I'm totally with you on the need to focus on value. The question I always like to ask is: "If you take away speculation, why would someone want to buy STEEM?"

My issue with the EIP (and the whole concept of rewarding content just for the sake of it) is that even if it works out perfectly - i.e. the highest quality posts always end up with the most rewards or however you define the perfect "proof of brain" system - I still don't see how there is value to owning STEEM or why I would want to buy any.

Maybe I'm a great curator and can earn a ton of curation rewards, but being able to earn more STEEM is not a reason to buy STEEM in itself. That presumes STEEM has some value to begin with which would make you want to earn more of it. Again, if you remove speculation which gives it its value right now, what is the reason to buy STEEM?

That's what I think all of our efforts should be focusing on - giving STEEM some actual value that doesn't just come from being able to earn more of it.

The reason i am buying Steem is cuz of its consistant passive income.
When the price rises the income would be greater as well.
I am not a writer so the curation rewards are a big thing for me and for the most people that arent writers.
I think i am the only one who thinks that a 50/50 reward distribution is a great thing.

> "I still don't see how there is value to owning STEEM or why I would want to buy any."

Are you implying that Steem has no value? Advertising makes it clear that people's eyeballs have value. Bringing people's eyeballs to Steem has value.

People would buy Steem to increase their influence on people eyeballs and mind which are all very valuable to even the biggest corporations and governments.

The original whitepaper states:

> "The second principle is that all forms of capital are equally valuable. This means that those who contribute their scarce time and attention toward producing and curating content for others are just as valuable as those who contribute their scarce cash."

https://www.docdroid.net/0TuBFv2/steem-whitepaper.pdf

Eyeballs are largely a property of a web (or non-web) application, not a blockchain. The white paper and in many ways the whole Steem community both confuse the two in very significant ways. There are many logical leaps in these assumed models that are poorly supported if at all.

The only thing a blockchain can really ever do is pay people money (or tokens) according to a variety of rules. Apart from that, it is impotent to interact with the world in any way, eyeballs or otherwise.

I'm not convinced that people influence people's eyeballs by buying Steem, or at least the model by which they can do so has not been clearly explained in the white paper or otherwise. They can influence who gets paid, but that isn't the same thing at all.

For the reasons you mention here, I think my STEEM is not Steemit post may have been one of the more important contributions I've made here. It seems the community (and investors/speculators trying to evaluate STEEM) are still stuck in this discussion without a resolution. The utility of STEEM (unlike most other cryptocurrency projects) is no longer based on wild speculative dreams. It's being demonstrated right now, and some don't like that.

I don't think Steem has really demonstrated much clear utility. It has properties which can be useful as you described quite clearly in your "STEEM is not Steemit" post, but its user base has stagnated so it isn't really demonstrating that such utility has much appeal.

I think a better narrative than speculators "fearing" utility is something like earnings reports on stocks. Sometimes the demonstrated utility falls short of expectations and this causes the story to adjust downward and the price falls, but sometimes it exceeds expectations (or points to even greater possibilities), and the price increases. Unfortunately Steem has not really demonstrated the latter.

Obviously, when there is a excess of hype and expectations are 'to the moon', it is more likely that 'earnings' (or demonstrations of utility in the case of blockchains/tokens) will fail to meet them, but the opposite does sometimes happen too.

I was more thinking along the lines of "We're going to build project X that will do Y!" where X doesn't exist in reality yet and Y is just a set of features (not a promise of future economic returns). If X does get built and it does functionally accomplish Y, then it's no longer speculation. Then it's more along the lines of what you describe in terms of evaluating it as a real project with expectations of profitability and utility value.

I'd say Steem is built, and it does functionally exist as a social media application on the blockchain which rewards people with tokens of value. Many other blockchain projects still haven't been built out to do the thing they claim they are going to do. Many more are today than in 2017, but I still think there's a disconnect between pure speculation in the space and evaluating a cryptocurrency project against other competitors in that market vertical.

Ultimately, I agree, the value hasn't yet been demonstrated, or we'd see more people buying Steem and powering up.

In practice, it's still speculation for a very long time. The speculation is over how much it will grow. Building a blockchain to do Y may demonstrate it can do Y, but from a value perspective, that is little more than a proof of concept until it demonstrates that it can grow large and attract a large amount users and economic value. It's barely one step forward from pure hype, and if the proof of concept demonstrates some problems with the concept or growth potential, that's a negative not a positive. It's not a given that such a proof-of-concept will be a negative in this way, but in practice many are, for various reasons, some totally legitimate (like most high risk experimental ventures fail, but that doesn't mean trying them was a bad idea) and some not (naked hype and fraud).

Utility of steem is a joke at this point because most users used centralized bullshit. Developers have to build real technology first.

Without smart contract technology, building truely decentralized applications is difficult (though not impossible).

Curious, do you run your own front end to the Steem chain locally? If so, what do you use?

We run our own front ends. We ran into many problems following the herd per say , from centralized front end development. (i've gotten more people to deploy front ends, but it isn't a solution to have them only on the VPS servers) Web apps seem to be an extremely locked down ecosystem that isn't very p2p friendly.

Next logical step is running the chain locally with a front end/webui talking to localhost , and that is what myself, powerpoint45, techcoderx, and vaultec have been working together with.

Only times I use the full stack locally (more people should have this access and would run steem blockchain on their hardware) is when i'm logged into the witness node on smoke and need to broadcast a transaction per CLI. This is why we need Witness GUI for DPOS as well as front ends for posting data into the chain.
https://github.com/dtubenetwork
https://github.com/techcoderx/ipfsVideoUploader
https://gitlab.com/vaultec/dtubepermanente
https://github.com/powerpoint45/dtube-mobile-unofficial

At no point is this Steem blockchain's fault. It's front end and backend developers who missed the point/access of what BTC core wallet (full nodes) achieved, as bitcoin has over 10,000 live copies online. Steem only has 125.

This comes from lazy development , not pushing hard enough , (even to the brink of failure) innovation.

I often wonder what it would look like if people built integrated hardware solutions. Something like a raspberry pi complete with the full blockchain ready to go, you just plug it in and you have a full node available to you locally. Maybe @anyx's api could be used as well.

Why do you think 'eyeballs' wouldn't play a (big) role on a blockchain application like STEEM(it)?

Imagine for example I am writing an article about Steem Monsters (or any other business built on STEEM). Then I think it does matter if 50 people are reading it or 5000, if I assume that a certain percentage of the readers gets interested in Steem Monsters and decides to buy Steem Monsters cards with ... STEEM! :)

Apart from that, as many well informed poeple (including you) are so eager to test the planned HF changes, I would say "Yes, lets try it now, don't lose more precious time (apart from testing) and just see what happens!"
Then at least we cannot say we hadn't tried it out ... and then I really hope my scepticism proved to be wrong.

Well the simple fact is you can't, as a typical user, "look" at a blockchain in and of itself. You are always going to be using some sort of application and the application is effectively a gatekeeper on eyeballs.

For example, steemit.com has started showing "featured posts" which have nothing to do with the blockchain, that is just whatever their company management decides users should look at, and those posts I believe get far more eyeballs as a result.

Yes, of course the programmers of the different apps have quite some influence, but apart from that, if there are more users altogether on a blockchain, business owners (investors) have a bigger pool of potential customers (my example was Steem Monsters). If the products of the businesses are paid with the currency of the blockchain (for example STEEM) that should originate in more demand and thus a higher price of the currency (at least that would seem to be logical in my eyes).

Sure more usage can correlate with higher value. That's not at all the same thing as 'eyeballs' though.

I meant we should care about getting/retaining as much as possible users which means more 'eyeballs' as well (English is not my mother tongue but I translate 'eyeballs' here with people who view content, advertisements, articles about Steem Monsters etc. - tell me if I am wrong) which should lead to more usage as well.

> I'm not convinced that people influence people's eyeballs by buying Steem ...

Yes, if someone is buying STEEM that doesn't influence people's eyeballs, but if there are more eyeballs (= more users) there is a bigger chance of more people buying STEEM. Therefore I think the formula more users = more value still should work even on a blockchain based platform.
And that's why we should care about the effect every change has on (potential) new users.

> Yes, if someone is buying STEEM that doesn't influence people's eyeballs

That's the premise being claimed above which I am questioning. In a lot of ways we seem to agree.

Passive users and active users alike increase the value of Steem.

Why do you think Steem has value if it ain't what I highlighted?

Well almost every single cryptocurrency has some value even the most nearly-defunct ones with abandoned development, semi-broken blockchains, etc. They almost never lose all value.

As far as why it has specifically the value that it has I don't think its much different from any other cryptocurrency. People speculate that it may have greater demand in the future for a variety of reasons, or that it may have less. The process results in a price.

But I'm not sold on it having anything to do with influencing eyeballs.

Steem is different than most other cryptocurrencies as most of its inflation doesn't go to pay for the security of the network but to the content creator.

Linear reward introduced a loophole which was explained in the original whitepaper. We talked about this at length already so I'll leave it to this.

This loophole gives the possibility for opportunists to extract a growing amount of value for a negligeable amount of work. This is at the expense of the whole network value.

The network value experienced a similar 90-95%+ drop in 2016 long before linear, and also at that time it was also greatly underperforming other cryptocurrencies.

It was also at the time that broad awareness of Steem was likely close to its peak, and was certainly very high, as it was the first social network-connected blockchain or cryptocurrency and people were notable people from both within and without the cryptocurrency world were flocking to it in part due to the high and highly visible payout values. Dan and Ned were featured on many well known podcasts, etc. One can even see the many attacks on Steem as a scam or ponzi scheme as a sign of its (short-lived) success; nobody even bothers to make these attacks now. At #70+ in market cap ranking, it's not even worth attacking.

And yet, in 2016, long before linear was even considered, it not only lost a tremendous amount of its value, but it fell in value to the point that did not suggest investor believed in there being a lot of promise for it. (Nor, I might add, did apparently Dan, since he left for something which, we can all see with the benefit of hindsight, has indeed been far more promising.) The decision to switch to a linear model, however we may feel about it now, did not happen in a vacuum, it was made after seeing the superlinear model fail to perform in driving the growth and retaining value.

No one has demonstrated either a solid descriptive or predictive model nor empirical evidence as for why people would buy Steem in order to influence eyeballs. There are gaping flaws and leaps of faith in any argument I have ever seen including the original white paper.

This does not mean that Steem can't become popular or increase in value, but these are still very different question, and I don't really attribute the lack of success Steem has ever had (regardless of payout curve) in convincing investors of its promise to the 'eyeballs' issue in and of itself. I attribute it to lack of any convincing story for why Steem should succeed and accrue value. In that I largely agree with @lukestokes.

Probably the closest I've ever seen is the "secret plan for world domination" post that @lukestokes likes to reference (and he is not alone). Indeed that post also has very little to do with people buying Steem to influence eyeballs. It is more about growing a large community with users and a variety of useful apps (including smart contracts) which uses Steem as its currency platform. Unfortunately we got really distracted by this whole "paying content creators" concept which was supposed to be a means to an end. When it became largely an end in and of itself and a primary focus, things went downhill from there.

>it was made after seeing the superlinear model fail to perform in driving the growth and retaining value.

I disagree and many metrics disagree with your opinion. Superlinear reward weren't given enough time but aren't fundamentally flawed like linear. Don't get me wrong, I was super aware of the collusive voting going on to game the curation but it couldn't be perfectly gamed as the collusion would always profit some more than others.

> No one has demonstrated either a solid descriptive or predictive model nor empirical evidence as for why people would buy Steem in order to influence eyeballs.

I bought Steem under superlinear to influence the platform knowing other people would compete to do the same. Currencies are just that, store of influence, store of energy. Whether or not people understand this doesn't make it less true.

We do indeed disagree on superlinear (as implemented in Steem) not being fundamentally flawed or even any less flawed than linear (I would say in some ways more flawed, but yes both are definitely flawed). It was just not fundamentally flawed in exactly the same way as linear.
> many metrics disagree with your opinion

Name one. There is no evidence in terms of actual metrics of Steem being on a success trajectory in 2017 after about a year of superlinear. It was cratering in terms of user base growth, retention, web ranking of the main site, etc. and there is no data to support that more time would have done anything but continue the trend.

I'm not saying there is a causation in regard to those 2 metrics but these 2 fundamental trends were up before the linear rewards were introduced.

Linear rewards were introduced in June 2017.

https://i.imgur.com/Tr9JY5d.png
https://i.imgur.com/P9wW8TU.png

What you are missing is that for several weeks prior to the linear hard fork, linearity (or at least a very strong attenuation of n^2) was largely in effect already due to the 'whale experiment'. Whatever gains you are seeing there, to the extent they have any tie to the payouts, would correspond with getting rid of n^2, first by whale voting changes and later by the fork itself.

Also, IIRC one of the forks (I don't remember which one) botched the payout pool logic and resulting in there being hardly any payouts for a month or so. That may also have helped the price, but can hardly an endorsement of n^2, or even paying rewards at all.

> What you are missing is that for several weeks prior to the linear hard fork, linearity (or at least a very strong attenuation of n^2) was largely in effect already due to the 'whale experiment'. Whatever gains you are seeing there, to the extent they have any tie to the payouts, would correspond with getting rid of n^2, first by whale voting changes and later by the fork itself.

These are your assumptions.

The whale experiment isn't linear rewards. These 2 are different.

Yes, those are my assumptions because that was a premise upon which the whale experiement was based (abit did some math and determined how low votes needed to be to largely stay out of the most superlinear part of the curve). The overall effect, while not perfect, was to dramatically reduce the vshares in the pool and therefore increase the weighting on smaller payouts. It is very similar to the effect of linear or convergent linear.

