RE: Why and how Steemit needs to improve (or face future competition that will come in to replace it)
The system is just as the people creating and maintaing it are. If people are revengeous and thirsty for the instant vindictive gratification then they'll build into the system the possibility to revenge. Just recently I read a comment on a post explaining that the commenter downvoted the poster by just as much as the poster would earn by a bid bot. In his vengeful reasoning the commenter forgot that 1. the poster invested his own SBD to the bidbot, and the commenter took thet too, 2. the commenter didn't have so much insight to consider the changing price, so by the payout the price my be different that when he downvoted, 3. when the poster pays it out into fiat the value may be different again, and 4. by downvoting also other upvoters loose.
Now imagine this type of payment system for work. You can't order and pay work of others by such a system.
The other thing is, that in one post I read a recommendation of one more wealthy guy around here that for those havlesses around here it is better they just comment on the posts of havlots, because they might earn far more then by writing their own posts, up to 1,200.00 USD per month he said.
Thanks for your insights. And yes the system is designed (wrongly) to allow vengeful actions by whales. You are also absolutely correct that a number of people don't even post and make pretty significant money just off the comment upvotes on whale blogs. This again shows that the incentives in the Steemit system are simply wrong.
The crappiest part about all this is that after people get used to a system and have worked their way up in it (i.e. whales), they somehow think that everyone new should have to do the same thing too because they did it. (Some ridiculous self-righteous attitude that I can't truly understand.) They don't seem to bother to ask the question as to whether it makes sense at all in the way that it is structured along with the ridiculous hoops that people need to jump through. Through this weird social mechanism, the whole system becomes self-reinforcing despite it being a crap design. It reminds me heavily of this experiment done with monkeys but in a different configuration:
This is great. Has anyone actually confirmed that this experiment was done this way? Or is it a story?
I honestly haven't looked for the original study documentation, but I'm quite convinced it's from a real experiment. This is exactly how people operate in any case.
A great video. The funny thing about this self-righteous attitude is that they have changed the system, because in 2016 they were able to get 1000 SBD for a post easily (that's what one of them said), so buying a car with cash or paying out the mortgage was easy. But not many say anything about how it was before that fork. Now, they don't pay out more than 1000 SBD per post, or at least that was to read somewhere. Well, the rich always like to preach about hard work even if they got with entirely other methods than hard work.