RE: HOW TO BEHAVE IN THE EVENT OF A WHALE "ATTACK"
I'm new here, I still don't know and don't understand many aspects of Steem.
To me looks like everyone is looking for a solution for this huge power whales have, power of killing your post reward and power of making your post overpaid.
So smooth and other whales are downvoting posts. They do that trying to reduce rewards for posts that are overpaid, being upvoted by other whales.
What I do not understand is why Steem has whales, not how whales behave (they can do what they want).
I do not understand why an upvote should worth more than another upvote. It's so obvious to me that every vote should be equal. That a post with 200 upvotes should be paid 2x a post with 100 upvotes.
There is absolute no correlation between how popular are my posts and how good I am in evaluating others' posts. But Steem creates this correlation.
You can buy Steems and power up, this should be ok if used for promoting my posts, not for dramatically changing reward of others' post.
Maybe I'm missing a piece, don't be mad at me, I'm just tring to understand. Explain me!
It is Steem Power that influences voting power. I have about 23,000 Steem Power, so my vote by itself right now is worth 1 cent. When someone has much more Steem Power, they are a whale and can give you dollars with a single upvote. Newcomers have very little Steem Power, don't influence post payouts much at all, and are called minnows.
Does this help you understand?
I know this, but it makes no sense to me.
I like Steemit for several reasons, but not for the reward system, wich is crazy unfair.
I think it would be a lot better is every vote had the same influence. Instead, you can pay for having more voting power. How bad does it sound?
Okay, I understand what you meant now.
I can totally understand your point of view @bnoise but consider this. In my situation, I've been an active member of Steemit for 7 months. My first few months here barely broke a dollar with very few larger payouts -- I'm talking tens of dollars not hundreds of dollars for posts.
The amount of time dedicated to building a community and writing over 6,000 comments far outweigh the rewards I've received, IMHO. So, a newbie coming in with the expectation of making a lot of money quickly chafes a bit. I personally tell the people I refer to Steemit not to have ANY expectations of earnings until they've built their community. When I see new people I recommend the 3 C's: Content - COMMENTS - Curation. This helps build a SOLID foundation for your Steemit experience.
All you have to do is take a look at @papa-pepper's or my blog page and you will see how our rewards fluctuate. Yes, my last post did extraordinarily well but I wrote a blogging tutorial which was more beneficial to the community and it only made $1.41
I do not agree with whales who downvote to even out the rewards because in the overall scope of things time in + effort + quality + interaction + curation + payout are great equalizers in and of themselves. But that's just my opinion.
And I undestand your point of view, you worked hard and now you deserve a piece of the pie. Totally fair : )
I'm not here to make money with no efforts, I'm here because other reasons, for example I can write and read what I want, and nobody can delete posts and comments (no censorship).
But the paradox is that I could make money with no effort, if, for some strange reason, my posts were upvoted by some whales.
Let's make an example, and please correct me if I'm wrong:
A and B are new users (minnows), with the exact amount of Steem Power (low amount). W is an old user with lot of Steem Power (whale).
The same could be said for flagging instead of upvoting. If a flag from a whale would be equal to a flag from a minnow, nobody would complain about being flagged by a whale.
I've been reading lots and lots of posts about the problem of how powerful whales behave (colluting, flagging, and so on), maybe my solution would be simplistic, because I'm missing some piece...