1 step back, 2 steps forward? - Vote buying question and Trending [ part repost ]
A little over four months ago I posted an article about the relatively new trend (at the time) of vote selling. Four months is not very long but it feels like a lifetime when it comes to the content I have posted in between. All of the vote selling and buying issues seem to be coming to a head as people are starting to realise the fundamental problems with the practice.
I noticed that @surfermarly posted about it too tonight. Perhaps when people like that start getting on board the wagon also, then others will start listening too. It would be nice as up until very, very recently, it seems that there has been only very limited open pockets of resistance to the practice. At times, I fell silent publicly as so many people were using and supporting all of the various versions of them, and it began to feel like I was flogging a dead horse.
Also, I started to engage with a wider social circle and some of them are/were sellers or their clientele. I think for most, the concept wasn't to do any harm and many thought they were doing very well for the community. But, with a little thought, it all unravels and starts to look like a condensed version of what the banking industry has been doing for the last few hundred years as middlemen.
The interesting thing that has come out of this is how narrow the support is for Trending authors and this is likely what has been the straw that has broken the proverbial Whale's back. When I first started at Steemit, I thought there were only about 100 or so users because trending was always the same people. I learned pretty quickly that they were almost completely the early adopters who got powerful fast and had friends in similarly powerful positions.
If we call the current 'Vote selling' an experiment, we see that they often have much less support without a few of their old friends. Their friends with high Steem Power sold their delegated voting power to the numerous boosters and sellers instead as this returned them a higher margin than curation. This meant that their trails and bots become much weaker, as did their manual curation votes (the votes on content they actually like).
This in turn made some of the Boosters very powerful indeed and with 100 SBD, one could buy a top spot in the trending pages. Finally, new blood! The problem of course was that anyone with a 100 SBD could now be a trending author, regardless of quality or reputation. This must have been a bitter pill to swallow for some people who were regular faces on that page and enjoying the reputation and financial reward of being there.
So, once the podium was stolen, the previous faces have started to realise what the vote selling had done to their wallets as more and more of the pool would be sold off to the highest bidder. On a side note, this is how many of the little people feel when they see the same faces in trending regardless of their content, just there because of their friends. They didn't realise at that point however, that their friends were able to be purchased.
So much SBD was flying around and so many different people buying and selling, no one seemed to want to slow down and take a step back and observe. The long-term view of this practice is platform death. It has to stop. I found out @freedom undelegated some of what they had loaned and it seems that many more jumped ship back into the whale seas. It is likely that at least on a large scale, the vote sell and buy is coming quickly to a close. We can only hope.
This has been an important chapter for Steemit and I hope that the lessons from it will be carried well and far into the future. If we bring the economic cronyism that run rife in the real-world into a decentralised community, it will kill it. The other lesson should go to the authors and supports who now appear to be back Trending It seems to be very much who you know, not what you know.
I wonder where this post will be in 4 months....
On another side note: I see many familiar faces in trending again.
Here is the original article. I have linked it at the bottom also for verification. I recommend reading some of the comments on it also.
A few weeks ago I heard of call a whale and I have called Randowhale a few times, first for myself twice I think to test and then for a few accounts that I think were more deserving than the few cents I could offer.
Having thought about it a bit more, I am not going to do that again as I think it may not be in my long-term best interest to do so, even though I may get a return higher than the 2 dollar fee. I don't know how all the algorithms work but I think that anyone can do the same thing.
Right now, my vote is worth 77c but let's make it an even 1 dollar for this example. Call me: randotinyfish
I get 10 x 100% votes a day, That means that I can upvote 10 dollars to posts, comments etc.
If I sell each vote at half price, 50c, I can generate 5 dollars in income and can guarantee 10 dollars out of the pool. That means that anyone that buys a vote from me is guaranteed to double their outlay, one step back, but two guaranteed forward. But for me, I am selling access to the pool. There is no outlay for me other than what I have in SP. I am selling a product I do not actually own, but have access to (perhaps).
At the moment, I generate about 6 SP a week in curation, granted, I am not the most active curator. But, selling my 100 votes at half price (50c) guarantees me 35 dollars a week and not in SP, in immediately tradeable income. Plus the curation anyway.
Now, if my vote is worth 10 and someone transfers 5, I can make 350 a week, and if my vote is 100, transfer 50 and I can make 3500 a week. Something doesn't seem kosher about this.
