Reasons and Solution of Reward Pool Abuse : Restriction of 3 posts per day
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Preface
Steem Blockchain is one of the most versatile blockchains of today's era. Each day, a set reward pool is allocated to reward the authors and curators of steemit platform. While, many people took this as an oppurtunity to deliver quality content and get paid for it, some chose to abuse the system..
Currently, there are various discussionss going on in the platform amongst few influential influential individuals on how to stop the reward pool abuse but instead of reaching a viable solution, steemit community is now divided and have started to take sides in flagging wars. This practice is destroying the entire ecosystem of platform and does not reflect the ideology upon which the pillars of steemit and steem blockchain were formed.
How Reward Pool Abuse Works
It is no secret that most people on steemit like to follow steemians with massive wallet size. This is done in hopes of curating the post of such whales at the right time to get their attention and to get high curation rewards.
Keeping in view the above mentioned hypothesis, the general following of a whale is rather large and single post from that whale ends up paying out nearly 300-400$ on average.
The real issue however, is that few whales have started to post almost 10-12 times a day on purpose and are earning 400$ average on each of their posts
With current prices of SBD and Steem, it is estimated that each of those whales are earning more than 10,000 US Dollars per day.
Evolution of the Problem
While the above mentioned problem existed and was confined to only 2-3 whales, others took the charge to create massive amounts of posts (containing 2 paragraphs at most) targeting those 2-3 whales without offering any viable solution and in turn abused the reward pool even more in the name of "Saving the Reward Pool" since each of those posts also paid out in thousands of dollars.
Almost 40-50% of the trending page on steemit is filled with these kind of posts that is not only making steemit look bad but it is it is also destroying the tag of "Trending" . Many deserving posts could not make it to either "Trending" or even "Hot" sections because of this.
Despite the poor level of maturity that was displayed in the said posts, there were few who actually made some contribution in an attempt to reach a suitable solution. It is suffice to say that terms and conditions of proposed solutions could not be met by all stakeholders and everything went back the way it was i.e. massive abuse of reward pool.
Another Type of Reward Pool Abuse on the Rise
Setting this aside, there is another form of reward pool abuse that is on the rise. Steemit devs clearly have authorised to use voting bots whereas few whales took the responsibility of setting guidelines on how people should use voting bots.
While these efforts are worth applauding in relation to making steemit more transparent, but once again, in order to promote their agenda and self created guidelines, these whales have started to post countless times a day with each post containing a mimicking gif or a meme along with names of those who are not using voting bots as per their guidelines. These poor quality posts are earning more than 900$ per post as well, which again comes under the umbrella of abuse of reward pool.
Solution of Reward Pool Abuse
Keeping in view the above mentioned encumbrances, I hereby suggest a viable solution that will curb the reward pool abuse to some level.
All the steemians may please be restricted to be able to post only 3 times a day and Top 20 witnesses with 5 posts per day. Please note that by post, I mean blog posts and not the comments.
Steemit condenser can be edited to show everyone how many posts are remaining in their daily quota.
This step will help in reducing massive amount of posts that are being posed by whales just for fighting with each other. Also it will curb those whales who are posting 12 times a day in order to grab more shares from reward pool.
Conclusion
The ugly war of "who is right" and "how it should be done" has blown out of proportion and needs to be nipped. The only reasonreasonable solution of the problem that I can see is to reduce the number of posts per person to "actually" save the reward pool.
I rest my case...
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Thank you very much.. :) and thanks to @utopian-io too :)
I think this is a reasonable solution. I don't post too often, usually no more than two blogs a day. I certainly have not reached the point to be considered as abusing the reward system, but how you explained how some people are posting poor quality material and taking advantage of their voting power, it looks like that's the case.
I hope you guys can come to a solution and I am willing to limit my posts to no more than three a day until this gets settled.
3 posts a day is an ample amount even if you do not have a full time job.. i believe most of the posts that are being pushed out by whales who are abusing reward pools can be combined to make 3 posts.. they will still be rewarded with heavily as per their stature but at least there will be a limit to it..
thank you for your valuable comment... ^_^
You're welcome, and thanks for bringing activity such as this to the attention of others such as myself @jbn!
Well its a shame though, i could have attached screenshots of the entire situation and how people are abusing reward pool in the name of "saving" it to further augment my case.. but the utopian rules do not allow that..
