RE: Take Two. And... Action!
I want nothing more than to see Steem succeed and live up to its promise. But I watch people abandon the platform in disgust on a daily basis. Why? Because it's painfully obvious that there are people gaming the system in order to extract short term gains with little regard for its impact on the platform. Honest efforts to contribute to the platform in meaningful ways are often completely disregarded, while repetitive low content posts are enthusiastically upvoted consistently by a small group of powerful whales. It's been happening on some level since the beginning of August.... but since the price of Steem has declined and the reward pool has dwindled, the efforts to extract liquidity from the reward pool have accelerated. Since everything appropriated in this manner is unavailable to other users who were promised the chance to earn money for their contributions, it is quite literally squandering the growth potential of the platform by producing dissatisfied users who will be left with a bitter taste in their mouth.
Flag me, that's fine. I expected nothing less. But I will speak the truth as I see it. Even with your "permanent crosshairs".
Thank you, thank you!
It's so blatant and obvious since day 1. Now over 2 months have passed since the July payout and it seems like this situation has barely improved.
Is it gaming the system or working as intended?
I had and still have high hopes for the platform, but if we could have addressed this openly 2 months ago instead of getting marginalized and called whiners and envious all the time, perhaps things wouldn't be as bad as they are now.
Thanks again, @bacchist , for keeping up the fight on this front. And no thanks to the whales that set up auto-voting for their favorite "authors".
Does it seem at all reasonable that a post should get hundreds of dollars due to a few whales that auto-upvote an accounts posts while the readers only see fit to leave 1 or 2 comments? If the content is interesting and engaging one would think that the readers would want to engage to some degree. Even with a "Wow, that was a really nice post!" at the least.
Meanwhile other authors can have 20 or more unique comments from users that clearly are enthused about the content and the author gets a few pennies.
So, who is really bringing true value to the platform?
Perhaps there is a fundamental flaw in the system and the only way to rectify the problem is to start over from scratch. Keep everyone's Steem, SP, and SBD intact, but start over with an improved incentive and algorithm, etc. Damn, I want this site to work out!
That's an understatement.