The Death of a STEEM clone // Whaleshares
These last few days ive been looking at what has happened to Whaleshares and at their incoming HF4.
For those of you who are new here, Whaleshares was a pretty large community on STEEM. Among the biggest on Steem at one time until they decided to go on their own.
They were lead by a whale account at the time called @officialfuzzy.
During their time on Steem their chat was booming. Extremely active. They had competitions, curation initiatives, all sorts of things.
They were a significant factor on Steem. Which ofc went to their head.
They decided that they were fed up with "something" that was happening on Steem. Was it bots? Was it Steemit.inc not delivering on their promises? Maybe it was simply that they thought they were more capable then those in charge or maybe they were just greedy.
Who can say?
What ever it was they packed their bags and left STEEM to create their own blockchain.
For a while during the start, things went well. They were able to create the atmosphere of trust and made users believe in their ideology.
They would get rid of bots and bring forth a new era of prosperity for content creators!
Unfortunately.....
All of that was complete Bullshit.
Whaleshares suffered from the same problems as #oldsteem did at the time. People like Haejin were there farming WLS like crazy. Given enough time, due to his investment he would outpace everyone in stake accumulation (something he can never do here) and own most of the WLS on the platform.
Then there were guys like @scipio that are mentally unstable yet were capable of gathering significant support from accounts like @blocktrades which he then used to gather poltroons and bootlickers around him and farm WLS to a high degree by voting up his comments. (Why blocktrades allowed for this, i will never know)
The abuse happening on Whaleshares got so incredibly bad due to the abusers having so much more power on Whaleshares then they did on STEEM.
Haejin here could have only voted himself with 15$ which has been easily countered, but on Whaleshares no one could touch him and no one would touch him.
Downvotes
After some time, the dev team on Whaleshares thought it was a good idea to get rid of downvotes. How in the world are you going to fight abuse without downvotes?
The most ironic thing is that STEEM actually managed to get rid of bots via downvotes, something that Whaleshares promised to do, but failed completely. lol
Until that point i was happy to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I have talked to them about them being fearful of the open market. I have told them not to fear approaching exchanges. I tried to explain to them that by hiding from investors they are making the WLS market susceptible to manipulation which will lead to the price going to 0.
They ignored it all. I even tried to get them to talk to Steem-engine devs to create a pegged asset so WLS could transfer more smoothly between STEEM and Whaleshares that shared a lot of the same community. They even said no to that.
After a while i realized that the folks in charge, as nice as they might portray themselves as, are simply...
dumb as a bag of bricks.
What they created is akin to a hippy commune somewhere out in the woods, hidden from the world, where a bunch of greasy pot heads sit in a circle, sing songs about how great what they created is, but at the same time they have to wipe their ass with a rock since they cant afford toilet paper.
Their insane criticism on making $ from posting
A few days ago in my Discord channel, one of our members @anouk.nox shared a "naughty list" that was created by a Whaleshares user.
Now i cant confirm who that person was, but apparently it was one of the witnesses in charge that has a dislike for people trying to make a few $ from posting on Whaleshares.
This blacklist wasnt a circle jerk blacklist since Whaleshares does in fact encourage circle jerks. It doesnt even address vote selling.
It simply lists people based on the simple conclusion by some person that thinks that the people on the list want to make some money
Well, fuck! Shoot me, im guilty too.
_Self voting, vote selling, comment voting, spamming would all be valid things to address, yet they do not.
Vote Selling on Whaleshares.
This is one of the most ridiculous things ill write about.
See, when Whaleshares started their main selling point was that they will get rid of bots and vote selling.
Did that happen?
Absolutely not. Their failure in that regard is so bad that a gif of Jim Carrey laughing at their face would not be enough to portray how big of a failure Whaleshares is in that regard..
Instead of bots Whaleshares has created what they call "Whale Tokens". What would basically happen is that you would sell your WLS for BTS on the market, then use the BTS to buy WHALETOKENS that would in turn vote you for more WLS then you spent.
@freedomexists was one of the whales on Whaleshares that would do this.
The problem that this behavior creates is that of a downward pressure on the price of WLS.
No longer do you want to buy WLS on the open market. What you want to do is buy Whaletokens and power up that way.
Due to the market being so small (daily volume is around 20$, i kid you not) his vote selling took a major toll.
At first all whales did the same thing but after some time most stopped and moved to rewarding contributions. Still, the damage was done.
Freedomexists actually had a brilliant temper tantrum in Whaleshares couple months ago about the state of Whaleshares. Actually ran into it today again. Its brilliant. Go read it. haha. https://whaleshares.io/@freedomexists/whaleshares-well-this-is-all-a-bit-shit-isn-t-it
Another one when he discussed vote selling with @whatsup in her short post on Whaleshares. Its all hilarious. Cant find that one though.
.
.
.
A once proud platform with revolutionary tendencies, with aspirations to stick it to Steemit.inc turned into a complete shit show. haha
And im not even going to talk about the fights behind the scenes here and people getting banned from discord servers, demonized for stepping out of line.
....Anyways..
Just wanted to share a bit about how Whaleshares died. ATM they are getting a new Hardfork ready. HF4. They are completely getting rid of the creator reward pool and will pay out most of the inflation to stake holders and developers.