The reason I won't use randowhale anymore is that each purchase drains the pool but the content it votes on can be absolutely anything. This isn't in my best interest for the long-term future of Steemit, I think. Plus, if anyone can essentially do this (at varying degrees of pool access) what happens to the site and content quality when no one curates?
I am not sure if this is the way I have said it here. Like I said, I don't understand all of this stuff, but perhaps someone that does can comment.
Does this make sense, or have I misunderstood something fundamental?
I am not trying and do not want to step on any toes here but I am very curious how this would play out if everyone decided to pay to play.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
Original:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@tarazkp/1-step-back-2-steps-forward-vote-buying-question
Two sides of the same coin? on one you get whales who upvotes each other's post regardless of content quality, and the other you get minnows buying upvotes on their post regardless of content quality.
But afterall its a free market on the Steem ecosystem where everything is open and permissionless, people can do what they want and face the consequence whether good or bad.
But one should be very aware of the long term result of both vote buying and circle-jerking where the platform's overall content quality gets chipped away to a point being too toxic to be a part of. Having a situation where this happens will of course hurt the price of the token and hurt the investors.
So while both makes money on the short term, are everyone willing to let it go on and continue to hurt the platform?
Everything in moderation i guess, of course its okay to upvote your friends and of course its okay to get a fighting chance at going hot/trending. But as usual humans will go to the full extreme if there is no control in place.
so should there be a control?
Self-control seems too much to ask, as does delayed gratification.
The free market system is unfortunately not as free as we may think because even without the constraints, human nature is repetitive and what happens and is failing in the real-world is being dragged into an environment that could do something fundamentally different.
It isn't decentralised if we are all acting on the same learned behaviours as those we are trying to escape.
Yesterday i have tried buying somve votes for an expetiment since everybody started talking about it. I am steemit user for about 4 months. I have made over 7000 posts, have over 1100 followers. I would not argue over the quality of my posts. It's subjective.
I've put a lot of work and time into platform. Creating only orginal comtent. I did reviews, i did tutorials, i did extensive posts, and sometimes i would just upload an image. There is no correlation at all. If not for a few people that have me on the upvote list i would be making cents a post. Now i am earning ~1.5 - ~2.5
It is still way more than so many users who post quality content.
We also built our photography community over Steemi blockchain and also are bringing dozens of new users to steemit platform who are creating exceptionaly quality content. I've trying to reach out to some whales but with no avail.
I am not complaining here just stating the obvious, as my interest does not lie in earning from posts myself rather than building solutions that could work on a massive scale.
If the buying votes is gone we are going to see that hundred people in trending again, making them the ones who are actually earning again. I appreciate all the time they have put while helping to grow the platform and all and i have absolutely nothing agains them.
Just stating the obvious. Steemit as a platform has very serious issues in it's core and is going to die unless something very serious is not done very fast.
Or the same circle of people will continue to earn while the others will continue to make cents a day. While it is a viable option for some from very poor countries, which is absolutely awesome and i am happy that they are able to make 10USD a week which is a month salary there, but at this rate steemit will never ever see a mass adoption and will continue to shrink which will lead to a drastic drop in steem price which will still be fuelled by FOMO.
The only thing that can save Steem blockchain itself are SMT's, but we will have to see how that develops. Might be another number of ICO's funded by the same sircle of 100. Might be that it will turn out big.
As for steemit as front end application i am very sceptic. System in theory would have worked very well, but is killed by extremely uneven token distribution. And everybody knows this.
Final note: If whales do not wan't to see their 500k steem and more turn into 5000k dollars in the next 12 months they should consider getting back to manual curation heavily.
It would really be a shame to see such a promising concept fail.
You write faster than me.
It is 4 am here so I will be heading to bed but, you are right and I hope that SMT's will bring in some changes that will stabilise the platform somewhat. I just hope that they aren't just all hyped projects from that same circle.
It 4 am here too and i was typing it in a phone with no spellchecking so sorry for the speling mistakes.
I do not see how SMT's can stabilize the platform other than prople leaving and joining better built solutions. But with steem power concentration in a few hands all new projects will be put at risk again if they choose to utilise the same.rrward system. And a very fair distribution of tokens has to be worked out for it to work.
Hi there :) I am definitely feeling your frustration, I read the post by @surfermarly and there is also a really good one about it resteemed on @acidyo's page. @meesterboom made an animation about it as well...I think people are starting to finally take notice that it's becoming a serious problem.
