RE: Steemit Update: HF21 Testnet, SPS, EIP, Rewards API, SMTs!
The problem came in when bidbots became open sourced, when there were one or two fine, they were structured and had business models, now every anonymous dog and his auntie runs a bidbot, so things are a bit crazy. However I have been on Steem since June 2016 and one thing I know is that having the freedom to boost ones' own posts is way more dignifying than having to beg and lick the you know whats of the whales who held all of the voting power, I think that was subhuman, vote bots are just like every other promotional aspect in life, paying for ads and higher rank on traditional media, getting yourself visible.
Before vote bots a small group of people were getting all the rewards and benefit, with bots it is more widely distributed. It isn't ideal but I for one am happy I can just send some Steem and get some visibility on my post and not dm a few buddies to see if they will help me out in exchange for some witness votes or having to vote them back later.
MinnowBooster is now a less supported bot in terms of delegation, but it supports a whole team of people as can be seen on https://buildteam.io and has helped give rise to projects like @tokenbb and to take over the @ginabot project and keep it running.
Proactive is hard, Ai could be an answer, have it recognise what an abuse post looks like and deny it an upvote, but the issue is there are so many bidbots that if one service blocks them they can go to another. We do have a community whitelist on MinnowBooster that can help as a proactive measure to ensure the larger votes only go to whitelisted authors.
I've been producing content here since September 2016; never kissed ass for a vote, never used a bid bot, never made any kind of deal with anyone, for anything. I earned everything in my goddamn wallet. Glance at my blog, look at the engagement, compare that to the majority. It might look kinda silly on the surface but trust me, I know what I'm doing.
Why not just flag my material if you're the individual who feels the need to push it down into oblivion with paid votes? Same damn thing. I've taken a huge hit since bidbots.
If I had my artwork behind the windows of my shop, and someone came along to plaster posters and ads of their work on the outside of my windows so people couldn't see in, I'd be pissed. You think that behavior here is dignifying? Force me to pay someone else so they earn more from my work than I do?!
I got a fence, it needs painting. You're the painter. In order to earn money you must first give me $100, then paint my fence, then I'll give you $101. That makes sense to you, okay, but I somehow magically made $100 because you painted my fence.
Yeah, okay, I get it. Someone never had talent. Couldn't do a damn thing right to get noticed so they had to find little tricks here and there to get paid. Meanwhile, because of that selfish behavior, the true talent around here had to leave because typically, in the entertainment industry, those with talent can earn simply by being talented. Once they left, so did the potential billions the entertainment industry is known to generate, annually. All that loss just so a few people with no skills in this industry could get noticed. All that loss just to cater to the lowest quality performers and place them above the highest quality performers.
If you're running a network on television, you place the best programs expected to receive the highest ratings in the prime time slots, and you sell the late night slots. Here, because of bidbots, the late night paid programming nobody watches sits in the prime time slots while the best content is placed in the worst slots, forcing the best content to receive low ratings. We can't all be expected to purchase votes and shoot for those slots high on the trending page because the moment everyone does it is the same moment $200 worth of rewards becomes the new $0 and everyone is right back where they started.
Dude, don't get me started on this. It's great you've been able to fund projects and all that but anyone with tokens would be able to fund one hell of a lot more projects once they stop sabotaging the potential of the entertainment industry. I'm using the term entertainment loosely. Anything that grabs someones attention, regardless of what it is, is worth billions, and that is being thrown in the trash here so a few individuals can run tiny little businesses.
This is something that most people here don't understand, especially the interface owners. The fact that we have top witnesses who consistently fail to grasp basic economics and fundamental social media (or normal human) behavior, and proceed to sabotage the very chain and their "investments" at every opportunity, is very troubling. I can understand not grasping one or the other, but we have far too many that comprehend neither...and it quite obviously shows.
The person you're talking to - Ricardo, "thecryptodrive" - has done nothing but suck whale dick for three years and use various vote and delegation scheming to essentially self-vote his "company" posts for 2.5 years. (It should be noted that his "businesses" are just vote-selling and delegation-renting services...so not real businesses at all.) And whenever he gets a chance to milk more rewards for his "marketing" projects, he tries to market Steem with...get this...
Billboards!
lulz
Talk about someone who's completely out of touch and has no clue about entertainment or what it takes to successfully manage and market social media/entertainment...
Of course he's going to play up bid bots and how useful they can be. He doesn't care about the perception of Steem or its interfaces. He makes easy money doing nothing. He doesn't even code or manage his own witness node. He bought Steemvoter from someone else (by begging for whale votes on his multiple begging posts to cover the costs), he took Jesta's chainbb code and just renamed it "Tokenbb," and the one project that he promised to develop back in 2016 after getting tons of whale support and money (SteemSports) was basically dead by early 2017.
This is your typical top-20 witness, sadly. And we wonder why shit is so bad around here.
He just proved to me he's the biggest idiot on STEEM, by far.
That's what he does.
His exact words were:
He thinks he's subhuman. Why am I not surprised to find out a fucking asshole is a fucking asshole? Says one thing and does the other. That's your top twenty witness right there. Just another shady politician but this time the shady politician thought he could act one way for the public to see, and another way behind the scenes, on a blockchain. Not too bright. All talk, no action.
