RE: Open Letter to Ned and Dan: You Badly Need a Communications/Community/Content Expert and I Hereby Nominate @stellabelle or @donkeypong For That Job
I'll take this point about CURIE to say that it is essentially a Delegated Curation Guild.
The reason there are only one or two of these so far (Smooth and NGC) is this:
Whales that are not voting a lot may be doing so as a means of abstaining from rewards and giving minnows a chance to grow influence.
Whales that are voting a lot may be doing so as a means of projects like CURIE to give minnows a chance to grow influence.
Both parties are seeking the same goals of gamifying / growing the platform.
It just happens that the difference in means creates a strong cognitive dissonance between the two groups.
Delegated Curation Guilds (DCGs) are potentially a solution to the cognitive dissonance by allowing both types of whales to continue doing (abstaining from voting, voting actively, or “hiring” curators) what they were doing while bringing the available voting power into the market in either a profit seeking or altruistic manner.
Edited to add the this:*
Richard, no one meant any offense anywhere, including CURIE - If Val's response was emotional as trying to protect me then that's on me.
By describing the Curation Guild I was trying to make the case that curation can get better. Any whale of the same size can do the same thing nextgencrypto is doing, but instead most are not voting and using that as a community benefitting strategy. I hope you see that.
We can do better on community engagement for proposed changes. Let's do better. (We are hiring: https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitjobs/new-steemit-job-posting-community-and-social-media-manager)
I appreciate Richard and the community for bringing all the time and work that you are
There's only 1 proper solution to this; a hard fork to reduce all accounts above 100k SP to ... 100k SP
That way the whales will no longer be able to skew the results as they do now, and the votes of the dolphin will actually mean something ... as it should
(as in; I agree; inactive whales are in fact better than active whales ... let's turn them all into dolphins; problem solved!)
so, and by now, I wrote a post about it;
https://steemit.com/tag/@luminousvisions/safe-steemit-1-day-voting-moratorium-for-the-whales
@dantheman ... you just downvoted my comment?
what is that all about? what's wrong with it?
I'm just suggestion a solution and in return for offering my help ... you downvote me?!?
look at what I've been up to;
little baby dolphin
I'm already working on a solution!
I'll play devils advocate here.
First off... your post was written big and bold, simply stating that "there's only one proper solution". That's not true, and there's no way you could possibly prove it's true. I believe there absolutely has to be a better "proper" solution than that.
The argument could be made that what you said could be damaging to the brand. Do you think an investor who's considering buying steem would want to see a comment stating that the community is gathering pitchforks demanding hardforks to remove peoples balances? They would just walk away.
Again, I'm not saying I agree w/ the downvote, but I don't think it's completely unwarranted.
I'm an investor, I already bought Steem!
and I'm actively working on a solutions, I did this;
https://steemit.com/bounty/@luminousvisions/there-s-no-flow-in-steemit-bounty-opportunity
and just last night I did this;
https://steemit.com/steemit/@luminousvisions/little-baby-dolphin-goes-to-steemit-school
so, if dandy dan would have taken the effort to see who I am first, he would have known I did this for steemit's best self interest!
the biggest problem with steemit is perception, and comments like mine being downvoted by dandy dan himself is the exact opposite of what we need
take a look here;
https://steemle.com/charts.php?charts=posts
it's going down ... why is that? is it because I used bold in my comment or because there's something fundamentally going wrong with steemit itself? I'm willing to bet it's not me using bold in the comments that's causing steemit's crash ...
don't worry, I'm not mad, I understand you're playing devil's advocate ... I'm just making my case, nothing personal ... I'm not like dandy dan ... I will not downvote your comment, but simply answer it ... you know, like grown up's do ...
so ... now I'm going to work on the post I'm writing about all this ...
I'm an investor; I'm defending my investment, while dandy dan is squandering it!
Totally understood :)
We're all looking out for the best interest of steem in our different ways. Hopefully all of our votes and conversations will culminate in a proper solution.
As a potential investor, which I have talked about many times, I find the fact he/she was downvoted, on this "Freedom Loving" platform, much more upsetting than her comment.
I don't know that I buy into this argument against downvotes. Are you saying that Dan shouldn't be free to downvote what he disagree's with?
It was horrible comment. You basically proposed that the blockchain should steal from the users. As you probably know, @dantheman is libertarian who hates theft, so it's not a surprise that he downvoted you.
