RE: On Guilds and Managing Expectations
When replying to such a long post its difficult to form the right kind of arguments. I'll try and reply to the ones that were most relevant to me.
Looking at the top trending authors of the last month and seeing that they pretty much all come from the Steem guild and are self voting is a red flag.
Anyone that's on top trending consistently for too long on a bot list evidently reduces the quality of their posts. We've seen it play out multiple times on Steemit.
I think the guild members started out on high quality posts, but some of them are pumping out poor quality posts lately.
The argument that those members are worth that % of the reward pool is nonsense. That they're entitled to a developed economy's middle class 'pay' is ridiculous.
What matters is the % they siphon from the reward pool and the perception that siphoning has on future growth.
6 months ago I saw this developing, when steemed announced his author list - it may apply to this situation...
https://postimg.org/image/406k6xrgt/
It brings me to an appropriate Orwell quote "All Animals are equal, but some Animals are more equal than others"
Power eventually corrupts.
I think that's actually a bit broad. When I had a bot list I noticed that some authors milked it, and some authors continued to produce good content without even increasing their frequency of posts. As with everything there are good apples and bad apples. I noted this because I received complaints and evaluated them. Sometimes I agreed with the complaint and took the author off the list, other times after evaluating the authors contributions I did not agree and saw no decline in quality. Ultimately it is up to the stakeholder to decide if their votes are being used constructively, whether they are being done personally, with a bot, or via a hired guild. If that doesn't work then the system rules don't work, at least not with the stake distribution that was created here. That's a plausible argument.
agree with this completely. I think arguments to the effectiveness (and the unintended consequences) of guilds like the OP are generally aimed at changing the large stakeholders minds about their support of these guilds.
Very true, not in all cases but in most from my perspective the last few months I've been here.
I don't think it's about good and bad apples in general. Just people getting wrapped up in their ego in the face of perceived high rewards vs a 'normal job'.
I think we both realize this system is potentially plagued within a tragedy of the commons context.
its not even really about ego. Its about common sense. If im going to get paid 100/post regardless of quality, its really really stupid of me not to post the maximum number of posts allowed per day (at least from an economic standpoint).
The same thing happened with cars in the 70s in the united states. US car manufacturers were producing shit that couldnt compete with japanese manufacturers. So the government subsidized them. ANd what did they do -- they just doubled down on the shit.
Yeah, i might lose my support if my quality declines significantly. But there's certainly no evidence that will happen on steemit. Especially since its fairly obvious that many (not all) whales don't even read the posts they upvote... they just set their bots and continue to upvote as many posts as the author cares to write.
All things being subjective, and whether or not if anyone's in agreement with the results of guild curation works.. there's a level of objectivity in the work performed by SG members with their routine - you can see them distributing votes to the folks in SG list day in and out. Now what else is there to say when most who are not associated with guild works are also earning pretty decently, including @ats-david who seems to be doing well too just being a solo-operator with no objective, obligatory work so to speak.
I will remain with my opinion that SG should either revise their fees or just try to stay away from occupying top trending all too often from self-upvotes. Personally, this is the only valid problem with SG that I'm seeing in the entire dissertation that @ats-david has put forth. Whether they're overpaid or not, I hope they'll discuss it with the whales that have delegated their voting power to see if its fair compensation. I'm sure they've discussed it in length.
So to answer @ats-david
I will recommend everybody to check out the post that I've put up a few days ago regarding this. Blockchain communities are a VERY new thing (even the metrics are so elusive) and I hope if anyone's serious enough in trying to help the platform, please read and study up, or hire the consultancy firm stated in this post:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@kevinwong/building-and-evaluating-the-value-of-blockchain-communities
I noticed this a while ago. Its a classic liquidity trap, though i don't believe its actually fair, or accurate, to call it corruption. Its simple self interest.
I think that's the most ridiculous aspect of this as well. You have a handful of users who believe that their curation efforts deserve a weekly wage of hundreds of dollars, while everyone else's curation efforts get them a very small amount of SP rewards - a few dollars per week, if they're lucky. And as I pointed out - the time and energy that they have to put into curation is entirely due to their self-imposed guidelines. If the curation rewards are not worth the effort, then don't do it. But collectivizing the costs so that they can essentially have a "living wage" is absurd to me.