The biggest problem with the whale experiment was the high cost of the downvotes, and indeed that is probably the biggest flaw in the original white paper design, and likewise also in the assumptions that went into switching to linear (that people would downvote, retaining what is effectively a non-linear curve, and avoiding the self-rewarding issue with linear raised by the white paper). Since downvotes are too expensive, that didn't happen (more then 0.01% of the time at least). Everywhere you look, expensive downvotes are a problem.

With cheaper downvotes, any curve works a lot better. Without them, any curve works poorly.

Whether the upcoming changes will make downvotes cheap enough remains to be seen. Social stigma, retaliation, and uncompensated effort may still impose too high a cost.

> It is very similar to the effect of linear or convergent linear.

It was very different. The day the fork happened the change in the payout made this very clear.

Disagree. There were some differences in particular payouts yes, but the payouts before the experiment were in a different universe altogether.

Let me ask you another question. If n^2 as proposed in the original white paper was such a great thing then why is no one going and creating a new system using it? Why is Voice not using it?

I doubt I will be able to convince you but most rational people, probably including Dan, have concluded that the original Steem white paper just got a lot wrong (not even necessarily a lot of separate things, but the things it got wrong are very important). It was a legitimate and mostly credible attempt, but after trying things we learn from them, at least most of us do.

I've been saying that I'm of pretty much in favor of any curve that gets us away from linear. I never said n^2 was the best.

Ah, fair enough.

If you were in the top 20, would you work to get the other witnesses to reject EIP for HF21?

Steem curation can be displayed as a reflection of the most valuable content according to the shareholders.

> The Steem community provides the following services to its members:
> 1. A source of curated news and commentary

This has value for the community, aspiring authors and curators.

> I'm not convinced that people influence people's eyeballs by buying Steem, or at least the model by which they can do so has not been clearly explained in the white paper or otherwise. They can influence who gets paid, but that isn't the same thing at all.

There are clear incentives for the community to have a window on what are the best-paid posts and the more Steem someone has, the greater their influence on the platform/pay.

> The third principle is that the community produces products to serve its members.

https://www.docdroid.net/0TuBFv2/steem-whitepaper.pd

> There are clear incentives for the community to have a window on what are the best-paid posts and the more Steem someone has, the greater their influence on the platform/pay.

Maybe. For those who are personally involved with dedicated curation of reward payouts, very likely yes. For major investors, maybe (depending on their own views on how important it is what particular payouts are made, some will care and some won't).

For many users, they may be happier looking at whatever Steemit thinks are the best posts to 'feature' or content that meshes with their own personal interests regardless of payout (possibly by app-level targeted curating, or just the user's own decisions of what to look at), or they may not even have a choice if their preferred UI (for whatever reasons) takes a different approach to showing content or doesn't even show 'content' at all (as with some of the games now reasonably popular on the blockchain).

I don't know how much demand there is for influencing the eyeballs of power curators, who are the only ones who can actually be counted on to have their eyeballs directed as a result of on-chain curation. There might be a bit more demand to influence the eyeballs of major investors (since that is a relatively valuable demographic to advertisers), but it still depends whether the investors care about payouts for their eyeballs to be focused on that content.

Saying 'curation' generally isn't specific enough, because Steemit does their own curation when they decide what posts to feature and what advertisements to place on the pages and where to place them. This curation exists alongside the curation of payouts and the former is more directly in line of users' eyeballs.

For users of UIs and apps that have their own policies on what content to feature, or none at all, those looking to reach those eyeballs will simply buy advertising from the app or UI operator, as with Facebook or non-blockchain games. Having a blockchain behind the UI doesn't change anything here.

The best way to capture people's attention is to let them express what they value. This is done through curation. Displaying the results of curation refines the process and create virtuous cycles.

People's attention has value. Capturing people's attention has value. We can account for irrational behavior but it can't be predicted.

See my other reply. I really believe that the biggest problem is simply that we have elevated this whole content and curation mechanism into something that it supposed to be a big deal on its own, when in reality it isn't.

It isn't that it has no value on its own but it really needs to be just a small piece that starts the ball rolling on building a larger community with its own vibrant economy that does much more (which makes the costs of paying content an acceptable means to an end). When it becomes too much of the focus and only a small part of the story for where Steem is going then, the fundamentally unfavorable economics of it all become dominant and value just bleeds away.

The attention economy was never a good story here. Attention has value but it has financial value that can be monetized only to the extent it can be tolled off, as sites like Facebook do. That's not a good fit for a blockchain economy which is built around permissionless access.

It's true that eyeballs are not property of a blockchain, but what if we make it one?

We can easily solve this problem in a centralized way.

Step 1: Steemit, Inc stop using ads for personal profit.

Step 2: They start selling the ad spots by auction to the advertiser who is willing to burn the most STEEM. (They can even take a small cut if they are that greedy).

Step 3: Bidbots are obligated to burn at least 20% of the profit they make, if they don't, then steemit, Inc downvotes them to death. This will create a good sink for STEEM. Centralized, yes, but effective.

Step 4: Price of STEEM obviously falls less than it is now, and rises higher if helped by speculation. Steemit, Inc which holds millions of STEEM is now happy because they made more through increase in price than by selling stupid google adsense ads.

Step 5: Encourage Dapps like Dtube etc to use ad spots and sell them by auction to the highest bidding advertiser (again burn most of the steem). Those apps will help the price of steem, which will benefit them, benefit users, benefit Steemit, Inc. THIS IS THE STRONGEST NETWORK EFFECT EVER.

Step 6: Dapps that help steem in absolutely no way are also downvoted to death. Centralized but effective, again.

With the exception of (6) none of these can actually be enforced in any plausible way. (6) should probably happen but even without any access to the reward pool, dapps can still build business models (for example around selling ads, services, etc.) which don't contribute much if at all to the value of Steem

Can’t be enforced but it’s possible to go in this direction through discussions. You are more influential than me so getting to you is one of the best things I can do.

Posted using Partiko iOS

When I say not enforced I'm really saying that I don't think they will work out because without some form of enforcement, people and companies will find ways to cheat, although they will usually dress it up in less negative terms than that.

A couple of years ago Ned was talking about the attention economy and some concept (never fully defined) of how ad revenue would be shared with the content creator, the reader, and/or with Steem as a whole through burning.

But when the rubber hit the road and they started selling ads, they just decided to keep all the money in the name of 'sustainability', and there isn't a damn thing anyone else can do about it.

Another reason our coin has devalued so much is because the original whitepaper is such a piece of trash. Maybe we should re-write it with #freedom values developed by steemians not Dan, who btw powered down his steem already and fucked off.

The whitepaper has already been re-written.

But with who's values? Maybe Steem should re-write it every year since we evolve unlike ANY other chain! A decentralized vote is possible with the amazing data chain that steem is!

I could explain how 10 measly content producers could generate enough demand for consumers to buy 2.5 million STEEM. The problem I have with explaining it is the fact I've tried what feels like a million different ways of saying it. Maybe it's my wording? I don't know. I have these two recent posts:
https://steemit.com/steem/@nonameslefttouse/curators-hello-where-the-hell-are-you

https://steemit.com/steem/@nonameslefttouse/how-much-have-you-spent-on-entertainment-in-your-lifetime

I left a good comment somewhere else where I actually break down how 10 content producers could create so much demand. I don't know what to say anymore and I'd have to hunt for that comment, and I'm so tired. Writing it out again just seems like a waste.

*Edit: Found the second time I used that comment I speak of under this post
https://www.palnet.io/palnet/@midlet/on-50-50-for-steem-you-ll-never-beleive-what-the-real-problem-is

Combine the wisdom from everything I've said within these links, plus I can find more links, just read my entire blog and every comment; you'll eventually find some answers.

Maybe what people need to see is an example of it actually working, not just talk about it. There's been a lot of talk over the last three years. Not many success story examples.

There's also the downvote UI issue I mentioned in my post. Any serious content producer wouldn't touch this place at all if they thought one person could come along and hide the content they worked so hard on.

What are your thoughts about that being a big part of the problem why serious content producers don't waste time with Steem?

> Maybe what people need to see is an example of it actually working, not just talk about it.

Did you even read that stuff? Skim? Couldn't grasp it? Can't see how it already works? Plenty of examples. I used music in one, to be able to tap into a few billion. Blog posts/magazines what's the difference? So there's a few more billion. The fact is people spend money on entertainment. It's fact. What examples are you missing? Just look outside.

>There's also the downvote UI issue I mentioned in my post. Any serious content producer wouldn't touch this place at all if they thought one person could come along and hide the content they worked so hard on.
>
>What are your thoughts about that being a big part of the problem why serious content producers don't waste time with Steem?

So the other day, sometime this week, another top twenty witness insulted me. Do you realize what you just said? Since I reacted poorly to the insults earlier in the week, I've learned my lesson and will not snap.

Again. Luke. I want to stress the fact that I can respect you. I have no issue with you as man, at all.

> Any serious content producer wouldn't touch this place

For nearly three years, I've been watching so many witnesses in top positions put their disconnect on display. Do you truly know what goes on here?

What makes you think I'm not a serious content producer? Do you even realize you just insulted me?

I'm looking for examples on Steem. That's what really matters. If your premise is correct. show me examples of where it has worked with Steem. Just saying it can work doesn't accomplish anything. Yes, we know many things can work, but what is working?

I ran a business for ten years. Ideas are cheap. Implementation is everything. Pointing to other industries and saying "We can do that here also. Millions and billions!" is not reality. Real examples here on Steem is reality. Make that happen, and I'll better understand what you are saying. Until it does, it's just more opinions and ideas with no implementation leading to actual results.

> What makes you think I'm not a serious content producer?

I have no intention of insulting you, but if your premise is correct, shouldn't you be a working example of how the price of STEEM is increasing because you are here adding value? By serious content producer, I was referring to your examples of the millions and billions of dollars available in the media and entertainment industries. These industries involve millions of people and their millions of dollars. No cryptocurrency project has been able to do that, let alone Steem.

To me, your ideas and the reality of what Steem actually is today is equally disconnected.

I think most of us see the potential. It's why I invested ~9 BTC into Steem when it was around $3/$4 years ago. I saw this as a technology which would take over the world and become a global phenomenon used by every media outlet on the planet. It didn't happen.

Luke. Be quiet.

> Maybe what people need to see is an example of it actually working, not just talk about it.

This isn't what you say to someone who wants to invent the car. "Well maybe if someone else invents the car, and I see it running, then I'll believe you."

Luke. You've frustrated me beyond words today. Blah. That's all I got.

In your interactions with me, you seem to describe your frustration and how no one seems to understand what you are saying over and over again.

Henry Ford didn't talk about inventing a car for mass adoption.

He went and did it.

I'm simply saying go and do it and then maybe people like me will understand what it is you're trying to communicate, and you won't be frustrated all the time at our lack of understanding.

Luke. Be quiet.

You come to my blog leaving your comments on my post and then tell me to be quiet. Ugh.

Yes.

And here's my response to this strange little troll underneath me.

https://steemit.com/life/@nonameslefttouse/why

LOL you are way off here!
[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmf7NutULGXD1N6nFwaHkdMYVZHQxuZUuvXmTt1GtTrJJ8/Screen%20Shot%202019-06-25%20at%207.55.51%20AM.png]

WARNING: IF YOU REPLY TO THIS ACCOUNT YOU WILL BE FLAGGED, YOUR REP WILL BE HARMED AND ALL OF YOUR REWARDS WILL BE REMOVED.

There's simply too much to get into to be able to explain, current issues with the platform that need to be resolved, a playing field that needs turf. Many of these things require a community effort. You've insulted me, shot me down, doubled down on those insults, already proven you're unwillingly to listen. There's no LUKE in team. Therefore, there's no point in having a discussion. You've been disrespectful and that's why you should just be quiet, so it stops, because I don't want to hear it. If you can't respect that, it's because you're disrespectful.

I'm not a disrespectful person. Those who actually know me, know this. Admittedly, I sometimes say things the wrong way and offend people unintentionally, but I just re-read our dialogue here, and I really don't see what was so justifiably offensive to you. You misunderstood my meaning of "serious content producers" and took it as personally offensive.

Disagreeing with someone's points and not preferring their delivery isn't an insult or "shooting them down" IMO. I agree with your premise that the Steem ecosystem would benefit from more content consumers being entertained by valuable content they want to reward in order to see more. That's not a new idea and was mentioned in the original white paper along with how important it is that this can be obtained with an upvote and no loss aversion associated with having to pay for content. This has been said again and again since the very beginning. I read your content and didn't see anything new to me which is what you implied was there.

Maybe we just have completely different personality and communication styles. If you come to my blog and leave comments on my posts telling me I'm disconnected, I will respond in kind. If my approach offends you, please be open to chalking it up as a different style of communication. I mean no offense. No one is entitled to respect. Not preferring someone's approach is also not the same thing as disrespecting them, IMO.

If I see your writing style or your art and am told I should read it and think, "I don't prefer that" is that disrespect? I don't think so. It would be different if I was just passing by, looking at your blog posts. To comment there uninvited and share my personal opinions could be considered disrespectful, but it's also just the result of putting your art on display. Taking that personally doesn't make sense, IMO. For you to come here and say read these posts, the wisdom they contain, and the answers within is a different story. From my perspective, I'm simply disagreeing that something new is being said and you're choosing to take personal offense at that.

I started out my post linking to this for a reason.

If you do care to get to know and understand me, telling me to be quiet in the comments of my own blog is not a way to earn my respect.

I wrote a response to yabapmatt(spelling?) I don't know why you're rambling about this other stuff. Do you see any benefit here, other than trying to make me look bad and yourself look good? Get over it man.

> If you do care to get to know and understand me, telling me to be quiet in the comments of my own blog is not a way to earn my respect.

You told me to be quiet and go do it. Without even giving me a chance to explain the things you're missing. And now you're pouting because I told you to be quiet.