@samupaha
You said:
But why do we have to put words into his (Dan's) mouth to justify his actions? This lack of communication is likely a factor in the failing confidence within, and falling price of, Steemit/ Steem, as the original poster (@steemship) has so clearly demonstrated.
We need an open discussion about this most important topic of how to more evenly distribute voting power, and/or if such an action is necessary, if for no other reason than to quiet some of the fears regarding apparent weaknesses of the Steemit system, which have only become more pronounced over time and amplified by the lack of clear communication, from the top, about possible solutions.
Silence isn't the answer here, nor is stubbornness. Trust is built through transparency and by consistently demonstrating that care is taken to the considerations of all involved/ invested. The block-chain that runs Steem is one layer of transparency, but the more more important layer - the people who control the hard-forks - are not forth-coming with any kind of clear plan, nor demonstrating to me in any way that they have any care beyond their own wallets.
If you ask me, Dan's recent actions - the proposed hard-fork, with seemingly little concern for the generally bad review that it received from the community and his childish/ cowardly/ unprofessional way of dealing with constructive criticism/ alternate approaches - reeks of your typical penny-stock CEOs. It appears to me that every decision coming from the top is aimed at protecting themselves, even at the cost of strangling the smaller investors. But maybe it only appears that way because they've failed to accurately communicate their intentions. Ideally, we wouldn't have to speculate about such things, especially when considering that these "policy makers" are running a social media network. Oh, the irony.
hahaha ... really?
you totally missed the point I was making; it would be better of those whales were to stop voting, but ... because nobody upvotes interesting comments, I turned it into a sensational slogan and ... it worked!
This is how I see Dan's down vote as well. Look at it from his perspective: he is just curating to mold the platform into something that represents his principles. That's what we should ALL be doing.
Arbitrarily restricting the voting power of whales IS theft, it's not like theft. They earned that SP either through investing, for being here early or curating. Why take away their incentives? Aren't they the same incentives for everybody? Your comment (if implemented) guts the principles described in the whitepaper, or at the very least disrupts and imbalances them.
I like this article, it is open, direct and sounds similar to discussions I've heard in the BitShares community. I know transparency is important to Dan, but I agree he hasn't figured out how to balance the interests of all parties (investors, developers, user community) yet, and I do hope he figures it out soon; I don't want steem to fade away b/c he or Ned can't delegate to a PR team to inform the community or use it to monitor the pulse of the community.
An advisory board comprised of reputable, carefully chosen members of the community would be very useful for communications in both directions, from the community to Steemit leaders AND as a mechanism to explain the rational of decisions made by Steemit to the community.
I sure hope Dan & Ned seriously take some time to reflect on this open letter and the comments people are making about it. I think some type of advisory board is a good idea. I suspect Ned & Dan may think that somehow gives away too much control of the direction the platform is headed. But that is an overly fearful position to take IMO. The concept is an advisory board, meaning it provides advice, not dictate policy. Such a board is not a matter of control, it's a matter of a better management structure to supply quality information to decision makers, who are not obligated to follow it. If they choose not to follow it I would hope their rational would be explained. That's very important also.
In early 2015 a marketing advisory board was suggested to help Dan promote BitShares more effectively and help him review and edit Dan's disclosures so they wouldn't have such a sharp, dramatic affect on investor attitudes OR the trading value of BitShares. Stan + Dan's approach to that suggestion was to put the responsibility of selecting such a board of advisors onto someone else, rather than seriously look into who would be qualified to serve in that role themselves. Ultimately no action was taken.
Do note however that unbeknown to the vast majority of the BitShares community during that time, the totally new graphene architecture was under development, and they didn't want that information leaking out. An advisory board might have compromised that. Still, the transition from the 0.9.x version to 2.0 was not handled well at all IMO, tho ultimately 2.0 did become a reality, or steem wouldn't exist today.
I sincerely hope Dan will learn how to manage his team better and balance the often contrary interests between the parties involved.
sure, some commie council ... that will fix it ... sure!
/sarcasm
As a Libertarian, I think that is extremely lame, instead of downvoting the comment he could have taken 2 minutes and typed his POV. In this platform that is silencing. He can't take the time to tell her why?
Before your suggestion below that they stop voting let's try a day or week of whale abstinence. This will give us a preview of what the platform wild look like
see here a day of abstinence will answer the question
very, very very good idea!
https://steemit.com/tag/@luminousvisions/safe-steemit-1-day-voting-moratorium-for-the-whales
Upvoted only because it was downvoted. This is a bad idea that should be discarded for many reasons, but as input from a community member, it should be valued and considered respectfully, even if not ever implemented.
