Appreciate it
As I've mentioned in the past, someone's actions on the chain tell often more about the person than their words do. So here's a story about what someone decided to do recently and maybe why most people don't use their downvotes to improve Steem and proof of brain. In a perfect world people would not take downvotes personally and would attempt to see the whole picture but unfortunately we are just humans and emotions most of the time control what we do and how we act upon it.
For those who have not been following our activity since the HF, here's a quick guide through.
The HF introduced the curve where votes that didn't bring posts up to 20 Steem payout would get an exponential penalty the lower the rewards were the bigger the tax. Although I wasn't a big fan of this change cause it meant lower influence for most users on the platform that don't have a lot of stake I saw how it would be beneficial to combat low reward spam and hidden leeching and combined with all the other changes I also saw how it could be a good mix of having more votes deciding if a certain post should make it close or past the penalty - it all builds on content discovery and proof of brain and at the same time not over-rewarding certain posts. As we have seen the effects of it now it has worked pretty well, ex bid bot owners with a lot of stake using it to curate instead of letting their vp stay at 100% are carefully choosing what to curate, most want to curate posts that take them up past the penalty zone so they don't miss out on curation rewards while trying to front-run other curators on posts that they don't mind voting afterwards because the posts are just worth it. It's beautiful really, it's a mix of greed and pick and choose where certain posts get curated anyway because they deem worthy of rewarding the front-runners because of the content whereby some ignore the ones that were front-run and try their luck on other posts that aren't past the penalty yet in hopes for someone else coming in after them and voting. These are of course things that I personally don't care much about but I'd be lying if I don't some times vote on posts I think will get more votes after, it's how the system works right now and it is much better than it was in the past. Some will of course only focus on front-running and maximizing their rewards but in a way that also adds to curation as they'll have to carefully choose which authors or posts they do so on.
At the same time it added 25% free downvotes to combat abuse such as promotion, vote-trading and self-voting or closed group voting. Now without getting too much into the details on this one it was also seen as something beneficial for proof of brain and policing/regulation the reward pool combined with all the other changes.
So me and some other users started using our downvotes with ocdb, in the beginning when we were still selling votes for the first couple weeks we focused on heavy vote-trading. Two very big accounts were targeted where one realized what they were doing and had done for the past many months was wrong and wanted to give #newsteem a try, the other retaliated on @ocd posts that had nothing to do with it and only rewarded our curators for their work but that's how it is, the accounts are similar in name so it's an easy target, even though they understood later that I was in charge of the downvotes and retaliated on my account too they kept it up for some time. In the end though they changed their ways and started curating more broadly which was a win for Steem and proof of brain.
Once we decided to go all in on #newsteem and stopped selling votes and manually curating everything we wanted others to do the same. We are not anti vote selling, there's a need for that too but during these times and bear market it was obvious that not many were interested in actually promoting their content as much as they were interested in the returns they could make by buying votes. The good thing here is that many bid bots adapted and started selling votes that were not profitable - although the adjustment was rather small but you can't sell much smaller votes cause that would mean less trending time, but it was understood that if some people don't like the ads or think the cost of said ads was too small (i.e. someone promoting a new gambling dapp would still get 90% of their promotion cost back after trending all day it would only be natural to downvote said post so the returns would be much smaller, in the real world there are no direct returns, people promote something for the attention and what that would bring in such as new users, traffic, and possible returns by using the dapp and they'd pay a lot up front without knowing the outcome of said ads).
Now when we were downvoting posts which 90%+ of were not for promotion, were bid botted late and the quality was garbage and obvious it was just for the ROI (before bid bots adjusted the ROI) certain owners would call us out that we are targeting them to "destroy" their business. Some accused us of downvoting them just because we shared delegator and that we were trying to ruin their returns in comparison to ours even though we were downvoting all bid bots we could think of in term to get them to stop selling votes to anyone or at least curate and police them better. One of the owners took it really personal, so much so that he decided to dig in to other projects of mine and come out with accusations of me cheating them and all that nice stuff. It was cute but I don't tolerate such bullshit when my actions on this chain have always been against being one of the maximizers or someone attempting to harm the ecosystem. You might say I added to the bid bots with @ocdb but as I've said many times in the past it was something that felt necessary and one of the lesser evils when our whitelist only had curated authors and we ran it at no profit after launching it late when we saw no change in the economy on the horizon. Once that change came we adapted quickly into curation.
