I Look Forward To Legitimate Steem Competitors

in #poor-leadership6 years ago (edited)

First off, I'm writing this because I legitimately do care about this blockchain and the users on it. But the lack of transparency by the developers, the broken promises, and the sheer amount of apathy of many of the whales with regards to conflicts and the struggle of some of the smallest and newest users, kind of makes me wonder how difficult it would be to make a better Steem. I'm sure someone will execute a blockchain with a stronger community where the rewards are better distributed and the greed is less rampant and better controlled by well-thought out mechanisms.


garbage-2729608_640.jpg

An accurate representation of Steem's default feeds


First off, I'm going to talk about the lack of transparency and broken promises. The amount of communication between Steemit, Inc. and the community is pitiful. It's February and there is no roadmap. There are no updates. There is no timeline. I have no idea where any of this is going. I regularly look at the GitHub pages and there is little to indicate that the organization has a clear path they are following and priorities they are focusing on.

Now, I understand that engineering projects can run behind schedule. But that's why communication is so important. So you can tell your user base that you are running into problems and perhaps need to adjust your roadmap. Unfortunately, Steemit has no schedule.

Communities and an SMT test net being ready by the end of the year were claims that Steemit, Inc. made at Steemfest in November. I understand that isn't a lot of time, but neither of those are ready and the developers are over a month late. And HF20 ain't looking like it is going to be done in the near future either. For those that think an SMT will be out and about before this summer. Well, there's no indication that is going to happen.

And again I wouldn't really have that much of a problem with it if they were more transparent and delivered a roadmap. These things don't require developers, they simply require a little bit of leadership. But maybe that's the issue.

But we don't have to worry because there is some merit to this social media blockchain idea and I'm sure that another blockchain will attempt to execute a similar but better thought out implementation of Steem. This blockchain has a history of poor decision making and a lack of forethought with regards to mass adoption and appeal to the average user.

The distribution was messed up through the initial mining period and messed up with the initial inflation. When these errors were corrected, that left early users at a clear advantage over any future user and one advantage that was due to poor design rather than any actual effort on any individual's part.

Proof-of-brain is a misnomer and clearly doesn't represent the rather lackluster distribution mechanism at the heart of this blockchain. The fact that "reward pool rape" is a common occurrence shows that your mechanism is clearly abused and the reliance on community policing when there is a clear incentive to avoid doing it to protect oneself shows a clear lack of understanding of human nature.

There is also the expectation for the community to build better solutions for Steemit, Inc. Consider how big of a stake Steemit, Inc. and Ned have, such an idea comes off as rather lazy and uninspired. Put some of your damn money into development and stop giving away these lackluster delegations. People who gift delegation don't have any real skin in the game. I give away cold hard SBD. I sacrifice money. I would expect the same from the leaders of the community and those seeking to promote the thing.

There are other issues but I'm tired of repeating myself. You can read about these in prior posts. I have not really had any desires to write a post other than this one. I've put this post off for weeks. But here's my critique.

Hopefully, legitimate competition will forge a better Steem or give us a better blockchain in its place. For awhile it has felt like I've been on the Myspace of the blockchain, but honestly that would be an insult to Myspace. Behind the scenes there is so much pay to play and corruption and farming that it makes me wonder. Why are we copying the system we claim we want to replace?

Money clearly corrupts the minds of the weak and maybe such a social networking concept was always doomed to fail. When 80% of your user base consists of entitlistas, you are always going to struggle. It's always about the money and that's what kills good ideas. Hopefully a future blockchain thinks about making the system more greed resistant because this one emboldens greed.

But you may wonder what was the straw that broke the camel's back? I came across posts critiquing @netuoso and a few hours later, I see that they have all been downvoted by @haejin who claims to fully support the dude with all 2700 of his MV. The whole thing wreaks of corruption and potential collusion between whales and witnesses. It's all a copy of modern day politics and back room deals where the poor get exploited and the rich get their way.

The worst thing is that these whistleblowers are being silenced unfairly by someone who clearly flags with a clear lack of perspective towards the other users. The dude doesn't contribute to the community in any meaningful way in proportion to the rewards he receives and he attacks other users in retaliation with ZERO consideration that he is a much larger user than any of them are. And that's abuse. Forget about the rewards, but the clear attacks towards those who descend should clearly show the intent and the level of respect this user has for other people. Defend that.

