Retiring From dMania (Why I Undelegated Power And Will Move My Elite Meme Game Else Where!)
Initially when dMania came out I thought it was a cool concept and felt that it could bring a lot of new users to the STEEM blockchain. I participated in some challenges and promoted the dMania logo in my memes so that when I put them on Twitter and Instagram it could promote the logo there as well.
I had delegated a little bit of power to dMania early on to support it. It later gained a lot more support and even got a 500,000 STEEM Power delegation from Steemit, INC.
There were certainly times when I was upset that I didn't get a dMania upvote for original memes and I was always trying to work their logo in to promote the brand. Usually I would see posts where someone snagged a picture or gif from the Internet with no modifications and then pumped it up with vote bots and then it would end up getting the vote from dMania.
Overtime I watched the voting patterns for dMania and usually they barely vote......WTF??? Their voting power will be at 99% or higher a lot of times and when they do vote they will vote on unmodified or unoriginal content that was pushed up already by vote bots. Most likely to gain the most curation rewards.
Honestly I got sick of seeing myself and other real Steemians who were making original stuff not getting the votes especially considering that my stuff was original, promoting the brand, and I had even delegated power to the platform.
The thing that is weird is that the creator of dMania made a post about abuse on the STEEM blockchain and it revolved around these upvote bots. So why is he barely voting and when he does it is for posts that have been boosted by upvote bots?
https://steemit.com/steem/@zombee/how-to-stop-almost-all-abuse-on-steem
Here are some of my Meme's that didn't get upvotes. They took a lot of times and they consisted of a lot of layers. The animated GIF was like 112 layers I had to modify.
These are original and I have a hard time believing anyone can look at these and then go over to dMania and look at the stuff he is upvoting and say those are better. I know it's subjective...... but REALLY???? It isn't just me there are other people experiencing this too.
The way dMania feels is exactly the same way we all felt on Steemit in mid 2016 just wishing for an upvote. It is using too much of my mental energy so I'm done. You guys can decide what you want to do. I'm moving my meme game else where. The delegated power would be better off supporting original content in my opinion.
In a weird turn of events I'm not getting upvotes from dMania but I'm now getting automatically upvoted by @craig-grant after I have been one of the most out spoken people against his promotion of the ShitConnect Ponzi! Figure that one out. And no I never communicated with him about any of this. His upvotes started a couple of days ago when I made a video about him @trevonjb and @berniesanders .
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I known you from your first steemit post, and I always liked you, never stopped. I don't have any hard feelings about your criticism of me, since most of it is false anyway. Right now there are not many bloggers like yourself on steemit. You should be getting more support.
You are good at being unpredictable and getting people to talk about you. I give you that for sure. I wouldn't have predicted some of the moves. Like the Lavar Ball of the crypto world. Unpredictable.
So I don't get why you don't just Stake stuff like NEO, Run Masternodes, and Curate on Steemit from here on out? That would be pretty passive and you will just have full time income into eternity.
Would you be willing to go on a LIVE Stream / debate with me?
before bitconnect my only interest was steem, because i can lock up steem power and use it to earn more steem. Bitconnect offered a similar service, but the affiliate program took it up an extra notch. I have no interest in those other speculative garbage alt-coins, only bitcoin. I played with DASH because of the genesis mining contracts, and used all that DASH to buy steem.
If I am not on steemit, crypto has no place in my life. I am staking the ex-lending coins cause i ended up with them, and don't need to sell at current prices. They will either fail or go up in value, I would rather loose it all than sell for cheap, and my experience tells me they will eventually go up in value if I keep talking about them on youtube.
Hey buddy, Bitconnect stuff aside your actually a very charismatic guy, you have a good on camera presence, your personable, you know how to keep people engaged and your a master at affiliate marketing. I've heard @brianphobos say similar things about you as well.
I'm no Steemit master but from my perspective or in my opinion you could do very well here on Steemit and on Youtube and the internet in general for that matter if you drop all the Bitconnect stuff and just do your normal everyday stuff, talk about AI like you've been doing lately, etc.
