ANNOUNCEMENT!!!!Betting, Is it hurting or Helping The Steemit Community? Special Edition Preview. No.0
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Resteem & Up Vote to have the talk, if I get support I will do exclusive interviews with Steemians to find ut whats going on!!!!!!!
@sirlunchthehost
I see @steemsports as a sort of "cloud mining" service, in that it's so easy for others to "mine" (obtain by a means other than posting/curating in this instance) STEEM.
The "rake" could be considered each users payment to the cloud mining service, and this STEEM based business appears to be very popular. Probably because this "mining" service also adds an element of fun to it and allows the "miners" to increase their odds of "mining" some STEEM by doing a little "work" (aka research or "tweaking of the settings" lulz).
BTW, isn't mining based on "luck"? (that's for @noisy). ;)
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. ;)
Hi @sirlunchthehost, I just stopped back to let you know your post was one of my favourite reads yesterday and I included it in my Steemit Ramble. You can read what I wrote about your post here.
This post has been ranked within the top 50 most undervalued posts in the first half of Dec 27. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $7.30 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Dec 27 - Part I. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
If you are the author and would prefer not to receive these comments, simply reply "Stop" to this comment.
if it is what people vote for and what they want, is it hurting the community? after all ,the community is the people isn't it? so they decide what they like/support don't they? and they are continually supporting the betting posts...
Thank you for Posting your Opinion about this subject! You have initiated the conversation. Lets Keep it going! Get the Community involved.
The votes are mostly on voting bots and are trying to get curation rewards and free Steem. I think it is interesting discussion and people should weigh in. It is good for the conversation to move on.
Gambling is popular all over the world. Whether it is good or bad I don't know, but to be a true community I believe there should be a place for gamblers within Steemit.
Sure, I agree. Gambling means you have something to win and something to lose and usually requires a risk to the "gambler". I have no issue with gambling, and I think the people who are worried about it, aren't worried about gambling.
The are worried about 50% stake being kept by Steemsports, they are worried about the rewards pool, and they are worried about the trending page.
It is all just a discussion at this point, but I think very few are really upset just by gambling. ;)
Contests, give-away promotions, sweekstakes, drawings, etc. are also popular all over the world. In fact far more popular than blogging. That fact, along with the popularity of sports itself, largely explains why Steemsports is popular here.
I didn't vote for steemsports because I liked it. Others expressed they didn't read the post before betting.
#openmic has become an incredibly successful initiative and brand without the need to BUY votes and yet they are able to set a fixed reward for the winning participants. Those who vote for it support it, not the the stake holder who bought their vote.
If you want to vote for sports content use your own SP to vote for it! If you want to use other people's votes then buy their steem, let them use their vote for what they are interested in and please, respect the community that gives your steem value!
within Steem - yes
within Steemit - no
Their users deserve to have much better user experience and they should focus on providing that. Their slow progress on this just proves that draining steemit community is good for their business.
I think you have a misunderstanding of what Steemit does. Their site is a browser for the blockchain. If it is on the blockchain, it is on Steemit (except in a few cases where there might be legally-mandated blocking).
You are proposing a radical change to the entire model, where Steemit exercises editorial control over which blockchain content appears on the web site. I see no evidence they have any interest in doing that.
That is the problem. Right now vision for steemit is not clear (at least for me). Steemit can be general purpose "browser for STEEM blockchain" (better looking version of steemd?) or "discussion and blogging platform".
On https://steemit.com/faq.html there is:
I will not argue, that one is more important than another, because for sure there is a need for each of this things.
There are different services like busy.org which could focus on one aspect, where steemit can focus on another. What we need is clear vision for steemit and good execution of this vision.
I wrote here in another comment:
I am seriously asking, am I wrong? Even before steemit I consider myself as blogger, so for sure I have tendency to wishful thinking, and I would like to see steemit as perfect place for blogging, but the question is, whether this is actually a vision of creators of steemit.
In worst case scenario, if steemit will no fulfill my needs, I will go to other places like busy or any other service (hopefully build on top of steem), which will match my needs and vision of my own.
@noisy i can't reply in-line below due to depth, but if you look back at the initial white paper it was absolutely not specifically focused narrowly on "blogging". It was to be a social network but the idea of different forms of value (not just blog posts) being subjectively determined by voters was baked into it.
That's more the blockchain, and what I wrote about steemit.com being a direct "view" of the blockchain, not one that exercises editorial discretion. Something like what @jesta is doing with graymass is more specifically focused on blogging, where specific blog posts would appear on the authors' own sites but be backed by the blockchain. Other things on the blockchain wouldn't appear there. As the ecosystem grows, that is one direction that may thrive. It is also possible that steemit.com may in time want to narrowly focus on only a subset of what is on the blockchain, but I don't see that happening right now (strictly my opinion).
Curation rewards are largely neutral between content and don't constitute an explanation for why votes are cast for particular content. I (or my voting bots) could vote for any number of other things and get the same or likely more curation rewards than I get voting for Steemsports.
This is a great discussion to have. Looking forward to where this goes.
Great. Didn't know if this would work. But love it. Larger font size for us old folks please.
Noted! This was just a Promo, the real issue will contain larger font! Thank you for the advice and support.