvotes either on the same people constantly.
You have to look at it from a personal perspective. In this case from a smallish player: me. The indirect effect on your wallet by the leeching is longer term and feels less impactful. A personal grudge towards you based on whatever vague reason is hard to control and can instantly kill your steem career. People see downvotes, may assume something is up. I am very scared to somehow get involved in any flagwar-situations.
The leeching is a problem too, for sure. But maybe the medicine to cure the long term illness will kill the patient this month...
Even with 2.5 'free' ones coded in due to the issues of the past 2 years? Come on, live a little :P
not having a FREE downvote was never ever the reservation for downvoting for 99.99% of us. They fixed a problem that most people never had. Sure the rich folk were worried.
What was the reservation? Potential retaliation?
We lost our good actors to poor economics. I'm hopeful of an improvement but that's all it is at present.
Potential? :-)
There are some whales I would love to flag. Maybe I will start doing that soon ... and maybe, at the same time, that will be the end of my STEEM 'career'. :)
At least then I can keep earning by playing Steem Monsters, haha.
Yeah, we all know that any action you take, downvote, upvote, comment, whatever a whale decides to take offense at... could wreck you if you're a plankton. Downvoting does me, as a plankton, zero good.
Since you brought this up, let me share my view: Overall, we lose good actors based on demotivation... which is caused by not gaining any traction on posts that they spend a lot of effort on.
I believe that as long as it's hard to find good quality (under-rewarded) posts, the whole system will just keep making the rich richer.
Why? The majority of the users are very aware that if they upvote an invisible content creator, their "ROI" will not be that high. You see this in effect when a user is added to a whale's autovote, a lot of extra auto-votes are coming in soon in the following posts. Everyone wants to profit from the whale's big vote as a curator.
The solution? Make it easier for the tiny players to be discovered. It should be possible that even if you only have 50 followers, you get 200+ upvotes (and not just because @curie found you). If tiny players can structurally gain good rewards when they have something awesome to share, curation will indeed turn into "finding good quality first". Right now curation is mostly just "predict who will earn well".
I agree with this and it’s something that has always frustrated me, and why I’ve worked with Curie and then eventually made my own curation group.. as we lose such great creators as they go unnoticed. To me upvotes are great, but engagement is a big part too.
Curation currently for most has nothing to do with quality and just voting what gets you a return.. I find that sad.
I am curious about your opinion on how these frustrations of authors who spend so much time on content to then be ignored are also caused by seeing such minimal quality content rewarded so well?
I guess I have this hope that if the rewards were actually balance with using downvotes to not only fight abuse but counter the over rewarded, this would help the overall thoughts on rewards? My hope would be these creators would no longer see a poorly taken selfie with a sentence at $20+ and therefore the frustration they feel would be decreased a bit?
Just curious your thoughts on it.
I also agree with a group handling it with clear guidelines so it’s more consistent and not just some sort of grudge etc.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the Steempeak team actually gets it. This whole thing is a complete misdiagnosis. It probably won't do a ton of harm, but if people are thinking all the sudden "regular users" are just going to start downvoting people like crazy, you just don't get it.
I wrote my post in a new thread.
Giving a 'free' pass to just use a feature doesn't turn it better or an improvement to any platform. If there is a need to give anything would be more sp to new users that come to the platform and want to engage with all the energy they have but sometimes they can't because their bar is drain and can't contribute as much.
I really think @r00sj3 is right downvoting will only increase even more personal grudges and will not promote a better experience or a more curated content. That should be always done by elected people that can do that work properly with a strong sense of judgment, tolerance and above all respect for every part involved in it.
The 15 SP gift was costly, and the abuse taking place due to it had to be stopped. I have seen 10s of initiatives to fuel new accounts and don't think that is the reason they didn't stay - @paulag might have something on retention before and after the change - it has always been very poor.
@r00sj3 could well be right, no-one knows for sure. What is pretty clear though is that we have many openly taking their rent home with poor content knowing that in time, others will just follow their lead.
I do like what palnet and steemleo are doing with a centralised account, and as a reasonably good Steem actor, I've long wanted Steemit Inc to take a more active role in policing the network. Some will disagree, and some will disagree that steemcleaners (fueled by 2m SP via Ned) are always right with their downvotes.
We need a change, I'm hopeful this is a positive one.