Great you just made more $ in these two comment than in any of your posts. I call progressiveness.
and people wonder why I use bold text in my comments ...
What a ridiculous idea...I'm actually glad to see that Dan agrees...
you're not supposed to take it literally ... it's called click-bait, that should be obvious
I'm just trying to make a point; if the whales were to stop voting, or at least put their slider on 10% and leave it there ... that would solve a lot of problems!
https://steemit.com/tag/@luminousvisions/safe-steemit-1-day-voting-moratorium-for-the-whales
please, read it, I promise, you'll be pleasantly surprised with it; it's a very simply, yet effective solution
https://steemit.com/steemit/@whatsup/fighting-over-that-big-steemy-piece-of-pie-while-the-new-users-and-steem-prices-die
Nice to see your communication skills. Nah, you don't need any help with that.
I don't think that's the one proper solution. Why not change the voting weight from n SQUARED to something less severe. E.g. n to the 1.1 power. It still discourages sybil attacks but makes every non-whale's votes more powerful while reducing the massively overweighted n^2 power of large whale votes.
I see a lot of cognitive dissonance mentioned in Richard's post. I hope he gets more than a textbook definition in response to his critique.
No one meant any offense anywhere - If Val's response was emotional as he was trying to protect me then that's on me.
I was trying to make the case that curation can get better. Any whale of the same size can do the same thing nextgencrypto is doing, but instead most are not voting and using that as a community benefitting strategy. I hope you see that.
We can do better on community engagement for proposed changes. Let's do better.
I appreciate you, richard and the community for bringing all the time and work that you are
Damn give it to him with out sugar :) Yes Ned need something with more weight in that response.
Are we still trying to keep steemit decentralized? Because its looking to be centralized like any other corporate business, with all these unknown changes and unfair wages....
You didn't really address any of the points that @steemship made though. This just makes the point about being out of touch. I wish you would actually listen to what people are saying.
I was so excited when I saw there was a reply, and then...
That being the case, the community (in the form of that project, RHW, and others) is getting the job done and the feature is not needed.
If and when problems arise that get in the way of these efforts, allow the community to bring that to the team's attention and then (and only then) request additional support from the platform. Otherwise, you very much risk undercutting not only these specific efforts, but the willingness of those in the community to do anything at all, because every time we do, the team drops some new rule changes or imposes its own top-down vision of how things should work. That is exactly why I had to reduce my own investment in curation efforts, because I saw team meddling as imminent, threatening to once again scramble the rules, and invalidate any investment I did make.
There are things only the team can do, most notably recruiting new users (because the team controls the 50% of the SP stake designated to fund new user accounts). Or improving the implementation and deployment of the platform as it exists (I still experience frequent stalls and connection problems, for example), or completing the implementation of additions to the platform that have been promised, such as a marketplace. Please focus your efforts there and let the community do what it not only can do, but does better than those operating from within the team "bubble".
Retention is pretty low right now so spending money on recruting users may be not optimal.
Btw what criteria do use saying community does certain things better?
By recruiting new users I include retention. A huge factor in retention is who you recruit and how you recruit them. Even if we acknowledge that some aspects of retention are impaired by platform issues that need to be addressed (and done so in a manner that does not piss off the users who are already here), there are clearly users who have retained well. Understanding better who those users are and why they are not leaving would allow focusing on trying to recruit more such users. This would make recruitment more effective. You could start by figuring out better way so to reduce sign up fraud. It is still a huge issue, a large percentage of the signups, and it costs money with little likely effectiveness.
The other thing that is leading to poor retention is a small and shrinking user base. As users slowly leave (which is inevitable in any site, no matter how good, if only due to life changes and such) and are not being sufficiently replaced by new users, it becomes a smaller and smaller community. You now see the same progressively-smaller group of people posting and commenting. A small community has less value so new users sign up, see there are only six (exaggeration, or perhaps, extrapolation) people here and they all know each other, and leave. It is absolutely essential to spend money on bringing new users ASAP (including focusing on users who will retain) otherwise the users who are here will continue to slowly leave, not be replaced, and you will be left with a shell of a platform and no users.