I know there's some people on this platform ganging up on you and I've mentioned in posts before I personally don't agree with that. If you do Bitconnect or Davor stuff fine fair game but if your doing normal content I think it's not only unfair but actually bad for Steemit for people to gang up on people. It's a slippery slope and while today @Craig-grant may be the bad guy, who's to say any one of us doesn't say something others dont like and get ganged up on.
Everyone on this platform talks mad shit about Youtube for "censoring" people when in reality they don't censor anyone they just don't allow certain content to be monetized, well by people ganging up on you and flaging your shirt they are doing the same exact thing to you that they complain that Youtube does.
My advice would be this, you will make a ton of money and have much more sustainable longterm success making normal content and just being craig than you will with fly by night scammy money making shit.
Wish you the best of luck man.
I'm kind of surprised that you don't like other coins like Litecoin and Monero. Those performed better percentage wise in 2017 than Bitcoin did.
That all being said there are probably a lot of coins that I maybe shouldn't have bought and just powered all that up into STEEM but mentally I like to be more diversified and if I have too much money and time invested in STEEM then I think about it too much and get mad about dumb stuff on here.
I basically agree with what @rulesforrebels is saying for the most part. Whatever you decide to do everyone in crypto will be watching out of the corner of their eye because you have been able to attract more attention than pretty much anyone else in the crypto space. The YouTubers know that videos talking about the drama actually garner the most views so it keeps getting talked about.
Your actually in this very interesting position where you are very polarizing. There are people who love you and those who love to hate you. It is very interesting and we see this with people like Michael Moore, Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, Hillary Clinton ......etc.
I personally don't know how the whole thing will turn out on here or with all the other stuff going on. I personally think the lawsuits are a waste of their mental energy and won't go anywhere. I was going to do a video on why I think that.
I'm not going to pretend to know what is next.
Make it right @craig-grant... for dah yardy dem... i don't know what's up... I just know mad people hate you right now. I'm predisposed to liking fellow Jamaicans 😂... Do some rebranding and make up for what ever it is they say you are doing.
What does Dmania offer that can’t already be handled on this interface? A collection of meme photos?
I’m not sure why this is a thing. So many “projects” just seem pretty pointless.
“Post memes on our special site!”
“Post short comments on our special site!”
“Post code on our special site!”
“Post essays on our special site!”
I don’t get it. Wouldn’t better categorization and filtering of content on one interface handle this much more efficiently without needing to sign into multiple sites and without all of the scamminess from “developers” and their idiotic delegators? I mean, I get how the reward pool rape works, but does everyone always need to fall for the same old tricks every time?
This.
^ And that!
Indeed.
I completely agree with you. I think DTube makes sense and I think Steepshot makes sense basically different formats for different types of content. That said couldn't I just upload my meme through Steepshot or Steemit? Why do I have to do it with DMania? To me I'm lazy and the process of logging in to an additional site for no apparent reason has stopped me from using it.
I generally agree with this. Dmania always just seemed like a bit of a "I'm gonna post memes and hope the dmania account upvotes me" kinda thing.
I think the bigger issue, and I'd been to hear @ats-david's thoughts on this, is that the apps don't currently have any separation, when it comes to Steemit.
For instance, Zappl makes a lot of sense if my posts never show up on Steemit. Currently they do, and that kinda defeats the point. I'd love somewhere that I can dump my random thoughts, that the people who follow me for blog articles don't have to deal with.
Even Dtube - I think right now you're better off just posting your video to youtube and embedding it in a Steemit post, because otherwise you're paying 25% to drive your followers from your place in their Steemit feed over to the DTube site (and this will be the case until their videos embed, or until there's enough people discovering your content via DTube to justify it)
@rossdcurrie you make a couple great points I really really agree with.
DTube to me isn't really worth posting too. They take 25% of my curation reward and if you read the details your videos only stay up for 5 years and after that you would have to pay them to host it is my understanding. Now granted 5 years is a long time but Youtube will host my video for free forever, and they aren't taking a cut. Also as a youtube creator I can drive more views to my Youtube videos where I'm getting paid as well from there. The only benefit I can see to Dtube is you get in front of an audience on DTube you may not be exposed to on Steemit since DTube watchers are probably more into video content and steemit watchers are more into written content.