^ This. Users downvoting each other for community moderation is not a realistic path forward, especially if this all scales the way we want. There will be some clear cut examples where it's warranted, ie plagiarism, or literally a one word post like "bloop" that then receives lots of bidbot votes. But a selfie is not abuse. A selfie is what a ton of the internet shares and enjoys. Downvote cowboys(I'm stealing this 🤣), especially those with a large stake, I think, will do more harm than good.
I support something along the lines of an anti-curation trail like @r00sj3 mentioned. I would follow that to do my part, but I won't be cruising around looking for an opportunity to be a hater while people are trying to have fun using the platform.
I rarely use flags now and am unlikely to use them any more in the future. When I have used them in the past it was because I felt there was definitely a need as the user was being abusive in some manner.
I never cared if that meant using my own VP to accomplish the rebuke to the user in question or not. If there was a need then it should be done.
I can't help feeling that those who think that a free flag or two should make a difference to their behaviour are rather selfish and entitled that they wouldn't have been willing to sacrifice their VP some to protect the system.
Content creators who have spoken up against giving up rewards to give more to those who autovote or simply race to vote first without regard for the actual quality of the content have been repeatedly labelled as selfish and entitled.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
I'm giving some thought to taking a page from @dreemsteem's method and using @tipu more after the HF so that when I appreciate content the reward goes to the creator. IF that makes me selfish and entitled.. so be it.
How would this even be possible when there's more stake locked up in bid bots than what is there to be used for curation?
well that is not going to change after HF21 ... people going to people and those bidbots will continue to make their delegators profit.
Looking forward to it. Right now i have reservations in flagging as it simply makes sense for people to vote the way they currently are. ie self voting
Until it is clear that there is profit in voting on cool shit and auto voting might not always be the best way, i will mostly leave it alone.
2.5 'free' ones from your account will be quite influential and I hope that you get stuck in to be honest :)
It's an easy one for me. Make it financially viable for me to vote for you, give me free down votes to help the overall economy, and i will play - it's in my nature:)
It's really the goal of the EIP. Free flags and a doubling of the rewards for a vote on someones content. Hopefully it'll be right up your alley :)
I am trying to understand why this post now. Why not before the decision was made? Or did the opinion of the majority not really matter?
I will not be taking part in the flagging game. I have flagged, but rarely and only if I see something very bad (a scam which can hurt others) - and if the poster shows me I am wrong, I instantly unflag.
I refuse to stand as judge over posts that do not meet my criteria, as I've seen that others do enjoy them. Also, I have seen flags by those like trashit, which were made because of political reasons (someone who mentioned he watches Alex Jones) or the post is anti-vaccine. The wording of the flag-comments on trashit are vicious or, at best, real nasty. He programmed his flag-bot in this way because he has been delegated over 25,000 SP and feels powerful, but I have not seen any good posts by this fairly new 'trash' account.
This is supposed to improve our platform?
The way I see it, we have a few choices, under the new regime. We all go ahead full steam and flag everyone we do not like, or else, we look at ways to stop others from flagging us.
Tying this in to the curating changes (taking from authors, not the 25% as it is-was, but 50% and, as was said in one of the posts by those in power, maybe at next HF we can go to 80% for curators and 20% for authors, because, as was said, authors are not important to steemit, only the curators are), I do not find cause to feel optimistic about the future of this platform.
I also would like to know how we can protect ourselves if we are targetted by some nasty people, can we, for instance set our setting to Deny Payments? Would that prevent flagging, or could they still flag so as to affect our Rep (this is I was told by someone else). Is it true?
As for the curating. I refuse to write stories, spend hours on them and then have a few of those who upvote me take the lions share. It is NOT as if the curators are using their own money and therefore deserve a big thank you. They are using common funds without cost to them, but because they think a post will do well and earn them money, we must increase the rewards to them? BS.
I know that of those who upvote me, most do so as a way of rewarding me for the post, or by some as a way of thanking me for supporting them when they first started on steemit. Those are the kind of reasons that evoke good feelings and help generate friendships, which makes the platform a nice place to be. Your way, I think, will bring about the opposite.
A sort of PS here: It also means I am going to have to withdraw almost all my witness voting, as most of them support the changes of this HF, even if only because they feel obliged to.
Which leads me to the question: Of the members with a Rep of 70 or above - how many of them have never upvoted their own posts, or those of another, so that they get upvoted by that person in return? How many have ever purchased a vote or promised, 'follow and upvote me and I will follow and upvote you'? But now, that they have high reps and strong SP, they want to ensure we cannot do the same as them? Why? Are we really meant to bvelieve they are being altruistic and acting for our own good? (sorry, but I am not that much of a 'snowflake').
