Is Adsactly destroying the Steem Ecosystem?
Have you ever run into a post that had the intellectual deepness of the following?
Plants need water and sunlight. Make sure to water your plants according to their needs and give them the sun they need. Then they will grow.
Probably not. Because this is hardly quality content and most writers know that, so they don’t write it. But what about this?
Customers typically want to express opinions, share experiences and give ideas. We need to provide appropriate avenues for these types of expression and respond adequately to such feedback.
It has a bit more “insider speech” in it, but apart from this it is the same generic low-sense as the first example.
Still, that second post got more then 200$, as got a row of similar posts of the same author before. Why? Is he a whale and upvoting himself?
Adsactly
No, but he is a member of adsactly. All his posts are upvoted by the same users.
Seeing this, I tried to talk to adsactly about this. See for yourself the text and what happened:
In less then 10 minutes the post was flagged for nearly 8$. Way to discuss an issue! (Funny detail: adsactly first upvoted, then un-voted my second comment after commenting.)
This is actually not the first time I have witnessed that behavior. Here is an especially… interesting example.
A user downvoted such an overpaid post (remember, “disagreement on rewards” is the first entry for the possible reasons). And then that happened:
I don’t think I have to add anything to this behavior.
Problem of us all
The problem with this is that the actions of adsactly, that remind me of medieval guilds, are reducing the reward pool for everyone else, quite a lot.
Even worse, the constant heavy upvoting is placing mediocre content on the hot and trending pages.
The promise of Steem is that people can find good content easily, and those who write it can make money with it.
The actions of adsactly are actively torpedoing this promise!
Freedom of speech?
Putting away the monetary aspect, how does the censoring of any comment that adsactly does not like connects to the idea of free speech on the blockchain?
Sure, you can still read those comments. But how many people actually open the greyed-out things? What should an author do that is losing all his Steem income to adsactly’s flagging if he speaks up?
What adsactly does – or threatens to do - is the total economical and reputational destruction of anyone who does not agree with their actions on Steemit.
Do you think that this is good for Steem?
There's a lot of talk here about "brain trust" and "quality content is rewarded", but really 80% of it at least is leveraging bots to upvote yourself. I've also noticed bigger players replying to my comments and upvoting their own replies while ignoring my comment .. every time you click yourself you get 5, 10, 20 etc steem dollars .. it's ridiculous. I understand @dan created Steemit and then walked away. That's a bad sign. They wanted some sort of libertarian anarchocapitalist space, but like uh Waco that usually devolves into chaos. Steemit has the feeling of a cult where some priestly class move above us at the top of the pyramid constantly clicking on their own content. It's pretty hard to imagine climbing much higher in status without imitating them.
And this is the underlying problem: Can quality content ever earn enough for a blogger? There are countless "photography contests" on here, for example, its just making money off of pretty snapshots .. actual content is not rewarded ultimately, it's about playing the game their way to "cheat" .. in the end maybe you make money, but you never know if your content is worthy, and maybe you don't care .. it's like celebrities buying their friends with drugs .. once the cocaine runs out, all your supposed "friends" are gone .. no Steem, no friends .. hahaha .. it's completely materialist in the end.
Steem never said it is NOT materialistic-capitalistic. And of course the system invites capital accumulation. The Rich getting richer etc.
But of course there is a difference of doing it "right" and the system having a problem and actual abusing.
Yes but the irony is that they want to create a decentralized economic system, but in concrete situations like Steemit, we can see that it quickly just imitates the current centralized economic model with a top 1% elite gaming everyone else. The minnows become debt slaves : ) .. I know they are anti-Socialist, way into Hayek .. no one is trying to make everyone rich, despite the occasional articles suggesting crypto will solve world hunger .. I understand that. But I think if Steemit is going to survive it needs to develop better self-policing or built-in limits to crowd upvoting or use of bots. But like Jim Jones, maybe they dont really plan on having Steemit last .. its a golden goose right now for the top whales, but they will kill their goose and we'll all symbolically have to uh drink the kool aid .. yuck :)
You said it. Artificial upvoting decreases the quality of top posts and discourages new members. This limits our potential for mainstream adoption.
