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RE: Steemit's Got Issues! Community Discussion - Whales Cannot Decide Everything - Take 1
But... whales don’t decide a thing. DPOS doesn’t care for whales as such. Unless, of course, you mean how powerful an upvote/downvote by a whale is and how a whale benefits lack of separation of powers.
Witnesses decide on Steem and most (top 20) witnesses are generally very approachable and responsive. Sometimes it may require some digging to find where which witness hangs out most, but generally it isn’t that hard to find them and even to get a reply from them.
But this will be/is a valuable series of discussions and I look forward to the next installment. :)
Witnesses decide on steem yes. Whales decide more than you may know here on steemit. As this discussion unfolds I believe it will become more obvious.
I don’t deny they have an influence, a very large influence even, and also a very powerful sceptre they can swing. Especially when we think about a democratic principle such as separation of powers. I wrote a long post about it during the most recent downvote teacup windfalls.
Im not sure how one wants to tackle the issue though, the are literally the hands that feed us. Do they lobby? It would be weird if they didn’t benefit an extra ear.
Without whales there is no value whatsoever to both our currencies. Fact.
Whales are important, no one is refuting that. It's merely that there are many large decisions here that affect all of us that are being decided without all of us. Or, not decided at all.
I recall a recent post that was attacking @freedom for delegating to people that appear or are spammers or whatever.... Point being, in that post it was commented blatantly that some whales will get together to decide what to do. I tried to find that post to link it here. I found what I thought was that post but all it was was bernie saying "you are being watched" all creepy stalker like lol.
"Build your own dreams or someone else will hire you do build theirs."
If the majority is outside the loop, they will inevitably be caught in the snare.
I recall that post but to be honest, again, nothing on Steemit is decided by whales.
You need to build a case and present to our Governance body, the witnesses. Only they can change the structure of the chain and whether such acts are possible or not. But most witnesses aren’t too big fans of regulation, which is often also why they are active on blockchains.
As such, the social experiment, has a huge flaw highlighted: society needs structure. Structure should include protection of the those less assertive, and the weakest ones. Which in turn requires regulation because otherwise offenders can not be harmed.
You have a fan because you started this series (check my feed and you will know why you have my interest), but I fear it’s another case of us overblowing things because we see this world as too small, rather than what it actually is... a new, replicated, Internet. Complete with all the good and the bad.
Welcome to Internet 3.0. The Infrastructure Internet. The internet which is totally mimicking what we have currently, but then on the blockchain. Just because we can. And because we have whales.
As for freedom... isn’t he Top delegator to Utopian too? You may have noticed he has withdrawn lots of his active delegations which were misused. We all learn every day and even the whales (eventually) understand that focus [on quality] a necessity is.
But I’m following this series. 👊
Thanks, I appreciate that.
When I say whales are making decisions I do of course understand that the type of decisions you are speaking of is decided by witnesses. However there are decisions affecting us that are made by whales. A good example would be bernie and transistos decisions on who to downvote daily. Also whoever is behind sadkitten bot and bots like this one. Or perhaps a simple yet overlooked decision to circular vote without regard to author value. Some of these are poor examples and some decent.
Again I understand the type of decisions you speak of and that they are not held by whales strictly but by witnesses.
Checking out your stuff now :)
Check out specifically this post. It deals exactly with the matter of downvotes.
Full disclosure: Bernie and Transisto IMHO are fighting a good fight. We have other, more quiet, whales who make people leave because of their downvote wars.
Wonderfully written post!
I think you lay out a great example of how downvoting can be changed to be much more fairly regulated.
I will add to it one thing...
The need for there to be a clear set of rules governing what can and cannot be flagged and what can and cannot be done/posted here on steemit.
With out a clear set of rules then there is no irrefutable way to decide if the poster is right (plagiarism aside as this is irrefutable) or the downvoter is right. With no rules one could easily say that both are wrong or none are.
This is some of the reason that many believe transisto and bernie to be in the wrong. A clear set of rules would either show that they are indeed doing what is right, or indeed doing what is wrong and clean up some of the clearly grey area surrounding what they do.
Great input man! Thanks!
Wouldn't it be nice. But there does not seem to be a practical way to do this without centralizing authority. I've spoken to the smartest people I can find here about this, debated with them, for a year now and I have yet to see a single workable solution.
I recently wrote about how ideas are nice but if they are not workable then they are just dreams. Can you think of a way to implement and enforce rules on flagging and posting?
Just on posting in particular, there is a large free speech contingent here and I don't think they'd take too kindly to any rules which say what can and can't be posted. In other words, isn't that direct censorship?
Whales decide who the top witnesses are. The top witnesses decide the blockchain parameters, make the decision to hardfork, etc. Are you contending that because whales do not directly decide these things for witnesses that they don't have influence in the decisions?
They also set the distribution for the lions share of the rewards from the reward pool (directly with the voting and indirectly via curation rewards).
Steem is a capitalist society, that further reinforced by the importance of vests for witness voting. But I’m not willing to run with the title as such because if we do we may as well say that we are merely POS rather than DPOS. There is still room for non-purely whale powered witnesses.
Only if some whales abstain from voting. With the current distribution of vests, the whales will always be able to choose the top witnesses.
I agree, the "D" is important, the whales don't make the decisions directly. Still, your contention that "whales don't decide a thing" is not quite correct enough.
That's pretty much what I was getting at. Thanks :)