So okay, this post is already getting really long and you might be wondering where it's going. Let me just say a few more things about our downvotes and why the current system sucks for those using them.
There's a lack of retaliation combating. @blocktrades was one of the few big accounts who automated haejin's and rancho's abusive downvotes and it quickly got the latter to do curation instead of wasting all of his future curation rewards, at least from what I've noticed that account doing lately. People like to hold grudges. As I mentioned in a post recently it is important for those doing the downvoting to curate the content constantly as well and not just continuously downvote just because of what that author has done in return. You have to be professional about it or else you're not much different than them.
At the same time @ocdb was a really big account which meant a lot of eyes on its curation and a lot of responsibility. Responsibility that we won't be abusing it's voting power by giving ourselves an advantage and votes, that was a no-brainer not to abuse though cause considering how many people it pissed off, especially ex bid bot owners who were not selling as many votes now meaning their returns had dropped and other people running vote-selling services it would quickly come back to bite us if we attempted to use it for our own sake. For the longest time we didn't self-vote but then came a time where the grudge holding people just kept retaliating, worst off when it was on users that had nothing to do with it like our team of curators. It's not difficult to see how so many are downvoting @ocd's posts that go out through beneficiaries to the curators while they vote on other automated curation reports. At the same time it's also not hard to see who is doing the downvoting, abusers such as @dobartim who are blacklisted by @buildawhale and his friend @flysky who are steemcleaned but kept trying to post garbage nonsensical poetry to keep their image up of being "Dr. Great SUCCESS" or whatever scams they were running in their discord. Most of our downvotes have had a reason and even though we lately have only focused on a few people cause we hoped @curangel's more decentralized downvoting would take care of new things and alert us of their findings so we could help them with downvotes (we were following their downvotes for a while) - it seems to have gone down and been down for some time now. Who knows why but I'm starting to understand the disadvantage that comes with being the people downvoting at these times when we're still so early in the transition phase and people still take downvotes so personal. It's kind of funny considering we are downvoting to help Steem which is what they themselves are invested in and they retaliate on that activity and activity that is there to help Steem further. Look for instance at the blind downvotes of @ocd's Gods Unchained tournmanets which we take no cut from and have been running for months trying to build a community of players introduced to Steem and are constantly getting in new ones.
So what triggered me to make this post. One of said bid bot owners who accused me of targeting them for ulterior motives, who doubled down and accused me of cheating my own Fantasy Football tournaments, who downvoted @ocd posts while automating his own reports and having his bid bot friends vote them up, who recently received most of freedom's stake threw a nice downvote on one of my recent posts taking it down from $105 to $30. Sounds a bit much wouldn't you say? Well let's look at the details, shall we.
As I mentioned before, we didn't self-vote for the longest time, but when there's 4-5 big stake holders retaliating on @ocd's and my posts constantly at some point enough is enough and we started voting it to mitigate that abuse. Not just ourselves though but other users that are targeted by them as well. You can easily track their downvotes either on steemd or on the steemreports downvote page: http://steemreports.com/outgoing-flags-info/
Here's the chart of one of these classy retaliators:
It would only take you a few seconds to check out his content, his usual replies and the words used in the posts to realize that this is either a malfunctioning AI bot that's been through a difficult childhood or it's someone trying to produce garbage content and tag it with poetry to sneak away with rewards. If you dare to call him out on it or the rest of the history of what he's done on Steem or how he's accumulated most of his SP you'll find yourself in a deep rabbithole that I don't want to get into right now, but his actions of retaliation on not just the big users downvoting him but any small account daring to use their downvotes will instantly get retaliated upon by him and his friend @flysky:
The amount of flags does not seem to be working properly on steemreports so take it with a grain of salt, there's a lot more of them if you look through the @ocd posts or mine.
