I really like the idea. I've been reduced to kinda spamming things a little. Just to get the word out of what I want to promote or talk about. I'm a real person, not a bot. I figured out it's not easy to make it, like you said, some just talk about some coffee they had and make $500.00. UPvoted.

P.S. I've recently moved to Whaleclub for my trading. Whaleclub also gives you demo money to play with, to try it out before you commit any real money. Comment or PM me with any questions. I'd like to get a group of us together possibly to discuss current events in the crypto space :P

https://www.coinbase.com/join/5946e2ab468d030e480cf68b
https://whaleclub.co/join/NcE0h - 30% bonus on first deposit with my link!

You're right, you are kinda spamming.

Still, you substantively commented on the post, so I'll cut you slack. I can honestly relate to the frustration that comes of trying to promote and running into ignorance and apathy.

Still... there is something to be said for simply making relevant comments, and letting the quality of your comments drive subscriptions to your blog, where you can post advertisements.

Just sayin'.

Yeah I've cut back on it, I want to be more legit :)

Some good critical points on how to make it Steem even better ... especially for little fish!

http://res.cloudinary.com/nzfxtrader/image/upload/v1501108586/images_lt63mm.jpg

Thanks for your input. We need to spread the word

good ideas - i am following you in support

I think it's great to think about these types of things, I wish I was as motivated to "think about the system". No system is perfect and can always be improved; Steemit is no exception. One point I'd like to make is that while it could be more fair, I also think it's a good thing that it is difficult to become "whale-like" and make a lot on your posts. I definitely don't think it should be easy. Even if their posts seem silly sometimes, most "whales" have worked hard and long for their following, and not just a following, but the right kind of following. It incentivises me to work harder and I respect that.

Anyway, I look forward to following your ideas in the future, and I hope we can get Steemit to the right balance of power. Thanks!

It's true that "most "whales" have worked hard and long for their following" but quality content should be king. You can see posts that would be downvoted for spam making a lot of money.

It's not difficult at all if you're wealthy though as you could just purchase SP, essentially allowing wealthy people to dominate the site an earn all the rewards whilst giving them the power to censor the views of those who are poorer than them. This should come as no surprise given that it's made by an-caps. Also, this is what an an-cap society would like like.

One thing I have posted about that you mention here, is that with sufficient capital, Steemit can be completely controlled.

There are entities with sufficient capital to purchase nominal Steem to completely control the witnesses, which in turn allows control of the code that Steemit runs on. I believe this was not unknown to the devs, although the only evidence of this is that they're smart people, and it's an obvious feature of the weighting of VP by SP.

If some RL whale buys enough stake to do this, the devs retire rich. If it doesn't happen, Steemit keeps growing and becoming more relevant - until it does happen. It may not be a get rich quick scheme, but as long as Steemit doesn't fail for some other reason, it is a get rich for sure scheme.

What if you take %5 rewards away from curation and give it to everyone who resteems?

Nice idea. But usually resteeming is not a hard work. It's a click of a button. You don't have to browse through all the posts. My idea is, you get paid for doing the job.

I've thought about a curation-like curve for resteeming too. It might be worth investigating further. There will probably also be opportunities for abuse.

Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by emble from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, and someguy123. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows and creating a social network. Please find us in the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.

If you like what we're doing please upvote this comment so we can continue to build the community account that's supporting all members.

There are a lot of wrongheaded ideas, but let's start with the most glaring one that I found:

> Steem Power rewards - 20% of all post payouts should be shared by all SP holder according to their SP ownership. People with more SP get more.

No. Just no. Post rewards are rightly distributed to the people who wrote the content and those that curated it. What you're suggesting is my hard work and effort reward everyone else who had no hand whatsoever in making that happen.

You mention voting power being linked to SP, while simultaneously being upset that whales are granted more weight in curation rewards than others. They have more SP.

As for curation bots, manual curation takes a metric fuckton of time. I manually curate heavily every day, and I don't have nearly the reach I'd like to have. Since I know several authors who consistently put out good content and wouldn't be caught dead putting out garbage, why can't I automate voting for them? Sure there's room for abuse, but there is a robust and healthy community fighting it.

The 30 minute post limit was put in place because there was reward pool raping going on prior to its implementation. It prevents the level of spam that I witnessed firsthand last year when the platform first opened to the public, and that's why it was implemented.

Finally, whales by and large earned what they have. Those posts making hundreds of dollars a day? More often than not they either invested heavily in the platform to begin with (like most of the devs and high-end witnesses) or they had a substantial following that transitioned to Steemit, bringing more people on board (like The Dollar Vigilante). Moreover, if you read the white paper, voting power is designed to diffuse to more users over time, thus reducing the scope of power the whales have without additional investment in.

According to my plan if you author quality posts you will get much more than you currently do. It will picked up faster by curators. The reason I suggest giving 20% for SP is because all owners of SP have a share in Steem.
People invested in Steemit should get according to their investment. But should they decide which content is good? This belong to curators that are backed by the community, not by whales because of their money.

They have a share in Steemit. A share that increases by putting in work (either creating content or curating). And yes, they should. That's the whole point of the platform. That's also why SP can't be withdrawn immediately; it's an investment into the platform.

I often talk about community being an important part of Steemit, but the beauty of Steemit is that everyone is a curator. There is no board that nominates curators. There's no process one can game short of actually investing money into the platform, which enriches all of us because it raises the value of the token this entire thing is built on. Curators are already back by the community; groups like @minnowsupport and @curie are community-driven curation trails. @dragonslayer109, @rhondak and everyone at the Fiction Workshop, and hundreds of other groups of individuals all work tirelessly to find good content and promote it.

You're trying to address a problem that doesn't actually exist. The only thing I've gained from your post is that you don't like whales having as much of a say in which content gets a massive payout, despite their enormous investment into the platform which gave them their position. I understand that, but this isn't a problem. Egalitarianism always ends in a race to the bottom, particularly if it's top-down like this would have to be.

In a few words: Steem is over a year and still not catching up. It's hard to convince people to post here because they have no chance in climbing up this hill. And it includes you 2.

Really? Cause I've been climbing up this hill pretty steadily by putting in the work of forging bonds with the people on here and posting consistently good original material. And yes, it has been catching up. It's a slow process that's set to happen over the course of years, but SP is and will continue to diffuse across more users as time goes on. Again, it's in the white paper. The more people receiving curation/author rewards, the less rewards end up in the pocket of whales. This has been accelerated with the linear rewards curve established in Hardfork 19, as the overall weight of whale accounts has decreased.

I have had zero difficulty in explaining the situation to people on here regarding rewards, as it's a matter of perspective. Just like in the real world, if you don't have any social currency (reputation, not just a rep score), no one's going to know who you are. You have to market yourself. It takes time, and it takes effort, but if I can do it, take a break for a few months to finish a novel, and pick right back up and gain an average of 12 users a day since I've been back, anyone can.

If you read this post, you would see that nothing changed from last year https://steemit.com/steemit/@bless/creating-a-more-secure-fair-and-decentralized-steemit-1-2017725t17584872z

@anarcho-andrei The speed of the distribution will change depending on the inflation rate of steem (new coins issued to authors and curators) and on the behave of whales. If inflation is low and whales and selfish, the distribution may not be enought to keep new users comming to the plataform and everyone will hurt.

It's even harder when you think of other languages and without them steem will never grow global. We have good people on steem trying to make national projects, like @camoes for portuguese, but it's almost impossible to make relevant money writing in other language besides english. So, if steem is to really go global and became what it is suposed to, the distribution speed should increase. You are right, it's better after HF19, but maybe not fast enought yet.

And it's not really about social capital. A famous brazillian youtuber could come here with hundreds or thousands of fans and still would be a minnow since very few people in Brazil have any SP to vote for him. Today, it's more like a plutocracy + aristocratic system where you have to either put thousands of dolars or be connected to the nobility class to become relevant. What you are saying is that connecting to the nobility is possible and I agree, but people are saying that maybe it's not the best thing to do with this plataform.