I gave you, exactly what you were giving me. That's only fair. Get over it.

> You told me to be quiet

I did no such thing.

> and go do it.

This, I did do. If you have it all figured out, and you're frustrated people here don't understands you, then my recommendation is going to be take action and show us what you mean.

Go ahead and explain, but what from what I've seen so far, I'm still having trouble understanding your perspective. As I said earlier, it's possibly due to a communication and style difference of preference. I'm not mad at you in any way.

In so many words, you did so. Just go read my response to 'matt.

He asked the questions I felt I could provide a few answers to.

Please stop arguing with me. I don't see why you're going on and on and on. If someone wants to think I look bad in this situation, I'm fine with that. I don't see why you're so busy trying to make me look bad, and yourself look good.

If the 'last word' is all you care about, have it. I truly don't want to argue, which was I said "be quiet". I open up the door, and look. Take a good hard look at yourself. Is what you're doing necessary? Is me responding to your attempts at saving face getting me anywhere? Do I have to close the door again?

My true colors, your true colors are none! @nonameslefttouse you are a true douchebag o trash! That was rudest comment ever, did not expect that! I know u just work for them! You lost my vote, probably earned flags for life already too! bitch! butch! lol You are stupid posting like that for everybody to see how you really are? pot calling the kettle black the other night!

WARNING: IF YOU REPLY TO THIS ACCOUNT YOU WILL BE FLAGGED, YOUR REP WILL BE HARMED AND ALL OF YOUR REWARDS WILL BE REMOVED.

Dude, leave. Social media on a blockchain is about free speech, so don't tell people to be quiet or anything like that. Respect free speech or go back to Twitter.

According to your logic, it's perfectly fine for me to say, "Be quiet."

I believe you have a right to speak, yes, but you clearly indicate that you are the type of person that tries to silence others. That can be done on Twitter, after all, that company loves that kind of stuff. Steem is suppose to be a rejection of that mentality, the mentality I see from your comments.

I respect your right to free speech, you should start respecting the free speech of others.

You clearly indicate you are the type to judge and come to conclusions about someone based upon two words. I also don't give a fuck what you think.

> but you clearly indicate that you are the type of person that tries to silence others.

And you say that right after telling me to leave. If you want to bitch at me, get your act together. Stop being a hypocrite.

> I also don't give a fuck what you think.

This, unfortunately, is why you and I have had such negative interactions on this thread. IMO, there are better approaches.

No. It's because you keep taking cheap shots at me like this here. Do you not see the part where this guy tells me to leave? I asked YOU to be quiet because I didn't want to argue. That's a positive. So just because I said the f word and don't really care if someone wants me to leave, I'm a bad guy? Instead of allowing them to make me feel crap I decided not to give a crap because feeling like crap would have been a "negative".

What's negative is you looking DOWN on me. Look at your wording. "Better." You have serious attitude problems and it seems like you want to be a bully. Are you going to discriminate because of the language I speak? It's 2019. Probably shouldn't do that.

I don't share the same mindset as you. Not everything is black or white. My experience here wasn't "negative". This isn't coke or pepsi. It's not up or down. It's not left or right. It's not team red vs team blue.

You got your negative in one hand and your positive in the other. Stretch your arms out. So now they're nice and far apart. Look at them. That's how you like to see them. As you make your choice, having two options, choosing from what you can see, taking the superficial approach(which is why you can't decipher my writings)... I'll use the thing in the middle. Do you know what that is?

It's your head.

Here's a pamphlet for you.
https://steemit.com/life/@nonameslefttouse/came-close-to-giving-up-yesterday-seriously-i-nearly-walked-away

I do make conclusions about people based on what they say, but it wasn't just two words. It was the repeating of those two words, but also that I took the time to read your comments and found them wildly out of line.

Maybe the word "serious" next to the words content producers offends you, but come on, we all know what he was trying to say. I'm not saying you are not a hard-working content producer, but until this little chat, I don't think I've read or saw a single thing from you. He meant "well known" content producers, like Tim Pool or Joe Rogan. No reason to silence the guy over such a small difference in wording.

I urged you to leave, that doesn't mean I want to silence you. I just find someone with your mindset (my assumption of your mindset) to likely be happier in a place like Twitter where people think the way I believe you to think.

My response has everything to do with why I think anyone would care to put a social media platform on a blockchain: censorship-resistance/free speech. Thus, I assert that telling someone to "be quiet" is quite the faux pas among a community of crypto nerds.

At the same time, I am a staunch devotee to free speech, so, yeah, I might take extra offense to people trying to quiet other people's viewpoints. He has a view that is not yours, get over it.

You know, if you really don't like listening to the ideas of some people, there is a nifty little thing called a mute button. I respect your right to mute me or anyone else. What I don't respect is people trying to get someone to stop saying what they have to say to other people.

Peace & love

Mute me.

I was not saying I would mute you. I almost never mute anyone, I did one guy, but that's because it was getting to a real harassment level.

My point was that not hearing someone you dislike hearing is easily within your power without trying to influence their free expression for everyone else.

On the contrary, I have showed you the respect of reading your comments and even the post that you linked in a comment to Stokes. Muting people doesn't jive with my style, I'm a free speech absolutist. I respect your right to disagree with me on stuff, I'll even give you the time of day and listen to your disagreement.

I didn't want to argue with the guy. I came back later and gave him a second opportunity.

I don't want to argue. I didn't want to argue. I don't want to argue. Get it?

Listen. I started out by saying "You guys don't realize the potential." I finished by pointing out the potential, that he was clearly missing. I wasn't offended by those words. I was simply trying to show him something he couldn't see.

> You know, if you really don't like listening to the ideas of some people, there is a nifty little thing called a mute button.

According to your logic, you should be muting me.

So I just skimmed through your posts linked above (sorry I didn't have time right now to fully read them) but I really think you're on to something there. I would love to see an SP holding based subscription model for content.

Off the top of my head I'm thinking there could be a front-end where content creators can choose a subscription level, for example 100 SP, to have access to their content. So that means if I want access to that content I have to have at least 100 SP in my account and then when i click some button to access a particular piece of content it will "unlock" it by submitting an upvote from my account.

I think that would be really cool and, if done correctly, could actually incentivize a significant number of people to invest in Steem Power.

>Off the top of my head I'm thinking there could be a front-end where content creators can choose a subscription level, for example 100 SP, to have access to their content. So that means if I want access to that content I have to have at least 100 SP in my account and then when i click some button to access a particular piece of content it will "unlock" it by submitting an upvote from my account.

Patreon 2.0?

It's more about selling the idea to consumers. It's already happening all around us, people just don't realize it.

Every time an "established" content producer shows up, what happens? People cheer because they have a large following. The established content producer then starts churning out content, but their following doesn't come with them, and the ones who do, don't buy STEEM. The established content producer forgot to secure their place here by explaining to their followers the benefits of purchasing STEEM and upvoting over the long term. They still ask for "donations". That money is thrown away and the consumer or follower must then donate again, and again, and again. That's silly, when we have a platform like this. Instead of donating, invest. Then if that content producer isn't performing up to the consumers standards, they can have their money back, or go support someone else, without ever needing to throw money away in the form of donations, ever again. Because these established producers fail to secure their future here, they often leave after only a few months, and the "benefit" of them simply showing up is nil.

You guys already get it. If someone plays Splinterlands, and gets bored, they get their money back. Aggroed said something along the lines of what I'm saying while promoting Splinterlands at a recent conference. The consumer can have their money back, plus more, if they decide they're no longer interested in playing. Games are part of the entertainment industry I speak of, so it's not hard to shift some of those billions over to your product. It's already working. People just don't realize it.

I'm not talking about a paywall, but I've written posts about what you're saying.

The whole point is to make the consumer realize the benefits of investing in content rather than buying it, or donating to content producers. Offer incentives like the 50/50 rewards split to encourage more consumers to consume. There should be far more consumers than content producers here, like in the entertainment industry, because that's how this works.

The fact is, people already spend the money. STEEM can offer them a better deal, with any form of entertainment consumption.

This is about educating content producers as well. There's a reason why you can't find content from an established producer describing to their following the things I'm trying to point out. They didn't know, but if they did, everyone benefits.

Thank you for explaining this well here. @starkerz and @oracle-d have been working with a model like this for companies and governments as well, encouraging them to invest in Steem Power to pay people involved via the rewards pool. It may work, or it may get downvoted. The key is still education, helping people understand how ti works. Now with Steem Engine tokens, communities with their own tokenomics rules can experiment with different approaches.

You're welcome.

Yeah, a delegation economy. I mentioned that idea in a post I wrote a while back. Think I called it "Steem Is Not Facebook, Steem Is LinkedIn" or something. The value I saw in Steem was its potential to create a delegation economy where you don't have to give money, just vote authority.

That said, the haters of self-voting ruin that entire aspect of Steem, because without the 100% value of the upvote given to the company I don't think the numbers work.

The tokenomics of any project is the magic part. When it works, no one can really say why. When it doesn't work, everyone has an opinion why it failed. Ultimately, all financial value is a form of speculation on story telling. I think Steem as a blockchain and a cryptocurrency could tell some really compelling stories which investors and speculators will value. I think it's had this opportunity for quite some time. I hope that story develops. This post here is the primary reason I was so excited about Steem: Steemit's Evil Plan for Cryptocurrency World Domination.

I still think it's possible.

> I think Steem as a blockchain and a cryptocurrency could tell some really compelling stories which investors and speculators will value

I agree with this, I just think the value is not in the "proof of brain" concept itself but rather in Steem being the platform to power other applications which may or may not use "proof of brain".

You say that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity, and that's how I see this EIP. We can mess with reward curves, percentages and voting pools all we want, but the end result will be the same. There is no magic formula that will change everyone's behavior and prevent automated systems from being able to "game the system" in a more optimal way than a human can.

Let the different apps deal with that and set up their reward systems how they think is best and we should focus on how building on the Steem blockchain can let them do that more quickly and easily than anywhere else. That's a story I know first hand that investors will value.

Funny, I was leaving this comment at the same time you posted yours. I agree with you. SMTs and the work you're doing with Steem Engine may have been an important piece of this system's success from the beginning. Without it, there's no experimentation or growth. That's certainly one of the stories we were sold early on. The downside of that story is it may mean the STEEM token itself has no real value other than serving as one example among many of what may not actually work well economically compared to other cryptocurrencies.

Maybe cryptocurrencies, like healthy life, need to reproduce. I explored that a bit in this Twitter thread.

That doesn't meant that STEEM has no real value! STEEM is the token that powers the platform. It was so much easier to build Steem Monsters on the Steem platform than any other blockchain platform I know of, and to be able to do that we need to have a significant amount of SP available to make sure all of our players have enough RC to play. SP is our fee for building on the platform and the bigger we grow, the more we will need.

Appics wants to create their "proof of brain" content platform - they can do it on Steem where (in theory) it will be just filling out a form and hitting submit or they can do it on a general purpose platform where they have to build the whole thing from scratch. Many will choose Steem, and they will all need enough SP to allow their userbase to use the platform and receive their rewards.

We already see there is demand for this type of product (appics, VIT, scorum, etc). This is how STEEM can be big. This will sell to investors and speculators.

Thanks Matt. That's a really helpful bit of optimism and encouragement. :)

If we had more successful examples like Steemmonsters, I'd fully share your enthusiasm about the great potential here. I've championed it for three years now (as of today, my accounts is three years old) and unfortunately feel like I was selling an idea which never materialized. Yours is one of the few examples. Appics was stuck waiting for SMTs and hasn't been able to move forward much (prior to Steem Engine), VIT has it's own troubles and forked the code anyway, so that won't help the STEEM token. (I didn't realize they had pivoted their whole company away from adult content). I'm not a big fan of sports anymore (even though I was a college athlete), but I do see a lot of potential there for sure. I just don't see how that will necessarily help the STEEM price if it becomes easier for people to just spin up their own chain as DTube just announced.

That is true, when the cost outweighs the convenience of building on a blockchain, whether that is Ethereum or Steem, building a sovereign blockchain becomes the natural choice.

A lot of blockchains are indirectly gunning for Steem's job. Ethereum is soon getting Akasha, but right now it already has Loom which created DelegateCall as a sample site to display the capability to build Steem on Loom. Then Cosmos is another way to do it effectively, and some social sites are already being built on it.

Ethereum keeps getting abandoned for sovereign blockchain roadmaps and if Steem was expensive for businesses to build on, why not fork?

There is a clear issue here, which is that blockchains and their participants have conflicting interests. Coins/tokens need to have a utility, but at the same time it seems in crypto that coins and tokens can become more expensive than the value they provide to the user, so the user starts fresh.

If content is actually valued in a way that is perceived as fair/valuable, that is a big deal. It means that the inflation being printed isn't just dumb dilution and there is genuine value being generated and rewarded appropriately. It means that others will seek to come in and participate in the exchange of value for whatever it is that they are creating on this platform. Others can come and participate in continuing to contribute to rewarding value, and be rewarded in the process (the motivation to buy-- influence within a fair system of value generation). A positive feedback loop.

And even if we aren't thinking along those lines, good content and engagement attracts users, and the platform's total networking power is what is valuable. If the system is perceived as fair then more people have reason to participate. Going the mass adoption route legitimizes the platform as a currency system in its own right.

I think there's a few holes in my argument / avenues for exploration here, but I can't quite figure it out right now.

This is very abstract. I'm looking for a clear reason why a person/business/organization/etc would want to buy STEEM for something that isn't speculation or "because I can earn more STEEM".

For some examples, someone might say:
- I bought Bitcoin because my local currency is being debased and the government confiscates precious metals.
- I bought Ether because I want to use decentralized applications that run on the platform and that requires ETH to pay gas fees.

