Dr. The Leaping Koala_ my journey on Steemit # 7_ I am hopin someone's steeming along
I was listening to the new song by James Blunt, Someone Singing Along and I felt touched by it.
It is very sad when we look in the world today and throughout history and find it filled with hatred, wars, separation, divisions, anger, vanity, hierarchy, sexism, racism, terrorism, feminism and now we have STEEMisim
How sad is that?
How sad it is for a platform that was created with a beautiful vision to combat social and government SCHISMs finds itself changing exactly to what it was supposed to fight?
My dear steemian friends,
I know how most of you feel. I understand you and I will never blame you. I know you are doing the best for yourself and the best way you think it should be.
I am like you too. I want to grow and become successful on steemit. I want to make money and become famous. I want to be appreciated and liked. I want to be upvoted by many because that shows how awesome I am. I want to make lots of friends that will follow me loyally wherever I am. I want to become a whale tomorrow. No, not tomorrow. I want it today. I want it this instant. I want more and more and more and more.
We all want these things. Its human nature.... But
But you know...
If I keep thinking this way. Only focusing on myself, how to make money and raise my reputation. If I only focus on making friends with the big guys or voting them to get more rewards. I may be able to succeed a bit and get somewhere, but I will do that on the expense of posts made by many other steemians that are dreaming of equal chances.
These posts that have no fault other than being made by unknown steemians. They may contain amazing art pieces, beautiful poetry, sad stories or motivating journeys. They may change your day or open your heart only if you had the chance to read them.
But alas, if things stay as they are, these posts may never hear any recognition nor get the chance to penetrate the eyes of visitors to reach their hearts.
Today, I was reading a post by @jerrybanfield about the maximum curation reward strategy and I would like to thank Jerry for sharing this important information.
In summary, @jerrybanfield indicated that the advantage of using automated bots upvoting service is
1- The upvoter will earn higher curation rewards when they program the bot to vote as early as the post is out. The earlier your bot votes the more rewards you get.
Mind you, if you vote within the first 30 min, you will lose some of your curation rewards to the author
Of course, in this case, many people will want to upvote steemians with higher payouts to maximize their curation rewards. This will lead to the second advantage for the upvotee:
2- The upvotee will gain rapid number of votes and large amount of SBD within the 1st hour of their posts making their post appear on hot and trending channel for a longer time and covering up anyone else who didn't have similar advantages.
However, there are several caveats (@jerrybanfield mentioned a couple I believe), which I will summarize here and add to them from my opinion
The caveats of using bot upvoting service being:
1- The voters may end up upvoting less than good materials (i.e a post with a picture of Jerry in his boxers). By the way, this fact has been stated by @jerrybanfield himself
2- The voters may end up not reading the materials or engaging in helpful discussions.
and the worst disadvantages are
3- Giving too much advantages to people who are already at advantage, which tips the balance of expected equal opportunity to a maximum of unequal opportunity.
4- Increasing the gap of hierarchy (Schism in payouts, reputation, income, etc) between steemians.
5- Steemians at the bottom of this hierarchy end up either getting exhausted and depressed trying to get themselves off the ground, give up completely on trying and leave steemit or post lots of junk to maximize their visibility and payouts
Think: if one junk post will get them 0.01 SBD then 10 junk posts will get 0.1 SBD.
6- Both the extra number of junk posts and the posts with very high number of upvoters will create a stronger shadow over other quality posts from talented steemians and make them eternally invisible.
** As an example lets take @jerrybanfield post from today
(Disclaimer: I am not advocating against @jerrybanfield. It could have been any of the big guys like @sweetsssj, @sean-king etc)
Back to the example. In this post @jerrybanfield had,
~734 votes (posted for 12hrs at the time of writing my post), around 20 of them came from big names
~624 views that mean 110 voters didn't even try to check the post contents
~131 comments which jerry answered about 20 of them and upvoted them with decreasing SP power starting by (20%) ending with (4%). Of course, it is impossible for a human to engage the 100+ comments let alone vote all of them the same.
~From the 734 voters, I am not sure how many jerry has voted. Could be 100? 200? I don't know. But I know for sure he didn't vote the 734 voters that voted for him. It is simply impossible, especially that jerry posts more than once per day. (all is simple math really)
Now I ask all those little people that voted for @jerrybanfield for the sake of getting a piece of the curation rewards (not even the crumbs in this case)
Are you growing fast with those rewards?