Everyone belives on the concept, but people have different expectations. Let's keep discussing until we find a way to make everyone happy and rich. =)

Cheers!

"Let's keep discussing until we find a way to make everyone happy and rich. =)"

We don't want this. Most of the content creators on here create garbage. They deserve the nothing they get.

I guess they are posting (not even creating) garbage because that's the best cost-benefit choise if someone wants to maximize rewards.

I wrote a fairly good content 10 days ago, took me 3 hours of research and writing plus review and linking in facebook and twitter. I had almost 100 views and 10 upvotes, made 50 cents.
Two days after that, as a test, I postes a youtube video of a song that I like, absolutly no maketing or anything involved and got 15 views and 1 dólar reward.

So, if my goal was to maximize my reawards, the best option would be to just post tons of garbage stuff hoping I can get somone to vote on them or invest time and energy on a single quality post? People say that making a quality post will get you more followers and on the long tun will be better, but I belive there is a problem in the way things are done now.

One option would be to limit the dayly posts by rep, so the quality content wouldn't be lost amont tons of garbage.

"I wrote a fairly good content 10 days ago, took me 3 hours of research and writing plus review and linking in facebook and twitter. I had almost 100 views and 10 upvotes, made 50 cents.
Two days after that, as a test, I postes a youtube video of a song that I like, absolutly no maketing or anything involved and got 15 views and 1 dólar reward."

I think, unfortunately, you have effectively summarized why many of us have felt Social Media is fucking stupid for a very long time. This exact same stuff regularly happens to me, or I release two very similar-in-quality posts and one makes 7 cents while another makes $300. Unfortunately, as I believe it says in the white paper, Steemit is kind of a lottery. You aren't rewarded on a fair, regular basis (unless you buy a ton of stake to reward yourself). All you can do is release the best content and hope for the best.

You can release garbage content, and because you get more "lottery tickets" that way, the chance of someone with some stake seeing it is higher. However, that is a short-term strategy that doesn't create followers.

The only long-term-guaranteed strategy is blood, sweat and tears. I have been writing for decades and even with a lot of content pre-brainstormed, regular quality production is difficult and often unrewarded.

Steemit isn't a magic money machine...unless we go to the moon and you are Hodl'ing, I guess.

>"Most of the content creators on here create garbage. They deserve the nothing they get."

I could not have less respect for that attitude.

Maybe you find @sweetsssj's posts riveting, and any number of others of little value. However, there are people that have not had your opportunities to attain liquid assets, through no fault of their own, and that does not make them less than human.

The value of Steem is derived from Steemit. Absent Steemit, your investment in Steem will prove unrewarding, and the masses of posters of 'useless' content are all that stands between you and a bad investment.

Heh, so, someone commented on this string and it came up in my reply feed, so I'll take this chance to reply again:

I think we're talking past each other here.

If you take a look at "New" right now, you'll see what I mean about most posts being garbage. 4 of the 7 posts in "New" when I wrote this were single pictures of food that may well have been plagiarism.

This is garbage content. That's all I mean.

"However, there are people that have not had your opportunities to attain liquid assets, through no fault of their own, and that does not make them less than human."

I don't think I implied this anywhere. I certainly didn't state it.

"and the masses of posters of 'useless' content are all that stands between you and a bad investment."

I don't think those masses of garbage content stand between Steemit crashing at all. It's the 10% of users with quality content, the top 1000 authors....they are what make Steemit valuable.

Not the 299000 accounts full of upvoting-nogonaoo bots.

LOL

I do take your points, particularly regarding botnets. But, and I wish to say this with complete respect, those 'garbage posts' are gonna be Steemit's bread and butter. Not the Single Malt and Champagne, but the bulk of the posts people are able to make that intercourse with their social circle.

As such, I don't have a problem with that. I'm not gonna follow folks that post pics of Kim Kardashian's butt, but I consider such posts literally sacred compared to AI written posts, botnets, etc.. Actual people hold them to be valuable, which gives them value.

While there may be little substantive difference between such posts and posts that are simply vehicles for votebots and vote buying schemes, there is a qualitative difference, and it's important. Most people aren't gonna write work that Hemingway did, and Steemit needs to be their social network too.

That it is will make the top content more valuable, not the only valuable content.

Without the 'masses' Steemit will fail. Fakebook will win, because the masses are recognized as integral to it's success. I bow to necessity in the fight to destroy Fakebook. Doesn't mean I'm gonna post pics of Nascar...

I apologize for any outrage I may have expressed in a semi-ad hominem manner. You are correct that stating that posts are 'garbage' doesn't state that the posters are.

No problemo. I agree with you. I've made the same argument from the other side when appropriate (when people complain that their quality posts to 37 followers make no rewards). Steemit is ultimately a popularity contest, after all.

I reckon it's only a contest if you're trying to win ;)

I see it as more of a forum, because that's what I come here for - to air and hear ideas in a melting pot.

I have endured a dissatisfaction with people so profound that I am considered a recluse by those that know me today. The thing is, I am not a recluse, I just cannot abide the fermented despair and doublethink imposed by society (in America) so simply opt out, in order to avoid having those influences injected into my mind and person.

This causes me no end of difficulties, particularly with lack of substantive criticism. Most people I encounter are trained to talk behind ones back, rather than offer straightforward comment.

This is not useful to me, so I extend my reach on here, to those that, like myself, and you also, will make comment that is not designed to save the face of whom you are talking to, and may actually help them reconsider what they need to.

I reckon I 'win' just by being here, popularity be damned!

I can only echo your sentiments of being an outcast in a dysfunctional society.

Perhaps it is because the system incentivizes this type of behavior. We need a valid solution to this.

Hi, you may be interested in joining the discussion on my recent post on Steemit's issues.

Let's all work together through building awareness of these problems to find a good solution.

>Really? Cause I've been climbing up this hill pretty steadily by putting in the work of forging bonds with the people on here and posting consistently good original material.

Well, your transaction history tell a different story. It shows that you've been buying lot's of steem rather than earning it. It shows that you have 1,479.318 STEEM yourself and people have delegated 9,048.881 STEEM to you - probably because you purchased it off a whale. It also shows that you've been buying upvotes.

You've simply used your wealth to buy yourself a better position. How on earth is that fair to those who don't have the wealth to buy themselves influential positions?

It's my earnings. I can use them in whatever fashion I want to. As for the delegated SP, I purchased that with the earnings I gathered from all the posts I've made previous to now, and I purchased it to expand my ability to curate. So you can shove your self-righteousness. You know how I earned enough SP to power down into Steem so I could purchase wider curating power in the first place? Good original content and building relationships with people.

I earned where I'm at and what I'm doing. I've put forth a year's worth of effort to build my position. I'm all for charity; I've delegated to curation bots I believe in run by people I know and trust. I have sat on the introduceyourself tag and greeted hundreds of new Steemians and answered tons of questions on Steemit.chat and Discord to help new users out. What I will never support is the notion that this should be automatic or a feature. No one deserves something just for showing up.

Of course you can do whatever you want with your steem, that doesn't mean the system is fair.

>As for the delegated SP, I purchased that with the earnings I gathered from all the posts I've made previous to now, and I purchased it to expand my ability to curate. So you can shove your self-righteousness. You know how I earned enough SP to power down into Steem so I could purchase wider curating power in the first place?

How stupid do you think people are? You powered down your SP into steem in order to use that steem to purchase 10x more SP? Sure mate, that happened.

I'm not being self-righteous, I merely pointing out the recorded facts.

>I earned where I'm at and what I'm doing.

As your transaction history shows, you've clearly bought your position. I'm not saying that you haven't made good posts or been helpful, I'm merely stating a recorded and undeniable fact. You can try to deny it as much as you want but it's right there in your transaction history.

>No one deserves something just for showing up.

