Welcome to the most tedious part of the run. The Boss Rush - the soul-crushing bore present in every Mega Man game ever, except X1. These are all rematches, and I've already talked about all of these, so I won't comment on them. Instead, I'll let you watch a sped up montage in the tune of Ratatat, and say a few things about Steemit.

Bid Bots

Everybody talks about vote buying bots. I've been a bit split on them for a while now, although by and large I find them to be a negative.

There was a post by someone whose name escapes me a while back where he/she showed how the trending page would look like without vote buying.

@whatsup made a good point in saying that it was basically the trending page from a year ago; the STEEM Guild circle jerk and a few other familiar names.

So, the fantasy that the trending page would magically be "fixed" by getting rid of bote buying is just that: a fantasy.

I've talked before about how nepotism is a natural occurence on a platform like Steemit where there's money involved, and there's no hardfork that can ever get rid of human behavior.

The same people will trend, no matter what. And it most likely isn't going to be you. Ever.

Steemit functions on "libertarian" or "anarchocapitalistic" principles, and a popular argument against, well, anything really, is that the code allows it.

And this is true. It's hard - impossible even - to argue against that from a libertarian position.

I've been shifting away from mainstream libertarianism for a long time now, though, due to the fact that, in my mind, libertarians always completely miss the boat on culture and its effects on a society.

My unpopular and inconvenient truth for the day is: a society can be free, but still suck if it has sucky culture.

That's a viewpoint that usually gets shunned by most libertarians.

But allow me to point out something that never gets pointed out: take a look at Japan.

Japan is slowly but surely killing itself. The birth rate is getting lower each year, men are opting out of relationships and decide to sleep next to anime plush animals, instead of actual humans of the opposite gender.

The fact that Japan is committing suicide can't be attributed to the government, it would happen even if Japan was entirely libertarian. Why? Because instead of the government, it's Japan's culture that's fucking itself over.

What does this have to do with Steemit?

The fact that I think the biggest problem is, and has always been, Steemit's culture and userbase.

I can't prove this, but I think Jeff Berwick's "I made 15k posting on Steemit!" promotional campaign was what killed Steemit right from the get-go.

It turned Steemit from a social media platform into a get rich quick scheme, attracted people attracted to that sort of stuff, who, in turn, rewarded other people into that sort of stuff. They then created their own circle jerk networks and the end result can be seen on the site today.

The vote bots aren't the problem - one could argue they're not even a problem, per se.

The culture of Steemit has simply turned into such that it's nearly impossible for people to get noticed without buying their way into the trending page.

Organic big votes aren't given out anymore, save for a very precious few, and your posts are practically invisible without a big bought vote due to the bad GUI that we're still stuck with.

There's no way to search for interesting content, but even if there was, none of the whales care about anything on the site. And it's painfully evident.

They're not doing anything the code and culture aren't allowing, so there's nothing that will ever change that. Steemit is what it is.

It simply makes more sense to rent out delegation that absolves the user from any and all responsibilities or liabilities. People are doing what makes sense to be doing in order to pump out as much money as possible from the site.

I can't really blame them, honestly, the site has very little else to offer. That also has to do with the fact that a lot of intelligent people see Steemit for what it is and simply avoid it. This leads to us being stuck with a lot of horrendously bad content.

Let's be honest: the New feed is even worse than Trending.

All that being said.

I think you may be wasting your money using vote buying bots.

I guess the idea that people have is that "I'll buy myself to trending, people will see my awesome post and start following and supporting me."

Sorry, kiddo, but that's just not how it works.

The 12 or so people here whose votes are actually worth a damn have their chosen people already. And it's not you. It will never be you.

It's naive to assume that the way Steemit works is people finding "good" content and upvoting based on that. People upvote their friends. And that's that.

You can make the best video, write the best article, paint the best painting, do the best whatever the fuck ever, and it will never matter on Steemit.

People will take that as whining, but honestly, it's not. I'm just observing reality the way I see it.

It bums me out to see people waste so much money on the vote bots, in hopes of getting additional support for their work. The reality is that once the vote buying stops, the posts go back to earning $0.01 and no one will see them. Again.

Also, something that differentiates the content on Steemit from the that of Facebook's and Reddit's is the fact that people post on sites like that when they're inspired to do so. I don't post on Facebook everyday - especially when I'm banned lol - but rather whenever I come up with something worth posting. Whether it's something funny, insightful, clever, or just a rage-induced rant about an article or news story that forces me to, once again, remind everybody why everybody else is doing society wrong, and I'm the only who knows how shit should be done.

Which is, of course, true, but that's neither here nor there.

The get rich nature of Steemit makes it so that people spam at least a post per day just for the money. At some point, you're going to run into diminishing returns as the content inevitably gets tired and lazy, done just for the sake of.

That's why the content is so bad.

Flagging

The talk about culture brings me to another thing I want to talk about that is flagging.

A lot of Steemit's problems - not all - could be solved by a tool that's already built into the system, but flagging has such a negative stigma around it that people are either too afraid or just unwilling to use it.

I can't understand why people fail to understand this:

A downvote is just a reverse upvote. No one has to explain why they upvote, so no one should have to explain why they downvote. They both do the same thing, just in opposite ways of each other: they allocate the STEEM in the reward pool. If one feels a post is underrewarded, they upvote; if one feels a post is overrewarded, they downvote. It truly is as simple as that.

Flagging should be way more prevalent than it is, and people should be more mature about the downvotes they receive.

The pending payout is not your money.

The final payout is the result of a consensus by the entire community, upvotes and downvotes both included.

The amount of times people have been turned into absolute bitches for receiving a single downvote from a big user after getting regular upvotes from another big user is insane.

If you accept the fact that a single user can make you $200 per post, you need to accept the fact that a single user can remove $200 from your post.

Upvoting is not giving and flagging is not stealing.

Both simply allocate the reward pool, not anyone's own money.

It's insane beyond belief how a person can post daily for months and get triple digits from one or two whales, and be fine with it, but when someone decides to downvote, it suddenly becomes such a travesty that, oh my God, a single user can completely wreck my post's payout!

Hey, dipshit, you were fine with the fact that a single user can entirely create the payout in the first place.

Welcome to life. Try to enjoy your stay.