HOW TO FIX STEEMIT
There seems to be an #informationwar regarding if DOWNVOTES are GOOD or BAD for the steemit eco-system.
The following is an excerpt from an ongoing conversation with @enforcer48 that I found very informative.
@enforcer48's comments are marked with the block-quote text style.
That's great! At what point do you think steemit will be competitive with youtube or facebook or reddit?
Steem most likely never will. It will remain a niche. But, even having 1% of FB's traffic would be tremendous for the platform.
Crypto itself is not user friendly. Steem itself is super complicated compared to other projects out there.
On the surface it doesn't seem significantly more complicated than Bitcoin.
The main difference is that the reward-pool is distributed by upvotes instead of randomized code-breaking by ASICs.
People don't want complicated things. And being a copycat to FB will not get you anywhere because it's already been done. Why go on Steem when it is just FB?
There are scandals and complaints about facebook and youtube nearly every other week. Steemit could be scooping up these disaffected users if they had the right feature set. Heck, I originally became interested in it when I ran across some videos posted to d.tube. I thought d.tube was a solution to all the "demonitization" and "shadow banning" everyone was crying about on youtube, but now, I mean, the fact that you can only get meaningful upvotes for 7 days (?) and the fact that your re-steem privileges can be disabled by a single downvote (?) paired with the steemcleaners welcome wagon (downvote) if you decide to re-post your old stuff, this all makes d.tube/steemit much less attractive than I first imagined (and no playlist options).
Youtube and facebook became giants because content creators could MONETIZE their pages based on VIEWS. It didn't matter if the post was 2+ years old, as long as it was still generating page-views, it could make some percentage of the advertising revenue served to that page.
We already know the winning formula, the appeal of steemit is (should be) that it is a fair and decentralized, transparent system.
If Libra does come to pass, there's no point to Steem at all except for some philosophical reasons.
What? Do you think being fair, decentralized and transparent are merely incidental concerns?
And look past the whole "getting paid" aspect. There exist people getting paid shitposting nonsense on places like Instagram, etc. You just don't see the rewards in the open like on Steem.
People are going to post stuff you think is wrong/stupid. That's why you should simply MUTE/BLOCK them. Whatever happened to "live and let live"?
That's a perfect example. The OWNERS filed a COMPLAINT.
They didn't. Steemians approached them on their FB praising them only to find out they don't have an account on Steem. Then, the community took it upon their own hands.
Wow, they got new fans and they got mad about it?
Here's the main problem with downvotes. Imagine that I start a band, say it's a cover band of some really popular band, then some other cover band that does the same thing as my band gets jealous of my band's growing popularity and gets all of their fans (who happen to have more money) to downvote all of my band's songs, basically making them invisible.
Nobody should be able to do that.
Imagine that steemit gets pretty popular somehow magically and grows to a modest 2 million active users. Now, this isn't very far fetched, just imagine the Chinese government decides it wants to de facto censor any negative comments about communism. They've got the money, they've got the motivation, and thanks to downvotes, they've got the perfect weapon.
Wouldn't it be nice if this kind of big-money-censorship was impossible?
Every payout reduces the pool, (just like when you run the shower, it "decreases" the municipal water supply) but it does not reduce the value of the pool.
Inflation (or adding to the circulating supply) without buyers exceeding the sellers is exactly what we have right now: low prices. The whales, Steemit Inc., and hustlers are selling faster than people generating demand.
You can instantly dry up liquidity by making all rewards 100% steem-power.
Steemit Inc has enough market power to stabilize SBD, right?
Why not drop SBD and just use that same market power to stabilize steem instead?
STEEM has one of the highest inflation rate among all projects. It will eventually level off, but it's still at a whooping 8.24% for 2019. This meant there will be 26.7M+ STEEM minted this year.
All that means is we need to grow the steem userbase by 8.24% per year.
The total supply has nothing to do with inflation. Just like QE1 QE2 and QE3 created trillions of dollars out of thin air, but inflation barely rippled, why? Because the new money was sequestered in vaults (not liquid).
That's quite a bit of demand that needs to be filled.
We need to pay people ad sharing revenue for pageviews, fairly and transparently and for way longer than 7 days.
Look at a list of currencies with that rate of inflation or higher. You won't find a first world country on there.
Well does the USA count as a "first world country" in your book?
This looks like slightly more that an 8% increase in total dollars in existence...