Are you really benefiting from your upvotes?
Are you upvoting because you want to or because you have other motives?
Whatever it is, I am not saying you shouldn't upvote @jerrybanfield or anyone else.
What I am trying to say is that: you are putting yourself and others at disadvantage by these votes. We all have a certain number of votes/day (about 10 upvotes if you want to keep you SP% high enough). Give some of it to big guys but give some to smaller people like yourselves. Help each other to grow together so you can benefit together.
Big guys are big already. They have their group of friends, they know each other and know who they want to vote for, they don't even need the small votes (each one of them can vote himself/herself to a fortune)
How many whales or dolphins are going to vote for small fries? if they do, we wouldn't have such problems, would we?
But you small guys need each other. you need to make real friends and vote each other to death until you become whales.
Lately, I joined an initiative called make-a-whale. I like to call it the " MAW guild" (a name inspired by @flauwy). It has a MAW bot made by steemians that we feed by upvotes and it upvotes us back one by one in return.
But I know we can do even better than that. If we all (guild members) voted each other one by one (the day we receive the MAW bot vote for example), we will grow even faster together. We will have support from each other so we don't have to worry about rewards and can focus on making better posts. We can work together to extend our help to even more people outside the MAW guild.
This way we will all end up as winners
Are these silly ideals I am talking about? Maybe. But they are not impossible to do.
Its harder to break small sticks when they are put together, but very easy to break them one by one.
Now here is the song. Enjoy it :D
Dr. The leaping koala 🙂
"by James Blunt, Someone Singing Along"
Yes. I have finally reached the twilight zone. James Blunt, good ol JB, he's relevant again!
God, I can't believe I saw him at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan. I bet he's playing the hot dog stand out front of RCMH this time around, to a crew of pigeons.
"The upvotee will gain rapid number of votes and large amount of SBD within the 1st hour of their posts making their post appear on hot and trending channel for a longer time and covering up anyone else who didn't have similar advantages."
I'm not sure exactly how Hot/Trending works, but I don't think the amount of rewards affects how long you are there - just whether you get there or not. The more competitive a tag is, the more pending reward payout you need to be in HOT or TRENDING on that tag.
Technically speaking, this only bumps other users further down Hot in a lot of cases, rather than fully blocking them.
"expected equal opportunity to a maximum of unequal opportunity."
I think this is where a lot of the problem lies. Jerry IS a representation of equal opportunity. He's a self-admitted alcoholic who quit being a police offer because he was bad at it. He's borderline unemployable (Jerry, if you're reading, I'm saying this with all due love) because he's honest enough to make these weaknesses, which we all have, public record.
Yet, this guy in his boxers with an internet connection is feeding his family, because he works at videos, scripts, and posting 45+ hours a week.
How did he do it? Perseverance and hard work. This option is readily available to both you and me.
I need you to clearly state for me - where is the unequal opportunity?
A just world will always be "unequal", because people are unequal. This is why communism fails and is a pox on humanity.
Appealing to people's sense of social morality never works. When people start to do this, it is a sign that the incentives in the system are improperly skewed. The reality of Steemit 'Whale sucking' (forgive me for this term, please) is that this behavior exists because the mechanisms that were developed are flawed. Steemit was the first of its kind, and while I think Larimer intended it to be fair, the designs he implemented turned out to have exploits.
Frankly, you can appeal all you want to the moral nature of people on the internet, but even if some do commit to these principles others will not. What you must do in order to have a fair environment, is properly design the incentives. This goes for any form of society. You do not need laws when incentives are properly aligned (except for psychopaths, who do not feed off of the same incentive tree). You most certainly do not need to appeal to a moral choice over a selfish one. They will be one in the same. As far as I'm concerned, any system that separates selfish from moral is a broken system.
On top of this, there is no reason to believe that this Minnow charity principle you are trying to put forward is fair either. Going against the grain to give to a Minnow is a potentially dangerous over extension of kindness. Your votes should go to the curator who you felt wrote the best piece, and no other reason. If that person happens to be a Whale, then voting for the Minnow out of principles is unfair discrimination against the Whale.
