RE: STEEM DOLLAR Peg Debate : Stakeholder Analysis
The problem is that most of those groups are rolled into one, so really we're talking about people who have a lot of SP. SP dominates the conversation. Lots of devs are witnesses or whales, whales dominate the curating game, the leasing game, the bot game, and the author game because they can just vote for themselves and others in their groups.
And so where does that leave everyone else? Nothing they do or say really matters. No matter how reasonable the arguments from someone with 15 sp are, their voice will not get heard because it doesn't make a dent on the blockchain. And what does that result in? Piss-poor retention rates, as you mentioned.
Steemit is the illusion of a social media site placed on top of a coin. It masquerades around as a social media site, but anyone with a brain can look at any other social media site, toy around with it for a few moments, and understand why it's successful. They all occupy various niches and have different types of users, but there are commonalities to most. And steemit lacks most of the basic functionalities and ethos that have fostered the success of them, preventing its widespread adoption and use.
Limiting the amount of times you can vote a day is anti-fun. Not being able to post for half the day is anti-fun. Your vote not mattering at all is anti-fun. Having to navigate a complex mathematical world of min-maxing is anti-fun for most people. Many people do not want their social media platform to reward them monetarily, at least not at the expense of the user experience. People don't like ads, so why would they like a website where no content or post isn't essentially someone advertising something, if not themselves and their own brand and image. People hate insincerity, humble-bragging, virtue-signaling, the restriction of free speech, and being able to be yourself, and feeling like they're being judged with every word they say, so why would they subject themselves to that in their free time?
Whales here are content to sit on their hundreds of thousands or even millions and earn a gradual return, knowing that as long as speculators can overvalue coins whose worth are dependent on a userbase ~50,000 strong with paltry growth and non-existent loyalty or retention, they can at least still generate a decent return on investment if they keep shitposting and voting themselves to the top. They favor a steady trickle of income received from price valuations that are completely decoupled from the reality that is steemit. Steemit was dead on arrival. There is no hope for steemit in its current incarnation.
Why would they vote against their own interests, making the hard choices and leaps of faith necessary to give the platform a fighting chance, especially at a time when the coins are so overvalued? They won't, and it's sad to see. I only say this not because I have full faith and confidence in steemit or steem or its shareholders, but because the competition is so detestable that I would rather watch steemit become what it needs to be, than see facebook implement a killer coin, or watch any of the other giants begin to reward their users with digital funny money to keep them interested and engaged.
When steemit dies it will be known as that weird place with the users who subjected themselves to low-quality memeing about how great steemit is, the place where the power dynamic reflected that of a typical cult and whose value and impact on the world was minimal aside from getting a few people rich and wasting others' time in the hopeless pursuit of getting rich.
And that's a huge problem. Most content creators who are of worth do not do any of what they do for money. Money is just a necessity that funds a basic living. The greatest content creators want to be rewarded by having the largest impact on the biggest amount of people they can, they want to actually change the world and remind humans of their shared humanity and actually have an impact. Maybe there are exceptions to the rule, clearly there are enough sell-outs to prove me wrong, but those who care want to help ordinary people, not just be trivial entertainment for some group of digital royalty like some court jester.
But if they actually cared about any of this none, of these issues would even be an issue by the time I had arrived upon this website, so I'm guessing it's all a moot point by now. And stop using the excuse "the onboarding process takes too long" guys, it's really lame and it's not convincing anybody. New people leave because there's literally no incentive for a sane person or a non-starving person to stay. And that's exactly why the membership is skewed as it is, between the haves and the have-so-little-that-it's-barely-worth-its.
You have expressed your dissatisfaction very clearly. Now, what ideas do you have to improve the platform? I hope you will expend equal or greater effort in building up the platform by offering better ideas on how to improve it and not only tear it down with your words and make people feel that it is a lost cause. Thanks.
Nobody tore anything down with their words, k. If you have ideas tell them, the drama begins the moment a controversy happens, AKA "only tear it down with your words and hurts people's feelingz on the internet by MAKING people feel that it's a lost cause" get the fuck off the internet you clown if you're so affected by someone's clarity of dissatisfaction, or stfu because there is zilch constructive material besides the bullshit remark I hear all the time which is copypasted here by the feelz you makes me that you are.
See my response to you below buddy. It's all right! I was just speaking in general. My ideas are in the very first comment at the top under the author's blog if you would like to ready my constructive suggestions at what needs to be focused on. Sorry if I have created more controversy. I thought I was just contributing to the conversation.