You might wonder why his posts are zero'd out, well we tried being nice about it and just lowering it for the longest time but continous retaliation and no improvement in quality (it's weird, he could just be creating poetry in his own language and most people wouldn't have anything against it or his lack of english and wouldn't downvote it, so why is he so stubborn to create gabarge in english - probably cause the only way he's gotten to that high rep has been by using his stake to vote-trade with and his content as a placeholder for rewards and if he were to write in his own language other vote-traders would not have a reason to justify voting it when they don't understand it).
Similar to these constant downvotes at some point we started voting up ocd with ocd and ocdb, it has a lot of downvoting fans nowadays who are there either because of retaliation, because they didn't like certain posts we voted on at some point in the past or people who hold a grudge for what we have done with ocdb.
So to get back to my post, I was pretty happy with this post. It was a really fun interview, a promising upcoming blockchain game who was looking into adding splinterlands into its mix and give the game and Steem more attention. You might think this was promoted content but I wouldn't have anything against buying votes if it was and I've mentioned in the past that if I ever post about something I gain a profit from to promote it, I would address this in the post. Since I found this post to be of high value not just for splinterlands (who I've talked to @yabapmatt about to try and connect the devs to find a solution on how they could be integrated) and the interview and post itself took a lot of time and combine it with all the downvoting I've been receiving in the past few months I decided to vote it up with @ocdb as well. Something I don't do often, looking at ocdb's voting pattern the past 30 days I'm at 0.8% votes on my account and 0.9% in the last 14 days.
Anyway I found the post to be of value to Steem in general, did it deserve $105 of rewards? Probably not, we also have some trails that seem to go off at random. Would I have been triggered if it had gotten downvoted by the usual people who downvote? Not at all, I'm a big proponent of downvotes and encourage everyone to use them, in fact we have a lack of usage and I keep defending people using them whether they have delegated stake or not.
But... a 100% downvote from an account with 5.5m SP, who's only downvotes before that have been on users who literally just spam the chain:
well, you be the judge if you think that was disagreement on rewards or maybe something else with a history behind it. :)
I don't mind the slashing of rewards either, I know there are many others out there in worse positions right now and even though I try to combat some of that retaliation I can't be everywhere until we find a better solution to automate it but that also requires trust in the people doing the mitigation. I am also fine in general cause a lot of other stake holders support my content because they know I'm not just an author here and I spend most of my time doing diverse steem things such as onboarding, approaching, "shilling" and curation and they want to reward me with autovotes and the likes.
One thing that is pretty sad, though, is how those downvoting are treated in the short term and long term because people hold a grudge. Can you imagine how many downvotes @trafalgar would get if he attempted to post something right now? Since he's been a big proponent for downvotes and used his wide and consistently, he'd get so much retaliation back if he decided to post right now I bet, and it's sad cause I really liked his posts in the past as he is pretty funny. What I'm saying is that I am understanding those who don't use their downvotes to clean up this place, one way or another you are going to tick off some people who are either going to instantly retaliate on your content or someone you curate or a project you run, or they will let it sit there building up and come at you later when it won't even matter what your content is about or what you do for Steem or how you are directly helping their own investment to grow in value. They will want to take you out because of something in the past they didn't like.
Think about it, if we hadn't downvoted those obvious bid bot purchases that were landing on garbage content and just being used for ROI. If bid bots hadn't adjusted their votes to not be profitable and mainly be used for promotion like they are today. Not trying to take much credit here cause we weren't the only ones and I really, really appreciate those who stopped selling votes altogether, but what would Steem be looking like today if no one had? More importantly, what would the returns of said bid bots be like if they were still selling profitable votes and not curating - what would the content creators not buying votes be making today withotu curation.
I understand that missing out on those returns is something one could hold a grudge over, I also understand that there is no limit to profit and greed. I understand that those who played by the systems rules are doing much better today in terms of stake and control over the rewardpool, it's just the way it is. Who knows how the system is going to change in the near future but it's a shame that those who should have a lot of responsibility decide to use it this way just because they can and just because we decided to put a stop on their ROI to help Steem become something else than another shitty proof of stake coin where content doesn't matter and trending was filled with garbage as long as it was lining their pockets.