Likewise, no one deserves anything just for being wealthy enough to be able to buy themselves a nice position.

If you looked at my transaction history, you'd see me powering down the SP I've earned over the course of a year in order to do this. Why don't you look again?

Also, what were those transfers in your transaction history from blocktrades?

Why would I need to look over it again? You just said that you powered down your SP in order to purchase SP? On what planet does that make any sense? It ain't fucking this one that's for sure.

I powered down SP into Steem. I leased 10k SP from minnowbooster for 400 Steem. Need me to write it in crayon or are you gonna keep making assumptions?

I'm glad I could finally get you to admit that you bought your position rather than earning it.

You mean like you did? You didn't. Nice try, though, Turbo-Lenin.

Yes, exactly like I did. My argument is not about you buying steem, it's about you claiming that you earned it all when you clearly rented it. What part of that do you not understand?

The part where I didn't earn the Steem I used to rent SP. Which is exactly the point you made. I didn't purchase Steem to lease SP. What part of that do you not understand? Want me to draw it in crayon for you?

I never said you didn't earn any of it, I said you didn't earn all of it and your transaction history proves that. /shrug.

Yes, I want you to draw that in crayon for me. Then when you grow up, you can start to use pencils.

Might be too much for you to handle.

Oh wait, I know exactly what those transfers are. You trying to buy your position.

https://steemit.com/steem/@steempower/how-to-use-blocktrades

Yes, that's me trying to buy my way higher up the ladder. Unlike you, I'm not going to deny that fact and I'm not going to try to convince people that I earned that SP when I so very clearly bought it and din't earn it in any way, shape or form. I didn't even earn the money I used to buy that SP, I made it from mining altcoins with my GPU.

Good for you. I earned mine. So by your own metric, I have way more of a leg to stand on.

Sure mate, you earned it by paying 400 steem for 10K SP.

Yeah. I earned the 400 Steem, which I turned into a greater investment. Get the fuck outta here with your commie bullshit.

You may have earned that 400 steem, you definitely didn't earn that 10K SP which you bought though. If that's commie bullshit, then the US government are commies:

>There are two ways to get earned income:
>You work for someone who pays you
>or
>You own or run a business or farm

No, let's look at what the say unearned income is.

>Examples of Income that are Not Earned Income:
> Pay received for work while an inmate in a penal institution
> Interest and dividends
> Retirement income
> Social security
> Unemployment benefits
> Alimony
>* Child support.

The US government is strongly socialist, which is the step immediately preceding full-blown communism. So yeah, they are. Don't really give a shit what a bunch of government agents try to define things as in the tax code, so you appealing to it is irrelevant. Has no value. Next slide, chief.

The US government is very right wing. The left wing of US Politics is further to the right than the right wing of the UK Politics and many other western nations. If you think the US government is strongly socialist then you're obviously a right wing extremist.

You don't need to tell me that you ignore facts, that's clearly evident. All that makes you though is delusional.

Right. Cause Social Security, socialized medical care, a central bank, centralized education, and extensive welfare programs are all right wing. This is a right wing utopia! Private property is respected above all here in the good ol' USA.

If you think the US isn't strongly socialist, you have no idea what that word means.

Like I said, you think the US is socialist because you're a right wing extremist. You're so delusional and ignorant - you think the US healthcare system is socialist. It's one of the most right wing health care systems on this planet and it spends more than twice as much per capita than other western nations that vastly outperform it.

Thanks for the laughs, have you tried doing stand-up comedy?

Guilty as charged. I'm a right wing extremist. I don't want governments to infringe upon the private property of individuals, including their own bodies. Considering the US conforms to an overwhelming degree to Marx's planks laid out in the Communist Manifesto, the only one who's delusional and ignorant is you.

This is exactly the issue I've pointed out in my recent post.

It'd be great if you could join that discussion as well to help highlight this problem further.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. This is social jealousy. Those without the clout or the following, or the extreme writing skill to get to trending without it, are always looking for ways to try to change the system for the better.

I honestly think that most of the minnows here are basically Steemit-communists. They all want to "seize the means of production" because it's unfair that "he makes more than me after investing $10,000s"

That's exactly what it is. To quote the other guy responding to me:

> some people are lucky enough to have a shit load of money to invest.

As if having a shit ton of money to invest just magically happens to people. Nope, no way hard work and effort ever factored into that. Risk assessment and leveraging your assets to get on the cutting edge? Nonsense. It's all luck.

Can't stand that shit.

Nice one; don't get me started...
You know the platform better than me; so it's good to have your perspective. Thankyou.

>Those without the clout or the following, or the extreme writing skill to get to trending without it, are always looking for ways to try to change the system for the better.

Is changing the system for the better supposed to be a bad thing?

>I honestly think that most of the minnows here are basically Steemit-communists. They all want to "seize the means of production" because it's unfair that "he makes more than me after investing $10,000s"

What were you expecting, an An-cap circle jerk? The vast majority of people detest anarcho-capitalism and prefer socialism. Look at reddit, /r/socialsim has around 100,000 subscribers, /r/anarchocapitalsm has around 1,500 subscribers.

If this site takes off, that's what you can expect. If it doesn't make the distribution system fairer though, it won't take off and users will abandon the site. Less people will upvote your posts and your payouts will decrease. Also, the value of steem will drop.

That was poorly phrased on my part. I was implying "for the better" simply means whatever benefits them more.

The whole point is there isn't agreement on what "for the better" is. Sorry about that.

It's disingenuous of you to compare Socialism and An-Cap. We're talking straight capitalism here, control of one's own assets. You want to compare the numbers of capitalists and socialists in the US, totally inverting your numerical advantage?

Socialism is a garbage ideal for those with garbage logic. Like Communism, it only works in theory until you run out of other people's money (tm), and Steemit is designed to be diametrically opposed to it.

"Less people will upvote your posts and your payouts will decrease. Also, the value of steem will drop."

If you haven't already noticed that the number of your votes is almost irrelevant, because 1 whale is worth 10,000 minnows, then I don't know what to tell you. Losing a bunch of minnow votes really doesn't mean anything. Minnows, if they aren't creating quality content, are a drain on the platform.

If you have data to prove that the value of an asset will drop if you can't get it into the hands of those with no net worth, I'd love to see it.

PS - Still loving the name.

>If you have data to prove that the value of an asset will drop if you can't get it into the hands of those with no net worth, I'd love to see it.

Just look at what happened to digg when it became dominated by a handful of power users.

Well, I don't have any data to show you but I do belive the value of a social plataform depends heavly on how many people want to use it.

Think about it: there is no ads, no value creation besides the content posted which is not sold to anyone. So, where the actual value comes from? Like any other currency, from the adoptions and trade utility. Both will not grow if the reward system still the way it is. And I know it because all those minnows trying to change this reward system is the only data I have to think about steemit, maybe not enought to convince you, but still something you should consider.

If things stay the way they are, steemit will soon become a small and valueless plataform for early adopters/investors scratch each others back. That's the right time for steemit to learn and improve or resist and probably die. That's the main reason I am not willing to invest more than the 500 usd I alredy invested on steemit.

Followed you based on your comments in this thread. I'm a minnow. I'm investing a lot of time and effort to provide good content (well i hope it's classed as "good) on here. That's all i intend to do. Hopefully, over time, my investment (although not liquid like yours) will reward myself and others on here.

Show data please.

Show me a current chart of the one I posted earlier, in reply to another comment. I have asked @arcange for a new, post HF19 chart, but receive no answer.

Social media needs to be useful to everybody, not just salespeople. While people that market themselves successfully can succeed in business, ordinary people just posting the stuff they post are the market for Steemit. This isn't supposed to be a marketing platform, but a social media site.

The rewards, as you point out, increase as folks gain followers. But, as long as bots, collusion, and punitive flagging exist, those rewards are going to continue to be concentrated in the accounts that 'game' Steemit for rewards, rather than to post ordinary content on social media.

