As the Price of STEEM/SBD Goes Up, So Does the Crab Bucket Mentality

in #steem7 years ago

Since the rise in prices for STEEM and SBD, there seems to be more of the crab bucket mentality going on.

While others are having some success and earning rewards(whatever strategy: self-vote, collusion, etc.), some are passing judgment on whether or not a particular individual should be earning the amount of rewards they are getting. There are valid issues in some cases but everyone is able to use their stake the way they want.

I find it funny because when the prices were around a dollar, there was not as much complaint about individuals earning too much. Now that we see the SBD price up, a lot of users are earning hundreds to thousands and I see a lot of users having the attitude of “If I can’t have it, neither can you”. We see some try to bring others down so they can get up on top and get out of the bucket.

Naturally, this behavior is formed being that this platform is social media combined with a monetary system. We see this all around society in the workplace, government, etc. I only can recommend staying focused and do your own thing.

As for valid issues, we can help look for solutions.

What Can Be Done to Improve the Platform and Help Fight Abuse?

Downvote System.

Not many users that have a lot of influence on the platform think there needs any change to this but perhaps we need to revisit the functionality of the downvote system and make some changes to it.

There are no rewards to downvoting(not saying there should be) and vote power gets used up. However, it benefits others on the platform when downvotes are used for valid reasons but some may feel it is not worth to use so frequently as they might see it as they are losing out on potential rewards.

If we could find some way to implement some type of consensus system within the downvote function, perhaps that could bring more positive results?

Communities

This feature is in the works and I believe this will help with abuse to a certain extent. Different communities could allow groups to set so-called "rules" and be able to decrease abusive behavior. As mentioned in the 2017 Roadmap:

Two types of communities will exist: communities into which anyone in the world can post
(where community founders (or their delegated moderators) can decide, post-hoc, which
posts to hide from view) or communities in which only community founders’ (or their
delegated authors’) posts will appear.

Having moderation can give specific communities the ability to maintain content within their own community namespace that could eventually lead to less abuse.

Changes in Curation System

As mentioned in the Hardfork 20 (“Velocity”) development update post:

Eliminating self-voting rewards through curation


While the change to 15 minutes will even the playing field against bots, it doesn’t address the advantage self-voting gives to accounts with respect to curation rewards. If authors vote for themselves right away, they get their author rewards, 100% of the curation rewards from their vote, plus a portion of the curation rewards coming from everyone who votes for the post after them. Any other curator voting at the same time as the author would get 0% of the curation rewards. This gives the author an unfair advantage over other curators because the author can earn additional curation rewards through self-voting.

In order to eliminate this unfair advantage, the unused portion of the curation rewards will be returned to the rewards pool instead of being awarded to the author, thereby increasing the overall percentage of rewards that will be paid to curators. This will better serve the original mission of the curation rewards budget: to ensure that the Steem blockchain distributes rewards to the most valuable content.

This does help from self-voting authors earning curation rewards but they can always earn some of that curation through alternate accounts. Just maybe not as much with the current system.

Test Reward System Other Than Linear.

Also mentioned above in the HF20, is to implement a shift to all votes:

After discussion with the witnesses, it was decided to apply the “vote dust” shift to all votes equally. Each vote that is cast will be shifted down by about 1.219 SP. This effectively establishes a “baseline” voting strength that applies to everyone, while still maintaining a linear rewards curve for votes above the baseline. This way even large Steem Power holders won’t be able to profit from casting countless inconsequential votes.

This is something we would have to see how much of an impact this will have but not everyone may agree with this change. Perhaps we can revisit the idea of trying out other reward systems mentioned in @clayop's post: Making Steemit Better: A Proposal to Flatten the Rewards Curve

Conclusion

With all this in mind, we can come to a consensus to find a better solution to improve this platform for investors, users, and everyone else in between. Also to find the best balance to drive up the demand for STEEM.