All I can do is tell my story and you decide what you make of it.
As you can see retaliation is a big issue and a problem. One of the many diverse reasons I try/tend not to down vote. I may have a bit more than a minnow's worth of SP, but not to Dolphin status, and I do not post that consistently.
Most of the down voting is done as what I see as "Bad Behavior". If the down votes were thought out and done for the benefit of Steem, then most people see no issue or problem with that down vote, a simple "down voted for spam" or other valid reason in the remarks, would let others know "the why of" the down vote.
When I mention that most of the time I get a response similar to "We do not require a reason for the up vote, why one for the down vote?" We as a society do not require justification from individuals for positive actions, we do as a society require justification for negative actions from individuals in society.
If when going to down vote a check box was used to indicate why, and then an automated response in the down voters name in the remarks, would allow society to determine if that down vote was justified, and then they could put their neck on the line for a retaliatory down vote, if when they did down vote the individual's initial down vote and left a reason "Down voted because I felt your down vote was retaliatory in nature." then either the person will get the idea and stop, or just continue in their retaliatory down vote manner. (While this would not take out all the @steem generated down vote only accounts, it would put their reputation scores well below the 0 level).
A lot of people ask where is the content, why do people leave and stop posting. meaningless down votes are one cause of it. Frustration levels rise, and people just say screw it, if I am going to get down voted and I have very little rewards anyway, I may as well go back to twittter or facebook or youtube, where I at least had more followers and interactions. the camillesteemer down vote bot army is and has had an effect on retention of the new users. Ask @krazzytrukker
why his posting rate has dropped so much, I am sure there are others.
This is a good point and for general and new downvotes I'd agree that leaving a comment would be good, i.e. if you've never downvoted someone before leaving a reason would be justified and making that a requirement before you can place your downvote is just one implementation away from being added to steemit or steempeak, I can share this with some people who might be able to do something about it if they agree to it if you want. (or make a post and I'll share that)
I do believe that over time and with more users who are not as interested in earning rewards with their stake (there are some of them) there will be projects and stake that combats obvious retaliation and more eyes on content looking for these kind of actions to combat them. As long as something doesn't get zero'd out the user countering an abusive downvote won't lose out too much on curation with their upvote.
I would've loved to hear the reason @appreciator downvoted my post but can't help to feel it was due to old grudges of ocdb trying to put a stop to bid bot vote selling and it affecting their ROI. Or the rest of arguments that followed where he was attempting to put me in a bad light with baseless accusations.
I have shared my thoughts on the down vote and how to fix it several times during discussions on HF20 psot and when the free down votes were being talked about. To me a non-technical person the fix I proposed I thought was a simple one, but when i mentioned it I got the we don't require reasons for up votes arguments, so when the occasion rises I still sometimes mention my fix, but to be honest I really do not see it ever changing on steemit, some of the other front ends may adopt it, but I doubt steemit will ever adopt it, after all they allow people they have given 15 SP to to do nothing other than down vote which adds no value and no incentive for new users to continue to post on steem block chain. I do still hold hope out for the other front ends though, since to me it is a simple fix. You get the drop box telling you what the reasons are to down vote, put a check box next to reason, then allow the click.
When we judge or are judged of a negative action we expect as a society to be told the why of it, we rarely expect to be told the why when our positive actions are judged by someone.
IF someone worked the code for that drop down list to include on Naturalmedicine.io I'd love to adopt it.
This was the image idea I posted about three months ago, (9-18-2019):
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRdpWv1Y9HYoUrpmdwAbfdnPeKa5YhiQXp4JwH94oAi3d/downvote2.png)
in response to a comment stream on anomadsoul's post The Normalization of downvotes | Read this post, then downvote it post.
