Made this for better perspective on things. Enjoy it.
By the way, guild members don't vote on posts on individual whims. There needs to be more than one suggestion / approvals from other members to actually vote on posts. This mechanism greatly reduces insider help and abuse. On the other hand, it's way easier for whale-powered / trail-powered solo curators to abuse their votes in many ways, because well, they're the only ones making the decision to vote (or downvote). Everything has pros and cons. All I'm saying is, don't just buy one side of the story. Fees incurred by guild operations aren't for nothing.
Except their own posts, that they vote on as payment for their "services" often with much more strength than they use when they vote for the posts that they are allegedly curating.
As i said in HNIB's thread, curation guilds take money from authors of quality content by taking their curator paychecks out of the blogging reward pool. The reality of their operation is precisely the opposite of their stated goals.
The fact that they give back some scraps after making sure they're at the top of trending every single day, while it might ameliorate some of the damage is a footnote to their real purpose -- which is to line the pockets of the guild founders.
Who, just as a by the by, expect to be paid (and paid handsomely) for what every single other person on steemit does for free -- reading steemit and voting for quality content.
IMO, until you can come up with some model that doesnt involve the misuse of whale votes to fund low quality pretext content from "professional curators" youre going to see more and more opposition to projects like this.
Hopefully, people like ned (whos participation in abuse of this sort baffles me) will wise up and cut them off.
Then the argument here's simply a matter of:-
a) Not agreeing on the operational fees incurred of SG (On the flipside, I do hope that you think Curie's reasonable, as the goal has always been to make it a useful public utility of sorts that doesn't take too much of the daily pool). This is simply a matter of what is fair payment
b) Not agreeing that it's a service (since you've used "services" and "professional curators"). I think it's a legit service. It doesn't mean that one isn't providing a curation service if everybody else can also curate for free themselves. Just like babysitting. Just about anyone can babysit and even do it for free, but there are definitely "professional babysitters". I just think it's not very reasonable to just blanket it up and say that it's not "work".
c) Not agreeing on the nature of posts that are being self-upvoted. In this case, I can agree that quality of posts should really be considered before getting the self-upvote. Personally, I wouldn't do it on my own posts if I think they're not one of my best works (doesn't happen often for me). That said, I think the question now should be.. what if SG's self-upvotes are actually stuff that you greatly value?
What does this mean, and example?
I'm not trying to defend guilds blindly in anyway, but again, the word abuse here really depends on the 3 points above..
Very nice post a few words with a lot of vision.
Pictures can mean a thousand words. :)
Yes, guilds that have whales "paternalizing" it has the risk of turning into centralized structures, mirroring their wishes.
I'm going to put here some thoughts I developed in my posts about the guilds.
Steemit can be a realizable social utopia by reorganizing in smaller communities with the same goals, but only in the condition that people who lead the guilds or smaller groups are true activists that embrace the idea of sharing the same needs and solutions for everybody
In some guilds I already see an equalitarian structure like the one we want for steemit with multi-decentralized curator sub-guilds working independently, but maintaining the vision, mission, and strategy of the guild, making it very functional and creative, and giving the members a big sense of participation and involvement in a different way to get perceived value for their work.
Interesting guilds are generating coins for content quality improvement, but at the same reward users with guild-coins besides steem, for participation in tasks that can help to improve this flourishing community of readers and writers that are enriching the global value of the steemit world of this new economy-valued-attention.
Difficult to expect everybody to fulfil that condition..
The only way to maintain a network's goals is really to have a self-sustaining system. For example, Google actually relies on their X team's projections (for moonshots) to acquire funding, just so they'll maintain whatever they're doing without special interests influencing their core vision.
Not sure about the need to visualize the last one. Isn't that meta obvious ?
Yeah it's super obvious, I feel silly making it.
I know I always sound cheesy when I leave you comment but...
u rule bro
Fistbump :P
Very insightful, Thank you :)
It's not much different from irl..
Wow, amazing.
Live @kevinwong
I like it.
This post has been ranked within the top 80 most undervalued posts in the first half of Feb 11. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $3.16 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
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