Will Steem succeed or commit suicide?

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)

In the last weeks there a lot of debate here on Steemit if authors should be allowed to vote on their own posts, and how much, and other debates how to attract more people from Facebook and Reddit to post here. I was inspired by all these posts and especially by a post of @bless "Creating a more Secure, Fair, and Decentralized Steemit #1". You can see in the image below (that's imported from that article) that nothing has changed from last year. The minnows have a very small share of the Steem pie.


 So I thought a lot to understand the problems and what can be done to fix them. And I believe I have found a solution that will benefit EVERYONE

First let's understand the problems

When a new user visits steem.com and starts posting content. Even if it's the best article, and in other mediums would get to the front page  - here it can go unnoticed, collecting dust - maximum he will get like $0.72 if he's lucky. From the other side he sees the trending pages a vacation post of a whale collecting $400 or "What coffee did I drink today". Other not important posts get similar rewards. And that minnow might try hard to build a following, but even if you have 1000 followers if you don't have a friend a whale - forget it. You can make $25 but that's it. Even if your post makes it to @curie that post can make a lot but the rewards of the next one will be back to "norm". He can work out for years and still not get what he would get in any newspaper.

What's the problem?

There is a mix of power over here

It doesn't make sense (to me)

  • That the whales should decide who's a good writer. In NY Times or CNN the stakeholders don't have a say on    the authors.
  • That the whales get curation rewards for upvoting more than all upvoters before them. They didn't do anything that they should deserve that reward.
  • That bots get rewarded and decide what content should appear in the trending page. They don't read the content and don't put any work. 
  • That the whales decide what content should not be seen. Because they have the wealth doesn't mean they understand to media.

So what's the solution?

Steemit needs a fundamental remaking of it's platform.

There should be 3 branches:

The Author branch

The Curation branch

And The Steem Power branch.


Here is how it should work:

The Author branch is where authors write articles. After the author publishes his article - it gets transferred to the Curation department. That means it appears in the "NEW" column. Publisher doesn't have an upvote right for his post. 

Arriving to the curation department it gets awaited by the Curation team. Who is that? You and me, and anyone else. They inspect the package - I'm sorry the post - and decide if it's valued stuff. If it is, they tag their upvote. A post with more upvotes goes up to the next floor - the "hot" column. A post with even more votes flies up via elevator to the 3rd floor. 

Each curation member has his Curation Reputation Tag. The more upvotes the posts - he curated first or from the first - gets - plus his continuous curation - the more his reputation grows. A member with a higher reputation is like a lot voters with lower reputations. 

Same is with the authors. Each author has an Author Reputation Tag. The more curation votes he gets - or fewer votes from high curation reputation members - the more his author reputation ranks. Posts from high reputation authors will automatically show in the "Top Authors" column.

The Steem Power Branch

Steem Power should be seen as Steem shares that will pay off at the rewards section. Stay tuned.


Rewards

Rewards should be splitted like this:

Author rewards - 50-65% of the post payout. It starts by 50% and the higher the author reputation rank the higher the %. Author with the highest reputation get 65%

Curation rewards - 14-29% of the post payout. The higher the author reputation the lower the rewards as above. Curation rewards decrease because there is less work curating a high reputation post, and to incentivise curation of new writers. The first curators get more than the later ones.

Steem Power rewards - 20% of all post payouts should be shared by all SP holder according to their SP ownership. People with more SP get more.

Referral rewards - 1% of post payout should go to the referrer of the author to Steemit. If there is no referrer the 1% should go towards marketing.

 

New rules

The rule of upvoting before 30 minutes should be nulled.

Upvoting button should be removed from the title link pages and will only be shown when viewing the article.

Since Steemit curation rewards are to reward curators for their job to find great post - no curation bots should be allowed. They don't add anything to the platform and are just reducing the reward pool that incentives for good work.

Downvoting should be made by at least 3 curators with a minimum curation reputation.

What will we gain? 

That everybody has an equal opportunity to author and curate, and make money doing so. 