This is not what the white paper lays out. Indeed, the white paper says

>"In the real world, algorithms must be designed in such a manner
that they are resistant to intentional manipulation for profit.
Any widespread abuse of the scoring system could cause community
members to lose faith in the perceived fairness of the economic system."

I'm getting really tired of people attacking those of us who bought in big to the platform. I've put damn near 100K into this platform and see non-stop proposals every day to try to reduce my influence or stake. I'm always treated like "the bad guy" because I think putting in a massive fucking investment into a massively risky platform should actually create some reward.

Minnows, stop being jealous that good writers who put in 5+ digits into this platform are more successful than your cat posts to 300 followers. If you don't like it, gtfo so I can actually curate /created again.

This rant is not directed at you, I am in agreement.

It is not essencially wrong to run a half-plutocratic/half-aristocratic model, but that's not what most people are signing for and without the majority all your steem will have near-to-zero value in the future. Newcomers are realizing it and trying to change the way things are instead of just leaving. Being heavly invested in steem you should be grateful and not angry about it. ;)

The (currency) value of Steem Power rewards comes from those who are willing to buy it and literally nothing else. Newcomers who invest nothing actually cost the platform substantially, in account creation fees and delegated power. There are thousands of these users costing the platform money for every significant investor.

Which is more valuable to court, and which is in shorter supply, is fairly obvious.

Maybe I am wrong, but I belive the value of steem is a consequence of the potential percieved and/or realized by steemit and other(?) steem plataforms. That's what makes people buy steem, the future potential of all this, not the short-time reward they can make upvoting themselves.

That being true, newcomers actually are showing there is real potential for steemit to reach mass adoption and without it -
being a small club of investors - steem worth close-to-nothing unless those investors are willing to invest more and/or never cashout.

For that reason, I completly disagree with your perception of newcomers as cost and I belive that if most whales see things the same way you, steem is not landing anywhere close to the moon and I will probably lose those 500 usd I invested in steem potential.

Hey, I just want to clarify some confusion, and say that I totally agree with you.

Newcomers being a cost is fact. They cost money in account creation and delegation, I've seen the numbers.

However, I was referring to these ones:

"Newcomers who invest nothing actually cost the platform substantially, in account creation fees and delegated power."

I wasn't clear, and I should have been. When I said "invest nothing", I also meant the time required to create "quality content". Which, admittedly, most users do not produce. There are many users who have never produced a piece of quality content and that have generated less in total rewards than it cost Stinc/the blockchain to create their accounts.

Those are the ones I mean. The botnets, the sock puppets, the plagiarizers, most of /created (aka /new).

Minnows who create content that garners more rewards (un-botted) than their account cost to create are the bomb, and eventually they turn into dolphins which turn into whales.

So we agree that steemit value depends on it's potential adoption and it depends on minnows and new users enjoying the plataform and use it - not botnets, not sock puppets or plagiarizers - real users/minnows who produce content want to make steemit a usefull tool for themselves and others.

What is happening is that exactly those "target audience" are the guys who are complaining about the reward system, like this post. Not the botnets, who are actually exploiting the current model. Not power users, who are able to understand and use some tools in their favor or famous youtubers who get some support from whales.

I had a few talks about the subject and read many posts about it. Can't see steemit solving this issue on a short term. Maybe famous youtubers can be enought to bring people here, but why would they buy steem? Why would they even make an account? Maybe a few super fans...

Anyway, I may be totally wrong about this, but after seeing real potential active users leaving steemit because of the reward system and after reading the position of relevant people here, I am not confident steemit will endure.

Game theory helps us understand the choices people make, and the perspective on that matter is also not very good.

For those reasons, I decide to power down all my SP for now and change it back in BTC on the next weeks. I will keep an eye on steemit and maybe come back when it looks like a good investment again.

Thanks for the talk!

" I will keep an eye on steemit and maybe come back when it looks like a good investment again."

That will mean the price is substantially higher than it is now. Steem looks like it's in a slump now, maybe undervalued. I'm loathe to sell at this time.

I think most of the minnows complaining about rewards overestimate what they contribute. I quickly made over $1000 in rewards here with no initial investment. I had several posts over $300 in my first week when I had only delegated SP from Steemit.

People think if they work hard on one or two posts and aren't making bucks, it's time to give up. This is a marathon, not a spring.

This does not adress the problems I mentioned. Sure, it is possible for one or another to make a reasonable or even awesome rewards for their work, but for most cases there is not a correlation between quality content and rewards.

The issue is: current curation/reward system simply does not work. Specially for the majority, newcomers who see their efforts being less rewarded than bots and spammers.

Unfortunately, I belive that without the majority steem will be just a nicho plataform and grow on a very slow pace - in case it doesn't die. Until this thing is fixed, I belive steem is actually overpriced. Perspectives are not good and it will be hard to change de course since the short-time economic incentives point in the current direction for those who have influence in the plataform.

That said, my decision for now is to stay out and wait for changes on those matters. I really like the concept of steemit, love the idea of a plataform that grants freedom of speech on a descentralized way, hope the community find a solution soon.

Maybe I am wrong, let's see how thongs go =)

Best of luck!

"The issue is: current curation/reward system simply does not work. "

I think this is a big part of the problem. The curation system should encourage upvoting others more. However, from my own observations, it rather strongly encourages upvoting yourself or creating bot nets. Maybe adjustment to the 30 minute rule is necessary, or maybe curation simply needs to have its overall coefficient reduced.

Either way, curation is hard to abuse and I think it should be rewarded more.

Curation should be an incentive to find and upvote quality content but as it is people try to maximize it by following and uptvoting authors (not content) that they expect to get more rewards. Besides that, the best efficiency on upvoting power is only achieved by bots (or an extremly disciplined human) and this also benefits bot curation which hardly ever is content driven.

For it's purpose, curation fails to achieve what is necessary for steemit to grow, that is making people see it as a usefull and fair plataform, where you can find good content easly and get rewarded by helping others to do so.

Great point about the Bots. They are fundamentally experts at curation, since they can work 24/7 and keep exact timers, plus they can analyze data and pick based on expected reward, not on content quality. Bot curation probably makes manual human curation almost totally pointless.

Bots are experts in maximizing curation rewards by time adjust and most probably(*) work on author/elapsed time selection plus some social proof of quality - but not content. There are a few exceptions, like gentlebot, but not enough in my opinion.

(*)this is a huge guess based in what I see, since I can't check the algoritms

I belive without real content driven curation steemit won't succeed. I belive it because without it new users won't see the plataform as fair neither find good content easly. A lot of posts about this subject are comming to the surface and I can't see a solution in the near future, so that's why I am less confident about the future of steemit.

Hopefully I am wrong and/or the community will find a way to fix it.

The truth is I think Steemit has a lot of real content that's actually pretty good, but it is buried under a ton of garbage and another layer of misleading-highly rewarded OK-but-not-excellent content.

Gentlebot is great, I've noticed he seems very effective. I love when he hits me up.

The value of BTC is just as you describe Steem. The number of users of Steem, however, is driven by Steemit. If Steemit fails, Steem will no longer have a use case, which will negatively impact it's value.

More significantly, the reverse is true. It is the content that users, those that invest nothing but time, money, and expertise, bring to Steemit, upon which the value of Steem depends.

This was the intent of Steemit. This is it's whole raison d'etre, according to the white paper.

I have nothing but good things to say about investors in Steem, however, investors traditionally invest in order to achieve capital gains, not to complain about the workers in the plant 'that only cost investors wages'.

It is those workers that potentiate Steem having any value beyond what BTC does.

Hey, I just want to clarify some confusion, and say that I totally agree with you.

Newcomers being a cost is fact. They cost money in account creation and delegation, I've seen the numbers.

However, I was referring to these ones:

"Newcomers who invest nothing actually cost the platform substantially, in account creation fees and delegated power."

