Why I Left Sndbox ++ You Are In Danger From Vote Buying on Steem

in #bots6 years ago (edited)

I recently left @sndbox as a result of a disagreement over vote buying. I was concerned that the group's main structure is this: You send 40 SBD per month, and you receive three votes per week.

At first I loved this group because, as an "incubator," it wasn't about vote buying . It was about mentorship, support, community, etc...

Unfortunately, after about 8 months in the incubator, I simply felt that I was not getting any mentorship or useful advice. It felt like more of an upvote support group, to be honest. There were good projects going on, but I asked myself: "Would people pay for this without the votes?" and I knew the answer was no.

Therefore, I left sndbox.

Walking Away From Your Biggest Whale

It wasn't easy. I left immediately after voicing my concerns, for better or worse, in the Slack chat.

I left behind two weeks of votes, because I finally realized that I couldn't accept them while staying within my ethics. The vote support from sndbox had already diminished drastically, so this wasn't as big of a cut as it would have been perhaps a few months prior. Nonetheless it represented an immediate loss of about 30% of my steem income.

The hard part isn't the loss of money. That part is kind of hard, especially since I'm so poor that I skip a few meals here and there. But I'm used to that and could give half a fuck for all I care, so long as I'm pursuing my goals.

My frustration is two fold:

(1) Because people are blinded by money, cool shit stops happening. This is a major risk to Steem.

I am very frustrated by the hype on this platform. People can't find the time to criticize ideas, to be humble, to slow down. Instead most people seem intent on gathering up as much reputation and clout as they can.

This was extremely true in Sndbox. I craved feedback, I craved help in fashioning good ideas, and I just wasn't getting it. I was surrounded by a lot of "yes people," who would enthusiastically support ANY idea I had. That may sound nice, but it isn't helpful. I want a sports team, not a family, when it comes to getting shit done... and I can't be part of a performance-oriented group where the bad ideas & execution are treated "politely" as opposed to honestly.

For the record there are many great projects within Sndbox. I just didn't feel like the organization as a whole was making me a better person.

(2) Vote Pressure May Reduce Creativity

I started to make content based on what I thought was most likely to get me a bigger Sndbox vote, rather than what would make the best impact. This was a hugely negative incentive, because in the long term, the only sustainable thing is to reach a large enough audience to decentralize your financial support network. If one organization's vote determines your "success" on a given post, that is actually really dangerous as you develop your content unless the organization is extremely good at developing young Steemians.

For the record I believe @curie is the gold standard, they are an absolutely incredible "minnow support" project with proper incentives and NO vote buying. Study Curie.

We need Steemians who understand that the best way to succeed on this platform is through hard work and a good business plan. Not by simply buying the biggest votes possible.

Vote Trading Will Exist But It Could Be Better - and I'll Keep Sharing My Experience

In a perfect Steem, a vote trading ecosystem will exist, but it must exist in a way that cultivates high quality content and it can't be a scam.

Anything where spending money to receive more money by votes is the core and main driver of value is a dead end. I cannot distinguish it from a scam, to be honest. Whenever you simply spend money to buy money, its a scam. FOR THE RECORD, to avoid "reading between the lines" -- there's nothing wrong with profit, in fact I believe profit is more of an ethical good, helping people find valuable work to do, BUT, but when user A buys a vote from user B, and the vote is worth more than they pay, and that's the full transaction, this is not a commercial transaction, it's an unsustainable system that will devolve into chaos.

Whatever we do, I hope that Steem finds a sustainable and long-term economic system that works. I'm still optimistic about this place but I'm the first to admit that we have problems.

And since I don't have much money, in fact I have very little SP right now as I double down on paying my credit card debt to reach net worth $0, all I can do is contribute valid ideas and information to the conversation. I will strive to do so in as honest and useful a way as possible.

What's your take on vote bots right now?

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Very admirable position. Great ethical example, Matt.

I think there still is a future for Steem, a healthy future also financially for many hardworking contributors. But we basically need to organize it ourselves and make it happen.

I dislike that too many people nowadays don’t dare to call a spade a spade anymore. There’s nothing wrong with negative feedback, as long as there’s still a constructive element (or delivery) in it. From constant confirmation we do not learn, only inflate our own ego.