I bought steem because I want to have more influence in the core social game (whose incentives have now been addressed to make things more fun)

May not be the motivation for everyone, but it's there. And the usual benefits of steem vs others but who is really using those as reasons.

I'd argue the Bitcoin reason is also highly speculative.

No one buys bitcoin for reasons like that. Everyone buys bitcoin because it may go up in value and make them money.

This isn't rocket science.

I see STEEM or mainly Steem Power as a way to be able to engage actively in one or more communities on the STEEM blockchain. Also yes that gives you more weight on rewards as well, but in general you are earning by helping build the blockchain and communities.

>"If you take away speculation, why would someone want to buy STEEM?"

This is something I've been asking for a long time and aside from curation rewards, there isn't much.

But for two years, I've been talking about advertising, revenue, and profit-sharing for website/interface owners. I even spoke with Ned about this two years ago and he had zero interest in it at all. Then he realized that capital appreciation from the "ninja-mine" can't pay the bills forever...or even a couple of years.

The added value that most people are looking for can and should be added by businesses running on the chain, not the chain itself. Taking my advertising example:

1. Interface owner implements advertising.
2. A percentage of revenue is distributed to their active users (people who are logged in and interacting with the blockchain via their particular interface).
3. Revenue is distributed based on the STEEM Power of those users.
4. Users can opt-in or opt-out to the advertising and revenue sharing. Non-users have no options.

What would this do for the blockchain? First, it would entice visitors of those interfaces to create an account in order to turn off ads or to opt into the revenue sharing. Second, it would entice users to purchase STEEM and power it up, or hold much of the SP that they accumulate in order to compound future ROI.

What would it do for the interface owners? It would entice more people to use their interface, which would increase their ad revenue.

What else could it do? It could attract better content creators who want to get their work in front of more users...the user base that is potentially growing due to the better incentives.

Worried about large stakeholders soaking up all of the shared profits? You can cap the distribution.

Want to further entice popular content creators to use your interface? Share another percentage of ad revenue with those popular creators through an entirely different ad program.

Concerned that your site is just being gamed by people looking for profits? Congratulations! That's what basic human behavior essentially is: economical. That's the foundation of commerce. And if you can get some steady commerce going on your site with legit businesses, value will continue to grow.

This is the kind of thing that many of our "developers" can do right now. And there's no hard fork necessary to do it either. They don't have to wait on anybody at all to get started. What are these interface owners doing instead? How are they making their money as website businesses? It seems most people don't realize that running a social media site is a business operation, first and foremost. They should start treating it as such.

We're not going to have much luck finding better value or more investment in(to) the Steem blockchain by simply hoping that our scheme of giving away inflation tokens will suddenly see huge demand shifts. There's only so much you can do with the internal blockchain economics - which have been severely broken and won't be fixed by the EIP alone. We need more developers focused on actual business models and adding value to this blockchain via those businesses and we need to give less attention (and money) to those simply looking to milk inflation rewards via vote/delegation buying and renting schemes or with outright ponzi/scam "projects."

For the record: I don't believe the SPS will give us different results, as much of the voting will be done by the same people currently allocating rewards.

Making STEEM the go-to currency for illegal international arms trading, that could work. Or has that application already been taken?

Let's try it and see how it goes!

@yabapmatt I hope you read y reply because the answer to your question is very simple.

Basically what you are looking for is to give STEEM a sink. A strong sink that makes it scarce and valuable.

USE EYEBALLS.

Content (written, audio, visual, etc...) and games bring users. People pay to get ads in front of those people. On the steem network, they pay bidbots to do that.

USE BIDBOTS TO BURN STEEM.

You are the father of bidbots. You obviously thought of this. Delegators to bidbots wouldn't mind cutting their APR by 2% if it meant that the steem was burned instead. And people who promote their posts to get them on rending wouldn't mind getting a bit less in upvote value from bidbots.

BURN 20% of all bidbot profits. This is the best sink steem can get. You have the influence to convince the whole steem ecosystem to follow this rule. If a bidbot doesn't burn, then mark him as unhelpful to STEEM on steembottracker.com.

> My issue with the EIP (and the whole concept of rewarding content just for the sake of it) is that even if it works out perfectly - i.e. the highest quality posts always end up with the most rewards or however you define the perfect "proof of brain" system - I still don't see how there is value to owning STEEM or why I would want to buy any

I'm not going to entirely disagree as I've been making this exact same argument since 2016 as many are well aware, especially regulars on the old steemit.chat #price channel.

However, I do want to make a counterargument which is that EIP and better voting generally may allow stakeholders to coordinate to pay out not necessarily the 'highest quality' content (which is a poorly defined concept in any case) but on content which brings value to Steem. This can happen in many different ways including:
1. Being externally popular (the best example of this I can easily recall is Dan's early post "Will the DAO be DOA" which was covered in popular media when The DAO was in the new first during its enormous fundraise and then during its hack. The steemit.com post was widely linked and discussed and probably helped give Steem a big early boost in attention and growth)
2. Being part of a process that evidences virtuous cycle growth, for example, externally-successful influencers with an audience being successful on Steem and inspiring more to join in turn
3. Contributing directly to growth by attracting users, but this only works if churn is also under control. This probably requires there being enough other "stuff" of interest on the platform/ecosystem beyond just free money, which most new users won't get much of anyway.
4. Supporting organic Steem influencers who develop their brand and attract a new audience to Steem.

There are probably others.

I don't know whether EIP will actually do this and if so I doubt it will do it right away, but it is possible that a stronger voting system will eventually allow more of the reward pool to be directed to these sorts of specifically value-adding content and not just content for its own sake or even just 'quality' content.

I love the idea of rewarding highly shared content referenced in news outlets. I'd even support using SPS funds to do it, if we had to. If someone writes something that goes viral on the Internet and is highly linked to which brings more people to a Steem frontend interface, I think that's something we should reward and encourage more of.

Do that with upvotes and lack of downvotes. Start upvoting based on actual value to Steem (external exposure is one great example but not the only one) and not just content that looks pretty but does little to nothing to help us (we could use 'likes' or some such to express recognition apart from pay) and downvote where value to Steem is absent but people upvoted it anyway.

In a few cases it might happen too late (after 7 days), in which case I would agree with the SPS idea of an exposure bonus fund or such.

Adding a "I like it, but it didn't increase the value of my STEEM" button would be interesting, but again, confusing to explain all the details and the differences. The more complexity added, the less people will understand and the more they will complain.

It's more like "I like it but I don't think it should get money" which is something that has already been discussed numerous times. We have somewhat of a version of that already with payment-declined posts, but of course those are based on the poster saying not to give them money which is not quite the same thing.

Alternately it could be more specific reactions than "like" such as "funny" "interesting" etc. which also don't necessarily imply that you think it should get money.

I agree there some obstacles but if somehow voters don't start directing rewards toward meaingfully value-contributing activities then @yabamatt's point about investors not seeing the value in buying into something that is going to be inflated away to pay for content for its own sake are going to turn out to be correct, and demand will continue to evaporate.

>I still don't see how there is value to owning but being able to earn more STEEM is not a reason to buy STEEM in itself.

Why not, though? Let's say it's 2016 again, there are no bidbots, and the only way to earn STEEM is through upvotes on steemit.com. Let's say there's a culture on the site where users who buy and power up are rewarded. Why wouldn't this culture encourage buying?

While I’m not the most clued on all the technical stuff I do believe in failing fast and testing new ideas! Steem has some real potential but it feels as if it’s being kept isolation and the whole blogging and curating uses case has too many people seeing as all it is when it can be so much more!

If we are to create more value we need more use cases and I think that blogging and the social media aspect can amplify all these use cases!

If we had more eCommerce both physical and digital with more cases to buy and sell Steem and make it an attractive place to not only promote but conduct business we would really have a winning formula on our hands

Posted using Partiko iOS

I love the idea of people using Steem for eCommerce. It was one of my original posts three years ago when I still ran FoxyCart: How to Build a Product Catalog on Steemit.

For everyone saying Steem is undervalued, if you aren't buying it, why is that? Is Steem boring? Does it lack potential? Or are you broke?

Posted using Partiko Android

I put in ~9 BTC years ago when Steem was around $3 / $4. I can believe what I want, but when the market tells me I'm wrong, eventually I have to listen to the market.

You hit the nail!
Why should any company invest in Steem and present their brand with the risk of getting downvoted?
I'm wondering, for example, about why is RT still posting here for the laughable rewards they get.
And yes, the downvoting will increase flag wars and make the climate more worse then it is already.
Cut rewards of content producers will drive people away as well...
All in all is not that difficult to see the changes are coming aren't good for the system or the value of Steem at all.
The view of an ordinary user.
Have a nice day
Tom

Posted using Partiko Android

To be fair, there is a lot of genuine overlap between personal attacks and low quality content that should be downvoted. However, I see your point that this could really dissuade brands/large creators from using the platform. I'm imagining two competitors just flagging each other to get their own content to the top.

I also worry that this will drive people away. I think we really haven't recovered since Hard Fork 20, which was so badly botched that a ton of people left and never came back. We can't take a hit like that again without the whole website basically collapsing. This Fork needs to be quick, but even then I am worried.

I think we're all just still scared from HF 20, which I maintain Steem/Steemit has never recovered from. That botched rollout cause a lot of people to leave, and a lot just never bothered to come back. I just want this to be a fast enough process that we don't have to deal with that again. I remember before 20 all kinds of new people were joining. Now I just don't see that happening any more.

You think all of that can be blamed on HF20? That's a bit much, IMO. Yes, the resource credit system had issues that needed time to work through. I had conversations with people to help explain what was going on at the time (such as "Steem Is Broken!?!" A Conversation with Sida of Partiko) and most people figured it out.

What really drove people away was the cryptomarkets tanking into a bear market that lasted for years. People were here for the rewards and the cryptocurrency hype in the news cycle. When that went away, so did the people who were here only for the rewards. See my post which goes into more detail on figuring out why you are here if you want to stay long term.

Don't you know the crypto bear market was my fault too?

Hahah

Steem token value, as with most coins on coin market cap is fake, of course you know this. It is a made up coin where small percentage of people hold most of the coins and if they decide to get rid of their stake in full numbers the bid order book would not be able to cover it. It would go to 0. Because whales do not need to cash out everything we hang around at this fake market cap. Am I right?

What if most of the BTC holders decide to cash out and dump it on exchanges? It's value would go to zero just the same. Steem's value is as fake as Bitcoin or any other coin out there (by your own definition). A more simple definition of it's value is that it is worth what people are willing to pay for it...right now the market values steem at around 40 cents USD...there is nothing fake about that.

When asset gets older you could argue it is harder to dump it as easy because more people entered the system, it is spread around more. Steem is still relatively young and volatile as fuck, well, not atm, we seem to be pegged at 0.4$. If one or two whales say they had enough and dump everything you would see how fake that 0.4$ price of one Steem is.

Yep, we are definitely struggling to get through 0.42 resistance...
Every time we touch that "territory" the price goes back to 0.4

You know what's also fake? The pieces of paper in my wallet with pictures of dead people on them. All financial value is based on shared delusions. It's a matter of picking a story you like most.

All order books would collapse (including BTC, Gold, Silver, and yes, even USD) if the large holders dump. I imagine China may do this some day.

Sure, everything is fake, just pick your horse, make a bet and see where it goes. Most people don't like volatility of crypto and that is why they will never touch it.

My worst mistake in crypto.... STEEM. Everyone get out why you can. I'm 1000 miles away from my keys so I can't power down and get out so I have to watch it be drained to a point where it will be about #150 on CoinMarketCap

The worker proposal funds will just go to the witnesses and large stake holders who already drain the system.

Stack Steemit Inc on top of the chaos and you are in for a financial beating. Don't invest your money here.

Congrats Luke you have everyone fooled into thinking you are doing something for STEEM. I would be embarrassed if I made as much money from this system based on everyone else chasing the carrot.

Your posts aren't any more valuable than someone like me throwing up pictures from vacations or random other things at this point.

Slow clap for running a witness server and being part of the club.

Posted using Partiko Android

I invested ~9 BTC into Steem when it was around $3 and $4. Steem is my worst cryptocurrency mistake (financially) also, but it's also been the best for other valuable reasons I describe in my post. I still believe in what this platform is attempting to do, and I still think it's undervalued by the market for what it is doing. Part of that, IMO, is that speculators fear utility. If I was just about the financial side of things, I would have left a long time ago. I hope you find something more useful to spend your time on as you go elsewhere. I'll enjoy not having to deal with your rude (and often, from my perspective, incorrect) comments anymore. :)

> The worker proposal funds will just go to the witnesses and large stake holders who already drain the system.

Define "drain"? Did you even look at the data I linked to in my post: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@lukestokes/exchange-transfer-transparency-for-2016-2017-and-2018

You can see right there who is "draining the system." Worker proposals, ideally, will go to developers building value so we don't have to relay on a central system like Steemit, Inc who we already know can't manage funds well (and thus had to fire 70 people). Throw as much shade as you want, but I think anything would be better managed than what we've seen so far.

> Congrats Luke you have everyone fooled into thinking you are doing something for STEEM.

I do exactly what I've always done: I create content and run a trusted witness node. Being a trusted member of the community and running a reliable node is the primary job of a witness. It's insulting to insinuate I'm attempting to deceive or fool anyone. If you don't like the way people vote, take it up with the voters. Go vent somewhere else.

> I would be embarrassed if I made as much money from this system based on everyone else chasing the carrot.

I'm not embarrassed for the content I've created or for the witness node I run. As I already said, I'm not even close to ever making my initial investment back and if you take a look at the data I linked to above, you'll notice I'm not someone cashing out like many others.

> Your posts aren't any more valuable than someone like me throwing up pictures from vacations or random other things at this point.

And who gets to determine that? The entire point is that value is subjective story telling. If you think the people who vote for my posts shouldn't, then take it up with them. What does that have to do with me?