I think you also make a great point about all these platforms posting to Steemit. I remember last summer when I first started using Steepshot I was very surprised when I saw the content show up on my Steemit blog. Being new I kind of assumed they were two seperate platforms. I've kind of gotten used to it and it doesn't bother me but I can see the benefit to seperating the platforms ie if I blog once a day but I also post 5 photos a day my blog kind of starts getting bogged down with photos. I think its only natural its easier to post more pics than it is writing so photos from Steepshot kind of wind up dominating your blog stream.
The question is valid for sure. I could see dMania being more beneficial to the dev than the STEEM ecosystem. To me it becomes sort of an experiment on interface.
Steepshot, DTube, and DLive are more valid to me. An interesting test for the capability of IPFS.
In the end I feel like some of that stuff can be integrated directly into Steemit. More of a usecase on what works and what doesn't.
Also I feel that Instagram and Snapchat have been able to learn from each other what people like. So I kind of see it like that.
I think it's a bot that votes for dmania randomly every 2.5 hours. If you vote at least 5 times a day, and make a post on dmania then you are eligible to get the huge upvote from them. It's something like that I remember reading, but I don't remember the specifics, I think it's on the site somewhere. I made a few memes but never got the bots attention.
I was under the impression that it was manual but that you had to meet the criteria of voting 5 times.....etc like you are saying. If it is 100% bot driven that is ridiculous especially in a situation with any kind of content evaluation.
I understood it was a bot vote, but the manually checked who they were voting each day to check for abuse. I might be wrong though I only scanned over the info.
They changed it to one vote every hour or so AND that vote goes to the post that already has the highest reward amount.
I never really gave DMania a try, partly because I'm lazy, but more so because I have Steemit and Steepshot to upload photos, having to login to yet another platform everytime I post a meme just never got around to it.
In regards to what you said about votes and stuff, I was going to make a bit of a Steemit rant here. I go through these phases of being kind of annoyed with Steemit. Lately I'm seeing a lot of these accounts with 70+ account ratings who do nothing more than post other people's memes, post a word for word article with a link at the bottom.
It almost seems like we have two sets of rules on Steemit as I never see steemcleaners go after these big accounts which add no value.
I also see a lot of these higher level accounts going around making stupid comments not at all relevant to the conversation, I imagine bots. Anyhow, its frustrating to see these garbage accounts without a real human even involved who are making a bunch of money, getting a bunch of upvotes and add absolutely nothing to Steemit.
I feel ya 100%. I think when it really boils down to it anything that we put a lot of time and effort in will get aggravating to some extent. In regards to platforms YouTube is clearly a frustration for me and Steemit has had various levels of frustration from Day 1 on here.
If we really want to talk smack about it we could say that the payouts have nothing to do with content being quality. It is
Since the distribution was messed up from day 1 all that has caused issues.
Now if we want to talk positive about STEEM we can say that
Both situations are true and it sucks to be frustrated. One of the reasons why I never went really deep into powering up was there were always a lot of question marks about some of the issues and I realize that when I go too deep on one crypto I spend too much mental energy thinking about it. I become too involved so it is better for me to stay a little more diversified.
I always worry about the story of Beta MAX vs VHS. Or the SEGA Saturn vs Sony Playstation.
It isn't always the best that wins..... little things can throw something off enough to where it doesn't reach the critical mass. I think STEEM has a good shot to make it through though in the end.
In regards to dMania and YouTube...... I don't like to feel like I'm chasing a carrot or gambling. It's at that point where I say.
Peace Out!
I kind of randomly stumbled upon an interesting video the other day, I was on the stair machine and my Youtube went on autoplay just playing videos. A video popped up basically playing devils advocate to Steemit.
The preface was basically unless Steemit starts to monetize it can't continue to make money and grow because "there's nothing backing it" as this Youtuber stated. Now I guess we could say the same thing about any crypto, the community gives it value and I think Steemit has a ton going for it in terms of community, working project, and all these projects being built around it like Steepshot, Busy.Org, DTube, DLive, DMania, etc, plus we also got smart media tokens comming out so lots of good stuff going for it but this Youtuber made the argument there's not as many people buying Steem who aren't Steemians and unless we have a pool of buyers willing to buy the Steem or SBD from creators the whole thing crumbles.