Now, I'm not entitled and I don't care if losing rewards if I'm flagged. Flag me to hell, I can take it. Stuff like that just confirms my thoughts anyways. A bunch of pansies that lack any core set of principles simply out to make a quick buck. Time is not on Steem's side.

I look forward to next generation social blockchains and hopefully Steem and Steemit, Inc. step up their game to meet the competition. Downvoting competitors is rather childish and stupid considering Steem is supposed to be used as an advertising medium. Someone uses it in such a way and you downvote them while ignoring the rest of the community and ignoring many problems bubbling under. Great job.

Well, rant over. If you have anything you want to get off your chest or you want to debate me, the comment section is down below. As always, I'm giving every the entire SBD of this post (if this post somehow makes money) because money isn't everything and I appreciate the "social" part of a social network. Good night, sleep tight, and always put pressure on mediocre leadership where it is deserved.

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Proof-of-brain is a misnomer and clearly doesn't represent the rather lackluster distribution mechanism at the heart of this blockchain... clear lack of understanding of human nature.

I never saw that term as more than a marketing gag. It doesn't mean anything, it's only a part of the psychology Steemits environment is supposed to be driven by. According to the whitepaper that psychology is the one of a Casino. Therefore I am not sure if they lack an understanding of the human nature, or if it is more a lack of understanding of Social Media.

In terms of the lacking development, I have the impression that this is a side-effect of the decentralized system. When you don't have a head, things tend to look messy and everyone does what he things is the most important thing - and some think that's ripping off the system before improving it.

If you want something to be done, it seems that you have to do it yourself and that requires programming skills. But even if you hand it to them on the silver tablet as I tried to do it with something rather small and simple, they won't take it.

The gap is just too big between greedy nerds who seem to run the system and normal users who see the potential and look for the experience. Not even the language is the same - the bluepaper gibberish tells it all.

But despite everything, here's a silver lining: The backbone of Steemit, the Steem blockchain nodes, seem to be going through a slow but steady process in the direction of more professionalism. The @blockbrothers are the first group of programmers who collectively run a node and now I have seen a 2nd group called @privex who intend to become a witness. This is good, very good. Because it adds professionalism to every one of these 1500 US-$ per day servers and every single one will have far more competence and reach.

I'm sure in a year at least half of the witnesses will be made up of professional groups. Lucky morons without skill and a plan won't have a chance against them in the long run. This development is so important imo that I would even pay them more for creating blocks to increase this shift towards professionalism.

I sure hope that the witnesses become more professional, but given the current concentration of power of the old guard and the apathetic voter base, it's going to take awhile before some of these witnesses get enough support to become regular block producers.

But that additional professionalism means that more outside groups can develop their own companies to build the Steem blockchain and if they build superior code, the witnesses can opt to roll with them rather than Steemit, Inc. I mean the witnesses already have the power to do this, but they seem happy to simply adopt whatever Steemit, Inc. throws their way.

The only remaining issue would be the millions of Steem that Steemit, Inc have at their disposal.

The question is how much time you give the evolution of professionalism. One month or one year? Assuming the @blockbrothers as witness collective is the most basic necessary step towards a betterment of the Steemit&Steem experience then 5% have already been accomplished,since they are in the top 20 witnesses. If @privex quicklymanges to get to the same spot, we are at 10%. So, it could go relatively fast and smooth.

What I thought about when learning about the economic naivete among the witnesses was to create quality standards for witnesses and maybe an own account for that which doesn't become a witness itself, but collects other users votes and then votes for the 20 most competent ones.

Quality standards would include:

  • programming skills (experience and problem fixing abilities)
  • the degree of professionalism (do they pay taxes, is there a corporation behind the witness stand?)
  • what money is spent on the server, how save is it on the Internet, what access does the government have to seize it/shut it down?
  • how reliable are the blocks produced?-
  • what economics knowledge is there, what books about monetary politics have been written? (maybe a list of books and papers to read would be interesting)
  • is there experience in running a business or even a startup?
  • Are they actively pursuing projects to improve Steemit or is it just creating blocks, taking the money and bitching around in the chat?

This could be met with a 0-4 scale and added a questionnaire in which currently important questions are answered (haejin or bernie, SBD peggged or not etc). Together users would have a 2-dimensional decision matrix where they can pick the witnesses who fit best or they can delegate their votes to the witness control account which just picks the 20 most competent.

