6 catastrophic issues with the SteemIt platform
These are the 6 main issues i found after testing the platform for a few days:
1. Web implementation
As many of you found out the hard way, the Steemit.com implementation was hacked and they had to bring down the main website. This means that 99% of the people aren't able to participate during that time. This is 180 degrees different from what blockchain technology is all about. One if it's best (if not THE best) features is decentralization, which the SteemIt web implementation currently lacks.
2. STEEM POWER calculation
A new system has to be implemented to prevent people from gaining way too much advantage from buying STEEM POWER. A big problem is that content creators receive money for their own upvote. A fair implementation would be that people gain only a small advantage from buying STEEM POWER, but a SIGNIFICANT reward when they gain it through the platform over a long period of time based on the actual quality of their content and their ability to spot other quality content.
3. Voting Power
It looks you don't have to be selective in your upvotes AT ALL. In fact, the more you upvote, the more you earn. Currently it looks like you could easily vote for a couple of 100 posts per day and while it decreases your voting power slightly, it SIGNIFICANTLY increases your rewards. This is best explained with an example:
User 1 votes on 5 posts per day and has approximately 100% voting power. With an average post value of $1000 that's ($5000 * 100%) = $5000 total value you invested in.
User 2 votes on 500 posts per day and has approximately 25% voting power. With an average post value of $1000 that's ($500,000 * 25%) = $125,000 total value you invested in.
4. Content quality
Because people get rewarded for posting content you can imagine people are posting way more than if they wouldn't get rewarded. The same goes for the upvotes the content receives. Both people don't have to be selective enough with their posts and votes which results in less quality content and a false rating of the content.
5. No censorship
This is good, but also bad in some way. It's only a matter of time before people are using SteemIt for illegal content (piracy, violent/obscene material and illegal porn for example) and not everyone can handle that! Also imagine your children being on this platform when that time has come.
Another damaging exploit is that people with a botnet can spam the network which floods the feed and bloats the blockhain.
6. Botting
Because only a small percentage of people in the world are content creators (the majority of people are "consumers" of that content) the vast majority of SteemIt users are using voting as their main income within the platform. Within this platform you get rewarded significantly more the earlier you upvote the post. Guess what will happen when this platform gets popular and nothing will be implemented to prevent or disincentivize botting: 1000's of bots competing with each other to be the first upvoter. Then determining good content isn't skill-intensive but in fact just a lottery!
Leave a comment if you agree with me, if you think i made a mistake or if you have some other great suggestions!
This post I've read indicates that bots cannot gain advantage over human selectivity of great content. Too many votes in a 24 hr period dilutes the reward.
https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/how-to-maximize-curation-rewards
So voting power DOESN'T influence the amount YOU get paid for voting and in fact only influences how much your vote pays THEM?
That doesn't make sense since i see @dantheman be first in 100's of posts per day.
Good post! I like it! Good Luck To You!
Thank you, took me almost 2 hours pff.
Great post, thank you for your insight. I believe the dev team has addressed some of these issues in the design of Steemit but it's a big experiment. Humans being humans you can bet there will be an enormous amount of effort spent trying to game the system for profit. Will be extremely interesting to see who wins!
I see the issues with 2 and 3. After spending several days on the platform I agree with the general concept but the algorithms seem to be off. If Steem is wanting to encourage new content/users there needs to be a little more weight/voting power for newbies.
The rich people decide what becomes trending, the quality of the content is completely irrelevant it seems.
I know this is old, but it seems closely related to what I've posted about here and I thought you might be interested in joining the discussion.