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RE: Steem Guild Will Transition to Community Building
Yo. Thanks for trying to do things well. We all make mistakes, but Steemit is a place where mistakes are vigorously misinterpreted as premeditated malice. I appreciate that you guys keep doing your work despite the never-ending stream of vitriol coming at you.
Thanks, for seeing the wood from the trees.
It is a "mistake" to lie to the community about how you are funding an initiative? It is a mistake to continue to do that after the community asks you to stop? When the asking didn't work, next came the flagging, which also didn't work. Now they vote on old posts to ensure the money goes where a select few want it to go?
Everyone knows this is happening. The same accounts just don't have the power or voice to anything about it. They fear back-lash which makes sense, because it is threatened a lot.
It is just a mistake to call the community entittled and whiners when they see bad behavior going on. It is just a mistake to tell them to write better articles if they want votes. (eh, no.. they won't get the votes, because the votes have already be allocated to whatever the whales have decided to fund)
Where I come from those are not mistakes they are blatant lies, fraud, and embezzlement from current investors. Setting up the end-users to be disappointed and based on the price it is a failing business model.
@biophil, yes, you support anyone you like. I do not support ANY activities by this group. I feel disappointed by those of you who are supporting it, and those of you who are turning a blind eye.
@whatsup @sigmajin @beanz @noganoo etc... I think some things need to be cleared up here. Keep in mind that none of this is directed at any one of you specifically but more at the general group. I just want to clear some things up. This comment is not intended to instigate anything, so please don't read it as such.
First of all, when SG was formed the whale backers of SG said they would prefer to compensate the staffers in upvotes on their own personal work to compensate them for their time. We asked them for other means of compensation via curation rewards or outright steem payments. We also suggested doing a model similar to Curie where we put out a single daily post which gets upvoted heavily and we use that post to help compensate the staff. All of those methods were forgone by our whale backers in favor of using upvotes to compensate the staff for their time.
Secondly, the staffer's posts were upvoted strictly in accordance with the amount of time they contributed to the project, the more hours they put in the higher percentage vote they received.
Thirdly, no one was ever voting their own posts, there were no "self-votes". Every post that was voted was agreed upon by another member of the group and voted in accordance with how much time and work he had spent on the project.
I guess some of you don't feel people should be compensated for their time but much of the rest of the world does. We are not talking small amounts of time here by the way. A couple of the staff routinely puts in 8-12 hours per day curating and then voting 400 plus authors every single day. That is a lot of work... The take away here is that no one has ever been upvoted above the amount of time and work they have put in, and again this is all the preference and in agreement with our whale backers.
Now, when the community started to show some backlash, we got together and went to our whale backers asking them if we could do some combination of steem payments or something like that as the community seemed to not be thrilled with their chosen method of compensation. The backers said that the only method they were comfortable with at this time was continuing to use votes for compensation.
SG as a group decided we would reduce the frequency and the percentage used on our post's to help satisfy some of these complaints. Again, this was not something our backers told us to do, it was something we decided on our own, and in reality didn't have to do.
When that still wasn't good enough for some of you, a couple of our staffers tried another alternative, voting on older posts to compensate for their time. They did this because one of the chief complaints being thrown around was that SG posts were dominating the trending page and that is not fair for others... OK, so a few SG members tried to appease that concern by going about alternative means of being compensated for their time while not dominating the trending page.
So, now staffers have both cut back on the number of posts and they have cut back on the percentage used, and some of them have removed themselves from the trending page completely. Yet that still doesn't seem good enough. Nothing was done in secret or hidden, in reality it was done to appease some of you guys in hopes that we could all work together for the good of the platform.
Another thing to keep in mind, look at the accounts of SG members, none of them are powering down. In fact all of them are powering up. This is a group that is committed to growing the platform not one after a cash grab. These are the facts. Run with them how you choose.
I'd also like to add that you may agree or disagree whether SG was actually needed, but I can tell you a large chunk of people have told me they would have left had they not started getting rewards via Curie and SG. So, we might be exactly where we are today in terms of price had SG never existed, but we would be here with significantly less of a community.
Again, this response was not meant to instigate anything. So, please don't see it as such. It was merely meant to lay out some facts regarding some misrepresentations that have been going around. Thanks for reading.
I see it as a reasonable response and attempt to explain your perspective. I truly appreciate an intelligent and thought out response. Thank you.
My perspective is different. Many people spend time curating and don't draw a wage. That is what the curation rewards were intended for. Not a fixed system where it is pre-determined who will vote for whom.