The criteria I'm using are two:
Yes, there are things only the team can do, and that includes platform consensus changes, but the approach to doing them needs to change, and change radically and quickly if you don't want to alienate 100% of the users (and I can tell you my perception of his disposition is that when @steemship starts calling you out, you passed the point of widespread user frustration quite a ways back). That means platform changes defined and developed in a more inclusive manner, with meaningful community input and feedback (such as an advisory board drawn from the user community), and sufficient time for the community to understand what is being proposed, how it affects them, and to give meaningful feedback (i.e. much slower). As such the ability of the team to effectively (without causing more harm than good) address needs on the platform in a timely manner without stirring up unintended but still inevitable frustration and hostility is already limited and becoming much more so.
If the community can do it, than let the community do it and save your limited budget of acceptable and accepted top-down changes for when it is really needed. Pick your battles.
@steemship - this response, which lacks any substance towards the points you bring up, is confirming with each passing second that the Steemit team absolutely needs one or more Communicators working full time to address this stuff.
Based on the outflows from the power downs, I would hope there is enough capital to support that.
Big stage, gents. Time to lead.
I don't understand how whales that are not voting are helping minnows? As far as I see it -
The author rewards they generate greatly exceed the curation rewards they receive. At least 3-4 times, even if a whale is first to upvote. So for every Steem Power a whale earns in curation rewards, the minnow earns 3x as much. Granted, some minnows may choose to cash out SBDs instead of Powering Up, but still the SP earned exceeds the curation rewards SP earned by whales.
They could simply vote within the first few minutes if they wanted to bypass their curation rewards. Or as alluded to above, vote on posts late, that have already gotten some attention from other whales. If they vote on a post that has already gained some attention, author's rewards they generate could be 10x as much as their curation rewards.
They could donate the curation rewards back to the author.
The rate their Steem Power is growing well exceeds the rate at which minnows are growing influence if they effectively do nothing. The Top 15 whales own 25 Million Steem Power. Every week, their Steem Power grows at least 0.5 Million (and higher than 1 Million right now, given inflation rate is much higher). That's more than the total holdings of 94% accounts on Steem. Net effect - there's zero re-distribution of wealth.
Please let me know if I'm missing out on something here. As far as I see it, there are only two ways for whales to help minnows gain influence - voting on them, or selling (ideally, donating) them Steem to Power Up.
I'm eager to hear more about the Delegated Curation Guilds proposal. I hope Steemit, Inc. take Richard's advice and explain clearly, precisely, as well as in detail. We are still waiting for a clear explanation on HF14's Vote Balancing. Something that shows clear case studies of before and after, in charts. As, many have pointed out here, not more than a dozen people know the algorithms and metrics behind this unpopular move, and that's a big problem.
I understand Val's comments were made in the heat of the moment, but they hurt the company's reputation badly, particularly as we are still waiting for an apology.
You are missing one thing...the more whales that vote the more worthless every other lesser vote becomes... usually by a couple of orders of magnitude.
This is a very important critique of the planned changes. I hope the Steem Team will read it and consider the questions you are posing.
If @razvanelulmarin is right which I'm pretty sure he is, not voting is helping those who are voted by other whales. His post is interesting and people could gain from reading it.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@razvanelulmarin/i-will-become-a-whale-in-24hours-here-s-how
the hard fork changes in 14 are perfect, a great way to bust apart these curation guilds, they are like political parties and not good for steemit as they have too much human control and emotions involved, these types of guilds are better off being handled by technological solutions, and i look forwad to those changes in hard fork 15
That's an interesting perspective. However, to create a technological model of what curation should look like in order to make curation "fair" to all parties and remove the "human bias", is an unrealistic goal.
The Steemit community is a community of people first and foremost, and as such its' attitudes are dynamic and alive. Trying to define rigid, universally applicable rules for how curation should be done cannot be done without stepping on somebody's toes.
Curation, guilds, balance of power - these are inherently political considerations and trying to apply a set of rules to guide, manipulate or influence the community towards one specific model of curation stifles expression. It must be allowed to evolve based on the aggregate expressions voiced in the community.
If that aggregate fails to represent the principles of individuals, be they whales, dolphins or minnows, they can take action to change that aggregate attitude or go elsewhere and start over. Before anyone decides to take their toys and go to a new sandbox they would be wise to evaluate their principles and make sure such a move is necessary, or adjust their principles if not.
Curation guild (human) = Delegated voting pool (technological)
What do you think about this idea. A day of no whale votes ( you could still do 1 percent votes) then we can see why the platform would look like with the no whales?
a day of abstinence will answer the question
If u have so much trust on Steem, why r u converting your Steem & SBD into bitcoin? Is not bitcoin dead?