I think if you do it the right way you can have an impact with something like that.

Well this blockchain concept is still far from getting that acceptance and we soon will be out of beta with lot of new features to support us.

What I expect from @steemit is to connect more with contributors and present a road map that motivates us to stick around. So far I see lot of whales posting and promoting how the whole thing is here to stay while nothing official to support those

It's a bunch of unwarranted positivity and hype. They preach day and night how great and better Steem is while they clearly don't understand that such fantasies don't exist for the buried 95% of users on the site. And it's only going to get worse.

If only you had a stockpile of hundreds of millions of dollars that you could use to speed things up and hire people to fix the real issues with the platform. Oh wait, Steemit, Inc. does.

I just read that Facebook is testing out a dislike button. They deny it, but apparently it's true. I imagine one reason they've always been reluctant to add a dislike button is that it creates abuse as much as it weeds out offensive content. People can use the dislike as a weapon, not a filter.

Versus a like button, which everyone is okay with. Who doesn't like to be liked or upvoted?

It's taking me a while to catch on, but it was just this week that it became clear to me how disproportionate the power of whales is.

I hear your frustrations. In the few months I've been here, Steemit Inc did improve the look/feel of the website, but it's still really basic. And not much has happened on the backend. So one wonders where are the money went -- either it skipped past fundraising and into pockets or perhaps they've had a difficult time recruiting a solid dev team.

They have a dev team and have millions of dollars at their disposal. I'm sure it wouldn't be that expensive to hire a few marketers to update us on progress. As for devs, they apparently have a fairly decent sized team it is just that they are working on so much at the same time and very little is actually getting done. It feels very disorganized.

The power of the whales can be countered but there is an obvious incentive not to bother with them and simply sprinkle them with praise and attention in order to earn anything worthwhile. That's not a very attractive environment to the common blogger.

There's also an apathy issue and having permanent stake-weighted votes for witnesses. Delegated Proof of Stake is weak to apathy and honestly might not be a great system in general because of this.

I don't care about flags until they are used as a mechanism to attack people with good intentions. An active user base might be able to counter this, but on Steemit everyone is in their own money bubble leaving very few to police thousands of people.

It's hard to build a productive community ownership mentality with such centralized distribution, particularly when that centralized distribution was created questionably. The massive allocation to Steemit was justified by the need to have an onboarding system funding new accounts with permanent SP. Then they reworked it so they could temporarily delegate to new accounts instead and preserve the centralized distribution.

Honestly, they should cash out of a portion of their stake to focus on marketing and expanding development teams for the many apps on the blockchain and blockchain development itself. But instead they sit back and let other developers build applications for them and they are still behind on promised changes to the blockchain.

If it weren't for the magic internet money attached, Steemit would be just another failed startup company. At some point I would like witnesses to start taking solid positions and putting pressure on Steemit to be more transparent and to begin spreading out their stake, but given the apathetic users and witnesses being a popularity contest, any progress is bottlenecked by Steemit, Inc's lackluster team.

Honestly, I bet you could get a healthier community if you restarted the blockchain using the current code and bootstrapping a social network from that. At least, it would be more fair and less centralized.

Most of the things you mentioned here are new to me as I have been here for three weeks only. But there is one thing bothering me. As far as I see there is no fail-safe to prevent self voting whale to upvote himself to eternity and earn incredible amount of money.

For simplifying the math lets say someone had 360000 SP. According to the vote calculator his full weight vote would generate around 100 Steem. Lets also assume that noone else is voting for him and that he has 80 reputation.

Now lets say that he decides to create 10 posts each day literally putting just one letter in each of those posts, and upvote each one of them. During the first day he would have earned around 1000 Steem of which part would go to SP making him even more powerful. which means that he would be able to earn 1000 steem daily and that number would only vote.

If I understood correctly you can't lose reputation (for which I still don't know what it does besides being a neat number next to your profile image) if you are not down voted by someone who has higher reputation than you.

Unless there is something I have missed so far, it seems to me that such person could just sit back for 5 minutes, make 10 posts wit just one letter inside and earn around 6k usd per day without anyone being able to stop him (besides another whale). Is there any rule or method that prevents that kind of behavior?

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