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RE: Join Me In Discussion To Build a Better Platform. @pawsdog
I feel you on a lot of this. There are times when I see a comment say something like "good job" and that comment has a couple of upvotes that translate to $5 or $6 and I am like that comment is worth more than my earnings for the entire day or even the entire week.
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Yeah that does suck and I feel your pain. I also don't like the concept of self voting or upvoting your own stuff for profit.. There are times I can see it being useful if you are adding a valuable opinion to a post with 100 comments that are garbage and you want to start a discussion, but for the most part I think self voting is somewhat tasteless.. For what its worth.. here are my 3 cents..
I agree with you on the self-voting. The problem is that it is a community norm here to self-vote your own content. I first noticed people voting up their own content, so then I searched it and I found that it is generally accepted to vote up your own content.
I don't think it should be allowed at all. To me, that is like going to your own store and buying your own products in order to inflate your sales numbers and trick your shareholders into thinking that you have a ton of sales.
There is also a controversy about voting up your own comments. I have seen mixed answers to that questions, so I have not voted up my own comments. I do vote up my own content only because the general consensus is to do it. I don't mean to say that it is right just because everybody else is doing it. It is something that I am torn on, but I also see that people are voting themselves up, creating bots to vote themselves up, buying votes from bots, and creating jointly owned bots to vote themselves up.
I find it to be even more unsettling when people of sufficient wealth do it, knowing damn well that they don't need it as much as the others commenting on their posts.
I used to get so frustrated, actually I still get a little pissed when I write out a detailed comment to an article (such as you have done here), get a response from a whale/high rep member and the the dick upvotes their response bu leaves me with zero. It would be like if I upvoted "this comment" and ignored yours that prompted me to write mine. I find that to be quite the dick move in most cases. Let the guy behind you upvote your musings if they are of sufficient quality that they warrant it.
I also hate the buy a vote bullshit. If I can write a trash article and simply buy votes for it, how does that qualify as the community picking only the best content. How does that inspire me to get my shit together, improve my skills and pick topics of interest?. How does it motivate me to engage my audience, interact with them, know them and help them so they help me? If I could just buy votes up to appear popular I would not have the need to know people. It become non personal and just a sham site full of shit masquerading as a place where the community decides the best content.
Remove the self vote and the bots and I think we would see many the milk the system move onto other things and many that are unnoticed would get noticed... here have .03 :)
People buying votes, creating voting bots, and voting networks call into question the whole purpose of the platform. Vote trading whether it be through direct one for one vote trading, jointly owned bots, or voting networks all leads back to the question of what is this network for?
Is this a social network or is it a tit-for-tat ego inflating pyramid scheme? I don't mean to disparage the network. If I hated the network I wouldn't have joined and I wouldn't stay, post, and comment.
I just know that their other blockchain based social networks on the horizon. If they get right what this platform gets wrong then I can see people leaving the network. People only have the time to really be on one social network. The last thing I would want to see is Steemit being a MySpace that is sitting around waiting for a Facebook to take them out.
I am invested here. Nearly all of my post are set up to 100% Power Up and the ones that are not set up that way were done so by accident.
Indeed, I would invest more, financially at least, in this platform if I didn't also see the distinct possibility that it could end up being the failed experiment that prompts the next big social network.
I think disruptors forget that they too can be disrupted. Often times it is easier to disrupt the disrupter. You get to see what the disrupter does right and wrong and you make small adjustments which doesn't cost as much since you don't have to build from scratch.
It seems like the people in the position to change the network either through hardfork changes or by changing their own actions directly are also the people that seem to have an incentive not to change the network since they are beneficiaries of the broken system as well.
They might only make changes when they see external threats, but then it might be too late. People who are less invested like me are now in the position where we are thinking about hedging.
Hedging is the last thing you want to see from your customers on a social network. You what all in mass adoption.
I agree, but you need to not go after the disrupter but go after his command and control. If your army is small don't go after the dictator and his larger armies, go after the farmers that make the wheat to feed his army.
Very true.. I think that many changes need to be made to create confidence in the platform.
When it comes to the self voting, I think that it is okay to Love yourself. I have seen others refer to this action as the "I love me syndrome."
I told my wife about this little bit of info when I first started and she was like "You better go and love yourself!"
It has come to my attention that when you are a minnow you are not shown something: An upvote slider. When your account reaches a certain value, your upvote slider lets you pick a lesser percentage vote. So as a whale if your upvote is worth $1000 at 100% voting power with your slider at 100% you can lower it to 1% so as to not give a user hundreds of dollars over a small comment but more like $10.
With that it is left up to the user to govern himself if he's going to love himself at 100%. I think its great being able to give myself a nice upvote if I really want my article to get noticed (as opposed to buying an upvote, since I can do it myself, hypothetically speaking) and I can't see myself abusing it. Some of the whales I see upvoting themselves are also curating other content as well and spreading the wealth.
I am not opposed to a specific hardcap on how much "love" you can give yourself to give your post a little boost and get noticed. Most people that are heavily invested in this platform are probably not going to spit out shit posts cause it'll only hurt their investment. At least one would hope they realize this, but common sense is not so common
When it comes to the buying of upvotes, there are both positive and negative avenues for this. For example, I user @minnowsupport and use their upvote feature in the discord channel. This helps me with recognition for sure and only cost a 1 time payment of a small amount of SBD.
Other upvote whales though are most certainly turning this into a Pay to win game. As a gamer for many years, I know all about pay to win and I am not very fond of it. This is very different though but the concept pay to win still holds some ground when it comes to buying upvotes. Especially if it is a bad post.
I think the "self love" thing pollutes the system by opening the door for one to providing financial incentive to use your influence to line your pockets instead of contributing to the platform. I can see "self love" as useful when you are actively trying to contribute to a key topic and you want to pass the fluff posts of "great job, nice read, following etc.) and get to a point where you can be noticed and actually engage that user on the topic. The way it is being used now, by many with sufficient influence is in an abusive fashion that serves no purpose but to increase their ROI and future level of influence.
You bring a valid point. I can't say I would necessarily feel good about upvoting myself if my upvote had that much influence. Besides all you really need to do to increase ROI is to engage and get involved. Not sure if you've noticed the happenings over at @checkthisout -- here but it is a prime example of a major flaw in the platform but it is unknown to me the purpose of this right now and some claim it's to create balance.
I will check it now, but then again perhaps I would feel differently if I had so much power so as to be able to just use the rewards pool like debit card.. hooker in Vegas... just 100 upvote myself... new motorcycle, a couple 100 percent upvotes.. I think that the lure is what steers so many to the darkside
I would be happy for sb to break out I have a not insignificant amount sitting on Bittrex. I have just not brought it here for the purposes of keeping the experiment pure. I suppose I could be like everyone else and just open another account to upovote myself with..
I resteemed that post to point out the issue with self upvoting and reward pool abuse.. that is worse than the recent flag wars..