I'm glad you're moving on from Steem. I sincerely hope you find something better.

@lukestokes I think a lot of people initially bought into the idea that you weren't a complete ghost figure like a lot of the witnesses and with your programming experience and Ivy League education you would actually build something. You continually say that a witnesses job is to just maintain a reliable node.... etc

Well I guess you are right. You and several other witnesses continue to stack coins up but how many people see what is going on and don't say much but take their money elsewhere?
The subject has came up several times at EOS related events when talking about problems with STEEM. Most other people who are front and center aren't going to say anything. They will just go on and move their money away from here.

I'm not saying you are some sort of scammer or something and I guess you positioned yourself well with minimal effort but a lot of people who understand what is going on just take their money elsewhere.

I would still be embarrassed if I got as much STEEM for no more than you have done here. You refuse to realize you are part of the problem around here.

STEEM is only going to get worse unfortunately. The market has spoken and we will likely all be sitting on a pile of dust very soon.

If I made as much STEEM as you I would have certainly utilized those funds to build something. At this point it is mainly impractical to build something here if you are self funded because it would just be more profitable to just put that money into a crypto that isn't in a death spiral. Worker proposals in principle is a good idea but it will back fire because the same exact people reaping the largest rewards will become the beneficiaries of the worker proposal funds. People will see what is going on and roll their eyes and take the rest of their money away from here. Sometimes the truth hurts.

This place was busted from the start. It is going to get a lot worse Unfortunately. The main winners will be some of the overpaid people st STINC, a handful of witnesses, and a select few others

Posted using Partiko Android

• I'm not a complete ghost figure.
• I never suggested or implied I would build something. That is not the role of a witness by the time I became one (witness rewards were drastically reduced to emphasize this).
• "take their money elsewhere?" can be seen in the data I put out every week. You may notice my accounts aren't there.
• I've been actively educating people about cryptocurrency with my content here for 3 years. I wouldn't call that "minimal effort." My experience which you cited earlier has value. I've earned that experience.
• After about a year or so on Steem, I put up a witness account after numerous people asked me to please do so because they wanted a witness they knew and could trust. Blaming me for how voters vote doesn't make sense. Are you saying I should shut down my witness node and if so... why?

If it's so broken, why are you still here? Why still participate?

I don't think there will ever be a fair value distribution system anywhere in cryptocurrency space. Either you have cheap electricity and technical ability to mine, you get votes in DPoS for being popular, you run an ICO, you ninja/pre mine, or you buy your way in with POS and earn even more.

As much as we all like to complain about the unfairness of STEEM distribution (I do a fair amount of complaining on that topic myself), there was no ICO and anyway can, in theory, earn at least something by doing something which might actually be considered valuable to the world (curation, content creation, etc), unlike most other cryptocurrencies which are just making pointless hashes.

You just continually say that it isn't the role of a witness to build something. It just reminds me of someone who sees a stack of papers fell off of a table in an office and instead of picking them up they say that isn't their job.

A better analogy of what is happening is when a kid's dad is the coach of a sports team so that kid is automatically playing all the time even if he isn't as good.

Kids start leaving that team and playing another sport and everyone just talks shit about the situation over there.

That is a lot of what has happened to STEEM. People just see that everything is an unfair joke and keep pulling their money out.

It is like you are oblivious to this.

My suggestion would be to either build something or use part of your stack to commission others to build something.

I powered down from 10,000 SP down to 2,000 SP and put it in other cryptos. Now from what I continue to see I will likely power down to 200 SP just to keep a pinky toe in over here and move the rest.

One of the only reasons I'm still here is because I'm trying to get a little something out to lessen the blow and I can't power down right now while I'm in Cali.

People just aren't impressed with the situation with most of the Witnesses, are annoyed with Stinc, and don't really see any future here.

I guess you could continue to just be one of the few really stacking anything from this place.

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> You just continually say that it isn't the role of a witness to build something.

Because it isn't. This has been discussed at length and as I already told you, a previous hardfork change to reduce witness pay made it clear. You saying otherwise doesn't change this reality. It's also why HF21 includes the SPS.

That said, different witnesses add value in different ways. I certainly appreciate those who are building things to add value to Steem, but I'm also frustrated to see witnesses like @jesta outside of the top 20. Look at how many awesome things he built over the years and still maintains. Why is he not being supported? Because he's also involved in EOS projects? I think it's a great loss to Steem to lose someone like him.

Ultimately it's down to the token holders to decide which witnesses they want and why. I've been helping people understand cryptocurrency and STEEM for three years with my content here. Some find that valuable. Maybe that explains why they vote for me. Ultimately, it's up to them, not me. I'm just doing my thing and people are voting.

If you think I'm oblivious to the problems of Steem, you haven't followed what I've written about. I also don't waste time complaining about things I can't directly change. I also know there are no easy, quick fix answers. Many strong arguments to move in one direction have equally strong arguments to move in the opposite direction. Now that we have Steem Engine to experiment with different tokens, different interfaces based on those tokens, and different reward models, I think we'll start to see some interesting things happen. We (hopefully) won't be as reliant on Steemit, inc to make changes. If the SPS includes projects which have great upside potential for Steem, I would certainly consider funding them above and beyond the SPS inflation.

I appreciate your suggestion to build something. I could ask you or anyone else to build something also. Witnesses run nodes. Product builders build products. Sometimes they are the same people, sometimes not.

Congratulations on cashing out your Steem to more profitable cryptocurrencies. I mostly have not because I do believe in the long-term value of this chain.

It was agreed upon by the rest of the circle jerk crew that witnesses can just chill and passively stack coins ? Did @freedom decide that for you guys?

Again the people with the technical competence to also be doing the same thing aren't amused by STEEM and all the BS.

By continuing what is going on is just making the problem worse because even the people who have stuck around and saw potential in the project can't really recommend it to anyone.

I tell my YouTube following. How many EOS? How many Litecoins? How many Monero? And I tell them that Steem is a bad investment at this point.

Asking me to create anything for STEEM doesn't really make sense. I have never really made any money with STEEM. Also I was building a multiplayer game for STEEM and have a website for it and all that but stopped because to go the distance I was going to have to hire other developers and I weighed out the pros and cons and decided that just keeping more money in crypto opposed to spending money to pay developers to finish this thing made more sense.

The same was true for developing the same thing for EOS. I felt I was better off letting the value of my crypto go up.

The proposal funds will for sure go to those of you in the circle jerk power positions which will be lucrative in the short term but will further implode STEEM and alienate more of the community members.

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HF21 How long will it be placed?

Sorry, I don't quite understand your question. Do you mean when will HF21 be released? Keep an eye on @steemitblog for updates.

Yes I wanted to ask that
Thanks

In other words you are in favor of HF21.

Yes, but context matters and most people don't realize that.

I agree context matters (I am also in favor of the SPS & the EIP). To be honest I am tired of the complaints, most of them come from people that are used to getting their rewards without bringing any monetary value to the steem token. I am not going to name anyone but several authors that I followed started to bitch a couple of months ago about the platform but when you look at their wallets they cashed out tens of thousands worth of value (in USD). I say good riddance to them.

I did not invest as much as you did but what I did purshase was what I could allow myself given my financial situation. I still believe that as long as we have a core group of people that are willing to work to improve this place we will see it reflected in the price down the road. It could turn out to be a mistake but nothing is guaranteed in life.

I'm tired of the complaints as well. One of the things that really frustrates me is an entitlement mentality. Maybe my responses to @nonameslefttouse in the comments here were not as nice as they could be, but I was picking up on that same attitude of complaining mixed with "I've got it all figured out and everything would be better if people would just listen to me" which, to me, smells like entitlement and gets under my skin.

I'm more interested in people building stuff which creates value, not in complaints or mere opinions.

Thanks for taking another shot at me here.

> I've got it all figured out and everything would be better if people would just listen to me

You're a poor judge of character. I thought I might have some answers. Thought it would be okay to share, and to come and talk. My frustrations stem from encounters like this, where someone like you feels it okay to throw me under the bus. You don't like complaining and opinions, as you offer your opinion and complain about me. If I said you were being disrespectful again, would you once again deny it, or would you, this time, be able to see yourself?

You guys just can't see the potential. "What we're doing isn't working." True, and what you're missing, is annoying, and I don't say that to be a jerk. It's annoying watching so many scratch their heads, when there are piles of billions of dollars everywhere to tap into. Luke. You know crypto, blockchain, financial stuff, tech. Okay fine. Have you ever heard of the entertainment industry? So many links here, so many posts to read within your post. Why not stop talking and start listening?

https://steemit.com/steem/@nonameslefttouse/curators-hello-where-the-hell-are-you

https://steemit.com/steem/@nonameslefttouse/how-much-have-you-spent-on-entertainment-in-your-lifetime

Maybe it's your writing style or formatting, but I have trouble understanding your point from these posts you link to. Yes, I understand the entertainment industry is huge. No, they are not using Steem and have no reason to (other than Steemmonsters). Why is that? I've spoken to authors and such and they won't risk their reputation by posting here.

As I mentioned in reply to your comment above, I think it has something to do with the story told around Steemit, Inc, Steemit.com, how things can just be hidden at the whim of individual whales, etc. Until those things are fixed, why would any serious content creator waste time here?

Another insult. Just rubbing it in. Writing style, formatting. Making excuses to remain ignorant. I truly don't know what to say or how to respond, because I might do it wrong. Like I already said, and this is the third time now.

> why would any serious content creator waste time here?

This is a huge insult to myself and many others here. Probably the most disrespectful thing you could say, and you said it.

Again, you are misunderstanding my comments, as I explain in this thread.

If you honestly think that's "the most disrespectful thing I could say" then we're in completely different worlds of understanding.

You don't respect the content producers who are here. They are lesser, than what you view as "serious". And we're wasting time.

Thanks? Is thank you what you'd prefer to hear me say, rather than "that was disrespectful"?

That's not an accurate representation of my views. That's what this is about. You took offense to two words, that in my opinion, you misunderstood.

If you want an apology, I'm sorry for not communicating more effectively.

I know you are serious as are many others who put in tons of effort on Steem every single day creating content, curating, commenting, and more.

That's not what I thought we were discussing. We were talking about the millions and billions of dollars in the entertainment industry who are not currently using Steem. I was not referencing anyone on Steem (because they are not here) which means I was not referencing you.

Up there you say

> No, they are not using Steem and have no reason to

And I'm trying really hard to offer a reason.

When I said:

> Why not stop talking and start listening?

That was a simple request and a big first step. There's a huge disconnect between many witnesses and content producers. As a content producer, unfortunately, I've grown accustomed to be treated as a lesser human, but I'm not made of glass and continue to be persistent.

Even with this comment:

> I was not referencing anyone on Steem (because they are not here) which means I was not referencing you.

Now combine that with this:

> Any serious content producer wouldn't touch this place

And this:

> why would any serious content creator waste time here?

I'm right in front of you and you act like you can't see me. I wasn't offended and don't need an apology.

You're underestimating myself and many others. You say:

> I've spoken to authors and such and they won't risk their reputation by posting here.

I could introduce you some authors, musicians, vloggers, bloggers, artists, it's a long list. We're here.

We're here and I hope this hardfork improves our situation. I can see the benefits. What's the next step though after this thing goes through, if it goes through? Step aside, start listening to us, so we can show you how this money thing works.

Also, on a sidenote. That same guy you're bashing for downvoting people, seems to have my back as I get trolled here. That trolling has been going on for a few weeks. I wrote about it today. You don't see me leaving, yet you say:

> how things can just be hidden at the whim of individual whales, etc. Until those things are fixed, why would any serious content creator waste time here?

You don't see me leaving. Takes a thick skin to be able to try something that's never been done before.

You continue to misunderstand what I meant by serious content creator.

I’m talking multinational media and entertainment brands with millions and billions of dollars to spend. I’m talking about celebrities. I’m talking about authors which are household names.

Are they here on Steem?

Potentially, yes.

Would you tell boogie2988 on Youtube he's not a "serious content producer" if this was awhile ago, when he started up his channel?

Maybe you would.

I certainly wouldn't.

Do you really think those established authors and "celebrities" don't come here because of downvotes? You don't think it's because they've already found a way to make millions, and don't need to come here?

Imagine for a second if the people doing the things behind the scenes over at Youtube when they started up began telling the first content producers they weren't good enough. Imagine how fast that place would have vanished if they decided it would be wise to wait for Snoop Dogg to show up and treat the others that put the 'You' in Youtube, like dogs.

Not many celebrities were born celebrities. They're just people, like you and I.

Any one of these content producers here, now, has the chance to be part of the group that helped build this house, like the first Youtubers did. Those first youtubers are celebrities now.

I enjoy things I see here just as much as I enjoyed those first youtubers back in the day. People enjoy my stuff in the same way.

No celebrity will come here until WE are allowed to prove the place is awesome. That's just how it works.

Joe Rogan already had celebrity status before he started his podcast. He did a sitcom, Fear Factor, UFC commentary, stand up comedy. Even with that he still struggled to gain traction on Youtube when he decided to post his podcasts there. Watch his first one, compare that to today, years and years later, watch a celebrity start at the bottom. Now his voice is one of the most heard all over the planet.

So yes, we're here. Plan on getting in my way?

You say you don't need an apology, but keep going on about what I said which you misunderstood. Googling around, I see Boogie2988 has a net worth around $1.7 Million. Great. Still not what I'm talking about and certainly not if we talk about where he was years ago.

We are talking past each other. I wasn't talking about you or content producers on Steem here today. I'm talking about who is not here and why.

The early adopters you're describing didn't get paid. People here are getting paid. It's not an accurate comparison, IMO. People who do well here and are still here are here because they want to be, not because of the rewards curve, etc, etc. That's one of the points of my post.

