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RE: Explaining the Vote-Bot Abuse and @Grumpycat Ultimatum Situation
I don't know what the answer is, but the whole week has shown me that yes, the whales could theoretically take the whole damn pie. We at the bottom are banking on longterm thinking on the part of enough whales to keep the short-term pool-rapists in check. The problem with that is, every time a longterm thinking whale starts to get cold feet, starts to think the pool-rapists are winning and the future of the platform is untenable, the incentive is there for that whale to join in the pool rape and get while the getting is good. It would seem that the worse the pool rape gets, the more pool rapists will come out of the woodwork and the less incentive there is for any longview of value building.
Yes. This is a mexican standoff, or a warped case of Prisoner's Dilemma. Because at the end of the day, the whales are here to earn money. The question is just what they think is the best way to earn the most money. I assume whales that are "long term" are going to take money out, just over a longer period of time, or at a point in the future.
And yes, the moment they see someone else making off with the family silver, they need to protect their investment, in part, by making sure they get their share...
But they are here to make money. And we are earning money at their sufferance, basically. The question is whether the relationship here is symbiosis or parasitism.
I would say it's symbiotic to an extent. Obviously the gains are not equivalent on each side. But there is something to be said for a comment @techslut once made elsewhere regarding someone's insistence that they put in so much time to build a steemit empire. To paraphrase she asked "What were your other options before coming here?" For some to spend all day blogging and curating and building a following... well, easy enough for them. Before they were doing nothing that earned them any money at all for their writing. For some they weren't earning any money at all and everything they make sitting at the laptop commenting and building a following... it's all cake for them.
But for some of us, we can't trade the hours spent earning real world income to invest 12 months of nonstop Steeming in the hopes that at the end of those 12 months we will have a stable and engaged enough following to replace all that money we shunned. I fall into this category. So I try to be engaged as much as possible. I try to post at least a few times a week. And I am happy with what cake I do get because before I was getting no cake at all from my writing. In that sense I don't feel like the whales are parasitic.
But I do feel the hype that if you come here and produce good content that good content will be rewarded on its merit is a load of shit. The truth is you will come, for a time you may be in Curie range and get a couple of fantastic payouts on a couple posts, then you rep out of that range and your content's value is unimportant as regards 90% of the rewards pool. The weekly rewards pool is a zero sum game. What a whale takes with or allocates to a bunch of shit posts or even more blatantly comments like "Place Holder" or a bunch of dots is not available to people who wrote content many others find valuable.
Now I get it that value is subjective, and I have no issue with that. But what is being shown here is that a powerful (in terms of SP) portion of voters on Steemit values themselves, their friends, and their pet peeves over content. Period. This is no case of "I value this shit post over that creative and well edited post." This is a case of "I value immediate gratification over content in general."
And that's a real problem when you're trying to tell people to come to a place where the value of their content dictates their success.
Banding together and valuing what your friends create, so long it's not shit, is honestly, the only real way I see of making Steemit work for most people.
So you make circles of people with good content, and you reward one another because you think they deserve it, and because no one else would.
Also, yes, it's also that even if you do spend those 12 months and get that following, it's even less certain than writing and getting paid for it in the real world, because the moment you piss off the wrong person, or they just decide to take more of the share to themselves, your earning will be impacted.
So many things to worry over, which leaves little mental space for you know, actually writing.
Exactly. Which is why when I suggested some kind of 'bot' or 'trail' or something for a group of fiction writers who were close and would always want to upvote one another but sometimes miss each other's content, and that idea was shot down as something that would piss off a whale because we aren't doing the work of real curation... well, my attitude was "Really? Some whale is gonna give two shits about us ensuring our 1-10 cents goes to people we value and trust to create good content, when there are posts out there that are literally nothing but a placeholder getting hundreds?"