Steemit will fail if whale-votes are not capped - draining the reward-pool is like watching politicians steal money from the people!
What if Zuckerberg and friends were the only one who could LIKE anything on Facebook? How much Likes would you get with 1.6 Billion users?
I am not against the rich getting richer - stake as many coins as you want and live happy on the interest-rates. What I am against is whales having the abnormally large voting-power so that they can dictate where the daily rewards go, when that reward-pool belongs to every voter on the platform.
The whales are not only milking the cow completely dry every day, but they are also slaughtering the cow and selling the meat at lower and lower prices.
The fact of the matter is that no whales or group of whales can reach out and "reward" new users - all they can do is to drain the reward-pool and point the rewards where they want the rewards to go in what really seems to be their own pockets.
So, good luck @ned and @dan - unless the whale-vote is capped to a level where it does not steal everything from everyone, most of us will go back to reddit and facebook, I am sure you have seen that the user-growth is minimal.
Well, greed has taken over and poisoned peoples mind. @stellabelle wrote a post about a certain account today and got down-flagged by big whales who many now believe game the system to their own advantage.
a voting-cap for evil whales is needed or we, the users will quickly give up this place and move on, which will be the true death of this place.
This post is absolute bullshit. NO ONE is "stealing" votes and it is spreading FUD to say so. All votes show up as much as "likes" show up on Facebook. It's just that if you haven't contributed much to the platform, your vote doesn't count for much - BUT IT STILL SHOWS UP. It hs NOT been stolen.
The more you contribute to the platform, the more your vote will be worth, but it will STILL BE ONLY ONE VOTE.
I think you could have put your concerns in a more diplomatic way. This is alarmist .
It is not stealing it is the way it is set up to work.
If you have a workable solution that can fix the problem you see then suggest away but I don't see what can be done about it.
It is easy to complain and much harder to actually figure out how to make things better.
Even the best solution is not always perfect.
If caps were imposed you would disincentives people from increasing their SP.
This is the problem with quick fixes. They normally break something else.
^ Right on.
I can see from where the author's concerns are coming from but I don't agree with most of the statements. "reward-pool belongs to every voter on the platform" - yes it belongs to every voter but proportionally to voter's stake, and stake is the best proxy of the ownership. Analogy with Zuckerberg doesn't work either - he and his friends owned 100% so basically all FB likes went to their pockets, not to users. Neither I agree with generalizations like this "greed has taken over and poisoned peoples mind", but if a lot of people start sharing this believe this can be a sign of a problem.
As it for whales - as platform's co-owners they would be better listening to users rather than downvoting their critical opinions.
Exactly and even when you get one penny on a post it's more than you get on Facebook where 100% of the earnings go to the company and the shareholders. We get nothing there and they sell our information to advertisers and use our posts to profit. It is a terrible comparison.
It isn't the critical opinions that are a problem, nor the reason for the flagging. Your opinion here on the latter points was presented in a thoughtful manner, and I'm upvoting you for them. The original post with trolling and spreading anger and negativity, not ideas. Critical ideas or not, the way they were presented is destructive.
To respond directly on your point about "people start sharing this believe", I believe one reason for that is precisely people promoting these attitudes as a form of trolling and possibly in some cases competitive sabotage, stirring up jealousy in order to get upvotes and visibility and then even in some cases getting paid by us to do it. They are using our own platform and our resources against us, and as one of the platform co-owners as you put it, I do not want to see that continue.
I have yet to find any thoughtful posts criticizing the platform to have received anything but silence. Being silenced seen as the answer when the quiet knocks for attention go unanswered time and time again, and people begin to scream.
Most of the criticisms have not been thoughtful at all, though yes there are a (very) few exceptions. This is a complex system and most do not understand how it works. You can't make constructive suggestions to improve something until you first understand it, and as someone else said on this thread, most such suggestions end up breaking something else.
In the end, people will have to learn that some of their preconceived notions of how a site is 'supposed to' work need to be checked at the door, and stop making suggestions that try to make it a safe, controlled environment with enforced rules like Facebook or any other centralized system. These 'suggestions' (which I would call trolling after a point) quickly become repetitive and tedious and when turned to a negative hateful tone, their very presence serves only to damage the platform.