Rewards will be paid to whoever deserves it - to the hard workers.

Whales (and minnows) will get their share according to their SP without upvoting. It's not their job.

There will be more quality content on the top pages.

This will attract new talent and get Steem on the map. And hopefully raising the price of Steem to the happiness of all of us. Else if nothing changes than we will have to do what @dan did.

Please follow @emble upvote and resteem. Thank you

Sort:  

Very nice post! I think you forget that people are actually investing real money into this platform. And of course they want a nice return of investment. Therefore, whales have to have much more influence than a minnow. Steemit is pure capitalism. The winner takes it all. But maybe there are some others ideas to promote great writers that do not have a lot of SP.

I didn't forget, and that's why I think they should get their stake of Steem Power Rewards. But investing money doesn't make you the best author or curator. That's why I think you need different reputation tags for them backed by the community.

What you are missing @emble, is that if you do that, people will not have a good incentive to buy more steem. Then the price will fall. Then, the whole system will fall.

Sure they will have! They get proceeds from every post.

There are a lot of wrongheaded ideas, but let's start with the most glaring one that I found:

Steem Power rewards - 20% of all post payouts should be shared by all SP holder according to their SP ownership. People with more SP get more.

No. Just no. Post rewards are rightly distributed to the people who wrote the content and those that curated it. What you're suggesting is my hard work and effort reward everyone else who had no hand whatsoever in making that happen.

You mention voting power being linked to SP, while simultaneously being upset that whales are granted more weight in curation rewards than others. They have more SP.

As for curation bots, manual curation takes a metric fuckton of time. I manually curate heavily every day, and I don't have nearly the reach I'd like to have. Since I know several authors who consistently put out good content and wouldn't be caught dead putting out garbage, why can't I automate voting for them? Sure there's room for abuse, but there is a robust and healthy community fighting it.

The 30 minute post limit was put in place because there was reward pool raping going on prior to its implementation. It prevents the level of spam that I witnessed firsthand last year when the platform first opened to the public, and that's why it was implemented.

Finally, whales by and large earned what they have. Those posts making hundreds of dollars a day? More often than not they either invested heavily in the platform to begin with (like most of the devs and high-end witnesses) or they had a substantial following that transitioned to Steemit, bringing more people on board (like The Dollar Vigilante). Moreover, if you read the white paper, voting power is designed to diffuse to more users over time, thus reducing the scope of power the whales have without additional investment in.

There are a lot of wrongheaded ideas

I disagree. @emble has the right idea... even if it is possible to shoot through some of this and make it swiss cheese.

A more complex system to get content reviewed and published is exactly what steemit needs.

I know we're still in BETA, and I know it's been a little over a year...

...but what @emble described... a variation of it... is what we may need and see in the future.

I thank him for his proposal. It's a good starting point to get us looking at what types of solutions could exist.

Or, conversely, if we could remove a mountain of crap posts, that would be great.

What about filters for the following:

"Under two sentence post"
"Picture post only"

etc. If I could get all that crap out of /created, I'd feel less like I'm wasting my life everyday trying to curate that garbage.

I would strongly support better filtering.

I'd also strongly support being able to filter out posts that have been upvoted by bots.

I would upvote none of them.

That's an interesting idea! I hadn't thought of the bots option.

The problem is you'd have to restrict it to users who used the bot themselves, because otherwise you could censor anyone by throwing them a randowhale vote. Then, you'd have problems regulating this, because people would just use another account to trigger the bot...you'd end up having to manually weed these out.

I think the technical limitations here might be a problem. Perhaps all bots need to be disabled unless whitelisted by community consensus (cheetah, steem cleaners).

I'd very strongly support disabling bots that curate. Unless folks consider AI to be equal to people in rights, then I don't want bots voting. If folks do consider AI to be equal to people, Imma quite voting altogether.

There are other bots that do good stuff, such as bots that ferret out good content and suggest it to people. While this treads close to the edge, I wouldn't mind a bot that provided a list of posts that contained no recipes for baked goods, make up tips, or pics of Kardashians.