WHALESHARES FAILED BECAUSE IT'S TOO COMPLICATED.
If you know Steem, Whaleshares is just a couple of more steps. They got rid of downvotes over there and there have been some interesting behaviors at display.
It seems like you're significantly over-simplifying the reasons for this "failure".
ZOMBIEBASICTRAINING
Essential sites for (new) steemit users:
check anybody's steemit activity log
check anybody's steemit activity patterns
offical steemit etiquette guide
identify the most influential steemit users
advice for minnows and plankton
are you tired of $0.00 rewards? (balance denominated in SBD)
are you tired of $0.00 rewards? also check
Also, set your rewards to 100% steem power and you'll get a cool steem logo next to all your posts!!
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Your scathing critique is requested.
REGARDING THE STEEM-BOUNTY,
Please leave your suggestions about how you would rescue steemit.
(1) My primary proposal is to remove all downvoting and set the MUTE feature to be reciporical, so if you MUTE someone, you also become invisible to them.
(2) Then we should give everyone advertising revenue sharing based on PAGE VIEWS, in addition to the upvotes FOREVER, just like youtube and facebook (not just 7 days).
(3) THEN, we should launch a FREE-SPEECH campaign and scoop up all the disaffected youtubers and shadowbanned facebookers!!!! There are literally millions of them!!! We've only got 30,000 total active users (and that number is declining)!!!
Please share your thoughts and suggestions and criticisms and disagreements!!
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I think, we need some content insignificant mass appealing app, that can reward real participants. For example, a review app, that could take all amzon reviews out of amazon and reward the reviewers, who give better review ( in the form of curation).
They have that in @steemhunt, but it's often plagued with people saying stuff in comment section just to receive free votes from the dapp. And, I haven't really found anything worth reading there.
I know @knowledges has an entire tribe dedicated to that called Reality Hubs.
It's still on the Steem blockchain, but that frontend only displays product reviews. Ask him for more details.
Eh, I'm not sure. Can you make an app that lets you watch 3speak and or d.tube on Roku?
No, I can't.
Maybe... http://www.instanttvchannel.com/roku/quick ?
Okies, well I disagree that flags can be simply eliminated. They're broken, but nonetheless flags are necessary. I also disagree that a user muting should be able to censor the account they're muting. I also disagree that platforms should undertake advertising. I propose instead individuals being able to advertise (this is actually the case presently, although the broken flagging mechanism prevents it's use) but have to share with the platform, reversing the flow of money and putting individuals in the controlling position.
Social media has proven to be the most profitable business model in the world today. Just not how Steem does it, and that does not mean that centralized platforms are the best possible model. The ninjamine prevents Steem from adopting acceptable mechanisms to society that would grow the social media platform. The Huey Long algorithm would obviate profiteering via stake weighting (that's why it is not in effect) and enable rewards to do their job and virally grow the market for Steem.
I'd end curation rewards completely, along with SBD, and remove all limitations and tweaks to VP (other than that it is reduced by use, or decays) while instituting the Huey Long algorithm. I'd also end the Witness and SPS taxes, and simply enable folks to pay for those things with their upvotes.
That's about it.
Thanks!
Seems the problems are many and solutions few. Downvotes is a big problem, but removing it too might bring too many unwanted things. Taking away sbd doesn't sound bad
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What kind of bad things would happen without downvotes? Couldn't we just flag offensive content to be reviewed by the witnesses? At least then we could vote for the witnesses that we agreed with philosophically?
There's an account on whaleshares that comments on people's posts asking them to mute him, but your solution might work.
I think the mute should make both parties invisible to each other.
Unfortunately it doesn't
Fair point, but that is based on the assumption that there aren't enough good actors to counter the effect of a select few bad actors. Taking your band analogy for example, if your band is popular enough, there should be more upvotes than downvotes (assuming only the enemy band is downvoting you). In addition, the party doing the downvotes is also having a opportunity cost as they could otherwise use upvoted for curation rewards. However, I do agree that the side performing downvotes have a slight advantage after HF21/22 considering there is a free downvote pool. Perhaps it requires further tweaking if there are clear cases of abuse.
As for the case of government funded downvotes, I think it is more about how posts are being discovered on this platform. As it stands, posts with higher rewards are getting more attention thanks to the trending page. But there are active curators that are discovering undervalued posts on a daily basis, counteracting the effect. Besides, there are many other cost effective ways governments can censor content. Using China as an example, their Great Firewall can block any Steem interfaces/API nodes as they please. So if it ever reach the point where governments need to downvote Steem content as part of their censorship, that means Steem has grown to a level far exceeding the current size.