While I don't object to you trying to make Steemit a more fair environment and work within its limitations, I tend to see them as futile. Steemit's incentives are a ponzi scheme, and this makes it a temporary platform. Keep your eyes open for another like Calibrae which might over come the failures that Steemit has stumbled upon. But until then, keep on blogging, because this is a block chain, and free from censorship from the ever oppressive forces around the globe.
Edit: fixed capitalization inconsistencies (for Minnow/minnow)
Excellent comment.
I strongly agree, until you got here:
"Steemit's incentives are a ponzi scheme"
Technically, they are not. The incentive is Steem, which you will receive. A ponzi physically requires new money coming in to pay out the guarantees to old money. Steemit only guarantees Steem. Not $.
Whether you can sell that on the open market is another thing, but it is by definition, not a ponzi scheme.
A fair response, though I dare say it is a bit of semantics. You are correct of course, but since the entire point is to convert that Steem into money, the result is virtually the same.
I think it's an important, and relevant, distinction.
If Steemit were actually a ponzi scheme (it paid out old investors from fresh cash from new investors from a centralized point of failure), then failure is an inevitable result. Eventually, you run out of "greater fools".
Since Steemit is given value based on market demand, it's not inevitable that it fails, any more than a multitude of other products produced in some kind of limited capacity that people want.
A very good post, and so true.
We have to help each other grow with up voting.
If we don't fertilize each other - create something from our
efforts - our sweat -
I 'm not sure anyone else will.
Thank you for your comment and engagement @lucylin,
I am glad you find the post interesting and you agree with the ideas presented in it.
I hope other people will feel the same as well, although my audience are limited to about 20 loyal friends. So I am not sure this idea will reach that many more. Here is hoping :)
Hi @theleapingkoala. I saw your post featured in the Daily Qurator. I completely agree with you on this subject, we need more support for minnows by minnows. MAW and Qurator are two great initiatives to help accomplish this. The last thing Steemit needs is more bots blindly following the whales. Fighting over the tiny crumbs falling from their feasting tables.
Alas, as you said, human nature being what it is, most people will pile on the Jerry's of Steemit and ignore some really great posts by minnows. Like this one.
Hi @gregory-f,
I am very happy to have you visit and read my post and thank you very much for your generous upvote and kind comment.
I agree with you. But I am so glad I joined MAW and Qurator because as you mentioned
another thing that is amazing about MAW and Qurator (especially MAW) is that a lot of people who are signed up for it are great people who think of not only benefiting themselves but also benefiting others, like you are doing :D
You can't imagine how happy I feel to have met you guys. Steemit became so friendly all of a sudden and a better place for me to hang around. I am getting to read many interesting posts, meet very kind people, make friends with like minded steemians who are happy to help each other grow.
Cheers to my Steemit/MAW/Qurator buddy :D
I agree with you. I research my posts carefully and when I post personal stories they come from real experiences. As a result I post perhaps one or good posts (my estimation) a week. Sometimes it can be disappointing when you have put so much effort in, to see it disappear in the hundreds of mediocre posts. I have had good rewards on some of my posts but it is not assured. As for curation and upvoting, it is tempting to go for the highest reward but as you so rightly put it, it discriminates against those hundreds of minnows who have so much to offer but never get the chance. What to do about it? It depends on your makeup, split your time, take some of @jerrybanfields advice, after all he is very successful but allocate time to those what need encouragement, after all it was this aspect of Steemit that drew many of us in the first place.
Dear @petruska13,
Thanks for the comment and engaging the subject.
I like the way you put it about taking Jerry's advice
When we vote successful people for rewards, at least we should put an effort in reading their posts.
After all, the best way to learn how to be successful is to follow the footsteps of successful people not only piggyback on their rewards to gain a bit more
Wow. I didn't know that was possible. Getting bots on steemit? I suppose it was just matter of time before someone did that. Makes me feel like I know nothing about steemit!
Don't worry my dear @mike.rod, You are not alone in that. I just discovered the automated bot votes yesterday myself.
Bots now are replacing people in steemit
Its amazing what technology can do to people, yet its scary too (At least I find it that way).
Absolutely
It ain't silly at all. It's something we all (well most of us) know and should get around to. We should all try harder as we will all benefit from it. Great post and thanks for reminding us. Resteemed for sure!
Many thanks for visiting, upvoting and resteeming :D
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