The real issue for me is curation. I remain unaware of any bots writing posts, yet, so am not exercised about that.

Why not limit the posts/week by rep?

According to my plan if you author quality posts you will get much more than you currently do. It will picked up faster by curators. The reason I suggest giving 20% for SP is because all owners of SP have a share in Steem.
People invested in Steemit should get according to their investment. But should they decide which content is good? This belong to curators that are backed by the community, not by whales because of their money.

Yes but 20% is way to heavy. Maybe like 4-6%. I agree with the rest of you ideas.

This is not the final proposal. Everything should be hammered out in the unlikely event that the Steemit board decides to take a look at this.

you could make a new post with the ideas from this comment section. The more people see this the better.

New posts will not help. We need resteemers to resteem this post, to get this message out.

They have a share in Steemit. A share that increases by putting in work (either creating content or curating). And yes, they should. That's the whole point of the platform. That's also why SP can't be withdrawn immediately; it's an investment into the platform.

I often talk about community being an important part of Steemit, but the beauty of Steemit is that everyone is a curator. There is no board that nominates curators. There's no process one can game short of actually investing money into the platform, which enriches all of us because it raises the value of the token this entire thing is built on. Curators are already back by the community; groups like @minnowsupport and @curie are community-driven curation trails. @dragonslayer109, @rhondak and everyone at the Fiction Workshop, and hundreds of other groups of individuals all work tirelessly to find good content and promote it.

You're trying to address a problem that doesn't actually exist. The only thing I've gained from your post is that you don't like whales having as much of a say in which content gets a massive payout, despite their enormous investment into the platform which gave them their position. I understand that, but this isn't a problem. Egalitarianism always ends in a race to the bottom, particularly if it's top-down like this would have to be.

I'm getting really tired of people attacking those of us who bought in big to the platform. I've put damn near 100K into this platform and see non-stop proposals every day to try to reduce my influence or stake. I'm always treated like "the bad guy" because I think putting in a massive fucking investment into a massively risky platform should actually create some reward.

Minnows, stop being jealous that good writers who put in 5+ digits into this platform are more successful than your cat posts to 300 followers. If you don't like it, gtfo so I can actually curate /created again.

This rant is not directed at you, I am in agreement.

Could not have said it better myself, thanks!

Tell me about it. And then I get flack for defending you guys for investing into the platform to keep it alive. How the hell are people so economically illiterate that they don't realize whale funding is the only reason Steemit is still running at basically full speed?

It is not essencially wrong to run a half-plutocratic/half-aristocratic model, but that's not what most people are signing for and without the majority all your steem will have near-to-zero value in the future. Newcomers are realizing it and trying to change the way things are instead of just leaving. Being heavly invested in steem you should be grateful and not angry about it. ;)

The (currency) value of Steem Power rewards comes from those who are willing to buy it and literally nothing else. Newcomers who invest nothing actually cost the platform substantially, in account creation fees and delegated power. There are thousands of these users costing the platform money for every significant investor.

Which is more valuable to court, and which is in shorter supply, is fairly obvious.

The value of BTC is just as you describe Steem. The number of users of Steem, however, is driven by Steemit. If Steemit fails, Steem will no longer have a use case, which will negatively impact it's value.

More significantly, the reverse is true. It is the content that users, those that invest nothing but time, money, and expertise, bring to Steemit, upon which the value of Steem depends.

This was the intent of Steemit. This is it's whole raison d'etre, according to the white paper.

I have nothing but good things to say about investors in Steem, however, investors traditionally invest in order to achieve capital gains, not to complain about the workers in the plant 'that only cost investors wages'.

It is those workers that potentiate Steem having any value beyond what BTC does.

Hey, I just want to clarify some confusion, and say that I totally agree with you.

Newcomers being a cost is fact. They cost money in account creation and delegation, I've seen the numbers.

However, I was referring to these ones:

"Newcomers who invest nothing actually cost the platform substantially, in account creation fees and delegated power."