Again, hat off to you! \m/

Thanks man! I agree that we need to make it happen for ourselves. For me right now its a little tricky, and you might feel similarly, since I don't have the kind of resources that would give me a voice in the "upper echelons" of steem society. I know a few people but meh.

For now all I can think is the more conservative approach: Enrich myself while maintaining strict ethics, seek opportunities to influence where I can. I'm enjoying your posts too as they are always a different viewpoint and challenge me to think. Cheers dude!

I think that the automation that is taking place on Steemit (vote selling and buying) is ruining everything. A few days ago, I transferred 5 SBD to one of the upvote bots to see how much I would make. I got a ~10 SBD upvote in return, so I can't say that the ROI is that huge.

So what makes people spend money on upvotes? I guess most will say that buying votes can get you more exposure. However, I have the feeling that exposure to the trending page brings nothing else but spam comments. I never make it to the trending page, and my posts are full of good and well-thought comments. Open a trending post, and you'll see that it's full of shitty comments.

I really hope the development team changes something with the next hard fork because the current situation is unsustainable.

Anyways, thanks for sharing this, dude! I hope you pay back your debts as soon as possible.

If your figures are correct, I'd say you did quite well on the bot vote purchase. You doubled your money.

  • In the real world if you have a store and double your money, that's a pretty reasonable ROI. But then you have all those expenses such as rent, utilities, insurance, loss due to theft, ... ...
    • Even if you get back your original SBD and power up with some steem, it's actually a good deal. That would be self-sustaining and powering up is the bonus...
      • and that's why people are doing it...

Well, the upvote was double the amount I paid for it, but then you have to consider that some of the rewards went back to the curator (the bot). And what's left was split between Steem Power (which is not liquid) and SBD, so I think I got paid a bit less SBD at the end. Anyways, you are right - it's still positive ROI.

You make good points Dan - the kind of money you can make from buying/selling votes at the small scale isn't very exciting to the kind of person who regularly earns hundreds of dollars or more per paycheck.

On the other hand I have to agree with @wizardave that it's enough an ROI to be a HUGE incentive for many people. I mean it must be a strong incentive given how much vote buying and selling occurs.

Thanks for your thoughts guys!

So much this! " Vote Pressure May Reduce Creativity"

I see nothing but examples of this on my feed every day. Most people are just trying to push as much content as they can that is pure crap so they get more votes.

It's a shame.

The phrase that struck me in your post was "business plan" as in "have one". The advertising for steemit isn't great. Lots of people have spoken about the Trending page. The other thing that is problematic is the external promotional message running along the lines of "have a voice, make money doing it." Some people are going to do that, either by luck, higher investment, previous reputation or ... having a good plan. But for most people, even with a plan, it is going to be like any other start-up business in any other environment - hard work with no guarantee of success.

People who are doing curator/mentoring type stuff put in a lot of hours. Some of them, I don't how they manage it. So I was relieved when I learned that there are different models where their work can be rewarded. I don't know @sndbox, so difficult for me to comment but I admire the proposition behind @steembasicincome. That project isn't offering mentoring support or validating/curating quality, but it does have an element of mutuality and reciprocity so it is in every sponsor's interests to support participating, quality accounts.

The other project that I've come to know a little about is the @runningproject. This does offer votes for ever on all your posts, but there's an approval process (examples of quality posts) and an enrollment fee. For a whole range of reasons, I think @runningproject is important (I'll write a post about that). It's supported by @isotonic - a voting bot - with 90% of vote-buying income going back to the investors who have delegated steem power and 10% going to support and grow @runningproject.

I'll also mention @treeplanter and I am sure there are many other examples. These all seem to me to be examples of the potential positive benefits of vote buying.

(I agree with your point about vote-buying as a simple transactional exchange is not a great idea).

I think an "enrollment fee" in order to get votes, sounds a lot like vote buying to be honest. But I don't know enough to be sure. If those projects are offering a lot of value that is not related to the votes, then that is cool.

It is buying votes, forgive me if I sounded like I was suggesting otherwise. My argument was that to buy or not to buy was more nuanced than good vs bad.

