RE: Newbie lovers, please stop ignoring older minnows
As the big meany who started #project-smackdown, I want to make a statement in my official capacity of founding member of the Steem Cooperative:
We do not want to 'punish' especially not little users, new, or old, at all. In fact, I admire your tenacity to keep going, though I wonder if you took a look at my wallet (@elfspice and @l0k1 both) you will see that I now have a total of around 2600 steem power. I managed to go from zero, to about 15,000 steem, in about 6 months, and put every last euro-cent of my welfare payments into Steem Power, before powering it down, in order to get my project of Make Elfspice Better (my health) Again.
I so far spent about $4000 of my powerdown, which amounted to about $8000, as I started it before the big price jump, I did not get the max possible which would have been about $40,000, buying GPU mining hardware, about $4000 worth. I have spent another 2000, probably, on renting an apartment in Bulgaria, for 3 months, while I seek to end my addictions, fix my health problems, and prepare myself for the Zombie Apocalypse, with some sensible shoes, lugol's iodine solution, some quality, practical tactical pants, some goggles (I love goggles, I hate dust and crap in my eyes, which happens every other week here in Sofia, with its' dusty river valley soil).
So, back to you - @smackdown.kitty is using the 100,000SP she was delegated, in a conservative fashion, to downvote the most absurdly large self rewards discovered, at a rate of about 20 such self voted comments per day. Note, this is ONLY comments, ONLY the top 20 in a 24 hour period, and NOT any account under 1000SP.
In fact, pretty much, what we really see is accounts with over 100,000 SP that are being downvoted. The content of their wonderous valuable comments can be seen in posts that myself and @personz made under #project-smackdown
We want to ban it on the blockchain level, BECAUSE IT IS BAD FOR SMALL ACCOUNTS - something @inertia pointed out in his response to my inital announcement post for #project-smackdown and @smackdown.kitty
Sure, new small acounts too, old ones, it doesn't make any difference. We also want to educate users and make the interface facilitate more judicious use of voting power, because it is our opinion that too many elements of the design of both interface and blockchain, yield such a homogenous, entropy (low novelty/information) outcome, or in other words, the good stuff is being missed, and not getting the rewards it would get, if the parameters were calibrated better, to produce a more balanced outcome.
If we can get the minnows, who constitute about 20-30% of the bottom half of total stake in the platform, to use their votes better, it will benefit the whole platform, as well as accelerate upward mobility.
This would mean faster growth for your account also. I have been following you for quite some time, and you are one of those who I describe as 'good honest, hard working, underpaid steemians'.
Thank you for your elaborate comment @elfspice! Let me first start by saying I don't think you're a big meany at all! ;-)
I did not know all the ins and outs of the project (as I stated) and I mainly used it as an example, a stepping stone to my bigger issue. Thank you for explaining a bit more about the project to me. I agree that self-upvoting excessively should be punished somehow (maybe punish is a strong word, counteract might be good here). I understand why non-whales do it though. Heck, I even understand why big whales would do it, though I think with how much they have invested in the platform and the effect their votes have, they should know better.
I can completely get behind the idea of banning it on the blockchain level and I would not be sad to see it go at all. If no one can upvote themselves, things would feel a lot fairer. Though in that case, I'd be worried about whales with alt accounts, but yeah...
How do you think interface changes can work towards a fairer rewards outcome? One thing I read a while ago was hiding pending payouts. How do you feel about that? At first, I thought "No way, I want to see my pending payouts!", but then I figured it might be better, because it would make it harder for people to 'follow the money' on big upvotes. Though ofcourse you can always check out past payouts on people's blogs, so I wonder how much effect it would really have.
I think we have many minnows who are not happy with how things are going now. They themselves try to be fair in their upvotes (even if they upvote themselves aswell), but with the other part of new minnows simply going for a quick buck through 'follower for follower' ideas, we don't have a big group of people trying to be fair. I still don't know how to combat ideas like 'follower for follower', other than to try and educate. In my opinion, it's really harming the platform both with spam and upvotes on crap content.
I don't know about dolphins and whales though. I don't know many at all, because they mostly go indepth on crypto topics quite a bit and my knowledge is very limited there, so I skip over it or can't contribute to their conversations. I wonder how they feel about Steemit and I wonder how they vote. Do they vote minnows a lot, or is it like a 'rich people making other richies more rich' kinda thing? I have noticed a few trying to build up their friends by upvoting all of their posts, which I understand. I'm doing the same for my brother, though my votes don't do much.
I guess my main focus is the other minnows on the platform, just struggling to get seen, so my overall view is somewhat limited at times.
Anyway, thanks again for your comment and also for the compliment. I try to be as honest as I can, though sometimes I tone it down a bit to not piss people off :-)
Currently, especially for small accounts, many of the defaults cause small accounts voting power to be rapidly consumed. If a minnow posts 4 posts a day, they knock their voting power to 80%, and any more votes after this, and every day like this, their vote power goes down, and down, and down, until there is no more.
So having an interface default that causes an unwitting consumption of vote power is doubly deleterious to minnow accounts.
There is other issues I have in my sights related to this, you can see a github issue I posted about the vote slider.
https://github.com/steemit/condenser/issues/1544
I missed the reply and issue, and I stand by my assertion that it is a bug. I am even locking horns with a highly upvoted witness on this issue. They are proposing to eliminate bandwidth limitation in the initial HF20 proposal, which in my view will open the floodgates for a tsunami of spammy nonsense originating from digital sweatshops 'mining' steem.
Which reminds me. I really have to write about that.
Aah I see! Yes, it is very hard for smaller minnows to keep up their voting power. I've heard complaints about that before. I definitely understand you fighting to give them a slider aswell!