I wasn't clear, and I should have been. When I said "invest nothing", I also meant the time required to create "quality content". Which, admittedly, most users do not produce. There are many users who have never produced a piece of quality content and that have generated less in total rewards than it cost Stinc/the blockchain to create their accounts.

Those are the ones I mean. The botnets, the sock puppets, the plagiarizers, most of /created (aka /new).

Minnows who create content that garners more rewards (un-botted) than their account cost to create are the bomb, and eventually they turn into dolphins which turn into whales.

I think you're touching on a serious point that no one wants to clarify properly. Investors in steem should not be entitled to anything but the steem they purchased. In the event it goes up in value, they win.

At the moment, though, they get to endlessly drain the rewards pool for themselves which makes no sense.

It is the witnesses who deserve compensation as they are essentially keeping the blockchain running.

I hope you'll consider joining the conversation in the comments of my newest post on these issues. We really need to highlight these problems for anything to change.

Maybe I am wrong, but I belive the value of steem is a consequence of the potential percieved and/or realized by steemit and other(?) steem plataforms. That's what makes people buy steem, the future potential of all this, not the short-time reward they can make upvoting themselves.

That being true, newcomers actually are showing there is real potential for steemit to reach mass adoption and without it -
being a small club of investors - steem worth close-to-nothing unless those investors are willing to invest more and/or never cashout.

For that reason, I completly disagree with your perception of newcomers as cost and I belive that if most whales see things the same way you, steem is not landing anywhere close to the moon and I will probably lose those 500 usd I invested in steem potential.

Hey, I just want to clarify some confusion, and say that I totally agree with you.

Newcomers being a cost is fact. They cost money in account creation and delegation, I've seen the numbers.

However, I was referring to these ones:

"Newcomers who invest nothing actually cost the platform substantially, in account creation fees and delegated power."

I wasn't clear, and I should have been. When I said "invest nothing", I also meant the time required to create "quality content". Which, admittedly, most users do not produce. There are many users who have never produced a piece of quality content and that have generated less in total rewards than it cost Stinc/the blockchain to create their accounts.

Those are the ones I mean. The botnets, the sock puppets, the plagiarizers, most of /created (aka /new).

Minnows who create content that garners more rewards (un-botted) than their account cost to create are the bomb, and eventually they turn into dolphins which turn into whales.

In a few words: Steem is over a year and still not catching up. It's hard to convince people to post here because they have no chance in climbing up this hill. And it includes you 2.

Really? Cause I've been climbing up this hill pretty steadily by putting in the work of forging bonds with the people on here and posting consistently good original material. And yes, it has been catching up. It's a slow process that's set to happen over the course of years, but SP is and will continue to diffuse across more users as time goes on. Again, it's in the white paper. The more people receiving curation/author rewards, the less rewards end up in the pocket of whales. This has been accelerated with the linear rewards curve established in Hardfork 19, as the overall weight of whale accounts has decreased.

I have had zero difficulty in explaining the situation to people on here regarding rewards, as it's a matter of perspective. Just like in the real world, if you don't have any social currency (reputation, not just a rep score), no one's going to know who you are. You have to market yourself. It takes time, and it takes effort, but if I can do it, take a break for a few months to finish a novel, and pick right back up and gain an average of 12 users a day since I've been back, anyone can.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. This is social jealousy. Those without the clout or the following, or the extreme writing skill to get to trending without it, are always looking for ways to try to change the system for the better.

I honestly think that most of the minnows here are basically Steemit-communists. They all want to "seize the means of production" because it's unfair that "he makes more than me after investing $10,000s"

That's exactly what it is. To quote the other guy responding to me:

some people are lucky enough to have a shit load of money to invest.

As if having a shit ton of money to invest just magically happens to people. Nope, no way hard work and effort ever factored into that. Risk assessment and leveraging your assets to get on the cutting edge? Nonsense. It's all luck.

Can't stand that shit.

Nice one; don't get me started...
You know the platform better than me; so it's good to have your perspective. Thankyou.