Steemit isn't supposed to replace your full-time job, unless the price happens to rise and we all get rich, or you earn enough Mvests to curate and power down your weekly rewards to live off of them. Other than that, you probably shouldn't quit your day job.
That's one of the first things that I noticed after speaking with one of the guild members and seeing the first update post. Then I realized why I was hearing some of the grumblings behind the scenes. It was just a poor decision in general to make that the "payment" structure and to continue it, especially coming from the CEO of Steemit and the things that had transpired last fall and the recent issues with Dan's flagging. It just doesn't look good - and perception is reality, unfortunately.
On a micro scale I've had some some great conversations with the Steem guild guys. On a macro this just looks wrong. I mean 'payment' for curation to the extent that you're in the top 10 of rewarded authors?
Not an appropriate response, if anything, Steemit Inc should provide a cut of curation rewards as you stated above. The trending page is one of the only marketing tools available. Stepping back from what I know, it looks like there's something wrong at first glance.
Curation should absolutely be on par with writing in terms of payment. In fact, at its inception thats exactly how the reward system worked. Curation and blogging rewards were equal.
Now, the ratio is something like 8:1 in favor of blogging. (its 3:1 theoretically, but actually much more lopsided than that in reality because a big part of the curation reward goes to the reverse auction).
The problem isnt that the curators are getting too much, its that theyre being paid in a dishonest way.
And also, payment thats being represented as rewards on a post. That is to say, its represented as endoresment of the quality of the content. If that content is relatively high quality (and @hanshotfirst is a great example of this) thats not so bad. If its the wikipedia entery for giraffes cut and pasted and on the top of trending, then yeah thats pretty bad.
[nesting]
In other words, since this is all widely known and has been for some time, the actions reveal that the stated goals are not an accurate description of the actual goals.
Can't agree that payment on a post is 'represented as endorsement of quality'. It isn't always. It is simply expression of a view that the post or author should be rewarded by stakeholders. For example, it is perfectly legitimate for a post reporting on work that adds value to Steem to be deserving of rewards even if the post itself is poorly-written (in fact I find such a post more deserving than a well-written post which does nothing else to add value to Steem other than grace us with its presence, which I doubt adds much value, if any).
As you mentioned elsewhere it may be that these Steem Guild 'payment posts' are in some way dishonest, in that they don't simply say "vote for this post to support my work as a Steem Guild staff member". That's another question, but I wouldn't find anything wrong with the latter approach.
I see your point, though i think there's a difference between a post being rewarded because the author is describing the desirable actions he took (for example, the dude that put up that billboard last summer) and a post that gets an arbitraty upvote based on the author being entitled to a freebie.
Well, to be really honest they would have to say something like "ned gave me his vote to use on anything i want to support my work on steem guild, and im using it on my own post because thats just how i roll."
That said, honesty aside. Yeah, a whale can absolutely upvote bad content to reward good actions that are entirely unrelated to the merit of the content you're upvoting.
And yeah, a whale can absolutely support quality content on steemit.
But not at the same time. At least, not as long as the reward pool is fixed. Which is the whole problem with these guilds. theyre paying curators to cast small percentage votes on other peoples good content by casting large percentage votes on the curators bad content.
The result is a net loss for the good content.
--note (some of the beneficiaries of this are pretty cringeworthy. Some are pretty OK... but even the good stuff, the point of the program and votes as pay for curation is that these posts are getting votes that they otherwise would not merit based on their quality in a vacuum. This must work at cross purposes to the stated goal of these guilds)
Same here. And they have been quite respectful. However, not all of them appear to able to conduct themselves appropriately.
Right. And it's not just one account. It's five...and they're in the top six over the last 30 days. I don't know how much more obvious this issue can be.
It doesn't look good because it isnt good. And it really never has been.
At the end of the day, whether its an automated "bot list" or "featured author/hidden gems" or steem sports (old version) or whatever, the problem is that its a redistribution and management scheme where the redistributors take most of the money.