The response to criticism of "well what do you suggest" is common but you took it to "only tearing down".
All this could go away tomorrow in a spectacular crash and burn and yet I think that the idea behind it is immutable because of the principles behind it" Transparency and Decentralization of Power.
I apologize for using the term "only tearing it down". That was a bad way of putting it to someone who obviously still wants the best for Steem. I agree that regardless of what happens the principles will stand in one form or another, hopefully in some other more successful app on the Steem blockchain or maybe EOS.
No hard feelings, this is the internet after all, yet when I am on steem it certainly feels like another place, without the copyright at the bottom of the page or the ads on the side and least of all without anyone to ban or moderate content. Steem is what the interwebs aspire to be.
It's a fair comment and you make a lot of good points.
There are people who could fit into multiple Stakeholder groups, but there are also people who might specialise in one group. I am asking for representation via these groupings because those who wear multiple hats can have a conflict of interest.
There are a couple of reasons why I powered down last year and you've touched on some of them. I see a lot of problems for the platform that people are ignoring or are in denial about, which means they are unlikely to be fixed. With the recent mania there is a lot of gorging at the trough going on and while I am happy for people to be making money in the short term I would rather see STEEM become so much more than what it is today. I'm just not convinced any more that it will ever realise it's full potential. To me it is in danger of going the way of Netspace once the mania dies off and a real competitor emerges.
Maybe at that point people will be willing to make the tough decisions, but maybe at that point it will be too late.
To most, money comes first before any visions of a better future for humanity (lol) so I don't doubt that their desire to make money now will hamper the platform's chance at competing when the going gets tough. I feel like a lot of discussions are simply distractions to peel everyone's attention from the real problems with the site, so perhaps they're cleverly keeping people engaged in those discussions by design.
Yeah, without a high price for the coins I don't see what value people will see in the platform, and if we are to consider the very real possibility of a long-term cyclical bear market for crypto then this site is deader than dead once that happens, and that's discounting the fact that other companies are going to absolutely crush the possibility for steemit to be a dominant social media force.
Fiat or metal in the hand feels a lot better than digital bags or non-existant bags, and I feel like this site has been creating more than a few micro-bag-holders of late.
You're here and by the screen name I take it you're neither hungry or interested in riches of the moneyz, but look at this, show me a place that drives as much thought and does it without censorship. Steem cannot die, bitcoin and all other coins, gold and everything might die, even SBD and STEEM, but Steem cannot die, it literally will be here for our great great great (xinfinity) children, because of the idea behind it, and ideas do not die, especially those that bring such great minds (you, and the nameless horde!) together under the umbrella of FORUM ;), toodaloo.
@baah—I believe @charitybot was talking specifically about Steemit dying, not necessarily STEEM, although I would add that Steem could by extension die because of the very idea you speak of. If people lose faith that their voice can be heard on Steemit to the audiences they wish to reach, then fewer will come and more will leave.
There is censorship on Steemit. It's called flagging/downvoting. If you want to, and have the power to do so, you can flag someone's post or comment to the point where it's no longer visible for the low ratings it received. Unfortunately, too much flagging here involves retaliation, not curation. There are people here who don't take kindly to even a different opinion, let alone being called out for their five second post that may or may not have value.
I do agree with you that of all the crypto coins I currently know of, STEEM has the greatest chance of holding on the longest because of Steemit. But I also agree with @charitybot that as Steemit is currently set up, it is not a social media platform—yet. And the glimmer of hope I read from your post @charitybot, is that with enough voices like yours finally being heard, and people actually acting upon the words, from the ground up, that Steemit can be molded into what it's been sold to be, but really isn't, and may never be unless we, the people, will it, and act accordingly.
Yes, we need to raise our voices and be heard but we need to offer more ideas and support and less complaining, tearing down and fomenting ill will and making people lose hope.
Here's a novel idea, instead of letting people make you feel a certain way because of their opinions you take responsibility for what you feel and what you say and don't blame others for the atrocity of not being owner over your own emotions, because ill will and making people lose hope is wholly your invention.
I wasn't speaking for myself alone. I do take responsibility for my emotions and constantly work to keep them in check. I will continue to use and believe in the platform. I am talking about the majority of humans that are subject to having human emotions and basing their decisions largely on how they feel about things, especially when it is something new to them and they are deciding if it is worth getting involved with. If they come on the platform and see a bunch of people fighting most will just turn away. If they see people suggesting ideas that will improve things, they will naturally want to get involved and bring their own ideas with them.