Those without the clout or the following, or the extreme writing skill to get to trending without it, are always looking for ways to try to change the system for the better.

Is changing the system for the better supposed to be a bad thing?

I honestly think that most of the minnows here are basically Steemit-communists. They all want to "seize the means of production" because it's unfair that "he makes more than me after investing $10,000s"

What were you expecting, an An-cap circle jerk? The vast majority of people detest anarcho-capitalism and prefer socialism. Look at reddit, /r/socialsim has around 100,000 subscribers, /r/anarchocapitalsm has around 1,500 subscribers.

If this site takes off, that's what you can expect. If it doesn't make the distribution system fairer though, it won't take off and users will abandon the site. Less people will upvote your posts and your payouts will decrease. Also, the value of steem will drop.

That was poorly phrased on my part. I was implying "for the better" simply means whatever benefits them more.

The whole point is there isn't agreement on what "for the better" is. Sorry about that.

It's disingenuous of you to compare Socialism and An-Cap. We're talking straight capitalism here, control of one's own assets. You want to compare the numbers of capitalists and socialists in the US, totally inverting your numerical advantage?

Socialism is a garbage ideal for those with garbage logic. Like Communism, it only works in theory until you run out of other people's money (tm), and Steemit is designed to be diametrically opposed to it.

"Less people will upvote your posts and your payouts will decrease. Also, the value of steem will drop."

If you haven't already noticed that the number of your votes is almost irrelevant, because 1 whale is worth 10,000 minnows, then I don't know what to tell you. Losing a bunch of minnow votes really doesn't mean anything. Minnows, if they aren't creating quality content, are a drain on the platform.

If you have data to prove that the value of an asset will drop if you can't get it into the hands of those with no net worth, I'd love to see it.

PS - Still loving the name.

Followed you based on your comments in this thread. I'm a minnow. I'm investing a lot of time and effort to provide good content (well i hope it's classed as "good) on here. That's all i intend to do. Hopefully, over time, my investment (although not liquid like yours) will reward myself and others on here.

@anarcho-andrei The speed of the distribution will change depending on the inflation rate of steem (new coins issued to authors and curators) and on the behave of whales. If inflation is low and whales and selfish, the distribution may not be enought to keep new users comming to the plataform and everyone will hurt.

It's even harder when you think of other languages and without them steem will never grow global. We have good people on steem trying to make national projects, like @camoes for portuguese, but it's almost impossible to make relevant money writing in other language besides english. So, if steem is to really go global and became what it is suposed to, the distribution speed should increase. You are right, it's better after HF19, but maybe not fast enought yet.

And it's not really about social capital. A famous brazillian youtuber could come here with hundreds or thousands of fans and still would be a minnow since very few people in Brazil have any SP to vote for him. Today, it's more like a plutocracy + aristocratic system where you have to either put thousands of dolars or be connected to the nobility class to become relevant. What you are saying is that connecting to the nobility is possible and I agree, but people are saying that maybe it's not the best thing to do with this plataform.

Everyone belives on the concept, but people have different expectations. Let's keep discussing until we find a way to make everyone happy and rich. =)

Cheers!

"Let's keep discussing until we find a way to make everyone happy and rich. =)"

We don't want this. Most of the content creators on here create garbage. They deserve the nothing they get.

I guess they are posting (not even creating) garbage because that's the best cost-benefit choise if someone wants to maximize rewards.

I wrote a fairly good content 10 days ago, took me 3 hours of research and writing plus review and linking in facebook and twitter. I had almost 100 views and 10 upvotes, made 50 cents.
Two days after that, as a test, I postes a youtube video of a song that I like, absolutly no maketing or anything involved and got 15 views and 1 dólar reward.

So, if my goal was to maximize my reawards, the best option would be to just post tons of garbage stuff hoping I can get somone to vote on them or invest time and energy on a single quality post? People say that making a quality post will get you more followers and on the long tun will be better, but I belive there is a problem in the way things are done now.

One option would be to limit the dayly posts by rep, so the quality content wouldn't be lost amont tons of garbage.