I wasn't clear, and I should have been. When I said "invest nothing", I also meant the time required to create "quality content". Which, admittedly, most users do not produce. There are many users who have never produced a piece of quality content and that have generated less in total rewards than it cost Stinc/the blockchain to create their accounts.

Those are the ones I mean. The botnets, the sock puppets, the plagiarizers, most of /created (aka /new).

Minnows who create content that garners more rewards (un-botted) than their account cost to create are the bomb, and eventually they turn into dolphins which turn into whales.

There are a lot of posts by people that I have little interest in. However, just cuz I don't find it thrilling doesn't mean that pics of Kim Kardashian aren't 'quality content'.

Botnets, sock puppets, and the like, can all be damned, as far as I'm concerned. I do not equate such malicious actors with folks that post stuff I have no interest in, or vehemently disagree with.

I think you're touching on a serious point that no one wants to clarify properly. Investors in steem should not be entitled to anything but the steem they purchased. In the event it goes up in value, they win.

At the moment, though, they get to endlessly drain the rewards pool for themselves which makes no sense.

It is the witnesses who deserve compensation as they are essentially keeping the blockchain running.

I hope you'll consider joining the conversation in the comments of my newest post on these issues. We really need to highlight these problems for anything to change.

Tell me about it. And then I get flack for defending you guys for investing into the platform to keep it alive. How the hell are people so economically illiterate that they don't realize whale funding is the only reason Steemit is still running at basically full speed?

Could not have said it better myself, thanks!

Being equal in VP does not mean we'd end up with Kim Kardashian ASSets being the highest paid posts (a race to the bottom... get it?), but rather that the content that more people found worth a vote would be valued most.

A good way to examine what that would produce is to follow @screenname, who tracks posts that are undervalued, when the number of votes is compared to earnings. No ASSets end up on that list.

Neither does @sweetsssj. Dunno why exactly @dan started flagging her, but speculation I have heard is that the drain on the rewards pool was his target.

The problem of inequity in rewards certainly does exist, and just saying it doesn't won't make the content creators that are angry about stay and post more good content.

Yes but 20% is way to heavy. Maybe like 4-6%. I agree with the rest of you ideas.

This is not the final proposal. Everything should be hammered out in the unlikely event that the Steemit board decides to take a look at this.

you could make a new post with the ideas from this comment section. The more people see this the better.

New posts will not help. We need resteemers to resteem this post, to get this message out.

"People invested in Steemit should get according to their investment."

Did you notice all your support comes from no-investment, sub-60 rep commenters?

...
...
...

Of course, they want a change. They don't want to continue getting pennies for their work.

Maybe they should try networking with the evil whales and dolphins.

Maybe...

Networking, or pandering? Is there a difference?

I don't think there is for you.

If Steemit is all about making money, then good luck with it. That's not the goal of Steemit according to the white paper. It's supposed to be a social media site where content creators receive rewards that other social media sites just capture as profit.

This is why it's supposed to become the gorilla king of the space.

This is why it will, unless

>"...abuse of the scoring system...cause[s] community members to lose faith in the perceived fairness of the economic system."

In which case, there will be no (further) capital gains for investors. Competition, which I have predicted, has arisen. Calibrae seeks to improve Steemit in several ways which @emble advises.

Hey @anarcho-andrei,

Glad you wrote this comment. Steemit is an opportunity. No need to complain about whales having more. There's a reason they have more and all of us have opportunity to increase our Stake in Steem. Thanks for taking the time to express your thoughts on this.

>There are a lot of wrongheaded ideas

I disagree. @emble has the right idea... even if it is possible to shoot through some of this and make it swiss cheese.

A more complex system to get content reviewed and published is exactly what steemit needs.

I know we're still in BETA, and I know it's been a little over a year...

...but what @emble described... a variation of it... is what we may need and see in the future.

I thank him for his proposal. It's a good starting point to get us looking at what types of solutions could exist.

Or, conversely, if we could remove a mountain of crap posts, that would be great.

What about filters for the following:

"Under two sentence post"
"Picture post only"

etc. If I could get all that crap out of /created, I'd feel less like I'm wasting my life everyday trying to curate that garbage.

Why not limit the posts/week by rep?

I would strongly support better filtering.

I'd also strongly support being able to filter out posts that have been upvoted by bots.

I would upvote none of them.

That's an interesting idea! I hadn't thought of the bots option.

The problem is you'd have to restrict it to users who used the bot themselves, because otherwise you could censor anyone by throwing them a randowhale vote. Then, you'd have problems regulating this, because people would just use another account to trigger the bot...you'd end up having to manually weed these out.

I think the technical limitations here might be a problem. Perhaps all bots need to be disabled unless whitelisted by community consensus (cheetah, steem cleaners).

I'd very strongly support disabling bots that curate. Unless folks consider AI to be equal to people in rights, then I don't want bots voting. If folks do consider AI to be equal to people, Imma quite voting altogether.

There are other bots that do good stuff, such as bots that ferret out good content and suggest it to people. While this treads close to the edge, I wouldn't mind a bot that provided a list of posts that contained no recipes for baked goods, make up tips, or pics of Kardashians.

The real issue for me is curation. I remain unaware of any bots writing posts, yet, so am not exercised about that.

>No. Just no. Post rewards are rightly distributed to the people who wrote the content and those that curated it. What you're suggesting is my hard work and effort reward everyone else who had no hand whatsoever in making that happen.

This is pure nonsense. You may have put in the effort to create a decent article, but if it wasn't for the people upvoting it and the flawed system which allows whales to make shit loads of money simply by upvoting their own content, you would get no monetary reward from your effort.

>Finally, whales by and large earned what they have.

Did they fuck!

>Those posts making hundreds of dollars a day? More often than not they either invested heavily in the platform to begin with (like most of the devs and high-end witnesses) or they had a substantial following that transitioned to Steemit, bringing more people on board (like The Dollar Vigilante).

That doesn't mean they earned it any more than a lottery winner earned their money. A whale can only claim to have earned their place if they've got their through curation and posting alone. Just like some people are lucky enough to win lotteries, some people are lucky enough to have a shit load of money to invest.

> some people are lucky enough to have a shit load of money to invest.

The fuck outta here with that nonsense. Let me guess: rich people never earn their position, right?

No, quite a few people have worked their way up from the very bottom and earned their position and wealth. Investors don't earn their income though and that's why their income is classed as unearned income as opposed to earned income.

None of the wealthiest people have earned all their money though as it simply isn't possible to actually earn that much money.

If you make a shit load of money from investing, you've done nothing to earn that money. You've used money to make more money and any rich idiot can easily do that by paying someone to do it for them - they don't even have to do it themselves.

Where'd the money come to invest in the first place? Magic? And how is investment - taking calculated risks or paying someone to manage those risks for you - not earning the income you make? You put your currency on a risk hoping it pays off in a certain term. It's a risk. There's a chance you might lose it.

Given your propensity for communism, I can see how you'd think that people don't deserve to keep what they make off of trades. If you want communism, go start a commune. Stop trying to ruin my platform.

>Where'd the money come to invest in the first place? Magic?

No, it came from working or from inheritance. Just because you earned money in the past though, that doesn't mean that any money you make in the future has also been earned.

> And how is investment - taking calculated risks or paying someone to manage those risks for you - not earning the income you make?

Earned Income vs. Unearned Income

Did you think I was just making those terms up or something?

> You put your currency on a risk hoping it pays off in a certain term. It's a risk. There's a chance you might lose it.

Is it though? What's the risk to a billionaire if they lose a $1m on a bad investment? There's no actual risk whatsoever. It's like me throwing a penny away.

>Given your propensity for communism, I can see how you'd think that people don't deserve to keep what they make off of trades. If you want communism, go start a commune. Stop trying to ruin my platform.

It's not your platform and communes are not communism. I'm not a hippy and I'm not living in the the 20th century. Automated labour and Matrix like VR through brain-computer interfaces is the way to achieve communism. I don't need to do anything but wait a couple of decades. We'll all be god like entities at that point capable of creating anything we want just by thinking. All your wealth will be worthless and you'll have the same power as everybody else.

