RE: DEBATE: Vote Buying and Selling, Just Good Business? Or Bad for the Steemit Community? Here's my opinion, give yours in the comments!
I agree, but I do think the system already works better than we often think. I've analyzed the voting bots several times and so far I've seen that it takes a lot of patience to bid at the right time on the right bot to get a positive ROI. If you add up the SP and SBD post payout, you often end up with less than your bid. I'm not taking into account the advantages of the SP, because it would be easier to change your SBD to STEEM and Power Up in the current state of Steemit. I don't necessarily think it's bad, but it does leave me confused as to why there is a 'promoted' tab.
What I don't agree with is using vote count, comments and views to measure the quality of a post (or giving them more weight). They are vanity stats that can easily be manipulated, which could actually make matters far worse (think of click farms).
Then what would you use to rank posts? What other metric is there?
The great thing currently is that posts aren't measured by a metric, but by people. Well, at least that's the idea and of course, bots ruin that whole proposition. I think Steem being built around the idea of upvotes, where upvoting power is connected to Steem Power, is a really great concept. The problem with ranking posts, is that it's always subjective. Unless, you make clear rules which everyone has to follow, which makes it centralized. Unless, you decentralize the rules, which makes it impossible to use one specific metric to rank posts. So with the state Steemit is in now, so far, getting upvote by someone with a lot of SP, willing to provide you with a higher % of their SP than usual is about the highest approval you can get when it comes to ranking posts. Not sure it's the best option, but trust me, if it were views, the would be an apocalypse of 'influencers' driving traffic from other channels to Steemit. Just to get their posts to rank higher. And I'm quite happy that's not the case.
By people? but how do you measure the number of people if you don't measure upvotes, resteems, comments or views? Magic? Ranking by these stats is not subjective. It's inherently objective. How those stats are earned is another matter. But vote count, views and comments are objective measures. If you have more, you're objectively more popular in the steemit algorithm. There are already a huge rush of them, and your opinion is well taken, but I think misguided. Counting $$$, which is largely a factor of who you know, not whether your content is worth a damn, as the only thing that drives interior promotion makes it nearly impossible for newer accounts to break through.
I agree with you the that counting $ is not the best way to measure, but vote count, views and comments aren't any better. Let me elaborate:
Person A: Vote count is an objective measure
Person B: So... you telling me that someone's post who get 5-10 upvotes through a discord or Facebook group is objectively better better content than a post that gets 3 votes organically?
A: What about views then?
B: If views become an objective stat, I'm paying Facebook for a traffic ad from click farm countries to get me couple of hunderd views.. bam.. I'm a stud!
A: Comments?
B: Sure, just like they are objective measures on Facebook pages. Vanity stats, vanity stats... lesser than page likes, more than quality connections.
A: Resteems?
B: Can you even publicly see how many resteems a post has, didn't know that
A: So, you are sticking to payout then?
B: No, that sucks, I mean if someone has a payout of $100, of which $99 is through voting bots, is it better than the hard earned $2 posts? And we haven't even talked about the 1 sentence posts and non-sense posts that rape the reward pool.
My point is. Like with all Social Media, you have camp ROI and camp Social. Camp ROI will find ways to objectify statistics. Camp Social will say its about building deep meaningful relationships. The truth lies somewhere in between. But yes, the people, the users, in the end will make or break Steemit as a platform.
So, you're back to magic, or random post promotion. You have to trust at least one of these stats and I say the best way is a combination of all of them. That way, if you want to game the system, and every system can be gamed, you have to work all angles at once. You can't just buy votes and claim the reward.
Not to mention, do you recall how SP was laying in the streets when we got here? You could scoop it up, with one or two posts and reach what takes the new accounts months now. Also, many of the big accounts have bought their way in, why should that be the standard? Is content the mining process here, or not?If yes, then relevant, evergreen, value adding content should be the gold standard, not whatever is popular this morning.
You don't have to buy in. I've seen people buy in and leave (currently on full power down mode) within the 2 short months that i've been actively using. Why, because they miscalculated, thinking that what works for others would work for them. If you get SP delegated, you better do a damn good job or you'll lose trust. If you buy in big and continuously upvote yourself and get no one behind you, your time here will be short lived. It's amazing to see how much effort Haejin puts in to stay alive (or win, depending on once perspective), considering Bernie among others straight up bullied Trevor away recently. Really don't understand anything what Haejin is posting, but posting 10 times a day does take a serious time investment, the main reason why the feud hasn't ended. I'm not taking side or justifying anyones behavior, but definitely saying that not everything that blinks is gold. So yes, people that are blind to popularity are on the trending page daily hoping to get there. Some are spamming whales with tip notes to get there attention. Meanwhile I'm here, talking with someone with way more experience on Steemit than I have, acting like I know better...:D..
Maybe I'm just naive, or maybe I'm right and we have to believe that long term, good content and real interaction win, just like smart financial decisions and investments do.
#lobi
Btw, buying votes at the moment... not a smart financial decision/investment.
It depends on which bot you use. Some are paying off quite nicely. I've done a few little buys just to see what it's all about. But, like I say, I think long term, managing my votes and building relationships and strategic partnerships is where it's at.
True, long term it just doesn't work.
But even the ones that are paying off nicely don't do that great short term. I recently upped a post for SBD 3 total, Payout reached $5.50, days later has dropped to under $4.50, around 25% goes to curation, the remainder is split 50/50, which leaves me with SBD 1.3 and SP 0.4 according to steem supply. I rather use the SBD to purchase STEEM and Power Up next time around.
Well, I'm banking on that too, just not sure how you think we'd reward it without metrics. You have to measure something, or serve the feed random posts.
I do agree you need to measure. Do think views are a valuable metric, but as soon as you incentive one of the metrics, people will try to abuse it. So unfortunately, it's objectivity just has limits.
Well, no, objectivity is inherent. there are x many views. there are x many upvotes, there are x many comments, there is x amount of sbd pot. payout. That is inherently objective. Subjective would be, I like this, this committee thinks this is valuable, that person thinks this is worthless, etc. We make subjective judgments, based on our own biases, as to what we will reward. But the stats are objective. And anyone can get the stats. I just think using money as the ONLY stat is a shitty way of doing it. Again, of course they can game the system, but most won't. Most aren't really now. So, that's what I mean.