⚠ ☢ ☣ ☠ Steemit Safety Meeting: Objective Two; "Abuse", The Current Drop of Cryptocurrencies Value, and the Burning Question If One Should Invest? ☠ ☣ ☢ ⚠
The Current Dip, the Dip Before a Fall or Will It Rise Again?
As a fellow newcomer learning the steemit ropes, I would like to share some of my experiences and thoughts of what I have seen so far.
One Month In and 150+ Followers Later,
and Still Going Strong - or So I Like to Think.
While offering what little advice I may, I hope readers can learn a few things in what I share. And maybe even comment on some of their own experiences and thoughts of what they have observed so far here.
First things first....
Find And Read the steem "White Papers"
(44 pages).
Written by Daniel Larimer, Ned Scott, Valentine Zavgorodnev, Benjamin Johnson, James Calfee, & Michael Vandeberg
March 2016
If you do not do this I can tell you it's a disservice to yourself. Within it you will find all you need to know about the intent and purpose of the steem blockchain back-end & it's steemit User Interface front-end.
I made the "mistake" of calling out what I saw as a fraudulent scam of one particular account here before I even knew what the "White Papers" were, and it only took that one particular account 5 flags to nearly "nuke" my account (destroy one's Reputation).
Within these "White Papers" it boldly defines unacceptable abuse as anything that "undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency". Everything else is fair game. There is next to nothing built into the system to prevent anyone from building and running Networks for the sole purpose of abuse, and it is on us to manage the community to restrict/curb those who do choose to abuse it.
IMAGE: Steem White Papers, Page 18
"Steem is designed around a relatively simple concept: everyone’s meaningful contribution to the community should be recognized for the value it adds. When people are recognized for their meaningful contributions, they continue contributing and the community grows. Any imbalance in the give and take within a community is unsustainable. Eventually the givers grow tired of supporting the takers and disengage from the community." ~Page 6
Meaning it has been recognized from the start that those who have advanced to a high value (by one means or another, not every account of high value got there by investing their own money into it) would eventually "tire of supporting the takers and disengage from the community". Whether these same users decide to attack newcomers and others within the community (rather than "disengage" from it) is entirely without consequence to those users UNLESS the COMMUNITY stands together against it. In fact, if the Community does not stand against this those users can make some pretty large profits through their tactics of unrestricted abuse.
"Through the addition of negative-voting it is possible for many smaller stakeholders to nullify the voting power of collusive groups or defecting large stakeholders." ~ Page 17.
Ahhh.... thee 'ol double-edged sword... the same power that gives a thousand Red Fish the ability to "nullify the voting power of collusive groups or defecting large stakeholders" is the same power that gives collusive groups or defecting large stakeholders the ability to nullify the voting power of thousands of Red Fish.
In other words, it takes the efforts of thousands of little accounts to nullify the voting abuse of one large account while it only takes the actions of one large account to nullify the stabilizing efforts of thousands of little accounts....
With that being said, steemit can be whatever you want it to be within it's capabilities. If you want it to just be a social tool to be used like Facebook or Twitter, then that's what it is for you. Want it to be a drama troll-fest spectators' show, then that's what it can be for you. Want to use it to try to convince others to invest fiat currency while you scheme on how to confiscate most of said investments, then you can go for it!
The More One Upvotes in a 24 Hour Period the Less Value Said Upvote Will Have.
It is recommended to use your vote no more than 10 times a day to keep it's value somewhat influential (especially for Red Fish Accounts).
Posting 5 or More Top Level Posts in a 24 Hour Period Will Decrease Potential Payout Value AND Increase Value Decay of All Posts In That Same 24 Hour Period.
Fairly self-explanatory, theoretically the right amount of too many posts can leave any and all potential payouts relatively worthless despite how many supporting upvotes they may have received.
Tags, Tags; Appropriate Tags! And Don't Forget to Put the Spam on the Side!
Never underestimate the power of the Tag. Often times I have seen people voicing complaint over being flagged "for no apparent reason". Yet when studying their posts and their comments I see a common error which even I have made several times when beginning here. I notice a post may be a rant piece about a certain user or feature of steemit, and yet the first tag to the post is 'steem' or 'steemit'. When in reality the post has little to nothing to do about steem or steemit as much as it does about one particular user or one particular feature.