I don't really buy into that argument a ton but I think it's interesting food for thought and something to think about.
It really is about your Steem power and who you know. You've been very supportive of me since I got on the platform which I greatly appreciate so that gave me a boost, however I also see newer Steemit users comming on who are out earning me which is perfectly fine I'm not the best Steemit user and could benefit from getting more involved in the community aspects of Steemit but it's funny to see how some can get like 75 upvotes and earn $2 and someone else gets 8 upvotes and earns $30.
I'm actually going to be starting my own little contest as kind of a thank you to Steemit for helping me to get to 1000 followers as well as to get some more engagemetn and I just think a fun thing to do as well
Sometimes there is an element of what people might say that would make sense but then other times they don't really know what they are talking about.
Ton Vays is a Bitcoin Maximalist and he did a couple of debates back in 2016 about STEEM saying it was a scam. It was actually funny to those of us on Steemit at the time because he basically didn't know anything about how the platform worked. Anyone who had a reputation over 50 knew 20 times as much as him.
So it is kind of funny to me if the YouTuber was saying it wasn't backed by anything. Most cryptos only have demand because the investors play is capital appreciation. There are a lot of people who just buy STEEM on the exchanges and don't even know what it really is or that you can power it up or any of that. They just want the price to go up. Then it has all these other properties that allow people to make money in this ecosystem. It is actually crazy how many ways there are to make money on this platform.
STEEM is actually one of the only coins that drive demand to it outside of just trying to profit off capital appreciation.
Inherently every crypto is backed by electricity and computing power even if it is proof of stake. The resource requirement is a lot less for that than POW but even if a person took it down to its root level it is impossible to say that any crypto is "backed by nothing".
I know you know this ........ I'm like typing this as if I'm debating the YouTuber who made the video. Hahahahah
Just found the video that I had watched...
Cool. I get what he is saying. A lot of people don't like the idea of ads being on there but I actually feel that adding a few non intrusive ads could help fund the project even further in my opinion.
In the end a lot of the demand will come from content creators wanting to have more influence. So even if the STEEM blockchain is this weird place where people are just interacting with one another for their own gain and increased power relative to newer users / content creators coming in the platform will sustain itself.
If you really boil it down a lot of it is the same as the advertising model that Google and Facebook uses..... but instead of 3rd party advertisers trying to sell you something we are the advertisers who keep trying to get attention and promote ourselves and our lives.
It is sort of like everyone on STEEM is a mini Tai Lopez trying to get everyone’s attention and gain more and more eyes on them. Tai buys Slip Stream ads. We buy STEEM Power
I totally agree I look at it the same way. Facebook in a sense has no product, technically they do with messenger and payemnts and what have you but ultimately their product is people like you and I adding content which brings other people there.
Most social media platforms have no product, their product is the content we produce and with the exception of Youtube/Adsense none of them give back at all to the creators. I think Twitter had tried to make a play into video offering something like a 70% revenue split, I applied htey never took me on and I dont' think they were too successful with it.
Anyhow, I agree essentially Steemit is like a Facebook but instead of Mark Zuckerberg keeping all the profits from advertisers we all get a revenue share in it, almost like a co-op grocery store where all the employees are owners kinda deal.
I agree, I think having some unobtrusive ads would be cool, could be used to offer bounties or do fun contests. Steemit I believe does have a tee shirt and mug shop so it's not as if they are opposed to making money. I'd love to see ads if it benefited the community or benefited the platform
You are so right about most of the things you say. I've also created some memes which weren't as good as yours but still better than some of the memes they are voting for. I mean, where is the support? Do they even look at the memes and compare them to others before voting? I dont know man, they should support good content but it seems like they don't. Thanks for your post anyway, it was detailed and excellent.
I think the main trend was that he was mainly upvoting the stuff that people spend a bunch of SBD to make the payout way higher so he could get better curation rewards. Since he can get a way better payout and build way more STEEM Power. He will drive dMania into the ground if this is his strategy but he could end up with a lot more Steem Power if Steemit Inc and other people keep their delegated power dedicated to him.