I have never quite been able to understand what adsactly actually did. Judging by what you've discovered, clearly it isn't always about highlighting quality posts.
And that blatantly bullying post is just nasty. If that is the kind of support they offer their members, then .... err, no thanks. If they want to be credible I'm sure they could do a lot of good in the community, simply by filtering for better quality posts from their members; and in fact encouraging better quality posts from their members. Now that would be excellent to see happen. :)
Yes, and I would have been happy if one of them had spoken p and said they will try to do this. But, as you see, you can't even talk about that.
I love my time with Steemit, and during my less than 2 months here I have started to notice similar things.
There are people big and small that are just gaming the system. Technically, I suppose it is within the rules. Nothing "wrong" is being done. But with power comes corruption, even if you think you are doing right. For example, I saw recently that a large account (which I otherwise respect) smacked down (down voted) a relatively new user just because he made a lame comment that was asking for a follow of upvote. I suppose it is annoying, but it has such a large disproportionate effect on the target. I also took a look at the victim's account. He was new but looked like he was trying.
I guess there is no way at the moment to police this, but if the witnesses don't do anything this could become a cancer that brings down the whole thing. We will turn into warring tribes.
Sorry about the lack of coherence in my comment, I'm tired.
Well, it may be overreaction, but it is the natural result of such actions.
The thing is it was ONE downvote. You can easily make that good.
Yes, but the piling in of supporter and friends would have made it difficult for someone who was obviously not a native English speaker to respond to a pack.
PS: I'm not trying to compare this to the situation that you find yourself in! I think you are pointing out something worthwhile.
addition: I made it into the top100 downvoted users today, thanks to adsacty! Number 51!
https://steemit.com/stats/@pibarabot/pibarabot-watching-the-watchers-2018-02-13
This problem, like most on the platform brings me back to distribution of wealth. No matter how “good” a whale is you cannot trust them with hundreds of times more power than even established minnows. It becomes even more troubling when a few of them pool their resources into a faction.
The comment about bullying is really ironic...”we don’t like bullying and we have thousands of people and can crush you so shut your mouth”, is basically what’s being said. An account with that much power should not be threatening anyone, however veiled, it’s an abuse of power.
I don’t personally have anything against adsactly but I don’t like how the largest active accounts are allowed to get away with whatever they want.
Historically the concentration of wealth in the hands of few (and the according poorness of the masses and the resulting corruption) was was brought most Empires to fall, not any external enemy.
You can btw. see that currently everywhere in the western world, with the increase of hate against refugees and racism, as a direct result of fears of losing in the poorer people, who have not benefited from the wealth increase of the last 30 years.
This is certainly a problem on this platform and I think the best way to deal with it is to connect with those we want to support and become strong in numbers promoting the content we want to see.
You know I'm their biggest fan. I love them so much I even gave them some flags of love and they loved me back in return even more.
Most of the platform and big players don't care what they are doing, which is very unfortunate. What can I do alone then.. Right now I have them on mute, I just can't watch trending with adsactly and velimir every day all day. They are blatant reward pool rapists and together they are number 1 rewarded users in the last couple of months on steemit, for, as you said, a content that will put you to sleep after one minute of reading it. Would you believe it, haejing is number 2!
With Haejin you could at least say he is posting crypto stuff, and that always gets overvoted.
But most of adsactlys 400$ posts are average to average good, which would not get even one tenth if posted by someone else.
Adsactly is probably already at the point where he has so much accumulated that it will increase in % of the daily output because of the concentration of the votes.
This will, eventually, ruin Steem.
Yes, he is maximizing those profits by creating a cult following that will back up everything he does, just because he can give them money from time to time. People need to wake up and see that adsactly is not the only whale on this platform.
The way they are going on about it, with the daily number of blogs they keep on producing with faceless users behind it, using other people work to give itself more of the reward pool is frankly very disgusting. I can never back up that kind of society. Also if you say something bad or flag them they will, as you found out flag you back without remorse.