Let me know when you can create matter from nothing. I'm sure the Venus Project is going to make communism work this time.

What's the Venus Project got to with anything I just said and why would I need to be able to create matter out of nothing? Do you not know what VR or brain-computer interfaces are?

Let me guess: machines will be able to provide for use while we're plugged into the Matrix, right? Each according to his needs?

No, not each according to his needs. Each according to their wants. Beach side mansions may be limited in this world but they're not in VR. In VR everyone could have a beach side mansion - they could have their own planet if they want. You may not be able to go paragliding or mountain climbing in this world for whatever reason but you could do that whenever you wanted in VR.

If you're living in fully immersive and completely realistic VR, you don't need any physical possessions. You don't even need your body - just your brain. There have been numerous experiments over the last 150 years were severed heasd have been kept alive with a simple pump to feed the brain with the necessary fluids. So, why waste resources maintaining an obsolete body when you can just maintain the brain and fit it with a BCI?

Who maintains the brains? Where do those resources come from?

Machines obviously. Where do those resources come from? Machines obviously. Now, those machines could be AI controlled or they could be controlled directly by the brains with the BCIs. This has already been demonstrated as possible with people controlling telepresence robots over the Internet with just their thoughts.

So machines would harvest the scarce resources necessary to keep people alive. Who controls the machines that produce the other machines?

What scarce resources would they be? Scarce doesn't mean limited - it means that supply is limited in relation to demand. What resources does a brain need to survive and what resources would be required to maintain the equipment? You making assumptions that these things are scarce doesn't make them scarce. Especially when you factor in all the freed up resources from no longer having to produce commodity goods and provide physical services.

If AI can control machines and people can control machines with their thoughts using BCI, then why would it matter what those machines are designed to do? Both AI and people using BCIs could control them regardless of their functionality.

Look at it this way. You remove a brain and stick it in a plug and play maintenance tank. The tank contains a BCI, backup power and backup reservoir. This tank then plugs into a skyscraper. The skyscraper provides a fluid reservoir and pump system to feed the necessary fluid to the brain. It also provides access to enhanced computational and communication technologies. How many brains could you fit in such a skyscraper and what type of maintenance would be required to keep this system functional?

You are writing a horror story right?

Sadly, I don't think you are. I fully acknowledge the ability of VR to replace reality (hell, our dreams prove that) but there is no reason to contemplate severed heads to make that happen.

Don't get locked into the scarcity mindset of @anarcho-andrei. Consider that AI and BCI will enable us to increase production, including by moving it off world, such that we can augment the native ecosystems of the Earth, rather than depleting them, as we have up to now.

Better management will produce better results. Remember your first boss? Do you think the best minds extant could do a better job managing than they did? That's the kind of qualitative leap that we can expect - the very best minds, not whoever inherited the money, or stole it from crack dealers with a shotgun, to buy the business.

As an aside, one of my formative memories is of my first boss yanking out his crank and pissing all over his shoes as we walked across a parking lot where he was going to show me how to fix plugged chemical toilets. You can hardly imagine my horror at the prospect, given his crude manners.

I, for one, will welcome our robot overlords, when they deign to free us from our own ignorance and prejudice.

> None of the wealthiest people have earned all their money though as it simply isn't possible to actually earn that much money.

And the crack-addict in Detroit who just sold his Obama-phone earned more than an malnourished infant in Somalia. @marcusorlyius
What happens when Atlas shrugs, Marxus O'Rlyius?
https://youtu.be/KR3MgIPxb38

> None of the wealthiest people have earned all their money though as it simply isn't possible to actually earn that much money.

You pay Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk & will soon pay Daniel Larimer, Ned Scott & I'm betting on Honest Andy, @anarcho-andrei too.

John Lennon got this one right.
https://youtu.be/BGLGzRXY5Bw

>What happens when Atlas shrugs, Marxus O'Rlyius?

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

>You pay Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk & will soon pay Daniel Larimer, Ned Scott & I'm betting on Honest Andy, @anarcho-andrei too.

What the fuck are banging on about, you gibbering loon?

>John Lennon got this one right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOgFZfRVaww

He sure did.

> What the fuck are banging on about, you gibbering loon?
@marcusorlyius

Ah! @@marcusorlyius
Ad hominem eh?

The Gibbering Loon

As your dead prophet at Highgate would say

When you run out of arguments on any day

Innuendo & slander work anyway

What if someone you out-thinks?

Opium eating masses; are anyway out of sync.

Show them the ones they can loot

The real One, Marxus O'Rlyius, knows a tree by its fruit

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Highgate_Cemetery_-_Karl_Marx%27s_grave%2C_Highgate%2C_London.jpg

PS: John Lennon went to be as one with the world, leaving behind everything to Yoko Ono including a Rolls-Royce Phantom. Of course, the children of Bangladesh did not count. It did for George Harrison, though.

https://youtu.be/4EJvizCVEyc

The variant suspects near the misuse! Her starting midnight mutters. The discipline cautions! An algebraic flute consults a commentary. Should a bone patent the mucking exam? An aerial voltage slices the cook. Under the attack pauses a dependence. The bookshop alleviates the layer. The paranoid nostalgia enlightens the camera across a state pan. Around the responsible well withdraws a lengthy garden. The idiot executes a wolf. The total lawyer writes after a sect. The dirt rests. An ally lowers the dual umbrella inside every blank. Outside the easier jest dances the intermittent bundle. The slave ascends. The chalk boils. On top of the initial dead advances every broad answer. The unstable servant multiplies near the correspondence. How does a token lean behind a grown plaster?

You're good fun @marcusorlysius 😊

>"What you're suggesting is my hard work and effort reward everyone else who had no hand whatsoever in making that happen."

If you read the white paper, and just use common sense, every quality post on Steemit is of value to the whole community, the platform, Steem, and Stinc. This is just another way of directly imparting that value to investors, whose investment make the platform possible. They did not 'have no hand' in making that happen. They are critical to making it happen.

However, 20% is a grip.

Still, I reckon that 20% is better than this:

[IMAGE: https://steemitimages.com/DQmaB7VhuLwRvAHX9rahRCA18RZx5Q9A9VZTUsDSqgvueXG/authorrewardchart.png]

which shows ~99% of rewards inure to but a handful of accounts. Reducing that to 20% would increase OUR rewards by 80%! I'm not sure that's fair to investors, who plunked down their hard earned BTC in order to mine Steemit's rewards pool, fair and square.

I expect we could negotiate a reasonable figure.

>"... I know several authors who consistently put out good content and wouldn't be caught dead putting out garbage, why can't I automate voting for them?"

Because no one values the opinions of bots. Curation is SUPPOSED to take a fuckton of time. It's just like your friends, except it drinks less beer. Automating curation IS abuse. Only human eyeballs, having read the post, should be able to vote (well, fingers attached to the particular eyeballs that read the post. Don't sue me if you put your eye out on your keyboard!) I don't think the vote button should appear until you have at least scrolled through the post.

You're getting paid to do it. Don't cheat and have a bot do it. BTW, the chart I posted is from AFTER the 'rewards pool raping' was 'fixed'. The 30 minute limit is also a way to rape the pool, as I have personally witnessed collusion to time a post with a clique of curators, so that they could all time their votes. The curators and author have SP, so the post would trend, and the curators would make bank.

It needs to go.

>"Those posts making hundreds of dollars a day? More often than not they...invested heavily in the platform to begin with..."

This is not a reason to be able to mine the rewards pool. It is the reason there is capital gains, wages, and stock. The traditional means of rewarding investors is capital gains. HODL is all about capital gains, and Steem would dish out far better capital gains to investors were it not so financially manipulated. Steemit would grow faster, and increase the value of Steem, and that would create gains.

