Wherever you go where money is involved, there will be an incrowd laughing all the way to the bank. Little you can do about it, it's a free market, and can you really blame them? A few actually write interesting content.
Maybe with a linear reward curve, some silent whales voting again, and @htooms and @berniesanders settling their differences and trying to do something about this, we could get a trending page that is somewhat presentable to the outside world.
From the Steem Whitepaper.
While being outdated in large parts, this bit is still relevant.
I'm especially upset about constitutionalized collusion by steemvoter and steemtrail.
I don't understand how any whale would support this crap.
Streemian offers the same service for free and without the self-vote exploitation.
There's an old Dutch expression that says: "De duivel schijt altijd op de grote hoop", which translates as "The devil always shits on the big heap".
This sort of thing will always happen when money is involved, and self-regulating mechanisms always seem to be weaker than expected, as the long-term prospects of Steem and Steemit are not exactly first and foremost on the minds of the greedy. They will just optimise their income any which way they can, and again, why blame them? They can, so they are allowed, free market and all that.
Really doing something about it with rules would be called socialism, therefore evil. Magical thinking and invisible hands are mainstream economics on Steemit, and those do not cater for institutionalised collusion.
Because they hold a position of trust; some witnesses support this collusion.
Witnesses can be voted out. Unfortunately, this voting is also stake-based. Money makes power, power makes money. This is designed-in because of the economic belief systems of the designers; to them, things are probably working as intended, or they just don't care anymore.
The witness income was intended to be spend for social projects outside of Steem.
Not to be accumulated to have a large stake to trade against other witnesses' witness votes.
Honestly, I don't see those projects from the major stakeholders (apart from the lame guild style selfvotes).
yeah I was wishing that something good came outside of steemit, so far there are some good examples like @verbal-d, who is being honest and hard working, but apart from a few people only @voronoi with his idea is focused on real world development @hitheryon I was a bit away from the steem for a while so I've missed most of the growth ideas, but as with anything I don't see that trending, things are back to the way they were, it only takes a week and everything is reset, bots are on new "lucrative" authors and whales are whales, always lending a helping hand, mostly to themselves, but we all profit don't we :D