Don't hate the player man.
The economics have been broken and he took advantage of what was offered.
The free downvotes and higher curation split in HF21 are really the first positive steps that have ever been taken to try to fix the broken economics that @thecryptodrive and others have exploited. Sad that it has taken three years to do anything at all, and it may still be too little, but better late than never I guess.
@smooth thanks for the support with the "don't hate the player" comment, I don't agree with @ats-david or the fact that I have exploited the system, if I was exploiting I would cash out way more, I am currently well powered up and only sell what I need to get by and cover server costs.
Many good devs were incubated at BuildTeam and we pioneered alot of things, take the SIngle Sign On for example, BuildTeam was the first to integrate Google and Facebook logins and now other apps are following suit. Granted TokenBB was an idea based on ChainBB, we rescued it when it was about to be abandonded, same with GINAbot, the developer is pretty much leaving Steem but we are keeping the project going and 8000 users like to receive her notifications on Discord about their Steem account activity.
Billboards weren't my finest moment, but I have never seen the community rally behind something with such passion which brought genuine tears to my eyes at the time, it certainly was a way better investment than a makeup post from someone who cashed out and ran away from Steem with her loot.
Dlease.io is an investor class delegation market that existed as a first on Graphene even before Chintai on EOS and has way more volume, at 23 Mil SP in total leases to date. I have observed some behaviour in our own team where if a 4 week lease with a good APR of 20%+ comes up, the team member would power up 1500 SP for example to fill it, taking those liquid funds out of circulation for 4 weeks lease time and a further 13 week powerdown, so it is incentivising powerups and retention.
I work every day to manage a team of developers and guide the various projects under my charge, MinnowBooster is probably the only seemingly undesirable product but with only 500K delegation it isn't much and isn't affecting much, we don't give away all of our profits and have used it to help pay for private RPC servers and even public ones at one point when we could afford it, at some stage we had 4 x 512GB rpc servers, two of which were a public cluster, we exhibit more corporate social responsibility than the average app who use the free nodes and when we tried to get people to band together and share the cost of private nodes not many were keen or only wanted to spend only $100 per month to contribute.
Very few people have stuck around and tried to innovate and keep business running, we don't always get it right, there will always be haters, business is about making money to sustain itself and its workers, we provide a paycheck to many and keep devs around and interested.
It merely looks like I do nothing because I co-ordinate things in a private discord channel, but anyone on my team can confirm I am active for many hours a day making suggestions, testing for bugs, editing communication posts, engaging in witness channels, trying to list steem on payment integrators as per recent posts you can see in my blog. Because I have a business on Steem and am a Top 20 witness I can approach such parties with a professional email.
At the end of the day I have a wife and kids, like many of us do and there is no shame in trying different business ideas to try and provide for them, I don't say I will always get it right, but at least I try and am still around and passionate about Steem.
Honestly I didn't mean exploited in a judgmental or negative way. Exploited as in saw the opportunities and made the most of it. Not a bad thing. The bad things are the crappy economic rules in Steem and how long it has taken to address them.
I have every confidence that with a better Steem economic system you would still have been building businesses, they'd just be different ones that fit within that system instead of the crappy system we have/had.
Thank you @smooth your response means alot, "exploited" could have be read the wrong way as if in agreement with David's allegations, but you have cleared that up. Much appreciated, my heart is in finding business opportunities on Steem and can only work with what system there is. :)
I would say you are an exception though, most users would never get any votes on their posts, or be discovered. You must have at least made some friends and done some sort of networking within the community. No way you would get consistently $5 per post and being a total recluse and not engaging with anyone.
That attitude is so common around here. NEVER give a content producer credit for the content. It's always something else. There's literally thousands of hours worth of time spent on producing digital art... but it must be something else. Countless jokes and tons of people laughing under the posts.... but it must be something else. Well written stories that grip the readers attention from start to finish... but it can't be that either.
Geez you guys...
That disconnect is exactly why you can't see the billions I'm talking about. You know nothing about the entertainment industry.
All I see in your latest post is that you give everyone who comments 6 cents worth of upvotes, stop doing that and you will soon see comments will dry up.
Hey, Asshole
You just insulted everyone who enjoys my work.
People commented before I even had a vote worth anything, asshole.
You, are a fucking asshole.
And how did you miss that? That's over eight hours of work. Might even be twelve hours.
Last one didn't qualify but this sure as shit should.
!dramatoken
You've got DRAMA. You are going to be a Whale!
To view or trade
DRAMAgo to steem-engine.com.So after being an asshole, and being called an asshole for being asshole, you'll do the asshole thing to do and downvote me? What a fucking asshole.
Just keeping the site family friendly :)
You just said "licks the balls of whales", turn into a fucking asshole, insult everyone who has ever enjoyed my work, and then tell me to be family friendly? My kids think you're a fucking asshole, too.
Fair point, it wasn't meant in a rude or bad way rather conveying the image of being undignified. I have amended my comment, your comments are just plain rude and arrogant, using swear words instead of supporting your case with proper structure, even one of your posts I clicked on was just the F word repeated over and over, not my style, sorry.
Scroll all the way down. Read all my comments. Then talk.