RE: The Heck is going on with Steem?
But the bots are not directly the issue they are the symptom of a rigged system since many minnows and dolphins can’t earn shit if they are not using the bots thus that’s their only option. Sometimes I don’t even blame them since many whales decide to keep the VP for circlejerking instead of helping the overall community, but almost no post is worth fucking $800+ especially if most votes are bought.
I couldn't describe it better myself - but that's pretty much what i've been feeling all along.
A new user comes along and their vote is worth less than a cent - and their content is never seen regardless of how good it is. So how is somebody supposed to grow here?
I do agree that flagging is probably a way of defeating the problem. But it needs to be done responsibly.
ie. if a post has $100 of rewards on a crap vote - flag the post so that it has $5 or so left over. That will hurt the hip pocket of the poster who purchased votes and they might only buy $20 votes next time, or the voting circle jerk might be harmed.
the platform needs to find an equilibrium. a better one anyway.
There's no way to survive here without bots tho. After posting quality content for 3-4 months and barely get a single comment (never mind a penny), I get lonely and sad lol. I'm glad we got minnowbooster. On the other hand, downflagging is a whale/dolphin game. There's no way I'm going to disagree with anybody on here because they'll just revenge downvote you smh. I came here to get away from capitalism and now we're here.
well there's a few different issues you've touched on there.
you do however end up with all the "good post" comments, which is just crap.
downvote censorship - disagree with a whale, or offend them in some way with your opinion, then you're at risk of that whale taking action with their downvotes and ruining your account rep. A whale can be very offensive and if their holding is big enough, they'll get very little resistance (i posted about this exact topic a week or so ago)
The relationship between voting power and SP - It's one of the core components of steem - and i think it needs to be adjusted. For example - if somebody holds 1000SP - which is not a huge amount by the grand scheme of things, it will take 65 votes with the minimum 15SP delegated to new accounts to equal that one vote. Technically i'm not even a minnow yet and it still takes probably 20 new accounts to equal my 1 vote. So how about people with 10k or 20k SP? is their opinion worth that of 1300 new accounts? or is a 20k SP holder's opinion worth the opinion of 65 people that have been around for a few months and hold 300SP? I'm not against the concept of higher SP resulting in higher voting power, but I believe that somehow the SP - VP return should be diminishing.. I do know that would cause other issues however, ie. the lack of incentive for big money to come into STEEM which would affect the price.
It's a tough formula to get right..