It will be like Steemit in 2016 where everyone is pissed off and everyone starts leaving....etc.
Hope they sort this out asap, i like the idea of Dmania. It would be a shame if they don't take actions and get their .. together.
I agree. The idea is pretty solid. And truthfully it wouldn't have taken much to pay a little bit to a couple respected human curators from Steemit to manage some of the voting. But who knows. It just seems like the decisions being made don't make a lot of sense and eventually people just bounce out and forget about it.
The reason I got interested in Steem in the first place was because it would reward real contributors and not scammers and spammers. I think that was the theory behind it but the total opposite is happening.
I'm sure bots provide some good features but most cases its just people paying bots to make money for themselves.
As you said in one of your recent vlogs the biggest threat to Steem is greed. There is huge potential in Steemit but I fear it is never going to reach this potential for this reason.
I totally agree. I see some accounts posting several times an hour, it's all bot auto generated stuff. There's no work behind the content, no person behind the content, its not origional content yet these accounts are making more and are further along than people who are putting in genuine effort.
I think upvote bots are fine, I personally hate comment or content generating bots, I think they are a cancer to Steemit
The automatic comments from the spam farmers is annoying for sure. When the price of STEEM goes up those things get worse. We don't even have to check Coinmarketcap. we just know from the spam. LOL
I forget where but I saw an old listing of someoen who was selling 100 Steemit accounts with an auto vote, comment and content creating bot. Steem was down at the time and the guy was selling everything for $1200. I think each account had at least 25 steem as well. Whoever bought that is clogging Steemit up with trash but also making a pretty penny doing it.
It is tough to really know the conversion on a bunch of this stuff. I'm not talking trash about the strategy but for instance @stackin uses the method of buying a lot of upvotes with SBD to get the post to the "HOT" page potentially and gain more followers and hopefully more upvotes....etc. He is also really good at engagement. The issue I see with using the SBD to do that is the math becomes really difficult to figure out if he would have just been better off converting the SBD to STEEM and powering up. He might be way ahead by using that strategy. It is really tough to say honestly.
I have mainly used the SBD to diversify into other crypto but after a reach a certain threshold with my NuBits I'm going to average down on a few coins with my SBD and then start converting all SBD to STEEM and powering them up for the time being.
These strategies are hard to really know what is the right thing to do and only time will tell. Having NuBits has been brutal on the up days because I feel like I'm missing gains but some of the coins I sold out of are below what I sold them for. I would have been better off going into Bitcoin or Litecoin but we all know how the floor can drop out from under us and that was the main thing I was trying to avoid by having the NuBits. So I have been better off with NuBits right now than I would have been HODLing the altcoins I sold but worse off than if I would have just bought, Litecoin, Bitcoin, or Monero with them.
I've seen you talking about Nubits a bit lately or in the previous weeks. Are you trying to profit by like 10% at a time by making small hits going from Nubits to another crypto or are you investing for the longterm or just have some money you don't know what to do with and don't want to go to fiat?
I bought some Nubits when they were low and made like 1000 satoshis on a quick flip. Oh shit as I'm typing this I'm noticing the days range is 0.86 cents to 0.98 cents. I've never paid that much attention to Nubits before, are those kind of swings uncommon? I was under the impression it was supposed to track the dollar? I bought at like 0.92 cents a few weeks back basically knowing or at least thinking I knew it would be back at a buck soon and Id make a quick 8%
My plan with NuBits was to just let the floor fall out below me on a lot of these coins. I have less than 10% of my holding in NuBits but I think there is a chance we go lower than the $5,900 BTC price we saw. My plan is if it gets bad I mainly HODL but then end up with more coins when everything is tanking. Instead of taking that money to fiat.
0.86? I'm seeing it got to $0.96 today. Usually I will see it at $0.98 to $1.02. pretty stable.
If you bought at $0.92 that is a pretty sweet deal especially if you bought it with crypto that was allocated to coins that haven't been keeping up lately.
A lot of these alts are sagging lately.
Hmmm, I have the inside numbers lol
I look at the upvote bots mainly like someone paying for YouTube pre video ad rolls. It can be used more as a promotional thing
There is certainly abuse going on and everyones veiw of abuse is different. Also the people who came as content creators are in a different mindset than the people who brought in a bunch of money and have to make that investment back.