Fully agree to this. I think 7 days reward window is too short to motivate people to create content that are aimed to be far-reaching and long-term. I recently got to know about the Steem Forever service. It aims to reward content beyond the 7 days window. This is one small step forward and I think all Steem interfaces should embrace this approach and reward content beyond 7 days. Ideally, all content should be perpetually open for reward and that should be coded into the blockchain itself.
Ad-revenue sharing will be nice as well and that requires all Steem interfaces to participate. As far as I know, not all interfaces are showing Ads. In addition, I hope that Steem can one day integrate with Basic Attention Token so that content creators can get rewarded with BAT directly.
That's my whole point. "If my band is popular enough".
What if the other band has 10 times the fan-base?
The downvotes allow (larger/richer) groups to effectively censor any competitors.
Thank you for your thoughtful and insightful reply.
Actually, China spends a lot of time and money censoring American news programs and movies. The recent story about the NBA getting threatened because someone said "Free Hong Kong" is just the tip of the proverbial ice-berg.
Blizzard corp recently banned a top-ranked-international-player for saying, "Free Hong Kong" in order to appease Chinese censors as well.
I think the above would spark a small fire under this place. Steemit placed adds up so I think its only right for them to allow us to do the same. Either let us have one add on the header of our main blog profile or one in each of our main topics.
As for what I would do to push Steem forward....... Good ol' fashion grunt work is the answer. Hit the streets and put up signs on the side of the road. Rent space on some billboards ...... The masses have no clue what Steem(it) is or that it even exists for that matter and I would aim to change that.
Get Rid of RC....... This place has become a social media outlet. No-one is going to come here and pay to do things they can do for free on countless other media sites. Pay to play only works if you have a big enough audience that your platform can sustain the loss of customers once you start to make them pay.
I agree. We already have the perfect model, youtube!!
It was great before all the secret arbitrary demonetization!!
Rewards based on ad sharing based on views that last forever!
@logiczombie, For sure Downvote will going to be a bigger problem when it comes to the Point Of Retention Rate because in a way once again the discussion come towards the Demonetisation by Downvote aspect. Stay blessed.
I got lost in the comment area...
And to give another form of variance to it :)
As for the behaviour of the system here, I think it's very difficult to call it a lively functioning system. From my point of view, it's not diverse enough in the way the people view and enter this sphere.
Every system regulates itself by growing or decaying. I assume that already at the beginning the necessary conditions for a diverse, multifaceted and species-rich growth did not exist and only a few species emerged. The whole thing reminds me a little of the biosphere project, which failed back then.
Even if people believe that they act according to pure economic principles, they still act rather emotionally, but believe that they act rationally. If emotional impulses meet other emotional impulses, but "think" of themselves as rational, you get a conflict. So the creators and the players made fun of the fact that they created the possibility of placing bots and automatisms between people, which made the whole thing an interaction between man and machine.
Man knows about his limitations, he knows about the unlimited possibilities of the machine. On some days it is certainly the case that the great joker shows you the absurdity, on others it seems to be bitterly serious. People are constantly changing how they look at this system and I think basically nobody really takes it seriously and it is consciously or unconsciously sabotaged. ... At least, I perceive it that way.
The virtuality of money becomes very clear in the Federal Reserve example, which is now becoming common knowledge that money is created out of nothing.
Since we are ourselves temporally limited material objects, permeated by the inexplicable subject, we know that infinity only functions mathematically and can be suspected spiritually, but our earthly existence does not correspond to this infinity on the limited planet Earth. There is therefore something unethical about the infinite multiplication of virtual currency, because it is unable to supply enough to the gullet of matter that is eternally new.
The fact is, therefore, that not all participants in a system will have the virtual money they desire. To renounce this completely voluntarily and to perceive it not as a sacrifice but as a blessing, because money "possesses" the annoying habit that one has to care a lot about it. As you can see here very well, it causes you endless headaches, embarrassment, calculations, considerations, fights and so on. A certain painful joy also seems to be associated with it. It's really hard not to get involved in this extensive interaction and stay with yourself.
Thank you for your insightful and original reply!
You're welcome and thank you. As always, I am late. That's my fate. :)