There are many of us out there that have never used, and probably will never use a vote bot because we believe in genuine interactions and the power of the community to support those people who contribute to it. Otherwise we are really not much better than what is already out there at the moment... there are enough communities out there and we just need more people such as yourself that are willing to stand firm in spite of the temptation to take the easy way out - I respect that!

Thanks @plushzilla hopefully if enough of Steem's influencers are able to provide a good example of hard work and patience, that will influence the entire community in a positive way. Even regardless of Steem's end result, there can be a good wave of energy pushed out into the world and it'll lift the tides across the blockchain space, not just in our own bubble.

Hey Matt. On this one I have conflicted feelings. After all, I am a sndbox member thanks to your nomination. It's been my experience over the years that any group activity on the Internet, like forums, tend with time to devolve into a herd mentality or group think with plenty of snark. I'm not a fan. So my expectations in that regard are always tempered.

In all honesty I never really sought mentoring in the group chat, on the other hand, the founders of sndbox were always open and helpful. They seemed to be particularly motivated toward helping people create social projects, I always got the impression that was where they were putting a lot of energy.

For me personally, they gave me the freedom to do things I otherwise could have never done. For example, working for a week on transcribing, editing, & formatting interviews. Rather than doing multiple posts they worked with me so that I could do one single extended post. One of my goals was to drive outside traffic to steemit, and make some musicians aware of the platform. They gave me the chance to experiment.

Naturally recent events forced sndbox to essentially reboot in a new austere environment. In your shoes I would have addressed my concerns in a direct message to them, but doing so in the group chat was certainly your right. There is still great potential in the platform, but it can be a long frustrating slog. I was very close to calling it quits when you nominated me for sndbox, anyway I hope karma will come back on you and reward the tremendous effort you have put into this platform :-)

As for vote buying in general, I completely understand doing it when starting out on steemit. If you are lucky you'll break even, and in the process you are essentially transferring sbd into sp. So far in 2018 I've avoided it, but who knows...

Karma is already rewarding me through the happiness of living by my ideals. I can honestly say it is a huge relief to be out of the sndbox "echo chamber" as it is helping me to think much more clearly and re-assess my activities.

it's great to see you succeed and I hope you will continue to do so. You come to steem with a lot of experience and having you and your network connected to the ecosystem can be valuable for everybody.

For the record when you say "Naturally recent events forced sndbox to essentially reboot," that stuff had absolutely nothing to do with my decisions or anything I've said so far.

Thanks Matt, and right back at you with the kind words. I didn't mean to imply that the reboot influenced your decision, I meant it forced them to scramble. I've got a warm spot in my heart for you, M. & K.

This is a very interesting position. I'm always re-thinking what I do on Steemit because we have this duality about writing what you think, what you feel and the need of money. And of course, if you have ethical principle it's more difficult to understand what you really have to do here....

It's good to know someone is finding her own way...

Nice thoughts!

Thanks for the thoughts @ylich, cheers mate

I don't understand the whole bot thing or even buying vote thing. I am still new but you can never go wrong with just working hard, I mean, I just happened to see your posts and liked what I see. I follow and up vote you on my own because I value your content.

Don't worry too much about it, working hard is the best way to achieve success via Steem.

I'm with you on this, imo it's this kind of fakery that ruined the rest of the internet. I guess it's probably unavoidable since there's money involved, but it kinda bothers me that it seems to be the "norm" here. It's good to know that others feel the same way. The real community spirit is what really makes Steemit special for me, it's become far to rare elsewhere.

Yea its hard, steem with the money means there is no easy solution. You are right about that community spirit at least.

Bots serve useful functions here, but they are out of control. I get solicitations everyday frol another vote bot asking me to send them money for ther service. The ratio between bots and real users following me must be 5:1. It is a problem and an aspect of Steem that worries me.

Yeah I have no idea how many of my followers are active humans and it bugs me a lot. I gain new followers every day but I'm not sure if they are real... Nonetheless I do know some reasonable percentage is real based on comments.

If I gain ten followers in just a few seconds and they don't have a photo in their profile, they are definitely bots. You can see it when you use Steem through @busy. Their notifications system is really helpful in seeing just how many accounts are bogus. It's really sad - and IMHO - still something that can really hurt Steem's future.

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