RE: Nihilist Takes on Msgivings and SBD payouts; Take another Look and See What You Think Now
For the most part, I agree with your post. Only two objections.
First
No one is this harsh towards people who make high profits off of ICOs, for being early adopters. Why does the SteemTeam get all that flak? Just a bias over pre-minings.
There were some people (not myself) who figured out how to mine Steem even with all the scant details the team provided. In fact, they (Steemit) purposefully withheld information so that they could mine.
However, some of these early adopters were very clever and figured out how to do so despite the lack of information.
When Steemit's servers failed and a re-launch was underway -- under the assumption that Steemit wanted to be able to give away Steem in the form of Power to new users -- the rewards of some of these early miners were wiped clean. This was how the re-launch was justified. It's done and it has happened and some of the rewards / power from early mining provided to the Steemit devloper team and company employees, as well as other insiders, raises questions as to whether or not these accounts should be voting or not.
Second
We were all duped by @msgivings with respect to the plagiarism. It took quite a while to find it. I really enjoyed her content (and agreed with most of her views on the subject!) and thought it was great that there were indeed spin-offs and responses to her posts.
Personally, I believe that the initial looking into her account was due to the fact that some users did not agree with her viewpoints at all; maybe some users don't believe that women should be sexually liberated. I dunno, I can't speak for them, but that was my interpretation as to the initial cause of the investigations.
However, with that said, I do appreciate the fine detective work in rooting out plagiarism, which I do not actually believe benefits the platform, even if lots of formatting, citations of pictures were done to hide this, not to mention how original posts and discussions appeared!
I'll admit I don't know all the facts, in regards to the two points you mentioned. Especially the mining scenario. That does sound strange how it went down.
The Witch-Hunt comparison is def fitting, it was that ppl got pissed off MsGiv's was getting money writing stuff they didnt like and that she wouldnt engage in debate. it's good overall that msgivings was exposed. There's more good that came from it overall, the discussion over what is/isnt steemit abuse and plagiarism has the people who steward those things deciding on certain standards of what deserves flagging. It really pissed me off at first, but now I think that AI can be used to make posts quality posts without plagiarism, and we shouldn't be to quick to judge it as it can be the same as using any other resources (just as you can rewrite anyone eleses ideas as long as you do the proper citations) It's an extension of the general AI tech controversies.
I need to make sure I am doing more proper diligence. There was a reason for the re-launch due to an integer overflow bug.
Fortunately, @joseph does a good job detailing the history of public record in https://steemit.com/steem/@joseph/the-history-of-steem-steemit-launch-in-the-words-of-dan-larimer-from-the-early-launch-days .
I'd edit my comment above, but then your comment would seem strange, and we currently don't (currently) have a nice UI to see all edits from every post -- although, maybe we'll see that soon.
It is appreciated.
An edit function like that, with a UI for us muggles, would be a great feature. A powerful one in some ways.
No problem.
I've wanted an ability to see edits in the UI (and a save draft one) for awhile now. I only added it to the github repository recently though : https://github.com/steemit/steemit.com/issues/319