Image Sources: 1,2,3

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As the price goes up, there's also a lot more incentive to abuse the system. Especially when very few people are downvoting even the most obvious abuse. We can expect to see more of what's rewarded, and those rewards also shift voting power creating long term momentum. I have no problem with high rewards for actual users and content creators, but I don't want to see the network overrun and destroyed by those who just want to harvest rewards without becoming a productive part of anything sustainable.

I think networks like Steem have the potential to disrupt the power of centralized social media giants and change countless lives for the better. That's why it bothers me to see so many colluding to upvote spam and share short term gains at the expense of Steem's future.

I'm with you 100% on this. Many of us can see the bigger picture for Steem and want to take it to the moon. We just don't need to bring each other down on the way there. Just need to focus on the valid abuse.

We'll get there.

@bitcoinparadise
I do think the general attitude within the @steemit community is about sharing and caring, I certainly hope we stay far removed from the mentality we find on places like FB which I seriously dislike as it creates a place of nastiness and ungrateful dissatisfaction amongst it's users.

I do think the philosophy shared on this platform is very different and I hope it stays that way :-)

Stay Blessed.

For the most part, yes. But it you are around the community enough it's not all sharing and caring..

haha :-) indeed. I will just keep on sharing and caring then, lol

I look forward to the communities

People never change, sad fact of life; the platform definitely needs some tweaking, IMHO down voting (flagging) others for disliking their approach is a bit rough.

Too many arrive believing they will become rich and famous overnight, whilst in reality there are only a handful making a fair amount off of posts.

Don't waste time, see what they do and emulate (don't copy) what they do, do your best with what you have to offer.

Yes, A lot of people have the wrong expectations when being new on this platform. Some also feel a sense of entitlement.

It's tough to find the right balance when this is a capitalistic platform and combining it with social media.

The crab bucket mentality was one reason in the Steem White Paper for why is hard to abuse the reward system.

I wouldn't say that that's one reason why it's hard to abuse the system. It's actually kind of encouraged.

Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.

The goal of building a community currency is to get more “crabs in the bucket”. Going to extreme measures to eliminate all abuse is like attempting to put a lid on the bucket to prevent a few crabs from escaping and comes at the expense of making it harder to add new crabs to the bucket. It is sufficient to make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping.

-Steem Whitepaper

Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work.

Adding to that, selfvote is not much different from average proof of stake reward distribution. That's another reason why I'm not against it.

Oh, I've almost forgotten to like my comment. :D
If I don't think it adds something, and not just random strings to Steem, why I would post it? And if I think its worth posting as a comment, why would I miss pushing the like button?

So yes, I agree in that anyone could use their SP as they see fit.
Someone could spam, I could dislike it. Both of us are free.

Even ive noticed the crab mentality as the prices are going up.
This way none of us will grow.
Hope something is done about this.

Well get there. Just need to work together.

Wonderful post and i agree. Im also a little hungry for some crab legs now :p

lol go get them crab legs :P

:p i will lol it made list

I would like to add another suggestion to improve the system which may have some impact. Moral discouragement by widespread discussed post and social boycotting.

Well, many have different moral standards so it will be kind of tough to have some type of system like that...

@bitcoinparadise hello how are you, I tried your bot swagger, is very cool I congratulate you, how do I help you to grow the bot?

Thank you. You can help it grow in many ways by using it, donate, delegate SP, get it into other servers, and voting on posts by @swagger. Will be starting up posting soon on that account.

@bitcoinparadise Do you know of any discord server where there are more users with your bot?

I only know of Steemit Ramble server at the moment...

I've never downvoted anyone since I joined here. I don't think I could even do that. If I didn't like something I read,I wouldn't vote at all.
I've been homeless a few weeks now, but before that, I was watching some people here abuse the rules, moral or not,and it saddened me to the point of 'why bothering write anything at all if I am not going to be seen,while others have people do the work for them?' I admit my life isn't interesting to you all. But I am not going to dummy up any posts with stuff that isn't real, nor have anyone else do it for me.
Thus, I just slowly backed away from this platform the past 2 months willingly and unwillingly.

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