If Steem hits $30, just ~1% the value of BTC, a $100k investment in Steem would be worth $30M. That's more than ~20k% return. Sucking the rewards pool dry doesn't even compare to that kind of return, and it is the sucking dry of the rewards pool that is PREVENTING Steem from appreciating!

That and technical issues. I have resteemed several posts in the last couple days referring to the problem with RPC nodes. God forbid Steemit grows rapidly right now, because it probably wouldn't survive...

>"...if you read the white paper, voting power is designed to diffuse to more users over time..."

No, it was intended to be distributed more widely from the get go, but it hasn't performed as expected. Instead of 90% of Steem being spread across ~30% of accounts, 99% of Steem gets to 1% of accounts. This is not getting better. In fact, since HF19, I suspect it's getting worse.

HF19 reduced the number of votes minnow can cast (no slider) by 400%. While HF19 was being developed, the number of posts increased by 1000%. This caused new users to face a vote desert, and it's still happening. While pandering to whales has always been an issue on Steemit (because SP weights VP, the votes from whales are the votes that pay), masses of minnow, redfish, and krill votes are no longer viable - at all - as a means of getting some rewards for a post, since (400%x1000%=400,000%) there are so fewer votes being cast by minnows.

This is why self votes have become epidemic. At least, many seem to be calculating, one vote is better than no votes.

The principal! He will give me TP! I would hate for my bungholio to get polio....Where I come from, we have no bunghole.

This post has received a 0.96 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @emble.

Some very interesting ideas, similar to past ideas of mine. The exact implementation needs more thought though. I don't have time to go into detail right now because it's extremely complex.

Thanks for getting the message out. This is not meant to be a final proposal, just a new way of thinking here. It's true people invested a lot of money and that's why they should get rewarded with the Steem Power rewards. But to keep motivation, attract new authors, and make Steemit a source for quality posts - a seperation of power is required in my opinion.

You're on the right track, a lot can be improved on SteemIt. Starting with rating curators in some way, currently only authors are rated. Also currently curators aren't earning enough when voting on others, so a lot just decide to vote on themselves without creating content (just a 1liner spam comment).

What if Steemit simply didn't show the curation/post rewards. If people didn't know how much a post was worth, would they upvote it anyways?

At that point, it would be more similar to Reddit (except you earn crypto, it's not censored and there are no adds).

That would also be a great idea. Currently the platform users focus is making money, so why do you need the read articles - a bot is good. But if you want it to be good content a change is needed.

Making the curation reward 'blind' would only deprive the general populace of insider information. Cliques of folks currently collude in timing their upvotes to capture the bulk of curation rewards, while sending the post on to the trending page. I have witnessed this happen, in a chatroom, where the timing was discussed.

The clique has to have enough SP to make the post trend in order to profit the most, but, in lesser form, this is exactly what MSP and other bot driven curation trails do.

The blindness only impacts those that are not in communication with the author, or for authors that aren't guaranteed to trend. Your proposal would not work for @sweetsssj's posts, for example, because her every post, no matter what the content, trends.

In order to continue to game the system with @sweetsssj, you only need to be able to curate her posts within the first 30 minutes, and this is relatively easy to do, even without direct colllusion, just by programming a bot to watch for her posts.

Very good points. Do you have any recommendations?

I do. Recently there have been a couple developments that hugely impact Steemit, and the rewards mechanism.

The SEC has announced that they have the authority to regulate cryptos, such as Steem, that are securities. Steem, since it's the basis for voting rewards, as SP, which weights VP, and thus determines how rewards are disbursed, is a security. Also, Steemit now has competition, or is about to, as @elfspice, a former Steemit witness (l0k1) has started Calibrae.

Most of the problems with user dissatisfaction with rewards on Steemit are due to the weighting of VP by SP. This weighting assures that the same factors that influence wealth throughout history (it takes money to make money) influence wealth on Steemit. There are other problems, but some of THEM stem from the influence of SP on voting, as well.

I have recommended that votes be equal, and that investors receive their gains as the price of Steem appreciates, just as they do for BTC, or stocks, bonds, and all other traditional investment vehicles. The mining of the rewards pool needs to end, and rewards need to be distributed to authors that are popular with folks, not just rich folks.

One whale vote can presently be worth more than 10,000 minnow votes. There is no way that the 'masses' will find this a fair system, and they will vote with their feet, since they can't vote with SP.

The reason the SEC matters is that only because VP is weighted by SP does Steem become a security. Were votes equal, or weighted (as I prefer) by reputation, the SEC would not have any authority to regulate - or prosecute - anything on Steemit. Since most of the Steem in existence was mined before Steemit even had users, and then Steem was offered to the public after those huge stakes were mined, those 'investors' may have trouble with the SEC, regarding offering securities to the public.

I don't want that trouble to come to Steemit. I don't think anyone does.

Calibrae is a HF of Steemit, which is designed to eliminate the stakes that derive from mining before Steemit was available to the public, and make some other changes that make it more fair.

It is the first Steemit fork to do so that I am aware of, it is just beginning, but it will not be the last.

Before Calibrae, Steemit really had no competition, and anyone that wanted to get rewards for posts had to come to Steemit, regardless if they thought it was fair or not. Calibrae is competition for that exact space, and either Steemit will be better received by the public, or it won't. There is now a market for this kind of social media, rather than only one choice.

As I said, Calibrae will not be the last Steemit competitor either, and those problems Calibrae fails to fix, someone else will, until we have an optimal platform (according to my basic understanding of economics).

Calibrae yet retains SP (or Juice, as @elfspice calls it) to weight VP, and I think this is a mistake.

However, we'll see.

More excellent points.

For what it's worth, I gave you a full upvote for this.

Likely the best reply I've read since starting steemit.

Ah, now I'm blushing! Thanks for your kind words =)

Great response. I've mentioned much of the same in my own post on the subject, but was told my post "doesn't even make sense" lol.

Very good read you definitely have a point something different is needed, cheers mike

Thanks for your support. We are all in the same boat. Whales should be the first to support this change, it will bring them much more wealth.

Very nice post! I think you forget that people are actually investing real money into this platform. And of course they want a nice return of investment. Therefore, whales have to have much more influence than a minnow. Steemit is pure capitalism. The winner takes it all. But maybe there are some others ideas to promote great writers that do not have a lot of SP.

I didn't forget, and that's why I think they should get their stake of Steem Power Rewards. But investing money doesn't make you the best author or curator. That's why I think you need different reputation tags for them backed by the community.

What you are missing @emble, is that if you do that, people will not have a good incentive to buy more steem. Then the price will fall. Then, the whole system will fall.

Sure they will have! They get proceeds from every post.

I would give you back up on this everytime. This is a nice plan.
Best,
mountain.phil28

All good ideas but I think the major problem here on steemit is the signup process. I'm still getting message after message from my audience telling me that they can't sign up or they are having problems signing up. First impressions are important and many of these people will never be back.

There are easier signup processes for a fee. Look at this post: https://steemit.com/news/@timcliff/new-tool-from-busy-org-create-new-steem-blockchain-accounts-with-steemconnect

Yeah, that's kinda my point. If people have to pay to sign up because its so complicated...FAIL. I mean we want mass adoption eventually right? Social media should not be hard to take part in...IMHO.

The website is still in beta.. The current signup process is not the final product. They are working on changes to the whole signup process in hardfork 20. The system that is in place for now works for the time being, and when there are cases where it doesn't - the people in the community are here to help.

Im really looking forward to the updates....just not sure how my audience will react to, "okay, this time it really will be easy to sign up an account". Im all about second chances though.

It is a goal of the dev team to improve and streamline this process. It is probably going to take some time to get there though. As users of a 'beta' website, we should not have the expectation that everything is going to work 100% optimally and have all the bells and whistles of a full blown social media platform. It is a work in progress, and we also need to consider how the platform will look in 6 months or even a year or more. Right now we are all the 'early adopters' - giving the site a try and providing feedback on how it can be made better.