I try to not think about the whole scam, it is making me uneasy, and that is ultimately why I muted them.
Maybe we should create our own guild?
An account to resteem and upvote, but only members (who have proved that they don't write bad stuff only), and only if they write good posts. A bit like a curation trail but for a smaller number of people.
Member would delegate 100SP to that account.
Each member has the guarantee to get 1 upvote+resteem in a month (if he posts anything worthy at all), so even non-natural writers would have a profit from it.
Also one vote daily would go to posts of non-members.
Just a instant-idea here. Don't know if I would even want to do this :D
Never even knew about this group. How do you know you are reading one of these types of posts, other than the lame content?
adsactly bots:
supreme downvote @lennstar/re-adsactly-re-lennstar-re-lennstar-re-a… (-5%) 7 minutes ago
33ba8a5e
Dorth dorth downvote @lennstar/re-adsactly-re-lennstar-re-lennstar-re-a… (-0.5%) 7 minutes ago
f878d365
Protoken protoken downvote @lennstar/re-adsactly-re-lennstar-re-lennstar-re-a… (-5%) 7 minutes ago
Dorth dorth downvote @lennstar/re-adsactly-adsactly-on-adsactly-part-38… (-0.5%) 1 hour ago
762554f8
Protoken protoken downvote @lennstar/re-adsactly-adsactly-on-adsactly-part-38… (-5%) 1 hour ago
762554f8
Supreme supreme downvote @lennstar/re-adsactly-adsactly-on-adsactly-part-38… (-5%) 1 hour ago
But foremost I hope (small hope) that adsactly or someone from their group comes here and explains why they upvote content that is not good to amounts that are 100 times of similar posts, if not more.
If they would spread it evenly/randomly, it would not be such a big problem, a bit like lottery, but it is the same users again and again. And such a thing destroys communities. I don't want Steem to be destroyed.
There is a Steemian i know that publishes stuff for utopian.io. Translates something on github, then posts screenshots of her work on Steemit every day. She gets around 50-100 dollars 2-3 times a day.
Now i cant be sure but i would bet those upvotes from adsactly are something similar. A payment for a service in the form of votes.
The reason they dont explain it i cant know for sure. Maybe they dont like sharing. Who knows? Who cares? As long as they arent doing anything illegal let them be.
From what ive seen, adsactly is just a big whale that flags those that speak of Adsactly negatively. I personally think that to be unneccessary but its everyones right to do so. There are plenty of whales. I cant possibly believe one whale can ruin Steemit with upvoting what you call mediocre content.
Hes just going to flag you again. Whats the point of attacking him? I dont think you are going to get community support to "deal with him" over a few mean flags and bad words. Just silly drama. Have fun everyone.
I don't attack him. I attack his actions. That is a difference.
I can. Because he is 1) destroying the fundamentals of this platform. 2) because he is already near critical mass.
I can't say how close, because nobody knows without extensive analysis and even then it depends on other people, but with - I guesstimate - 2,5% of the reward pool going to the adsactly crowd, it is easy to see that there will be a point where his circle voting will result in an ever increasing share of that reward pool, with rising tendency. Then it is only a matter of time until the implosion of Steem.
Other whales do not only and always vote the same other whales.
Because I looked in several of the last posts of this guy and, as I wrote, it was always the same (top) users upvoting it. And you can see some of those users upvoting adsactly posts.
Of course they could do curation harvesting - but with the bragging of 2400+ users, how likely is that?
And if that would be the case, don't they think what that means for the ecosystem? (For this it does not really matter if members of adsactly or acting with their votes like members)
He's making like $SBD 500+ per post for music reviews .. totally banal, hundreds of upvotes and comments .. it looks rigged. But if were to blackflag him I'd be punished and it'd do no good. The minnows are powerless. And as you state here, such users might reach critical mass and ruin the ecosystem if they take half of the available steem or more .. nothing left ... there should be caps on daily take per user .. no single post should earn more than say $100 and no one can post more than say 4 times per day ... even then people would find a way to cheat .. its the problem with monetizing content ...