The problem is not the bots. The problem is unfair distributuon of tokens. Steemit is economical social model and wealth distribution is the key. I could write the post about it but nobody will read it so i'll just save my time.
Steemit has become a huge Oliharchy. And that's it.
The problem is with the vote buying, as for whether anyone will read your post...since I've not met you before I don't know the situation. I only know that networking is the key to getting your posts noticed. The way this platform is designed, almost everyone here is a content creator, we don't have the luxury of a large number of people just being the audience. We are both the creators and the audience. When I first started here I spent hours a day meeting people and developing relationships. I post original content of quality I can be proud of, but that on its own would not be enough. Quality commenting and establishing connections is equally as important, so in the end it is both you and your work that is being voted on. Due to this unique and yes, flawed system, it's really the only way to go about it at least at this point.
I see a lot of people complaining about all of the things that are wrong, but when you have something that has never been done before it's bound to have these issues. That's what the hardforks are for, hopefully they will eventually fork out all the kinks :)
Which one on Acidyo's page? If you can link it here it is appreciated :)
Sure can :) - https://steemit.com/steem/@fknmayhem/rethinking-the-position-of-upvote-bots-in-the-steem-ecosystem-without-smts
Ah, yes. This is a decent article and explains a lot by @fknmayhem :)
I used boots for a few situations, but mostly I abstained, and I have been a bit vocal about my disdain for the overwhelming trend of bots on the platform.
If the whales supporting the bots are finally repealing the bots, it probably has to do with them not earning enough $ or the fact that Steem prices have dropped (and they're not earning as much money). Or maybe they all learned at SF2 that the pulse of the everyday Steemit user feels a certain level of dislike for bots?
Some bots can be helpful to the community, but unless monitored properly, they can harm the community as well. Since monitoring the bots is a lot of work, and the bots were created to reduce work, they disbanded the bots?
We will probably never know. Unless we see the bots come back online!?!?
The bots are unlikely to go anywhere too fast but, hopefully the vote selling and buying will at the very least change form. Perhaps this will mean that the bots change form also. We will have to wait and see.
Yeah, only time will tell. Some people have put too much time and energy (and possibly money) into creating the vote selling / buying bots to simply let them die forever. Although, it would be nice to see them go away.
Bots don't have a place on a Social Media platform, unless it's to regulate the platform against OTHER bots.. At least that's my view on the situation.
I haven't ventured too far away from my feed lately, so I haven't noticed a lot about these new bots. I did see that randowhale closed down? I had seen several of the bots "shut down" temporarily over the past month, but they always seemed to come back online.. Anyway..
As you said, only time will tell what happens with bots on the platform in the future.
Pretty sure Rando is dead and its owner is going to be doing something much more useful for the platform I hope.
Im new to Steemit, but the reason I joined was because of the underlying spirit behind Steemit or as I percieved it anyways. In my naive mind I only saw a community that rewarded good conduct and content and where it seemed to be a verry small platform for trolling and other simillar conduct thats festering alot of other social media communities. I hade no idea about this dark side that your talking about and appreciate the insight and eyeopening that you brought to me.
I do hope that the spirit as i percieved it about steemit is what will prevail in the long run however. It does seem to still just be in its infacy and theres allways ”bugs” in the beginning. ;)
Remember it is in beta and even though it is working, there are a lot of issues still to iron out. This really has never been done before in this way so there is a lot of open space to fill and unfortunately, many fill it with what they know first. What they know is why this was built. What they know isn't working.
Interesting insight for vote buying, I did buy votes from the mentioned randowhale as well and the votes were like 10% more than what I paid for. And you are right, with that in mind, it can vote anything, regardless of the quality of content, which may jeapordise the content making environment. However, being a minnow, getting attention is hard enough, and getting good upvotes are even harder. That’s why there are always demand out there, getting some remuneration for their works (at least earned that extra 10%). It’s still an experiment that worth to think further deep down.
Yes, I understand the case of both sides but in the end, both sides lose, the buyer most of all as they will have a continually increasing price with a shrinking pool. But, early days. There is still time to correct course.
I see. Still yet to be able to comprehend what will happen when the pool shrj
You are absolutely correct ! Me too used booster/voting bot sometime. Buying and selling votes is increasing and lets hope it will not be a buying and selling platform for upvotes !!