RE: Response To Jerry Banfield’s Exit From STEEM
I don't know man, I think the investors are what makes steem valuable. Someone somewhere sat down and did some calculations and determined that even if heavy voters used their maximum vote power that the system would still be viable. If it's a math problem maybe they need to tweak it, but that could be dangerous because that could also cause investors to leave en masse.
People upvote their content at 100% of their VP all of the time. I do it and I'm unashamed to admit it but I've got a vote that by itself won't even payout at steem's current value. Let's just imagine that I had an extra million in the bank collecting dust and by dust I mean 50k annually in APR which is five percent. How would you try to convince me to forego that interest and invest in steem if I'd be persecuted by folks like yourself for upvoting my own content?
Most of Haejin's charts are derived from his in depth video analyses of certain stocks in relation to Elliott Wave Theory. You should check out his YouTube channel, or search Elliott Wave Theory on YouTube in general. There are a lot of people that subscribe to the idea. If there is anything to the theory then some of the high frequency trading servers are probably already using it to clean house with. He probably got his 50k subscribers because some folks really enjoy his content.
I think what he's doing is perfectly legit. The weight of one's VP is a privileged that investors are given based on the amount invested but if you don't like seeing his content I'd simply mute him or unfollow him. It's unfortunate for the platform when people resort to flagging for all the wrong reasons.
If you want to look into something really sketchy though I'd look into the select few that were mining steem for the short window that it was possible to mine. I hear they've amassed themselves quite the tidy fortune. As far as the current value of steem goes, all crypto seems to be mysteriously tied to bitcoin. When steem was mooning bitcoin was too. Now that bitcoin has plummeted so has steem. So, your observation in regard to the value of steem might not be 100% accurate.
I'm sure there are a lot of factors to consider with respect to steem's value but I think the biggest factor is bitcoin. It seems to be the rising tide that raises all the boats. Only problem right now is, it's not rising fast enough to appease folks.
I get the argument and the quality of content is subjective but when the majority of the people coming to Steemit as outsiders don't really think the content is compelling. So at the end of the day why do we have to say it is a social media platform?
Why don't we all agree to just Post "Hi Everyone!" And then we can just upvote ourselves for that and that and everyone can just do that 20 times / day. Then when people visit the site viewers will just be like wow what a great community! Everyone is so nice and there are no trolls.
It starts to devolve so far but at the end of the day every platform deals with its various issues. For instance YouTube used to take a screenshot directly at the 50% mark so people would make their videos and throw in a picture of a hot girl showing cleavage at the 50% mark to game the algorithm. There were so many people doing this that the thumbnails didn't have anything to do with the videos at all and it left the viewers feeling duped. It just ends up being a poor experience for viewers / consumers. That is why STEEM is like 95% content creators or more. The content has little or nothing to do with quality. Nothing on STEEM can go viral anywhere on the Internet for the most part because the incentives are set in a way that someone can't produce high quality content just for this system.
No doubt, I feel you. TBH a lot of the stuff in the trending, new, hot, and promoted areas I don't pay any mind to whatsoever. It's boring to me so I just focus on monitoring specific tags that are of high interest to me instead of those major sections.
Even if someone did buy in at like 10 million and posted "Hi Everyone!" and upvoted their own content at 100% 20 times a day causing them to dominate the trending; then that may be evidence that the algorithm should be focused more on the content of a post as opposed to the value it is set to receive in upvotes.
I think the various portals should probably consider that with respects to how they code their algorithms to display new posts to the blockchain. I see portal wars in the future. We already see it now and it looks like steempeak is starting to gain in popularity.
They're sorting by popular tags of interest. They don't have the trending, new, hot, and promoted areas listed like the first portal does. Who knows maybe the answer is to promote the blockchain via portals that don't put a high emphasis on those three categories. That way new people wouldn't be instantly turned off by what they see trending.
SteemPeak is pretty cool but until the get delegated power or utilize that code to go to their own blockchain it is going to be tough. While I think it is cool I won't post through there or Steemit.com because you don't get an upvote from delegated power. So I mainly focus on posting through Busy.org and eSteem.