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RE: ANNOUNCEMENT!!!!Betting, Is it hurting or Helping The Steemit Community? Special Edition Preview. No.0
steemsports is working according to rules of steem community, but fact is, that steemsports is hurting steemit.
I believe in Dan's vision of fairness and open system which provides value to the world. Betting do not provide much value to the world nor this platform. Betting is based on luck not real work.
Arguments, that at least steemsports is engaging users is not true. Comments like "Go Lakers!!!!" is not true engagement.
I truly believe, that steemit should says what type of content it want to present in blogging platform as steemit. Of course no one can ban steemsports from blockchain, but giving them opportunity to drains other great bloggers rewards pools is another thing.
Last time I attempted to rebalance rewards by downvoting steem sports they made a press release claiming we don't support businesses on this platform.
My downvote was only able to reduce the rewards from $150 to $100 or so.
I like the creativity, but think their rake is too high.
I think they should disable the curation rewards on their posts to discourage the voting bots.
Please tell me you're not going to let blackmail take us down.
All publicity is good publicity!
Especially in these early days when we have nothing to lose apart from a very bad actor who is threatening us all and clearly does not have interest in the success of steemit.
His threat will always be a threat to the community!
We cannot afford to keep powering up this kind of character.
Steemsports has a team of 7 people producing content and developing the business built in the Steem ecosystem and on top of Steem (unless this sort of hostility drives them to focus their efforts elsewhere, and frankly I wouldn't blame them). They've been at this for months. For that, what you call 'rake' is accumulation of $17000 worth of SP.
In fact, Steemsports is participatory content more than actual gambling and the 'rake' is nothing of the sort. They are earning SP based on contributing content that draws participation, and based on the subjective view of many stakeholders that their model of participatory content is a positive for the growth and success of the platform as a whole relative to to other content such as poems or essays. In this case the participation takes the form of following, voting, wide distribution of stake, and some 'fan' comments.
The stake and rewards that are distributed to the actual voters are so small that calling Steamsports' earnings 'rake' is a mischaracterization; in fact they are rewards for Steemsports effort/work in putting the whole thing together and running it, including the posts themselves. It is similar to the profit margin McDonalds makes when they sell you Coke which has a game ticket attached to it. That's not rake.
Disabling curation rewards is not a good solution to anything (unless, possibly, done globally). Doing so means that voters have to contribute their valuable and scarce vote power and receive less back for doing so than they would voting on something else, potentially of equal or even lesser value. I actually think curation reward are currently too variable just using the existing formulas and result in perverse incentives along these lines. However, suggesting that one particular form of content disable them makes this worse.
How feasible would it be for us to have votes on chain which only count as long as certain conditions are met?
For example if I have a downvote on a SteemSports post which only comes into effect if the payout would be higher than $X. It seems like a way we could more easily express our views on fiscal policy via votes. I have no problem with SteemSports per se, I just think they are extracting too much of the reward pie. I could flag their posts automatically or manually, but that would come across as me saying that SteemSports is inherently abusive, which I don't intend to say, it is just a disagreement on fiscal policy (how much of the reward pool should go to this vs. all the other things being voted on right now).
How large of a percentage of the reward pie are they getting? I can't believe it's draining or hurting the steemit ecosystem. I personally find downvoting the most vile function on steemit. It's a highly skewed mechanism where the 1% throw their weight around in a very unbecoming way.
tldr: 8%, which isn't as much as I thought.
You can see on SteemWhales that since their arrival in September they have quickly become the top recipient of posting rewards.
http://steemwhales.com/?p=1&s=pr
You can see here that they receive between 18000000 and 28000000 per week:
http://steemwhales.com/steemsports?weekly
To translate that into the currencies, on the week ending 25-12-2016, they received 478.036 SBD, 2660.673 Steem and 5862.108 Steem Power. That totals around $1640 based on a Steem price of 14c. Given that the payouts total for that week was about $21000, as a percent of the rewards pool that week, it was about 8%.
https://steemdb.com/@steemsports/authoring
Ultimately investors pay for the rewards in the Steem ecosystem. Their investment in Steem Power entitles them to determine fiscal policy, that necessarily includes downvotes. The alternative of an upvote-only system is one where votes that allocate funds to objectionable or even heinous ways cannot be prevented by the majority stakeholders, making holding Steem Power and consequently Steem less attractive to the buyers who allow Steem to have a market price and fund rewards.
But after running the math, I am inclined to think that there are better things to worry about than ~8% of the rewards pool going to this purpose.
Please don't forget that we give 48% of rewards away, by powering up players and paying the writers.
Which means that steemsports, if your math is correct, makes around $800/week. This for the team of 7 people (we actually all work for free).
Glad you had the courage to go up against these meatheads. Shame so many witnesses are in bed with these guys to make a quick buck.
I am not aware of this press release. Does anyone have a link to it?
Heh. My winning percentage says otherwise. ;)