It actually bears a lot of similarity with Bitcoin and preconceived notions of how fairness, safety, and value are 'supposed to work' when it comes to money. Bitcoin has endured no end of these criticisms and, yet, it is still here, still the largest cryptocurrency and still going strong with no end in sight.
I always appreciate your responses. I agree that a lot of the notions that pertain to how it "should" work need to be checked, and also that a lot of suggestions would have the affect of breaking another thing.
Where do we get to find that out though? I know I have pulled up GitHub and found some of my own suggestions couldn't work and the reasons for it. That is my nature though, I like to look into details for what I am passionate about.
That said, it would take years for me to get an understanding on a level to know why they won't work. I just pick up a piece here and there. I was more saying that posts offering suggestions early are often not given reasons it couldn't work.
I know there isn't time to address every suggestion, there are a ton... but that is what I refer to when I say knocking turns to screaming. I have a hard time thinking of much else to write about, I am very hopeful for what a site such as this can mean to the general user. In my eyes these are the same users posting a majority of this content and feeling silenced or ignored.
I would completely love to have a level of understanding required to meaningfully contribute to what I feel the site needs. The majority of which doesn't address the money issues, but looks at other ways to promote the feeling of growth outside the $$$ part, which is hard to get past.
unrelated reply I hope catches your attention. I am asking as both a heavy investor and a witness, in addition to some I have respect for based on interactions, for you to read my post. It is a general question and I am not asking for a vote.... just insight and understanding on an issue.
https://steemit.com/witness/@clevecross/question-on-witness-voting
Here is an author that is looking at the same situation, but coming up with a completely different perspective. I am a much bigger fan of the way this author looks at things.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@hitmeasap/the-main-reason-for-steemit-to-be-considered-a-scam-envy-and-despair-is-disgusting
.
Agreed on that, promoted this for $0.5 ;)
Changing reward from 40 to 5 vote per day would help a little (eliminating bots and harm most frequently voting whales), but this change was delayed for some reasons. Dramatically fail of Steem price would help too, but that is unlikely to happen.
It has been delayed because most of the witnesses have to upgrade before a hardfork takes place.
Many witnesses have not upgraded to the hardfork, yet. This is basically to prevent the developers from pushing a hardfork that the witnesses do not approve of.
Precisely. If it were too easy to hard fork any ol' BS could be pushed through.
Downvoting this is simply fear of losing the whalepower. Whales don't want to lose their money because it's more important to them than life.
This whole thing seems weird to me. I was allowed to join Steemit even though I have never had a Facebook or Reddit account. So I suppose that's why I don't really understand how or why this is all so important.
I have participated in forums before but quickly tired of the rules and the rudeness. On the one hand, people could be as mean as they wanted to be to others but at the same time you couldn't talk about certain controversial things. Hey, it's their site. Their rules. But I don't like to be censored or told what I can't talk about.
But anyway. Isn't there some way to track what these whales downvote and look at it if you want to? It does seem strange that anyone would want to control what other people see. But again, it's their site, their rules I guess. It seems to me there must be a workaround though.
I am absolutely hopeless at figuring out what all this blockchain and crypto currency stuff is all about. I've never owned a smart phone and pretty much all the social media I do is email, Youtube and now Steemit. I'm not interested in making imaginary money. I'm not a good enough writer or "content producer" to worry about stuff like that. I'm a senior citizen who doesn't watch TV and likes to stay informed. Some people who I respect informed me about Steemit and I was led to believe that it was a place that was immune to censorship. Where even if you edit something, there will be a record of the original. I like that.
So far, I've only scratched the surface here and am just learning how to navigate the site. There is so much stuff here that I can't begin to explore it all.
I hope you all work out the money stuff. As long as I find interesting information here. As long as I meet interesting, goodhearted, honest people here. I'm not going to worry much about your imaginary money.
I know that there are a lot of you that rely on income from your videos and articles and I wish you the best. I promise to upvote everything that I find interesting and informative. But at the same time, I'm going to continue to support the alternative news sources I feel are best by sending them an old fashioned check.
I'll enjoy this place as long as it's enjoyable, or until I'm driven off. Whichever comes first I guess.
Lots of minnows are getting frustrated at Steemit and whales do weild much power. But things are not as bad you depitched in your post.
Why aren't they? Love to hear what exactly gives you hope other than hope
this is definitely a problem on Steemit. I really don't think it is sustainable in the long run but we will see. The majority who do most of the job is getting frustated.