If it was purely a promotional thing I would be ok with. For instance pay 5 SBD to promote your post and then you get a wider reach. What I don't like is that paying that 5 SBD can add more than $5.00 to your payout. It just makes no sense, it should be people that reward authors, not bots.
yeah i personally haven't made any contributions to Dmania but my friends did . They really prepared some nice memes and their hard work didn't paid off . Their hardwork fell in water since they thought dmania would help grow them . But your situation is seeming very worse since you've delegated the steem and yet you haven't got any upvotes .
Full disclosure. I did get some upvotes from them further back but these were 4 examples of really good memes that didn't get the upvote. It just felt too much like playing a slot machine and it seemed to be clear that his voting was mainly going toward people who had already pumped the payout way up with upvote bots. So since I wasn't doing that it wasn't about the quality of the meme..... it was about what could earn him the most Steem Power. At least that is the way it seems.
I also made meme for dmania like 6-7 but not a upvote from dmania.. so i stoped wasting my time on dmania..
Yeah I know what you mean. I was spending way too much mental energy pumped up that I just made a really good meme and then he would just upvote something that got yanked off some other meme site with no additional work. I could take another account and just spend 5 minutes barfing out memes on there like what he upvotting but it seems like he is mainly just upvoting the ones that have pushed the payout way up anyways so it just becomes a big crap shoot.
I am going to do some SmartCash memes. To see if I can earn some more Smart.
https://steemit.com/smartcash/@smartcash/smartcash-meme-challenge-6000-smart-up-for-grabs
Good for you! I have felt the same way about Dmania, and I don't even have anything invested into it! I have found the same problem with dtube and more people are speaking up about it. Dtube has even more delegated SP and they rarely use hardly any of it, and the content that they consistently upvote, a lot of the time is helped along by voting bots. I personally detest voting bots and wish the platform would ban them, but that's just my two cents on it! I also wish Steemit was more meme friendly, because I love memes! Your memes are awesome by the way!
I can see how some people would be upset about the DTube situation as well. I have posted quite a few videos up there and I wasn't getting a lot of love on there but what it seemed like is that they were really focusing a lot of what appeared to be original content made for the DTube platform. They have a big issue with imposters posting other people's content from YouTube pretending they are that person so I understand it to a point.
I did get a couple of upvotes from DTube which I was happy about but yeah when I see voting power above 95% for those platforms who have been delegated power it is an issue. If need be they should select a couple of trusted Steemians with high reputation to curate real content for them.
I want to get things set up to post on DLive. They have been voting a lot more. I tried to get OBS setup to do it but I had an issue doing it. I really want to get it set up so that I can just go live on there from my phone like I can on YouTube.
Yeah me too! I have an account on here for my non profit, and we really want to live stream our shows and performances. Once they make it a little more user friendly, that should be possible! And it's easy to forget that we are still at the very fledgling stages on a lot of these platforms, so I try to be as understanding as possible, but that being said, every day, more platforms are popping up, and they will have learned what Steemit did wrong, and try to build a bigger better platform. If Steemit wants to be the Facebook and not the Myspace of the crypto multi-space, then they have to start listening to their users. These aren't huge changes they have to make, but when the mega SP holders themselves are the ones holding Steem back from a higher Weiss rating, then it's time to potentially step back and try to patch some of the problems up.
It has been interesting that no one has really came in and made a competitive platform to this. We were talking about the competition back in mid 2016. They all went down dead ends and didn't come up with anything for the most part.
Yeah the distribution from the beginning really caused a problem but the voting curve was made it worse. It is way better now than it was.
I imagine it will always improve! And there were a lot of "Friendsters" before Facebook came up on MySpace and brought a can of whoop-ass. Haha. It will be interesting to see what happens. Though, if I continue to invest time and money into Steem, I obviously hope that it sticks around! :)
I'm confident that it will always be here to some capacity. Even when there are pullbacks there might only be 1000 people posting ...etc. But it keeps going and then when things surge that is when account values go way up . That is my thinking. It goes in waves and as long as you end up with enough power and play your cards right it will continue to be here