I am considering denying payments for my story posts, only allowing them if I make a news or political post. I am certain that by my doing so, I will be contributing to the platforms by my stories, while not funding leeches (those who are not satisfied by the current 25%). I can get rewarded on some of the alternatives which have sprung up recently.
Higher curation rewards would make bidbots less profitable. People will probably self-voting less often.
I'm sorry, but though your intentions may be good, you are either young or know very little about human nature. Actually, you know it will not work out the way you say, which is exactly why every post I've seen about this HF and Flagging, they always talk about flagging those who self-vote.
You think you can create by force an Utopia, but no dictator has ever managed it and they will not manage it here either. People will be idealists for a while, but they get tired of it and revert to their natural natures.
Which is why I have been trying to convince everyone that this is wrong and that it will kill Steemit.
The only good thing that might come out of this is that maybe someone who has the knowhow is watching and seeing how Steemit went wrong, they'll devise a healthy and practical platform.
? There were plenty of discussions before such as the post by @vandeberg when he took a deep dive into the downvote pool. This comment is coming off as passive aggressive already off the gates and "you guys only care about yourself and not about the smaller users/majority" so not sure I want to bother reading the rest.
Please refer to my other reply just made...
why would you make it personal? How is that the only example you could think of when there's literally tons of shit posts on trending with 99.99% stake from bid bots behind their votes in an economy where the majority of stake is locked up in bid bots enriching the owners and delegators and yet everyone is crying about 50/50 being so bad cause it just makes the rich richer and ignoring the fact that even if it helps get some of that stake off of bid bots and back to curation or curation projects it will have done it's part and most authors will be better off because of it. On top of that we will have the downvote pool to make sure that whatever stake remains on the bid bots is used on things deserving the promotion and those misusing it will get their rewards removed fast and the returns the bid bots provide for delegators will be reduced thus driving delegators to further delegate to curation projects that return higher curation rewards because they go out of their way to find good posts possibly from new users.
If ya'll can't seem to see that all these changes, working together with one another, will be good for the platform and their authors, combined with using downvotes appropriately to downvote abuse such as the example above so that those rewards go back to the deserving users that don't get downvotes and if you're not alone doing the downvoting on an account but many follow you it will not give the downvoted account a reason to go out and retaliate on all the accounts, if they are a big user in power of doing that then it will get noticed and other bigger accounts will step up and counter their damage because there will still be way more voting power than free downvoting power.
Anyway, I still went ahead and read your comment but please try and be more openminded to the changes, things can't get much worse around here lately and these changes will surely not make them worse, they may not be perfect but we can only improve from there on out.
I admit you have not convinced me - not because I want to be difficult, but because all I see is a number of assumptions about the effect of these changes. Of course they have to be assumptions, since there is no previous history of such a situation on another platform, but I do not see a practical approach being adopted. For instance, make changes one at a time, so that you can clearly see when one of them is causing more harm than good.
I am trying to help someone in Venezuela. They have a low SP (even with my delegation) so they only earn something when I help - and a few others do so. I can see them being worse off now, for who is going to care about them? This last week the child got sick and was taken to hospital. The hospital did not have the medicines needed, so the mother had to rush off to try and buy some from a private clinic. They are already struggling to buy food, so this expense has knocked them sideways. When a post was made about it...of course Steemians rushed to help (I am being sarcastic). I will send some today, but it is not enough.
There are various groups helping Venezuelans, but they cannot help everyone; it is necessary that small but capable of helping people like me also choose to help one or two. My vote is 1c - so if I cannot send them something by buying votes, I cannot help - and I love the posts and effort being made so as to feel they deserve my support.
Keep in mind, if I buy them (or anyone else) a 5Steem voting package, I am using my money, which already belongs to me - yet you want to have the right to steal it (from my point of view it does remain theft, since I paid for it). That is one thing nobody seems to mention. You see someone gets a 10 or 100 Steem upvote from upvote bots, but that is not what was earned; most of it, maybe 90% is money taken out of earned money and by taking it, you are stealing money that does not belong to Steemit. Once the money is in my wallet, it is supposed to be mine, so I am being damaging, though you are right, Steemit does benefit from having my money stolen and put back in the pool.
Oh well, it was a bit of a rant but by replying I have assumed you wanted a debate and to know why I am not happy with what I see being proposed (and put into effect). Yes, it is what I fear, all these good intentions rely on theories by idealists without pragmatic attitudes or experience. We want it to work, so it will work.