Perhaps it is because the system incentivizes this type of behavior. We need a valid solution to this.

"Most of the content creators on here create garbage. They deserve the nothing they get."

I could not have less respect for that attitude.

Maybe you find @sweetsssj's posts riveting, and any number of others of little value. However, there are people that have not had your opportunities to attain liquid assets, through no fault of their own, and that does not make them less than human.

The value of Steem is derived from Steemit. Absent Steemit, your investment in Steem will prove unrewarding, and the masses of posters of 'useless' content are all that stands between you and a bad investment.

Hi, you may be interested in joining the discussion on my recent post on Steemit's issues.

Let's all work together through building awareness of these problems to find a good solution.

Really? Cause I've been climbing up this hill pretty steadily by putting in the work of forging bonds with the people on here and posting consistently good original material.

Well, your transaction history tell a different story. It shows that you've been buying lot's of steem rather than earning it. It shows that you have 1,479.318 STEEM yourself and people have delegated 9,048.881 STEEM to you - probably because you purchased it off a whale. It also shows that you've been buying upvotes.

You've simply used your wealth to buy yourself a better position. How on earth is that fair to those who don't have the wealth to buy themselves influential positions?

It's my earnings. I can use them in whatever fashion I want to. As for the delegated SP, I purchased that with the earnings I gathered from all the posts I've made previous to now, and I purchased it to expand my ability to curate. So you can shove your self-righteousness. You know how I earned enough SP to power down into Steem so I could purchase wider curating power in the first place? Good original content and building relationships with people.

I earned where I'm at and what I'm doing. I've put forth a year's worth of effort to build my position. I'm all for charity; I've delegated to curation bots I believe in run by people I know and trust. I have sat on the introduceyourself tag and greeted hundreds of new Steemians and answered tons of questions on Steemit.chat and Discord to help new users out. What I will never support is the notion that this should be automatic or a feature. No one deserves something just for showing up.

Of course you can do whatever you want with your steem, that doesn't mean the system is fair.

As for the delegated SP, I purchased that with the earnings I gathered from all the posts I've made previous to now, and I purchased it to expand my ability to curate. So you can shove your self-righteousness. You know how I earned enough SP to power down into Steem so I could purchase wider curating power in the first place?

How stupid do you think people are? You powered down your SP into steem in order to use that steem to purchase 10x more SP? Sure mate, that happened.

I'm not being self-righteous, I merely pointing out the recorded facts.

I earned where I'm at and what I'm doing.

As your transaction history shows, you've clearly bought your position. I'm not saying that you haven't made good posts or been helpful, I'm merely stating a recorded and undeniable fact. You can try to deny it as much as you want but it's right there in your transaction history.

No one deserves something just for showing up.

Likewise, no one deserves anything just for being wealthy enough to be able to buy themselves a nice position.

Show data please.

Show me a current chart of the one I posted earlier, in reply to another comment. I have asked @arcange for a new, post HF19 chart, but receive no answer.

Social media needs to be useful to everybody, not just salespeople. While people that market themselves successfully can succeed in business, ordinary people just posting the stuff they post are the market for Steemit. This isn't supposed to be a marketing platform, but a social media site.

The rewards, as you point out, increase as folks gain followers. But, as long as bots, collusion, and punitive flagging exist, those rewards are going to continue to be concentrated in the accounts that 'game' Steemit for rewards, rather than to post ordinary content on social media.

This is not what the white paper lays out. Indeed, the white paper says

"In the real world, algorithms must be designed in such a manner
that they are resistant to intentional manipulation for profit.
Any widespread abuse of the scoring system could cause community
members to lose faith in the perceived fairness of the economic system."

Being equal in VP does not mean we'd end up with Kim Kardashian ASSets being the highest paid posts (a race to the bottom... get it?), but rather that the content that more people found worth a vote would be valued most.

A good way to examine what that would produce is to follow @screenname, who tracks posts that are undervalued, when the number of votes is compared to earnings. No ASSets end up on that list.