You are "allowed" to do whatever you want. I'm not getting in your way and neither is anyone else. Do your thing. Enjoy it. Become a celebrity.

Are you the type who prefers to argue? I like to talk.

I know what you're saying, you've made that clear. Why are you arguing what I'm saying? I could respond, once again, with the words I want to use; you'll pick that apart, add in some new random details and try to make me look like I don't understand what you're saying. What's the point of all this, man? You're offering me your perspective. I'm offering an alternative perspective. Then you keep coming at me with this I don't understand stuff. I could just as easily point out how I don't think you're able to understand what I'm trying to say. What would be the point of that though?

Seriously. Can you tell me what the point of all this is?

What have you gained from our discussion? Personally, I feel like I've wasted my time coming here. Since the moment I opened my mouth. If you had actually taken a moment to read what I said in those links, you'd realize what you're going on about really has nothing to do with what I said in those articles. I could tell right from the start based on your reaction. I'm through talking in circles. Those links are more about altering consumer spending habits. That's where the money I was talking about comes from.

Congratulations @lukestokes! You received a personal award!

https://steemitimages.com/70x70/http://steemitboard.com/@lukestokes/birthday3.pngHappy Birthday! - You are on the Steem blockchain for 3 years!

You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking

Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:

The Steem community has lost an epic member! Farewell @woflhart!SteemitBoard - Witness UpdateDo not miss the coming Rocky Mountain Steem Meetup and get a new community badge!

Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!

It's my Steem birthday today!

Happy birthday ;) @lukestokes.

I'll reiterate what I said early on about what I consider to be a fatal flaw in this system. There is no recourse when someone downvotes your content "for personal reasons." Some sort of dispute resolution function to counter this needs to be put into place or this whole system is going to continue to struggle, for reasons that you've highlighted here and more. Maybe it's a function that only top witnesses could serve, or maybe it would be somewhat automated. I'm not a programmer but I think I'm pretty decent at seeing how systems of rules and the incentives they generate will manifest. I knew accounts would abuse the flagging function right away after I started using Steemit and my first post got flagged for no actual violation, and so I saw that there needed to be a systemic disincentive to use flagging unjustly. Obviously a clear and objective set of rules would need to be posted about what constitutes an acceptable downvote. There currently is no way to make such accounts experience pain for their indiscretions, while there is a very easy and effective way to punish content creators, even if they did nothing wrong. People really don't like it when their livelihood can be destroyed by a simple click of a button by some asshole who simply doesn't like you. That imbalance of power is just plain unacceptable and frankly, it's not viable.

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I hear you, and you’ve made some important points, but just as some people won’t adopt Steem because they don’t want their potential rewards to go away or their post to be hidden, they also don’t want to see total crap content earning hundreds of dollars from the rewards pool. Both create a “That’s not fair!!!” response. The original white paper was clear about the super linear curve and rewards being like a lottery. People didn’t get comfortable with that and preferred something more equitable. So we got a linear “fair” curve and many of those who could exploit it for short term gains over value creation for the network did so. Eventually others had to follow along with similar behavior or get left behind as their Steem Power stake diminished compared to those who work the system.

I agree though, the imbalance of power here is a big challenge. Dan Larimer had some now famous run-ins with other powerful accounts (taking bernie’s reputation very negative, for example), but ultimately it didn’t matter because the system couldn’t resolve the power imbalance and Dan left instead of working to fix it.

Maybe it’s unfixable. Maybe the solution is Steem engine tokens or SMTs allowing communities to build their own interfaces with their own rules. If so, maybe STEEM could just become a really useful cryptocurrency and all rewards not related to securing it via block production could go away. I imagine that would piss of just about everyone, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.

> At the time that post was written, STEEM had a market cap of over a billion dollars. Today it's just over $100M. Where many other tokens have grown 10x in value, STEEM has declined 10x.

Very few tokens have increased 10x since early 2018 and in fact very few have increased at all. Bear market and all.

Nevertheless STEEM has seriously underperformed even relative to that market and most of those other tokens, so your point is still fundamentally correct.

My data goes all the way back to the launch in 2016, but you’re right that the timing of that post is different, so I think I got that a bit confused in my head.

I like how you took the time to lay it out as you understood it to be. So in that vain I agree with you 100% but I am no fan of the downvote for 1 simple reason. And I realize there are more than 1 reason to downvote. But for me I was in the twitter beta test and spent a lot of time up at Facebook campus. These companies have spent a decade training millions and millions of social media users how to share and consume content. And whether we like it or not, it has short form and mostly "shit" content that only people within their "social' group may or may not like. If we are to retain a social media element of steem we need to embrace that style of content and not downvote it . Instagram alone has thousands of influencers with millions of followers that would be far better off moving over to steem and subsequently moving their followers over to curate than by staying on instagram. If we model ourselves after a currently irrelevant long form content platform like Medium, we are dead in the water. I don't like seeing share2steem or actiffit content downvoted. Those types of dapps are our future whether or not steemians currently "get it" or not. In my opinion that is where our growth is and if we have influencers participating and earning here, then the investors will follow. I'm fine with the fork, just not the downvoting because big stake holders will just downvote for the hell of it.

I think you make some very important points. Steem is still in the “What am I?” stage and the dominance of Steemit.com in defining that self-perception can’t be overstated. Most people still use Steemit to access Steem content. Many people have very entrenched views on what is valuable here and what isn’t, and your point is important that it might be categorically based according to the medium (memes, short form tweet style, images, video, etc). I think the promise of SMTs was supposed to resolve this by letting each community creat their own token of value. Steem-engine is starting to make that promise a reality, but that doesn’t necessarily help the STEEM price.

> big stake holders will just downvote for the hell of it.

As I mention in my post, this may be the single most important reason some larger brands and influencers stay away from Steem.

The challenge is, when monetary rewards are involved, people act differently. Instagram likes are free and dot mean anything. If they did, the behavior on Instagram would change.

I wouldn’t consider Medium irrelevant, just different. The dialogue we’re having now is because of this long format approach.

I really like how you lay out your points. You're very easy to understand and that is important because very few steemians can take a step back to explain their thoughts clearly enough without being tribal lol. I agree about monetary rewards. You can pretty much figure out how things will be when you throw in human nature. That being said I firmly believe our future is in more instagrammy type content and not in Medium style. Medium is irrelevant when you compare it to social media platforms. The problem with steem engine (which I love) is that the content gets shared to the steemit feed and that's where the downvotes come from. People really should just hold the downvotes unless it is blatant spam.
For example I see a guy who posts a link to his site where he sells gift cards. It's 100% link spam. He should be downvoted. But people should layoff downvoting share2steem posts.

Thank you for your kind words.

Do you think people should downvote content that is overvalued? By overvalued, I mean a mostly spam comment self-voted to the max. Should that be downvoted to leave more of the rewards pool for other, more useful content?

No. And the reason I think that is because in the big picture it doesn't do that much damage unless the person has a high stake. That stuff going with plankton doesn't bother me at all.

What I often thought is that if whales would take 1 of their 10 valuable daily votes each day and split it up into 100 1% percent votes and vote plankton and minnows with it, the whole ecosystem would be different. Even if they did ten 10% votes to save their precious time things would have been different and we wouldn't have come to this.
The "Rich" need to be smart enough to protect and grow their stake by giving a little away instead of being greedy. 1 lousy vote a day sent out to the universe would have, and could still make a huge difference here.

> unless the person has a high stake

And in this case?

I've seen examples where people would count from 1 to hundreds, each as individual comments, and vote them up with sock-puppet accounts for many dollars per vote. If we allowed this, people would extract the entire rewards pool inflation for themselves with junk content.

These are hard problems to solve with no easy answers. I agree, people should think in terms of long-term value creation instead of short-term wealth extraction (see my post on that for more). Until then.... what do yo we do? What changes do we make to our system here to incentivize the behavior we hope for and prevent the behavior we don't like?

no I do agree with you on this point. Blatent reward pool rape is bad. But I get downvoted for my actifit posts all the time and I feel like that has no purpose.

So how do you allow for one and not the other?

If some things were made off limits for downvotes, people would extract value from those opportunities.

These are very difficult problems to solve. It's easy to complain about them when they impact us personally, but very very difficult to built actual solutions for them.

The way it is solved in my opinion is to not encourage downvotes. because we know factoring in human nature that it will be abused by the high stake holders here. It will only effect the low stake holders. Literally every economic model ive ever studied has eventually gotten to that. But I get what you are saying. Perhaps this isn't the right time to introduce that. It should be left out of this fork. In my opinion a bunch of bad actors will wipe out newbies and drive them from the platform instead of being smart and distributing upvotes based on effort. I will go with the flow and I'm a steemian for life but you may have noticed in my wallet I have not powered up the 1100 steem Ive accumulated. That will go to diversify. I'm 100% invested in steem and it's scary because I don't believe those with power are smart enough to protect and grow the platform.

I highlighted in my post how the changes pretty much require downvoting to be effective according to the lead engineer's comments. If people can just extract as much of the rewards pool as they want without any way to counter that, things will get far worse very quickly. You do see that, right? I'm not saying downvotes won't be abused (they will). I am saying less wealth extraction at the expense of others creating valuable content can be avoided if people use proof of brain and both upvote and downvote. If it is left out of this fork, then there will not be a way to effectively counter what is already a problem.

It is the old do as I say and not as I do.

https://steemit.com/rewardmyself/@rewardpoolrape/since-it-s-now-acceptable-to-reward-yourself

This is allowed to go on? But you get downvoted for your little penny post? What a fucking joke. Let me let you in on a secret.. the biggest abuser of them all.. IS THEIR BOSS.

Wow there I said it.. and it feels good to tell the truth.

Good luck out here in 1941 Germany! The rich are the Germans and the poor are the Jews! These posts are PROPAGANDA by Steemnazis!

YOU HAVE BEEN @kawaiicrushed LIKE THE LITTLE CONSPIRITARD BITCHES YOU ARE!!!

Absolutely agree. Downvotes serve no real purpose, because the people upvoting are upvoting with the share of Steem Power that they purchased. Who gets to decide that what they like they should not like? Some people like to upvote sophisticated articles of deep study and others like to upvote funny cat pictures. To each their own I say.

Honestly, I believe the biggest problem on Steem are these idealists dreaming of this perfect content machine that produces only pure content. However, this doesn't work, and the evidence is not there to show that the world is going to use downvotes for good. People are already much worse behaved online than they are in person, but now we're giving some people the power to be a real pain in someone else's backside just because they can. We need to think about whether Steem will cultivate positivity or negativity.

I think it's a positive thing when someone downvotes a comment spammer who is extracting rewards and ensures those rewards instead go to people adding value. Scammers can extract a lot of value (this is just one example) and if the community doesn't work to prevent that, more scammers will come until it becomes a serious systemic risk that destroys the system.

The rewards pool is, in a way, a shared collaborative commons. If we don't protect it, it will be abused. Votes are how we come to consensus on how that works.

That said, I agree, people using downvotes to harm others may actually increase.

Respectfully, I do not agree it is a shared collaborative commons. This mentality (again, I say this with respect) is one that I believe keeps Steem from success. Please allow me to make my point that Steem Power is not a shared collaborative commons, thus the inflation pool is also not a shared collaborative commons.

I find that Steem attracts a weird mix of ideologies that conflict with each other. Its trying to gain importance through appealing to traditional private investment and at the same time its trying to claim the reward pool as public property. The reward pool is not public property though, it belongs to those that have purchased Steem Power and those they decide to give it to as well.

Now, I would be fine if it did become a shared collaborative commons, but that would require Steem to make SP more about a resource credit economy than what it is now. I would say that Minds.com is a shared collaborative commons design, and people seem to enjoy it quite a lot.

Under the current design, I argue that the most logical way to look at the reward pool is as interest for stake, much like a CD. Only, in this example the CD itself is capable of being worth more than the initial investment and so the person depositing the value into the CD will support people that appear to be making their asset worth more.

When I look at Steem I see a new kind of bank account that gives me interest in multiple ways and a feature that allows me to improve the value of my stored money's buying power by contributing some of my interest toward someone or some project that can increase the buying power of my money. That's a very cool bank, but it gets better. I can retain all of my stored value but provide authority over the distribution of my interest to some other account for all kinds of benefits, creating a cool thing called the delegation economy. Now, I don't even have to buy things, just give away the authority over the distribution of interest.

Some may not like this but that concept is an entirely capitalistic design and Steem aims to use capitalism to achieve its objective of sprawling the internet.

I care about equality and I would love to see something kind of like a "shared collaborative commons" and I think SteemBasicIncome is doing a decent job of trying to make that happen on Steem. However, the reality of Steem's design is that it depends on investors in a very capitalistic way. Buyers of property have full right to their property, and capitalism is about protecting people's rights over their property. So, I argue that the owners of Steem Power have the right to do with their power whatever they want, because they paid for the right (read: not a privilege).

Somehow, Steem attracts demonetized/censored content producers seeking relief from Youtube/Twitter and also attracts authoritarians that want the power to shut certain ideas and actions down. It seems to attract the capitalist and the socialist alike. People want Steem to be a Twitter/Reddit with $0.50 rewards for memes and quick posts, while others want Steem to be this sacred and pure oracle of humankind's collective wisdom. Steem suffers from an identity crisis and I think that is the real problem.

Steem knows it needs capitalistic-minded investors to make the reward pool worth more than just monopoly money, but then it wants to tell those investors that the reward pool is a "shared collective commons" that belongs to those meriting a reward in a meritocracy. The problem with that is that to a private investor this is confusing and crazy. In their mind, they bought the Steem Power, and they have a right to their "power" and what they want to do with it.

So, I suggest that it is an illegitimate claim to tell an investor that they voted on something they should not have and stole from the pool. They purchased their votes and those votes are now their property. It shouldn't matter if they vote on an article so beautifully designed that Medium would be jealous or a silly cat picture that is original content from another site.