On steemit when you click the down vote arrow you get a pop-up box that has a few reasons to down vote and a small short explanation of the down vote. It pops up automatically when you click the down vote arrow, you Have to click the submit button. I added the small check box's, so one more small tiny step for a down voter to have to move through. The individual and I just see things differently.
Yep.... You nailed it.!! I am still here, but You are spot on with this one. 22+ down votes from that creepy stalker Camillpoopy and his Bot Bully parade of stupidity on a light hearted christmas post...? Pathetic.
And this GOOBER @anakrimba that Downvoted Me with out a comment, randomly I am sure, just to milk the block chain, damn right I will down vote back, I don't care if it is pictures of his/her/its daughter.![ma9n7hy5rr.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://img.esteem.ws/ma9n7hy5rr.jpg)
I know it carries no real weight on the $ side. But it really is ugly and turns Me off to Steem. When I pick up my phone/tablet/laptop at the end of the day I just surf right past the eSteem app to BitTubers. No Fecesbook/Twatter/GhoulGoolTube for this KrazzyTrukker and Kits.
We read the great postings from You, @galenkp and his bro @tarazkp, and always take a look at what kind of trouble Jonboy @janton is stirring up. But content creation for a plankton/minnow just to get shit on.... Nahhh.
Time is my biggest enemy, not enough of it..... Lol
Once in a blue moon We will look at Gab/MeWe. But just not enough time in the day for this old krazzy. You can always tell when I get a day or 2 off, I will read and up vote, try to catch up.
That's a pretty random downvote judging by that accounts activity, lol, almost seems like he may have sold it or something and the new user has no idea what he's doing. Was a retaliation downvote necessary there though, you think? There's a lot of bot accounts with barely any weight that do auto downvoting and I've seen a lot of people panic just when they see the downvote before even checking the effect it had on rewards, but I hope that most of the time they'd just ignore them.
In a way this is the attention economy and downvoting seems to be one of the cheapest ways to gains someones attention nowadays. :P
Probably right on all You say here, but the retaliation DV made me feel better. For a minute....lol
I got a ways to go and a lot to learn about the DV/UV. But little by little I hope to see it like You do, and Your post about it over on Your Blog was a good read and helps Me along on My journey in Steemlandia. The goal is to not take a DV too personal for Me. And I got a ways to go. I never even considered it might be a sold or Camillshitsteemer stolen AutoBotted account.
Like i said, i got a bunch to learn, and nobody better to learn from than the Real Steem Peeps like You @bashadow @galenkp @tarazkp and the many people they converse and curate.
Thanks for the comment/reply.
Try and be more consistent with your posting and use the right tags and I'm sure you'll get more curators on your tail, especially nowadays where most stake is being used to curate as interest for promoting posts is at an all time low and most bid bots have enabled votes to not return a profitable ROI meaning most spammers and farmers aren't using them anymore.
PS. if you posting original content use the #oc tag.
Right & even though the hard fork fixed promoting to help the platform and reward pool yet even more downvote too often pushing more away from steemit, now all i do is downvote bullies who pushed me off the platform. Pushing and bullying investors away is not an effective way to grow... good thing i stopped buying STEEM long ago & chose BTC. maybe if another hard fork comes out eliminating the bullying & censorship I would invest again.
Was 15k SP so I changed my mind now I am a liar and donot understand how ledgers work lol, geniuses both of you... donot worry the power down will commence when i want. The flag trolling is just giving a taste of your own medicine, no more complaints just flags
Stop downvoting my comments you pathetic liar.
I cannot believe you are still angry that I downvoted you for vote buying a month ago.
You have serious mental health issues. The platform will be better without you. Please let the door smack you in the face om your way out.
No one pushed you off the platform. You behaved dishonestly, people downvoted it, and you threw a tantrum. You continue to throw your petty tantrum even now, while clinging to an absurd facade of self-righteousness. You calling people bullies while flag-trolling them is the height of hypocrisy.
He says he's powering down and leaving. He's lying.
Hi @dynamicrypto
I've just visited your profile to check out if you posted anything interesting lately, just to realize that you didn't publish anything in a long while.
Hope you are well and didn't give up on steemit yet.