Hopefully we don't have a sudden influx of new accounts. According to @furion, @netuoso, and others, the network is iffy now, and dramatically increasing the number of users may well cause it to be unusable.

This is not my specialty, and I am not privy to the technical details. You might be, as a witness, though. Anything you can add to the issue with RPC nodes, and requiring more and more RAM to keep Steemit running?

On the witness side, things are pretty good. I personally run three 32 GB RAM servers for my witness, and I have a 32 GB RAM public seed node.

Steemit recently wrote a post regarding the scalability concerns. It sounds like things are under control.
https://steemit.com/steemitdev/@steemitdev/steem-blockchain-update-august-2017

Thanks for that link! Imma read it.

Great ideas emble! I think you really have some valid points here and your solutions would make Steemit more fair and give all of us a better experience.

My only concern is the 1% referral commission. It might resemble a MLM system too much.

Upvote and resteem from me!
@ronni

I don't think rewarding referrals resembles an MLM. You don't have to refer to make money, It's just like an affiliate link that all big companies - like Amazon & eBay - use.
Thanks for you support.

I don't know what 'designs' Steemit had in mind when they built this platform and I don't know if your suggestions are any better, BUT what I do know is that if the platform doesn't find a way to get better circulation and "compensation" of its "better" authors, then eventually the most talented people WON'T stay here and that will create the opportunity for competition that might drive Steem prices down as people leave for a "better" option.

I agree, the first alternative to address all these problems, will for sure build on the expense of steemit.

Calibrae has already begun. @elfspice, a former witness, has recently begun to solicit 'survivors' that seek a platform with greater fairness.

Lemme know what you think.

..respect!..don t know if agree with everything, but you think seriously about it..seems to me..follow you..upvoted..resteemed..

Thanks for your support.

This makes totally sense. I am newbie, but I see your points, which urgently needs correction.[IMAGE: https://res.cloudinary.com/peter2017/image/upload/v1499950299/Profil_Signatur/Peter_Signatur_kommentar.png]

I hope you will succeed here.

I got a bellyRub and this post has received a 2.45 % upvote from @bellyrub thanks to: @emble.

Some of these solutions definitely need some fine tuning...but the only one I'd definitely remove is:

> The rule of upvoting before 30 minutes should be nulled.

I'm actually very ok with the concept of curators giving up gains because they vote within moments.

There are plenty of posts that randomly get upvoted without actually viewing the content in full.

At best, if you wanted to modify that, I'd consider using the same formula "Medium.com" uses to predict read time...and if it has a video in it, API call to YouTube to get the runtime for that video as well...but I wouldn't totally remove the rule.

The rule was made because of the upvoting bots, but if we remove these bots and we remove the upvoting button from the Title link page, than it shouldn't be a problem. But yes your solution sounds good.

I agree with your overall sentiment but strongly disagree with some of proposals to sort it as they would just further increase the inequality.

For example, having more SP shouldn't allow you to earn more SP. That's completely backwards and just funnels SP to those who already have the most. What's required is a progressive distribution system like that used for income taxes.

It's like saying that people who have more money in the bank should not get more interest. SP is like money invested in the bank, so if you own some of them, you should get more interest. It's only a question how much.

Yes it is like that and that's also completely fucked up. Why should being wealthy allow you to accrue more wealth for doing absolutely fuck all compared to someone doing hard physical labour every day? Such a system is pure insanity and the only possible outcome is the majority of wealth being funnelled to those at the top.

This is true even if everyone earns the same percentage - a poor person with $10 to invest could double their money to $20 making $10. Meanwhile the wealthy person who invested $1m in the same stock will earn $1m. Why should the wealthy person be able to earn $1m more than the poor person if they both did the exact same work? If you think that's fair, you must also think it fair to have a pay difference of 100,000:1 for two factory workers doing the exact same work.

This isn't a flaw in the system. The system was specifically designed to do this.

Like I said, the only way to sort it out is by using a system similar to progressive tax systems that dampens the power of those with the most SP and boost the power of those with the least. Those with the most SP still get the most SP, they just no longer get ridiculously greater amounts of SP.

Given that most of the devs and witnesses are ancaps though, I don't see it happening. What I do see happening is a rival platform not dominated by ancaps using a sensible distribution system rather than the idiotic system in use here. Just like the majority abandoned digg for reddit due to power users dominating the site, the majority will leave steam for the new system that isn't dominated by the wealthy.

@elfspice is making Calibrae. Check it out.

Even if your post makes it to @curie"

It's worth noting here that Curie has a reputation cap for submission. So, if Curie gives you a bump once, you'll probably have too high of a rep to be eligible again. @JerryBanfield has a great post covering all the ins and outs of Curie for those who are interested.

"Steem Power rewards - 20% of all post payouts should be shared by all SP holder according to their SP ownership. People with more SP get more."

This is an interesting idea, but like much of the rest of your post, I think is far too drastic a change. Not going to get witness and community consensus on such enormous changes.

It seems most of your suggestions are to reduce the influence of stakeholders, so why would stakeholders buy in to this?

The stakeholders will get paid per their investment regardless if they vote or not. That's 1 good reason for them to support this change. Second, the price of steem will soar with these change bringing a lot more users and adoption of steem. Else steem will stay a small community with whales to stay and minnows to go. That means almost no new authors + no adoption = Steem to fail.

Companies uses profit for dividends or growth.
Steemit dividends are the rewards old investors/whales get and Steemit growth is achieved by atracting more active members to the community.

Newcomers represent the growth of this endeavour and stakeholders have to decide if they do rather get rewarded more now (dividends) or re-invest it to turn those newcomers into active members, increasing the lon-term value of the plataform.

How do you vote, sir?

The worst problems are most human profiles being spammers and spammer-minded and this: https://steemit.com/steemit/@stimialiti/bots-and-multiple-accounts-on-steemit

The suicide part is by not having direct ads, although the promoted content and the system as is now, actually encourage advertisement in a sense and help mitigate some of this problem.

Almost every single idea in your post is exactly correct. I would only disagree with the referral 1% (which opens up the Ponzi scheme nightmare, and presents other difficulties), and am perhaps unclear on what you mean by departments.

If you mean actual offices, I'm agin' it. However, you imply that the Curation department is us, and that just means the public decides, which is cool.

I reckon one important matter you have missed is that some votes are worth more than others, and this isn't cool. As you point out, just because someone has a grip of ducats doesn't mean their opinion is of greater value than a pauper's.

Votes should be equal.

This also eliminates a great many work arounds and fixes that have been put into place, including bots curating, to try to feed rewards to authors with small holdings of SP.

Frankly, all of those work arounds pale in comparison to simple popularity, as folks should decide what is good content, not tricks, timing, or the thickness of the wallets folks are packing.

Great post! Imma follow you now.

Sorry I missed the curation cutoff, or I'd have thrown a vote at you too.

I didn't mean physical departments, I meant it should be separated. I'm not a fan of equal votes because there are better curators then other. Imo the folks should decide who are the better curators.

That's what reputation is: vetting by the community. I'm quite in favor of VP being weighted by reputation, for exactly the reason you state. I'm also hard agin' SP being used to weight VP, for all the reasons you mention, and mebbe more.

Take a look at the Calibrae project. It is a fork of Steemit. The aim is to fix the problems you are discussing. Development is well under way. Comment on the thread if you want your account copied over from Steemit.

https://steemit.com/calibrae/@elfspice/calibrae-strategy-change-opt-in-rather-than-algorithmically-determined-opt-out

Read further posts about the project here

https://steemit.com/trending/calibrae

Yes, I saw it and already commented. I'm still not sure what it will look like because currently it's a 1 man band.

I have been having indepth conversations with him. He knows his stuff. He's recruiting others for the task.

Great!

This is a solid proposition. I've written my own stance on the matter here. You might be interested in checking it out and joining the discussion in the comments.

You are right @emble. So, what's happening now? Can we have any update on this?