Steem lost Dtube because of that "original content only" mentality. Reddit is a place where one can share content from another place, and yet Steem"it" trying to imitate the design of Reddit doesn't allow this due to that "sacred oracle" argument. And I have personally seen Cheetah abusing perfectly original content from reputable sources such as @jsecoin that is on Cheetah's blacklist simply because they didn't jump through Steemcleaner's hoops to prove authenticity. The world doesn't need to see an organization use Steem to create an internet police state.

Downvoting allows someone to weaponize their stake in Steem to hinder someone else's stake. It does not only hurt content creators, but also those that voted with their purchased stake. In its current design it is also a might-makes-right design, which is not good for drawing in new participants. My largest concern, however, is my fear that downvoting will worsen the negative behavior we already see online.

Weaponizing money is not likely a good idea. Many nations would likely continue happily using USD for international negotiations, but after the US began using the dollar as a weapon to force their political ideals on other nations, gold and Bitcoin began to look attractive. The same can happen to Steem... Would you prefer investing in a network that allows richer people than you to have power over your earnings and harass you, or the place that gives everyone the positive vote for things they like?

Karma is a dapp on EOS that removed the downvote (if I recall correctly) and it was something I took note of immediately. Steem might face rough competition if other platforms provide a more pleasant experience.

All this said, I do believe we have plenty that we likely do agree with each other on. And I think that if you review the things that I write you will see that equality and the ability for a common forum are important to me. Honestly, I have made suggestions that would turn the reward pool into something I would call a shared collaborative commons. I think turning it into a common reward system would be very good, my argument is just that it is currently in a very weird mix of opposing concepts and for this reason discourages investors.

Steem needs investors to work, but it also discourages investors. The way to make the reward pool an actual shared collaborative commons and incentivize investors is to give both what they want by separating the two groups and their rewards.

Steem Discourages Investors

Investors do not want to curate, they want passive income, ROI. But we're trying to force them to be active, which is crazy. We're trying to make them have a worker mindset when they have an investor mindset. We need them because their financial investment gives value to the reward pool, making it something worth earning for content producers. We don't need them to work, we need them to stay.

Steem Discourages Content Producers

Content producers are not investors, they are workers. We are likely not motivating the Tim Pools and Joe Rogans of the world to be active on Steem likely because, while they have money, they are not of an investing mindset but a worker mindset. Steem is failing to give them what they want by trying to make them become investors. They just want to work and earn. We don't need them to invest, we need them to work.

Steem Discourages Fans

Fans are not investors, fans are readers/viewers. Once again we're trying to force people to be what they are not. We have a frustratingly unaccommodating sign-up process that requires a substantial investment for us to be able to support the content producers we like. Why would anyone bother? Donating satoshis with Bitbacker or USD through Patreon is easier. Fans don't need to be investors, and our dreams of economic world domination is not going to change that.

A Solution

I have been excited as much as everyone else by the idea of SMTs, but at some point I realized they are almost completely pointless. They are not completely pointless, because some projects will get Youtube big and want their own reward system and that's where we can keep them within the system. However, most projects won't get big enough to be able to provide enough value to the holders of their token.

The currency STEEM has a great potential for being a universal internet currency. While big social sites will likely go SMT, small communities will want to earn STEEM, which they can rely on for having a value.

So where is the solution?

Investors prop up the value of STEEM by purchasing STEEM and staking, not curating as the audience. A robust resource credit economy can incentivize investors to buy and hold SP in order to generate RCs for selling to content producers needing RCs to post to the blockchain.

Authors can be motivated to pay for RC delegations in order to receive access to Steem upvotes from fans. This system puts the financial burden not on fans but authors seeking profit. This is a more palatable approach because we know that content producers will spend money to make money.

Forcing internet audiences to become investors to participate is not going to work if the goal is mass adoption rather than a small investor's community. Would McDonald's be making money if they required customers to own McD stock before buying a burger? That just doesn't work.

Audiences need a much more approachable way to participate. Cutting down fake accounts are important, and although difficult, not impossible. We need it to be easy for audiences to upvote what they like.

Upvotes need to be equal in order to truly be "wisdom of the crowds" as some people claim Steem is. Also, to make the reward pool a true shared collaborative commons we should adopt Minds.com's approach to their reward pool. Anyone with an account can upvote content, which is also tied to a hash of a phone number to discourage bots. On Minds.com resteems, upvotes, follows all add to the "network value" that the content producer provides to the network and the tally of these actions taken on a producer's content results in a reward matching the value they add to the network. That is what I call a shared collaborative commons, my friend!

Step 1:
Investors want scarcity, if it were up to me, I'd cut the inflation down to 1%. This alone would motivate massive buy-ins from investors, making the SBD value of that 1% hugely profitable for content producers.

Step 2:
I would disconnect votes for reward share from SP staked and give every account a total of 10 votes they may make per day all with the very same weight. But I would make SP generate RCs that would be necessary for authors to broadcast posts, and I would hike up the RC cost for posts by quite a lot. That way, investors can get their ROI on dlease.io by delegating their SP.

Step 3:
I would separate the audience from all costs except comments and transactions which would need to be treated the same as posts. Resteems, follows, upvotes and whatever other social activities should be free. But all financial transactions, posts and comments should require RCs.

Step 4:
No more curation reward. Its not necessary with this system, because if the audience wants to earn STEEM as well they will need to get enough RCs or have the site gift them RC delegations in order to participate. They get to show their interest in content with upvotes, follows and resteems for free, but economic participation requires RCs.

This design allows us to get a true "wisdom of the crowd" setup, incentivize investors to come and stay, motivate authors to spend a smaller but ultimately significant amount and not ask too much out of content consumers.

All that said, if this idea was implemented the HoboDAO project would have to massively restructure how it would work. So, yeah, I'm cool with staying the course too. ;)

Upvoting because you put a lot of thought into this, not because I necessarily agree with it all.

Steem Power is separate from the rewards pool. Let's not confuse the too. The rewards pool is based on the blockchain inflation. Steem Power is just a mechanism within proof of brain to try and figure out how to distribute this inflation which (IMO) is not owned by anyone or if it is, it's owned by everyone who has Steem Power. It's "common" to Steem Power holders or at the very least they have the highest claim on how it should be distributed.

> Steem suffers from an identity crisis and I think that is the real problem.

I agree. In many ways, it tries to be all things to all people. It wants to make investors happy, curators happy, authors happy... all while remaining within the constraints of a blockchain system. That's very difficult to do.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Steem discourages any specific aspect but instead highlight how these are competing interests and to improve one is to make it worse for someone else. My hope was SMTs and communities could solve this by creating different economic approaches to better meet the needs of different personas.

Your post got me thinking about the need for an RC marketplace, something I hope we see get developed in the future.

> Upvotes need to be equal

Hard to prevent Sybil with this approach. I don't know how Minds prevents abuse, but I remember when Steemit had a phone-number based signup, and I hear it got owned by scammers.

> I'd cut the inflation down to 1%.

And curators/authors who are here for rewards would leave. That said, maybe that's what eventually needs to happen and put a focus on investors.

> I would hike up the RC cost for posts by quite a lot

Again, people would leave and new users would avoid the site and complain about pay to play.

> other social activities should be free

If they are recorded on the blockchain, they can't be free.

If I may make a quick reply to the 1% point. A lot of investors in the crypto space care about a cryptocurrency being deflationary or super low inflation. I believe the general public are not concerned by how much STEEM they get, just how much money they make.

Steem is designed to reward in SBD when the price of STEEM rises and switch to rewarding in STEEM when the price of STEEM drops. If Steem were to become hugely popular the price of STEEM would go up and people would be rewarded mostly in SBD. This is a great system that allows for one's share of STEEM to not matter so long as they are getting good value in SBD for their content.

When a blockchain's block rewards halve the price of the coin rises by a great deal as people feel urgent demand over the squeezed supply. If we dropped the inflation down to 1% I suspect it would motivate investors to FOMO right on in boosting the reward pool value, despite the reduced amount of STEEM supply in that reward pool.

Sure, the actual STEEM everybody would be getting would be way less, but the dollar signs next to posts and comments would likely have more digits on the right side of the "." in my opinion.

That's certainly a possibility, but you see how much people are freaking out about taking 10% away to fund the SPS? Good luck trying to find consensus on removing most of the rewards. Also, the witnesses still have to get paid or they will leave and this whole thing goes away.

Well, I suppose the share of STEEM that Steemit Inc. owns would only be even more drastic if we dropped the inflation. For now, I could see how the inflation does help make the distribution more fair over time.

> the evidence is not there to show that the world is going to use downvotes for good

Ummmm have you heard of @steemflagrewards? Are you asserting not one SFR downvoter is doing so for the greater good??? (Perhaps you haven't heard of us and it's too bad. We don't abuse promotion like everyone and their mom so tend to be a more niche community.)

To quickly address your question:

I did not say there was no evidence that someone would use it for good. I said there is no evidence that the world would use it for good. Most people on the platform are hoping Steem will do well and are considered with the health of Steem. However, if Steem got to be as big as Facebook, people would stop worrying about the health of the network and begin focusing on using their downvoting power for whatever they deem worth downvoting. That opens it up to a lot of whimsical downvoting.

I recall seeing an article related to the words "steemflagrewards" that was talking about figuring out how to reduce the cost of flagging and also how to flag anonymously to avoid retaliation. That was enough for me to disagree with the group.

I mean no disrespect to you or anyone in your group, but I believe that your program is exactly the opposite of what will help Steem achieve success. The mentality behind flagging is very flawed when you think about the economics of Steem.

If you wish to know more about what I mean by that I welcome you to check out this lengthy comment I made:

https://steemit.com/hf21/@hobo.media/ptqmvo

Ultimately, and I realize that you likely strongly disagree, I don't consider use of the term "abuse" legitimate. When people purchase STEEM and turn it into Steem Power, they have paid for something and that means this "power" is not a priviledge or an opportunity but a property. Thus, standard property rights apply on Steem.

When you buy something, you are entitled to use it however you please, so long as it does not interfere with another person's rights. This is where downvotes become the true abuse. Someone with their purchased Steem Power is using their power to hurt someone else because they dislike something they did.

Upvotes are a non-aggressive action, and that voting power a person purchased and its share of the reward pool is their property because they purchased it. Downvotes violate the rights of individuals and the votes they purchased.

I believe that people should be able to upvote whatever they wish to upvote without harassment. They purchased their voting ability and that purchase helps keep the reward pool valuable.

Another gross violation against personal rights and personal property is the aggressive behavior and downvoting of bidbot customers. If two accounts make a private business arrangement with each other it is their own business.

> I recall seeing an article related to the words "steemflagrewards" that was talking about figuring out how to reduce the cost of flagging and also how to flag anonymously to avoid retaliation. That was enough for me to disagree with the group.

I did write about being against Anon flagging w/ SFR. Think if you are going to opt in for rewards with our program, there needs to be transparency particularly who flagged you and why. A flag is a mechanism of critique of content value after all.

That is why we needed to add the exclusionary blacklist functionality to skip over Anon flaggers in batch approvals.

> If you wish to know more about what I mean by that I welcome you to check out this lengthy comment I made:

> https://steemit.com/hf21/@hobo.media/ptqmvo

I'll check it out. I am also against HF21 and free downvotes but probably not for the same reason as you

> When you buy something, you are entitled to use it however you please, so long as it does not interfere with another person's rights.

That's where your worldview runs into problems as it doesn't take into account the interrelated nature of our actions and impact towards other. We do not live in bubbles, man. There implications to what we do that often affect the lives of others.

Extreme example incoming

Should the company pumping chemicals out of their smoke stacks care about the people breathing it in? It's their property, right? Hell, throw some asbestos in there. Maybe a little radon.

I'm just saying as a society there are certain protective measures we ought to take against the imprudent and / or stupid. Actually, the latter we have plenty of. They're called laws and we need them because people are stupid.

So, what of bid bottery? It's not legitimate. It's an exploit. It's the sort of thing that reasonable people on Steem and nope the hell out. It's collusive parties methodolically taking freom a shared resource but often without the sweat that should be there.

There are better reasons to invest in Steem than being part of vote buying / vote selling circlejerkery that undermines curation and pollutes the platform with trash content with laughable payout.

I've seen it all. Banana shitposts, goat shitposts, cringe shitposts, self fellatio shitposts, pizza shitposts and the list goes on and on. The #1common factor is use of "promotion" services. No, I don't think I'll be friendly to that. Not anymore than I'd be friendly to a corrupt politician buying their way into office

Well, lots of extreme examples today.

In conclusion, think your worldvirw may hold either naivete or ignorance of human nature insomuch it does not care to mitigate indirect harm. Direct aggression isn't good granted the reason is not to intervene with negatively impacted others. Unless you are a full blown moral relativist, there is a greater good. If we keep that in mind, things will go better for us rather than unmitigated assholery.

But that's just my opinion. Thanks for sharing yours.

I agree with many of your points. However, downvotes are a double-edged sword. When used non-stop against a person it is an effective way to shut down opposing opinions. At least on Steem, which would result in those people going to the competition and raising that network's value.

I fear for the harm it can do to the atmosphere of the web. Currently, we already have an issue of people not being respectful and polite with each other online.

There is a funny thing that happens on political blogs, the opposing side shows up more often than the supporters. People that agree with the blogger often don't feel as strong of an urge to say anything than those that are opposed. Now, give the fiery opposition a de-monetization button and you will have a real problem on your hands.

Such a concept is dangerous because it leads to serious topics that might need to be discussed from being discussed since it won't be profitable to point out anything controversial.

Right now content producers are looking all over for alternatives to the major social platforms because they want stability in their business. Downvotes are the opposite of stability, and I believe it will lead to people popularizing blockchain dapps that don't do it like Karma on EOS.