Cheers, Piotr
As said, you shouldn't worry about these things. Also, you might find that the person has no idea what they are doing😁
I feel that way on here at times too..... Like WTF am i doing.... Lmao. True Story..!!
never had to flag yourself though? :D
If I do.... Flag Meeself, I will try to explain to Meeself why I flagged Meeself.:-/
Oops accidentally voted up my comment when I was going for this one.
thank you for the reply and the vote, very much appreciated. Perhaps 2020 will bring a clearer vision to the folks at steemit.
I actually like the drop down list idea!
Firstly, it definitely doesn't count the flags correctly as I know that @galenkp has taken dozens of flags daily from Dobartim and Flysky. I have been taking many from Flysky, who I have had no contact with ever before and there was a period where Haejin and Rancho were smashing me for weeks. I have ignored the flags and just kept going, but I know that some other users like yourself have spent time healing too. I told Galen to keep going to and at the very least, be a drag on their power. You'd think they would rather use it on earning curation than targeting content creators.
The problem with retaliation is a big one and while I can understand if people use their own stake for grudges, when they are using other people's whilst at the same time vote selling, it is ridiculous.
What I do know is that over the last few months, @ocd through @ocdb has pushed out masses of rewards to deserving content and actually unearthed and supported accounts that lay undiscovered earlier. It is a shame it won't be able to do it to the same level now as I have personally heard stories of how grateful people are for having the lottery of real curation return to Steem. On top of this, I think that the #PoSh tag has reinvigorated a lot of Twitter interaction and is getting some traction there as well as the Gods Unchained tourneys.
You'd think that the actions of invested users would be to increase the value of the token, not just their share of the pool as over all they will benefit much more greatly from having everyone benefit, but as you say, greed knows no bounds and the emotional reactions are expected from people who have apparently never built a business before.
One of the major reasons Steem continues to fail has nothing to do with Steemit Inc, it has to do with us as immature end users who cut off our own nose to spite our face. Hopefully one day these people realize that their ugly noseless face, turns people away from Steem.
Woh. I am out of words. People who post the trash he -the half baked poet- does have the energy to downvote your work? @tarazkp's? @ocdb's? How sad and PATHETIC!
Forgive the caps but it's because what you and your team does has helped people like me stay around. That has helped me gather whatever I have in the last few months. I am sorry that everyone of you has to put up with such backwardness.
1 Big egos
2 Deep pockets
3 Long memories
Thanks for reading, seems long posts are a hassle these days to read. I'm guilty of that myself honestly even though I try.
But yeah it's a bummer and I don't see how normalizing downvotes without people or projects looking to combat retaliation abuse will happen in the long term.
I went on a bit of a spree when we first got them, but the circle I went after pretty much immediately stopped posting, and I never really acquired a new target/group.
Damn...how's your fingers after that?
They all have the necessary SP to cross the ~ 8$ mark that has no penalty.
I have a feeling that it will take much longer than you or I expected until everyone is one the same page regarding what is good about the future of STEEM.
Not bad, was a little chilly in the room so it was more annoying than exhausting to type. If I really wanted to I could be spitting out content for 8 posts a day but I choose to focus on other things that are going to help steem long term. ;)
Speaking of front run, tipu is a great pain in the butt. Sometimes we saw good posts, gotten a tipu vote, and the potential big vote hesitated. Like you said, big accounts sometimes really don't mind, but most of the time it does take away some judgemental brain juice to decide whether to vote or not 😂
Don't judge me, I'm one of them who has a curator role for tipu, but I mostly curate Chinese content which the big shots seldom curate. So, I think I'm doing stuff that people doesn't do. Oh and I haven't self curate with tipu so far. Am damn proud of that🙂
Cardboard is a genius really, incentivizing frontrunning and making everyone else do it for him so people don't judge him like others who frontrun with big accounts. :D
Well, people can get really creative, to front run all blocktrades sponsored contest posts so their curation score goes up. Then they're allowed to use bigger percentage of vote, and then self curate a huge chunk of the vote 😂 what can I say, they earned it.