Anyway, why get upset with me? I'm a small fish compared to you and whatever I decide,my influence is not likely to be felt....is it?
Not upset, you say this:
yet seem to have a lot less experience and understanding of the platform than most on this post. Again not trying to offend you but you're making assumptions and bringing forth examples that only happen a minority of the time.
Why do you think people would use their downvotes to downvote genuine posts that have "earned" rewards compared to having bought them from bots. "earned" cause nothing is earned until payout is through, upvoting and downvoting is only a tool to allocate the rewardspool towards accounts. Then yes you go on a rant talking about your altruistic endeavors, and even though I believe I've been rather altruistic myself even though I'm not in the best position either and currently powering down at these low prices, I do have to ask if you understand how the markets work. You realize for every Steem that gets sold there has to be a buyer, for most rewards you allocate to users that end up selling that Steem there has to be a counter investment back into the platform in one way or another. It can't just be "they are here and they are active, let's help them survive", what are other platforms or cryptocurrencies doing for people in need? Why is it that I only hear about a $60 dash donation and how dash is making big waves in venezuela on the internet but nothing ever comes out of Steem? Where is the marketing and the investment back to continue keeping this platform and relationship with Steem healthy so that it won't just dry up and bring everyone under considering how many people are relying on it. Well I haven't seen much of it, many like to complain about rewards yet have not remained invested. Many like to complain about changes yet only think about them from their own, often times shortsighted viewpoint.
There is this weird entitlement when it comes to Steem and at the same time the thought process of "someone else will take care of it". For every post that gets spammed in my DM's daily instead of using the share functions to share it onto other social media platforms and bringing in new users we would probably be doing a lot better. Yet most people just think about themselves and their short term gain. I'm not pointing this at the people you mentioned cause I understand their situation is dire but not many other Steemians are doing much to help the platform that introduced them to crypto, possibly changed their lives or if anything let them earn some rewards instead of making rewards out of them like most centralized platforms do. It's almost like no one deserves it to begin with, or at least that's what it has been feeling like lately.
So that was a counter rant to your rant, from someone who stayed powered up for most of my 3 years, powered up around 20k sp above $2 and is instantly being pointed at for powering down by other community leaders and rumors start to spread if i'm leaving steem for good without bothering to ask what's up or what I'm doing. That's Steemians for ya. You might be right that not much will change with the HF changes, as it seems in this thread most will not downvote, i.e. risk their cozy post rewards to downvote bid bot abuse that's just been taking their rewards while enriching owners and delegators for the longest time. Band together and see to it that deserving posts get the rewards and help the little guys get some rewards with the new curve. It might be that the negatives to the downvote pool will outweigh the positives, who knows, maybe that's just who we are and I guess then we will all deserve eachother at the bottom of the coinmarketcap ranks. One thing is for certain though that keeping these same rules going with the leeching of accounts such as haejin who has been using his buddy's account to self-vote garbage placeholder content that gives no benefits to Steem or kingscrown who doesn't bother taking longer than 5 minutes to write a post but invests all the time to get as much rewards as possible from anyone that gives in to his dms while votetrading with a delegation with as little skin in the game as possible or other votetrading groups that think we are going to get anywhere if we don't curate the way it was meant to and make that competitive instead of this safe proof of stake piece of shit that this blockchain has become with the same faces on trending every day and the same shit every day while everyone just thinks of their own ass no matter if it will cost everyone this opportunity to make something great off of Steem.
Anyway, not in the best mood so a lot of what I may have said might be emotionally driven, but at the end of the day who cares, it's not like there are many readers around today anyway and I haven't been one for caring that something will be "permanently on the blockchain" in previous rants either. I like to say my opinion and that's kind of how I'm feeling lately, if the new changes won't help us in any way then I don't really know, I'll probably still continue my attempts at distribution with ocd&ocdb, etc but part of me will be dead inside.
I spoke to a fairly large stakeholder recently who doesn't believe in downvoting and wonder if they could be swayed if rewards were removed from their content.
Also, grumpycat appeared earlier today, but has no vested stake, yet.
We have been long overdue a change, time will tell how this particular one pans out.
Any plans to use the mighty OCDB stake to remove pending rewards from the undeserved?
I will. To participate in a community like this requires balance on both sides of the scale. If everyone did their job and even kept a half eye on the largest abusers, the place changes dramatically.