But reaching towards a solution is more important than pointing out the culprit individuals at this stage.. so lets hope that something good comes out of this whole mess..
I think so, too and it would make things a little better on small accounts such as my own, maybe?
Also, do comments count in the limit of posts? Just curious.
Currently, all the comments are counted as posts. Though few contributions have already been made to revise the rules and it has been suggested to count post and comments separately, it is yet to be implemented..
And i already mentioned in the post that comments will not be counted in daily quota of number of posts.. if that were to happen, both of us would now be sitting ducks on steemit as we have already consumed our quotas by replying three times over on this post 😬
I'm sorry I missed that part where you said they wouldn't be counted in the daily quota.
I have noticed I've exceeded my bandwidth a couple of times here lately, so I'm wanting to interact more but being mindful of how I use my bandwidth, too. I was commenting for each comment and I think that's what ate up a lot of it.
Totally agree, making a minimum of 3 posts within 24 hours a day will be ideal. It will solve lots of problems with spam posts and people who are milking the rewards pool from whales :)
You are absolutely right. Thank you very much @stackin.. I actually feel honoured that a person of your stature has seconded my suggestion.. :)
I totally agree with you. There must be a limit on how many posts you can post in a day. Here, you would also see some people, posting like 10s of posts in a day, and most of those posts have just pictures/memes which they take from the internet. I like the Cheetah bot as it keeps a strict eye on posts like these and warns people who just copy paste. We need more bots like him, LOL! I am also quite fed up with people just posting color challenges in which they use pictures from the internet, rather than using their own photos. Lastly, this practice of sending like 50 SBDs to bots must be banned! Only less than 5 SBDs must be allowed for bots in my opinion.
The problem has gone beyond plagiarism.. that is just one side of the evil.. the other side is me posting 12 times a day on same topic that could have been covered in 2 if not in 1 post.. and if my each post is earning like 300$ then it becomes the problem.. apart from that, then there are those who are just making a post that "hey .. that guy is abusing reward pool" and they are also getting paid in same amounts because they are also whales..
Very reasonable suggestion, I would say...Reward pool abuse is indeed a serious issue...
This issue was needed to be nipped in the bud but instead it was allowed to continue and now it has grown into a fat ass tree sucking all the rewards....Many deserving post get dumped and its a shame indeed...
Surgical measures are needed to eradicate this cancer or it will spread into every corner of Steemit's body and will be incurable....
Recent case of @haejin is infront of us
You couldnt have summarzied it more elegantly. Though Its not only him though.. thats what we think.. the problem has gone beyond him and now many are doing the same thing..
The worst part is that some of these whales are same people who flag minnows repeatedly over spam and below average content.. i ask them that how is this (kind of posts they are making) not spam ??
Seriously, last night, a whale decided to post some names who were using bots in final 2 days before payout finalizes.. literally the post started with a rather racist meme, then came the list of 20 people without any description and then a mocking gif.. ironically, the whale self voted his own post and then used 2 bots as wells and is now sitting comfortably at 965$ payout.. if thats the kind of posts that deserve 965$ payout then what the heck the rest of us are even doing here??
Yes it is Frustrating as hell....
I've only just started so I wasn't really aware of how many posts I should do a day but this has certainly cleared things up!
Thank you so much
Henry
There is no hard and fast rule for this yet.. but ethically speaking, if you have a large following and you are earning 200-300$ on every post you make, you shouldn't be posting more than 3 times a day.. there are a lot of people (whales) who have been abusing reward pool this way.. hope it clear things up..
Nice suggesation @jbn nobody should be allowed to abuse reward pool and this is requisite to make this community more attractive.
Thank you very much @kamchore :)
Hey @jbn I am @utopian-io. I have just upvoted you!
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Nice and very informative post !! great job
This is not a bad idea at a glance, but I see one flaw. As I understand it, Steemit's definition of "post" includes not only full blog entries, but also comments. It seems to me that a limit of three comments (or one entry and two comments) seems a bit extreme.
I do most definitely agree there is a problem with reward pool abuse though, and in my admittedly amateurish opinion, a lot of bots are part of that problem. I mean, you can take a post with nothing but a cat picture and some gibberish, submit it to minnowbooster and a handful of other tools, and make 50 bucks off of it. Yeah, people could flag it but very few are paying enough attention o do so. Most just see "oh! High reward payout. ME WANT!"