Although you have received the feedback that your efforts have paid off, and I have seen it myself. the retention and price say it might not be as effective as you think. However, I REALLY appreciate the thought out response.
Fyi. We are not a group. I don't speak to any of the other mentioned people on a regular basis.
Thank you for your response. I still totally disagree with what was done and how it was done. However, it doesn't seem quite as sinister when you just straight up explain it. Thank you, @jrcornel.
edited: There are/were unintended consequences to the lack of transparency in how the rewards were distributed and @gavvet claimed he was voting on old posts to "catch a troll". Due to how you were paid, and how this was kept silent. It hurt the creditability of the platform which for me is way more important than the reward pool or the trending page.
Although, in my opinion, both of those areas were hurt as well.
Anyway, my goal here was never to be a blogger, so my interest in the whole affair was the credibility of SteemIt and SteemIt, Inc. And how it looks to potential investors.
I see. And yes that is understandable. Just keep in mind that any and all curation rewards were going back to the whales. Not SG staff. So, we did need some form of compensation for our time... Things are set to change drastically with HF17 for steemit and for SG. Hopefully for the better of all of us. Thank you for the diplomatic and kind words by the way, it was refreshing to read :)
So was your response and I appreciate the change of tone. Cheers. I wish you the best of success.
Thank you for a respectful response. I can see that the guild is made up of a mixture of people. Some receive criticism well, others don't. Those that don't are not very good representatives for a Community Building Guild. I understand you probably feel attacked and worn out from defending yourselves or having to deflect because of not being able to speak on behalf of these "whale backers" who chose this revenue model.
I've always been against the use of the upvote as an exchange because I believe it undermines STEEM as a currency - which should be the medium of exchange, and it depreciates the reward pool for the rest of the community which I believe was your purpose was to build. When a business hires people to work for them, they pay them out of the profits their employees bring them. So nobody is against the staff members being reimbursed for their work. It is just that the money is not coming from those who benefit from the service, it is coming from the reward pool, which means that the funds can be downvoted by anybody and everybody who does not benefit from the service, which makes it an unsustainable model - unless you can successfully interrogate people from downvoting the content - which is definitely not good.
But I understand that's not up to you how you get paid. I voiced my concern before about being on the list of supported authors for this very reason. And I know others stepped out of the guild because they saw the flaw. I hope the revenue model for this new initiative will be different.
That is understandable and we agreed as well, but we weren't left with many other options. We would have loved to receive some form of steem payment for the work being done. That is what we kept pushing for actually.
For those wanting the "market" to decide votes... I am not sure if you remember but before Curie or SG, the "market" was deciding that there were a handful of authors making thousands and everyone else was making under $1... now, and yes SG authors were often near the top of the trending page, but there was a much fatter tail of rewards behind them. There were tons of posts in the $10-$40 range that were never there before and that is factoring in the much lower price of steem, those same authors would have been in the $100-$400 range when the price was higher. If Curie and SG never existed, that fatter tail likely never happens.
So, yes while the compensation model wasn't ideal (we even agreed but weren't left many other options), we also agreed that SG was absolutely essential in keeping as many people as we possibly could on the platform. We weren't growing it, but we were keeping as many as we could.
And yes you are right about some of the members reacting differently and handling the stress we experienced differently. I am sure many people have said things they wish they could have been more professional about but sometimes emotions get the best of all of us, ya know :)
Thanks for always being diplomatic and professional about this. I have tried to be as well. We are all after the same goal of a thriving steemit.com and a much higher price of steem. Hopefully this next HF is a step in that direction!
If everything was transparent from the start, I could easily say that SG did far more good than bad. But you have to agree this conflict in the community is not good (calling them trolls doesn't remove them as an important part of the community - being the ones who voice their concerns rather than just leave) and could have been avoided if the whole thing began with more transparency and people reacted better to being questioned. Deflecting questions with accusations of bitterness or jealousy etc, just made people more suspiscious...
Exactly. This is what I want everyone to realise. I may not like the way things have gone, but I don't think malice was intended at all... Some mistakes and understandable ones when being transparant also means facing criticism from the start.
If anybody from steem guild would like to do an interview with @votu we would be really glad to have you. This Saturday we are doing an episode on witnesses and the role of witnesses as part of the community so it should be relevant to this community building intiative of yours (and ours).
A noisy group of self-interested, powering down and dumping, vest-less, trolls with and exit strategy does not constitute "the community"...
Time will tell.
Now on that we can agree...
Well said.