Neither does @sweetsssj. Dunno why exactly @dan started flagging her, but speculation I have heard is that the drain on the rewards pool was his target.

The problem of inequity in rewards certainly does exist, and just saying it doesn't won't make the content creators that are angry about stay and post more good content.

"People invested in Steemit should get according to their investment."

Did you notice all your support comes from no-investment, sub-60 rep commenters?

...
...
...

Of course, they want a change. They don't want to continue getting pennies for their work.

Maybe they should try networking with the evil whales and dolphins.

Networking, or pandering? Is there a difference?

I don't think there is for you.

If Steemit is all about making money, then good luck with it. That's not the goal of Steemit according to the white paper. It's supposed to be a social media site where content creators receive rewards that other social media sites just capture as profit.

This is why it's supposed to become the gorilla king of the space.

This is why it will, unless

"...abuse of the scoring system...cause[s] community members to lose faith in the perceived fairness of the economic system."

In which case, there will be no (further) capital gains for investors. Competition, which I have predicted, has arisen. Calibrae seeks to improve Steemit in several ways which @emble advises.

Hey @anarcho-andrei,

Glad you wrote this comment. Steemit is an opportunity. No need to complain about whales having more. There's a reason they have more and all of us have opportunity to increase our Stake in Steem. Thanks for taking the time to express your thoughts on this.

No. Just no. Post rewards are rightly distributed to the people who wrote the content and those that curated it. What you're suggesting is my hard work and effort reward everyone else who had no hand whatsoever in making that happen.

This is pure nonsense. You may have put in the effort to create a decent article, but if it wasn't for the people upvoting it and the flawed system which allows whales to make shit loads of money simply by upvoting their own content, you would get no monetary reward from your effort.

Finally, whales by and large earned what they have.

Did they fuck!

Those posts making hundreds of dollars a day? More often than not they either invested heavily in the platform to begin with (like most of the devs and high-end witnesses) or they had a substantial following that transitioned to Steemit, bringing more people on board (like The Dollar Vigilante).

That doesn't mean they earned it any more than a lottery winner earned their money. A whale can only claim to have earned their place if they've got their through curation and posting alone. Just like some people are lucky enough to win lotteries, some people are lucky enough to have a shit load of money to invest.

some people are lucky enough to have a shit load of money to invest.

The fuck outta here with that nonsense. Let me guess: rich people never earn their position, right?

No, quite a few people have worked their way up from the very bottom and earned their position and wealth. Investors don't earn their income though and that's why their income is classed as unearned income as opposed to earned income.

None of the wealthiest people have earned all their money though as it simply isn't possible to actually earn that much money.

If you make a shit load of money from investing, you've done nothing to earn that money. You've used money to make more money and any rich idiot can easily do that by paying someone to do it for them - they don't even have to do it themselves.

Where'd the money come to invest in the first place? Magic? And how is investment - taking calculated risks or paying someone to manage those risks for you - not earning the income you make? You put your currency on a risk hoping it pays off in a certain term. It's a risk. There's a chance you might lose it.

Given your propensity for communism, I can see how you'd think that people don't deserve to keep what they make off of trades. If you want communism, go start a commune. Stop trying to ruin my platform.

Where'd the money come to invest in the first place? Magic?

No, it came from working or from inheritance. Just because you earned money in the past though, that doesn't mean that any money you make in the future has also been earned.

And how is investment - taking calculated risks or paying someone to manage those risks for you - not earning the income you make?

Earned Income vs. Unearned Income

Did you think I was just making those terms up or something?

You put your currency on a risk hoping it pays off in a certain term. It's a risk. There's a chance you might lose it.

Is it though? What's the risk to a billionaire if they lose a $1m on a bad investment? There's no actual risk whatsoever. It's like me throwing a penny away.

Given your propensity for communism, I can see how you'd think that people don't deserve to keep what they make off of trades. If you want communism, go start a commune. Stop trying to ruin my platform.