This will basically kill the content creator scene that is already small as it is and will make Whaleshares into a pointless tipping social media site without a community outside the core dev team.
Whaleshares is all but dead. Price is 0.001$, 1/20 BTS. The daily volume is 20$.
It really goes to show that above having a message and a agenda, you need to be in touch with reality and have a goal and vision.
Unfortunately the Whaleshares team was not in touch with reality and had no clear vision.
Shame.. Because Whaleshares had potential.
Just a few thoughts and ill see you around!. :D
Oh the good old naughty list.. Now I totally don't regret doing exactly as they promoted: crosspost ("we encourage you to do so" were their words) Because I've tried to pull people to wls for almost a year, and I've believed in it for a long time. And even believed in it more than Steem at the time, but reality is that Steem has changed for the better, and they have signed their death sentence by pushing away those actually creating content.
I've also done a ton of curation work for different communities and have been translation quite a few things as well.. So when you give up, this is what you get.. Yes, at this moment I do exactly what they've been promoting: crossposting only, but the time that I spend most of my hours promoting and curating for the platform next to my own writings has easily been forgotten. I think my average post takes a lot more time and effort than those people who are now pointing fingers have ever created (all posts counted on both platforms..) So yeah sure, throw my name up the naughty list, whatever, at least I can say that I can actually create valuable content, what about them? There, I said it.
I love being naughty, so let's take it as a compliment :)
Haha. Well said.
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I didn't realise there were so many biggies from Steemit there! What a delightful mess!
There were a few. Not sure what theyre doing now since the token is basically worthless.
They probably arent even taking the time to crosspost.
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I popped over to look at the link you shared and head a browse and was astonished at how many people still are cross posting!
Most folks there simply crosspost.
Either that or theres a number of those that simply dont know what the value of WLS is.
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Except for smoke which i think sounds cool (are they really smoked?) think the others should fail simply on their names.
Smoke is cool :)
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A good name is half the project, they say.. Lol.
Smoke is a marijuana enthusiast blockchain. Why they needed a blockchain for their community os beyond me.
I assume many of these will come back to steem when smts come out.
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RIP Whaleshares!
Here is the article where I talked about them removing the downvotes.
He sounded pretty salty. Can you imagine if you cashed out your Steem to buy Whaleshares? That has to feel even worse than where we are at.
https://steemit.com/busy/@whatsup/what-happens-if-you-remove-downvotes
Some of them did just that and made everyone know it.
Folks like making grand gestures driven by emotion.
Unfortunately it rarely ends well.
He was salty, but i kind of understand him. He got burned bad.
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he's over on narrative now i see
They've always been good lab rats to us, always showing us exactly what not to do, so we don't have to make those mistakes.
Now they want to remove the content production and community element from the reward pool? Interesting. We'll get to see the damage that causes, so we don't have to make that same mistake here.
There really is no more damage they can do. Theres only so much damage you can do until it doesnt matter if you fall out of a plane or get hit by a car.
They simply reverted to the basic POS platform. Im curious as to what the point is of tying the platform to blogging and content creation then?
It is indeed the death of a steem clone, since now it can no longer be called a steem-clone since it is nothing like steem. Lets welcome the death of the steem clone and welcome the new and innovative social sharing friends network!
Haha.
I meant that whaleshares was dead as a platform as well as being a steem clone.
Come back in a couple months, im curious to see if your opinion will be changed then.
Right now the price is at 0.001$. 1/20bts.
We shall see what happens in a month or two.
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My thought will stay the same, i dont base value off of price, value is measured in units that arent for everyone to understand.
Whaleshares is not dead, and wont be.
I have nothing to prove to you, you are merely a name in my monitor.
You did have the need to comment here after we already had this discussion on another post and concluded it.
So you actually do have something to prove. What that is, i do not know.
They'll need some incredible exclusives there in order for a tipping model to be beneficial, along with a massive consumer base. That's all I'm saying about that.
If you think about steemit was first, and a great lab-rat for wls to be something completely different, its just that ones so used to their comfort zone that once they leave the zone everything is fowl.
I was sold on this post after reading this line.
😁
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This was a fun read, I think creating a new blockchain and token-based social media with all the economics set right from the start is an impossible mission, but I appreciate the attempt and what can be learned from it. Maybe Steemit Inc is not that bad after all 😄 Vesting reward pool was already 70% at HF3 right? so stake holders got already most of the WLS inflation, didn't they? Regarding Steemit: now that the bot issue is solved, next is to get the high STEEM inflation under control.
Yeah. High inflation should be addressed for sure.
Not sure if steemit.inc has something planned.
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Sometimes I get haejin's upvotes. Can it be called abuse?
Where is water? Very similar to a meeting of smoke.io participants
Whales turn into a POS coin with a tip system. I don’t know why it was necessary to carry out such radical changes in order to remove all the rewards from the pool.
On the other hand, Facebook also pays nothing to its users, but this does not impede its popularity and success.
Thanks for the post. Seems they had a kind of vision but then didn't implement it or got there heads turned with potential money they could make. Money is the route.....
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There was a lot of turbulence behind thr scenes and a lot of vague promises.
This was the end result.
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