Other times I notice users complaining they are being flagged for spam when their content is identical in nature to some other Whales' successfully high-value posts (usually one sentence pros or a copy/paste of a video description with a link to a YouTube video). Just because someone else has managed to put in the work to somehow make tons of money posting spam does not mean it's okay to do so. And, in fact, it IS successful not just because that user put in a lot of effort to build up a network to make it so yet also because (as a community) we are failing in allowing it to happen in the first place (I guess we are supposed to burn up all our voting power flagging these kinds of users' post while the system in place allows them to destroy our Reputations in the process).
Best advice I can give is JUST DON'T DO IT. Concentrate on the quality of your own content and building your own network while staying as far away from any accounts and networks of collusion as possible.
Sometimes flags are used appropriately and for good purpose, and flagging false tags and spam are some of those appropriate reasons.
And finally I would like to address any potential cash investors, anyone seriously considering putting their own fiat currency into the steem system.
I'm not claiming to be a market wizard or anything, and what the markets are going to do in the next minute (let-alone the next day or week or month or year even) are really anybody's guess.
Yet when I started on this platform steem was almost at a 2:1 ratio to the USD (each steem could be traded out for the equivalent of nearly 2 US Dollars), BitCoin was approaching $3,000. As of the time of this writing, Steem is quickly approaching a 1:1 ratio with the USD and BitCoin has fallen way below $2,000 USD, negating over half of the huge gains it produced so far this first half of 2017.
With this apparent upcoming August Fork/Split of the BitCoin Blockchain, all the markets that alt from BitCoin as it's base before cashing out will be extremely unstable.
Does one buy, thinking it's going to bounce back stronger than ever? Does one sell, thinking it's tanking and no sustainable recovery is possible? Only the individual can answer these questions.
Yet before investing specifically in steem, I would like you to consider all I have written above and combine it with what you may have taken away from reading the "White Papers" & with whatever you may have experienced or witnessed here so far.
Take the following user's video for example, giving you his "expert" advice to buy steem.... while other users investigate his & his wife's activities and history of running scams (everything from MLM [multi-level marketing] schemes to pornography and a supposed outrageous civil lawsuit claim against Match.com). @craig-grant is also the user I called out for using fraudulent tactics of high-value flagging in combination with powerful self-upvoting in a scheme to confiscate potential rewards in the rewards pool curated by his (and his Networks') own actions.
Yet if one even considers what is written here, I can only hope one can see the intent of this user and many similar to is to get you to invest KNOWING (as a large stakeholder of steem) he can use his Network to confiscate a lot of what one invests.
I sincerely hope we are not witnessing a "crash-and-burn" of any blockchain currency. Of course I would like the steemit platform to be successful and to even have a potential to earn a little while doing something I enjoy (this post took almost 2 hours to create; between thinking and writing and proofreading and preparing/uploading images to third parties [no thanks to my 3 Reputation, which restricts me from uploading file content until my Reputation gets above 10 - MUCHO UPVOTES NEEDED for that to happen], we all know quality content does not just create itself).
Of course we could go on forever about quality of content and the subjectivity of spam, about the definition of censorship and fairness, about the relativity of the reflection between an account's value and the quality of the content it's user provides. My intent of this writing is to hope to get you to think. Especially if you are entertaining the idea of buying some BitCoin to trade for Steem....
Yet if there is anything I wish you to take away from this it would be the following:
YES, original content seemed to be the soul of this machine. Yet it has been taken over by the Value-Of-Network being greater than Quality-Of-Content.
If one has built a sufficiently loyal Network (be it of malicious humans or worse bots) then one can post the absolute spam of all spam and still be successful and hugely profitable using that Network to flag other high-value content while using powerful self-upvoting and upvoting only the master of one's Network.
Personally, I think I'll wait for a version of a blockchain UI which discourages Networks of Bots (or bots in general, I prefer to interact with real people and allowing an action of one [be it for or against me] to stand on a 1:1 ratio) and curbs the ability of one person to destroy the Reputation of any one for any reason before I'll invest one red cent into it. But that's just me, never been a gambler (particularly in a game I see as fixed or rigged as a Financial Oligarchy).
If you like this work, and care to support this writer and content creator, please give an upvote to, make a comment in, and/or resteem the posts you like.
Thank You!