It's not your platform and communes are not communism. I'm not a hippy and I'm not living in the the 20th century. Automated labour and Matrix like VR through brain-computer interfaces is the way to achieve communism. I don't need to do anything but wait a couple of decades. We'll all be god like entities at that point capable of creating anything we want just by thinking. All your wealth will be worthless and you'll have the same power as everybody else.

Let me know when you can create matter from nothing. I'm sure the Venus Project is going to make communism work this time.

What's the Venus Project got to with anything I just said and why would I need to be able to create matter out of nothing? Do you not know what VR or brain-computer interfaces are?

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Some of these solutions definitely need some fine tuning...but the only one I'd definitely remove is:

The rule of upvoting before 30 minutes should be nulled.

I'm actually very ok with the concept of curators giving up gains because they vote within moments.

There are plenty of posts that randomly get upvoted without actually viewing the content in full.

At best, if you wanted to modify that, I'd consider using the same formula "Medium.com" uses to predict read time...and if it has a video in it, API call to YouTube to get the runtime for that video as well...but I wouldn't totally remove the rule.

The rule was made because of the upvoting bots, but if we remove these bots and we remove the upvoting button from the Title link page, than it shouldn't be a problem. But yes your solution sounds good.

I would give you back up on this everytime. This is a nice plan.
Best,
mountain.phil28

Some good critical points on how to make it Steem even better ... especially for little fish!

Thanks for your input. We need to spread the word

Great ideas emble! I think you really have some valid points here and your solutions would make Steemit more fair and give all of us a better experience.

My only concern is the 1% referral commission. It might resemble a MLM system too much.

Upvote and resteem from me!
@ronni

I don't think rewarding referrals resembles an MLM. You don't have to refer to make money, It's just like an affiliate link that all big companies - like Amazon & eBay - use.
Thanks for you support.

good ideas - i am following you in support

I think it's great to think about these types of things, I wish I was as motivated to "think about the system". No system is perfect and can always be improved; Steemit is no exception. One point I'd like to make is that while it could be more fair, I also think it's a good thing that it is difficult to become "whale-like" and make a lot on your posts. I definitely don't think it should be easy. Even if their posts seem silly sometimes, most "whales" have worked hard and long for their following, and not just a following, but the right kind of following. It incentivises me to work harder and I respect that.

Anyway, I look forward to following your ideas in the future, and I hope we can get Steemit to the right balance of power. Thanks!

It's true that "most "whales" have worked hard and long for their following" but quality content should be king. You can see posts that would be downvoted for spam making a lot of money.

It's not difficult at all if you're wealthy though as you could just purchase SP, essentially allowing wealthy people to dominate the site an earn all the rewards whilst giving them the power to censor the views of those who are poorer than them. This should come as no surprise given that it's made by an-caps. Also, this is what an an-cap society would like like.

One thing I have posted about that you mention here, is that with sufficient capital, Steemit can be completely controlled.

There are entities with sufficient capital to purchase nominal Steem to completely control the witnesses, which in turn allows control of the code that Steemit runs on. I believe this was not unknown to the devs, although the only evidence of this is that they're smart people, and it's an obvious feature of the weighting of VP by SP.

If some RL whale buys enough stake to do this, the devs retire rich. If it doesn't happen, Steemit keeps growing and becoming more relevant - until it does happen. It may not be a get rich quick scheme, but as long as Steemit doesn't fail for some other reason, it is a get rich for sure scheme.

What if you take %5 rewards away from curation and give it to everyone who resteems?

Nice idea. But usually resteeming is not a hard work. It's a click of a button. You don't have to browse through all the posts. My idea is, you get paid for doing the job.

I've thought about a curation-like curve for resteeming too. It might be worth investigating further. There will probably also be opportunities for abuse.

The worst problems are most human profiles being spammers and spammer-minded and this: https://steemit.com/steemit/@stimialiti/bots-and-multiple-accounts-on-steemit

The suicide part is by not having direct ads, although the promoted content and the system as is now, actually encourage advertisement in a sense and help mitigate some of this problem.

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