I didn't mean to offend you. Let's sing Kumbaya, let's chill, let's be positive and not let negative emotions affect either of us. Enjoy an upvote because I really do agree with the intent of your comment.
Countless good ideas have been suggested in the past, but like I said in my original post they will never be aired on a larger scale because it is not in the interests of the various stakeholders to make the necessary changes for allowing steemit to actually grow and be used by ordinary people.
Steem/IT is used by ordinary people and keeps growing, the investors aren't holding anyone back and almost all of the ideas offered are immature or haven't been considered carefully in exactly what other problems would be created, as for example the multitude that scream Curation equated to Censorship, which in my eyes is akin to killing in Self Defense being equated to Murder, yes killing someone in self defense is not nice, but it's not murder and a complete necessity and not a "protecting muh investment/strategy", yet that doesn't stop people for calling Curation Censorship regardless that for censorship to exist in the very first place it, in it's most base form even, at least one thing must be present:Centralized Authority and/or a mechanism to actually Censor, and not simply Hide/Rate content as Hidden by Default, content that can be simply accessed by using a different front-end and even brute force Spamming until the person's or persons's voting power is drained, regardless of how large the account is because the bandwidth limitation makes Flagging crap for "censorship" and there have been numerous suggestions proposed that hardly consider the numerous problems that they would introduce or even less consider the problem that they are trying to fix as not a problem but a feature and instead are convinced that their understanding of censorship and curation is understood when it hardly could be called considered.
Here is a question for you and all alike: Is flagging in the interest of the various stakeholders or in the interest of the community, and how can you explain that it is in the interest of stakeholders?
I'm tired of the rhetoric of "those greedy investors" and only hope that someone else will have the balls to ridicule such nonsense besides me.
When someone says "we" I always assume they are referring to themselves as in "me, myself and I" and I don't see any reason to approach that differently.
Curating is not Censorship. Steem cannot die, demonstrate how steem, a Free to use Free from Censorship Forum can die. I don't care about STEEM, SBD, STEEMIT but steem cannot die, as it is set up it is by far the most resilient proof technology that the world has: Decentralized Forums.
O yeah, did I mention that Flagging isn't Censorship, or we are so loose with our words and their meaning that for example Self Defense is Murder. Curation is not wholly dependent on your interpretation, curation is simply the act of Flagging or Upvoting, it cannot act as censorship no matter how "hidden" it is on a completely decentralized and transparent network.
Hard censorship comes in the form of flags, soft censorship comes in the form of any post by those not in various inner circles getting any attention at all. The majority of the userbase faces soft censorship on a daily basis, they post and their words are like farts in the wind, doomed to collect at most a few cents and a few pageviews.
You cannot censor the blockchain. Hard or soft it involves removal of content or alteration. Curation is not Censorship.
Ordinary users don't sift through new, as it's unprofitable to curate most of those posts, let alone investigate the blockchain itself to find content.
Obviously you like countless others who I've confronted with the facts cannot actually form an argument for equating Censorship to Curation. All I have to do is point out that Curation is not Censorship and I don't even need to say why and how because an assertion is trumped with a counter assertion, why would I argue with your other assertions when I could simply invalidate them the same way.
From personal experience from a few flag wars I've been involved in with whales I can tell you that regular, ordinary users click reveal on flagged content and even reward it. More so I didn't have to even CARE that I was being flagged by whales and simply said what I wanted to anyway which would bring negative attention to the whales flagging me because people would rightfully ask why I was being flagged, this happens and I can provide proof of it also if you want to investigate if you doubt that it's simply an assertion and only that.
People click Reveal, and in fact I would gladly take a flag because in my eyes I've only been mystified and delegated to intrigue, which is quite an accomplishment.
I really don't care about this issue as much as you might think I do, sorry.
Another thing is attention:
Nobody is entitled to Attention, and who cares what people do to "fit in" or be "accepted" when a feature, and quite a necessary one is seen as a problem SOLELY because of "feelz muh sting to be flagged", those people themselves are the problem and fuck them. To all others I say fuck that, flag away, curate away, and obviously spend your attention wisely or sow the sense of entitlement over "page views and cents" because "I deserve muh". I am awaiting to hear of any place that offers what steem offers, Farts in the Wind indeed.