The incentive, come on let's face it. Once I climbed all the way to the top 2 for a whole week, and daily I'm getting paid like 0.3steem everyday 😂 I could have just make a shit post and self curate, that paid the whole months off.
Sounds just like I expected it to be.
He should've maybe only allowed users with a curation history to do it.
So...Firstly, thank you @acidyo for your support almost from the earliest moment I arrived on the platform. I appreciate it more than I could probably express.
Secondly, to anyone else who has supported me along the way, read my posts and engaged, I thank you too. You and engagement are what this platform is all about.
As a @curangel curator I have put 671 posts forward for some vote-love and will continue to do so. In curating I have found many worthy content-creators who struggle to receive much reward, but continue to push forward anyway, provide great content and engage with others around them in the community.
This curation concept, along with other similar concepts, which promote good content and assist to build the community are a valuable part of our ecosystem and, in my humble opinion, are one of the key elements in building a better steem and user retention. I am pleased to be involved and will continue to curate in this way - I can't think of something, anything that would persuade me otherwise.
This platform contains a cross-section of society and, as history shows us, society is made up of many people willing to take action under the [often] limited understanding they have of the greater design.
With that in mind, it makes sense that I take action under the same premise. That's why I post with some passion and personality, write my posts myself and use original content. That's why I engage openly with other users, and not simply within a closed wank-circle. That's why I curate for curangel.
Something I learned a long time ago is that above all-else in life, one needs to be comfortable "within oneself". It is, after all, OURSELVES who we have to live with 24/7.
I've known many who simply cannot face themselves, you know, within the recess of their own being they feel uncomfortable, awkward, out of place, unvalued, weak, insignificant and powerless, for whatever reason. It is often those unfortunates who, through weakness, pride, ego and hubris, allow the rotten, cancerous and decayed thought to come manifest in life outside the dim recess of their own mind, in the outer-world; The community.
I'm glad I learned this concept at an early age through a decent up-bringing, life's-lessons, trial and error, success and failure, research and reading...It allows me to move forward with ownership and responsibility, for myself and actions, together with an ethos of humility and kindness towards myself and others.
Anyway, that's about it right now. I'm off to write a post about Star Wars because I'm excited about seeing the last instalment tonight. I'll end with my post signature which I have recently amended with a saying I remind myself of daily.
Tomorrow isn't promised - Design and create your ideal life, don't live it by default
Discord: @galenkp#9209
(I'm on discord, so any hate-messages need not sully this post made by @acidyo - Send them directly to me.)
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 0/4 - need recharge?)
What the hell, I didn’t hear about this until now. So those of us that don’t get noticed by massive accounts get our reward further decimated? What a load of crap. I’ve had several posts only worth 1$ and now I hear I’m penalized because of that? What’s the ‘tax’ on the post? I get combatting circle jerks but this is crazy, we want to attract people over here but that will hopefully be modified now that the bid bot culture has been largely stopped.
First of all I know who to trust around here and who's doing the good work supporting good content without being petty. The trending garbage didn't help the platform at all, and as a tribe owner with a front end I need to make sure that front end is enticing for onboarding purposes. However, I'm pretty chicken to be honest - I don't want to get involved in ridiculous trolling and defensive and retaliate downvoting wars. I'm not good with confrontation. I also don't like playing around with people with big egos and behaviour that tries to protect their version of their self inflated selves with no thought for the greater good of Steem as a whole. Saying that, that's really subjective as well - I got downvoted on my content the other day because he felt it was 'sexist' - though he missed my ironic/satirical tone. I was then downvoted by about 15 accounts. It made little difference - mosquito bites - and it doesn't bother me as I know how the system works and I've been doing it hard here for two years and don't plan on leaving. In fact everything I do is for the ecosystem. But if you're a new user, why the hell would you stay? Sometimes I think that downvoting should only be given to a central council that's voted in, but that doesn't fit with the decentralised ethic I suppose.
Ah, most of this I can watch with bemused and amused detachment - but that's why I don't get involved. I don't feel it's worth it for my personal sanity. Peace love and hippy shit. xx