I believe the world has forgotten a very important word: Tolerance

You don't have to agree with someone or what they do. But we all should allow people to do what they want to do so long as it is not violence toward another person.

For some people Steem is a sacred oracle for collective wisdom, and for others its a Twitter that hooks you up with $0.10 for putting up funny pictures of your cat. To each their own I say.

We lost Dtube, they now are creating their own blockchain with their own currency. Why? Two key reasons: 1. There is an "original content only" attitude on Steem and Dtube recognizes there is network value in sharing content from another location, 2. User on-boarding is a nightmare.

That was a serious loss, and I attribute that loss to people thinking Steem needs to be this "sacred oracle" that must remain pure. The reward pool is so unattractive in value right now, and I argue that this is because people are trying to entice capitalistic investors to spend money on a coin so that the world can have a shared collaborative commons. The problem with that idea is that capitalistic investors don't give a damn about doing that.

In the link I provided you I explain how Minds.com does a great job of providing a shared collaborative commons with their currency. It can be done, but Steem is not structured to do it.

Dear @lukestokes

Great piece of work buddy. Solid read.

My strong impression is that in order for HF21 to be succesful, we would need more so called "whales" to delegate some of their SP to those who actually curate content. That would encourage curators to be more active.

Will that really happen? I hardly doubt so. I think most big players will "milk the cow" and will focus on short-term gains.

Also from my understanding - current non-linear reward curve will affect those with small voting power and will discourage those who actually upvote valuable comments.

Yours
Piotr

Many whales like Steem for what they consider passive income. Hopefully instead of delegating to bid bots for that income, they will delegate to curation services which, in theory, could mean better content discovery which (again, in theory) means higher quality content will be rewarded which might encourage other quality authors to post and get discovered.

As for small voting power, they essentially have little influence no matter what rewards method is used. That’s by design. If people find value here, they will power up to participate. If not, they won’t.

I'm actually working on a project that could solve that problem. The idea is to turn multisig accounts into DAOs. Really, any community could create a multisig account as a Decentralized Curation Community (DCC).

You can check out the post here: https://steemit.com/palnet/@hobo.media/hobodao-announcement-and-what-s-a-dcc

This looks really interesting! Thank so for sharing. I’d like to know more.

I would be happy to take some time and answer any questions you have about the project. Right now we are looking for people that are active on Steem and reliable to fill one of three roles. We have many spots in these three groups for the HoboDAO.

Let me know if I can chat with you in some form that you like such as discord or email and answer any questions you might have about this project.

None of anything on featured it great.. I mean it is a great steeming pile of propaganda.. but beyond that.. spare me the BS.

Thanks Piotr

YOU HAVE BEEN @kawaiicrushed LIKE THE LITTLE CONSPIRITARD BITCHES YOU ARE!!!

Hi Luke, just wanted to ask you something and I'm not sure if I put it right but I'll try.

Will the price of steem affect the curve - and by that I mean, will the 100 000 sp that's going to be needed in order to touch the linear curve decrease in case steem goes to let's say 1 dollar.

As far as I know, the rewards curve is not based on the price of Steem and does not adjust to it.

Well this one will be tricky...
I believe 100 000 is by far to much sp needed to get the curve going, especially if price increases..
Hopefully there will be other ways to stay involved

I have what i think is a pretty awesome idea to get more people to steemit. Basically a reward system or a referral system. I know plenty of people who are good at writing but i dont want to pester them into joining, mainly because why should i there is nothing in it for me. If i got even a very small reward for their posts for signing up under me then maybe id be incentivised to get them to join up. You can lead a horse to water but you cant make them drink it is basically how iv felt about crypto for years. I was passionate about telling my friends about how crypto could change there lives in the early years but gave up once i realised nobody wants to hear it, which is why i dont promote steemit to people.

A referral program has been discussed many times, but nothing has been implemented yet.

I've dealt with the same frustration over the past 6.5 years regarding trying to get people onboard with cryptocurrency. It's hard to teach experiential knowledge. People just have to do it and they have to do it because they want to intrinsically, not because someone gave them a reward to do it. More thoughts the experience problem here: How Do You Teach Experience? What Will Your Cryptocurrency Story Be?

i get what your saying and your right but i just know that cash rules everything around me. Give me a referral program and watch me at least try to get people to see the potential. Personally i could see it blowing up with this type of thing easily.

To me, that sounds terrible. I don't want to be around people who feel "cash rules everything around me" and who need to be paid in order to positively promote Steem. Why would we encourage that kind of person and that kind of behaviour? Yuck.

human beings, human beings are the most vile disgusting sick creatures this planet has ever seen. Im honest about it.

They say that "Hell is other people". I didn't used to understand it.

this.

That sounds kinda greedy, a referral system! It is unneeded, youwill already get money when/if STEEM goes up for referring and helping grow the ecosystem!

WARNING: IF YOU REPLY TO THIS ACCOUNT YOU WILL BE FLAGGED, YOUR REP WILL BE HARMED AND ALL OF YOUR REWARDS WILL BE REMOVED.

busy.org has had that for a long time and but you only get beneficiary rewards from your invitees posts for the first 30 days

thanks for that i didnt know.

Hey - might not be 100% what you have in mind, but did you know https://steem.ninja/ let's you refer people and earn from that referral? You can even set your own 'price' for the accounts you 'sell' and thus decide what you earn from your referral yourself.

It might be a bit 'cleaner' from an outsiders perspective than earning from other peoples posts as tish would easily be seen as 'ponzi' where the first movers get passive income from the work of others?

Anyway, just adding this as an fyi :-) Cheers!

thats cool, i do understand there is stigma around it, and im only talking about a very small reward. Its a tricky one but i still fee like it would help to get more people to steemit. It has flatlined for a while now which is not great. Coinbase, ledger all do referral programs it doesn't have to be scammy.

Yes this is the frustration I have also been through this is a good idea how do you contact the right people to make this suggestion be considered for implementation? :)

People building centralized websites on the blockchain de-values of coin. Steemit devalues, d.tube devalues, steempeak devalues. I've begged all the developers to build decentralized applications but they build capps. Centralized applications. What's the point?

Building a real dapp is hard.

@anyx has some great posts on this:

https://steemit.com/steem/@anyx/what-makes-a-dapp-a-dapp

https://steemit.com/steem/@anyx/fully-decentralizing-dapps

Also, people want to control things they create so they can take the profits. That's why I've been focused on helping promote DAC technology via eosDAC. I think DACs are the future so that everyone can be an owner, employee, and customer all at the same time. That's a truly decentralized solution. Apps, tokens, communities, non-profits, companies, governments... I think they can all benefit from forming a DAC.

I hope some day Steem becomes a DAC. https://steemit.com/steemdac/@lukestokes/steemdac-a-plan-we-can-start-today-to-decentralize-steem-governance

It's hard? They have created A.I. that THINKS and speaks code to one another.. they put a man on the fucking moon.. we have self driving cars.. the real reason they wont do it.. is THEY WANT TOTAL CONTROL.

Now do us all a favor and go fuck yourself!

Thanks

YOU HAVE BEEN @kawaiicrushed LIKE THE LITTLE CONSPIRITARD BITCHES YOU ARE!!!

Are you emotionally unstable?

Why the need to tell me to “go fuck myself”?

Wanting control is certainly one of the reasons building a real dapp is hard. Please don’t assume I was just thinking in terms of the technical challenges. Have you ever tried taking a company with investors and convincing them to covert to a DAC and a dapp approach which essentially means giving their investment and control away? There is no easy path to doing that. It’s hard.

(And yes, based on the technical requirements, that part is hard too, just like going to the noon is hard).

You are a criminal. And I will call you that with out a second thought.. this whole fucking place is an illegal ring of fraud.

YOU HAVE BEEN @kawaiicrushed LIKE THE LITTLE CONSPIRITARD BITCHES YOU ARE!!!

https://media.giphy.com/media/26tPqTOGf3MMAaJR6/giphy.gif

What law did I break?

The law will inform you of that.

YOU HAVE BEEN @kawaiicrushed LIKE THE LITTLE CONSPIRITARD BITCHES YOU ARE!!!

https://media.giphy.com/media/26tPqTOGf3MMAaJR6/giphy.gifhttps://i.imgur.com/LA9FarR.gif

Congratulations @lukestokes!
Your post was mentioned in the Steem Hit Parade in the following category:

• Comments - Ranked 6 with 64 comments

I do not know many words in your words. But I knew a lot. Well liked I'm one of the new steemers, so it's probably hard to understand. I am very happy to win your valuable Idea. Thank you very much.

I agree that doing something over and over and expecting different results is bad. But the EIP is the same thing being tried over and over.

In reality, we could change the economics all we want and it won't help. Constantly changing the economics so that investors have no clue what the true goals of the potential investment is would also qualify as insanity.

The real thing that Steem needs is a clear vision and marketing that clear vision. The EIP just adds more confusion. The original n^3 + 100% inflation would have been fine if it was marketed. Instead we keep fiddling with it, hoping investors will magically get it by osmosis.

Steemit, Inc. currently says that their vision is sustainability (ads and programmatic selling). There is no mention or focus on STEEM Power (which means there is no focus on the fundamental unit of accounting for the blockchain).

So yeah, do your EIP. I think the only marketable aspect of this hardfork will be the SPS. In fact, once the SPS is launched, I'd like to see a proposal to switch all inflation to SPS, then make witnesses beg to fund the author/comments rewards pool, curation, interest and witness pay monthly.

The three years I've been here (three years as of today, actually), I continually chuckle at the challenges of coming to human consensus. Some are freaking out about HF21 changing things too far in one direction while others are saying it doesn't change things enough. Still others say there is no real change at all.

Steemit, inc hasn't ever fully focused on selling the vision of Steem Power or of making Steemit.com a world-class website. Both, I think, are problematic. Without a fantastic interface demonstrating the value of SP, I don't see how the SP story can be sold to investors.

Switching all inflation to SPS would certainly be a radical move. Would content creators and curators stick around? Would it matter and if so, how much?

Personally, I'd still post here even without rewards. I did it for months when bernie would auto-downvote all my posts before payout. Most people would leave though. They were sold on a "get paid to post" story and they are sticking to it, even if it's only a few cents here or there (still more than Facebook/Twitter). Meanwhile, investors are, as you said, confused without a clear vision of exactly what Steem is meant to be.

Since investors don't seem to really care much about STEEM anyway, I think the EIP is worth doing because it demonstrates we can make changes and hopefully evaluate them accordingly. If we have too much opposition making this change, how would we implement your suggestion? I think we have to start slow, see how the SPS works out in terms of funding value-creating action and go from there.

If it works, I'm open to increasing the percentage to SPS. Doing so before we know how it will work is not wise. EOS had 4% inflation set to go to a SPS-like pool and it just caused a bunch of drama and uncertainty. The funds were burned and investors didn't really know how to respond. I think it's best to lay out a plan, follow it, and then evaluate. Maybe we should all be focusing on determining metrics of success for these changes and then determining what we will do next based on what those metrics tell us.

> Switching all inflation to SPS would certainly be a radical move. Would content creators and curators stick around? Would it matter and if so, how much?

My idea is just that SPS would be in-between the various existing funds. For example, the author rewards would not get funded unless it's released from the SPS. And stakeholders would campaign for more or less funding in each round.

Basically, make the SPS the priority to fund the other pools. Maybe content creators would get more funding for certain rounds and less funding for other rounds, for example.

> Since investors don't seem to really care much about STEEM anyway, I think the EIP is worth doing because it demonstrates we can make changes and hopefully evaluate them accordingly.

That's great, except for one thing. Hardly anyone is making this aspect front-and-center. You point it out. Witnesses talk about it. But it never makes it into a sound-bite or tweet or any other marketing material. Just "Look at how agile we are" would be a great official video from the biggest marketing arm of the blockchain (but who is that?). Dash does it all the time. They can even market "sporks" of all things.

> EOS had 4% inflation set to go to a SPS-like pool and it just caused a bunch of drama and uncertainty.

See, that's another example of bad marketing. I am certain we can spin burn workers into something really positive. Dash manages this just fine. Some people even come away from Dash saying, "They'd rather burn Dash than accept my proposal." That is a marketing opportunity. If we're really that discerning with our inflation, investors will take notice.

By the way, I'm also pretty excited by the notion of a SteemDAC, that you mentioned in the root post. I'd love for that to be explored. That is also pretty radical, but worth looking at, even if it's never actually rolled out and just an additional way to model the existing blockchain. "We did this because EOS did it and it seemed to work well for them" is marketable and aggrandizing.

Aggrandizing!

Heh. That single word brings back so many emotions, most of them not good (though I guess I can laugh at it now, considering the harm has already been done).

Maybe with an SPS in place we can act a bit more like Dash. Prior to that, the money spent on Steem only came from Steemit, inc. Still does. If the SPS was truly a DAC with full transparency, I could get behind your idea of letting that DAC dynamically direct things. I also think it would be confusing for investors who like Steem for passive income (which, ironically, may be the thing hurting Steem the most via bidbots, automated self-voting. etc). If the returns fluctuate each month by the whims of the SPS board, that could be really confusing.

Either way, having to demonstrate value created for value received sounds like a good way to ensure value is distributed responsibly. In theory, that's what proof of brain is supposed to be doing. Instead, it's easier to put things on auto pilot with a bot.

As to the many good points you make about marketing, does that really have to happen from Steemit alone? Witnesses, app owners, authors... anyone in the community can put together larger marketing projects and seek funding to implement them.

Maybe part of the problem is we are decentralized. We don't have a single entity representing us other than Steemit, Inc and (IMO) they haven't done a very good job so far (and I think, personally, that's due to inexperienced leadership up to this point).

> As to the many good points you make about marketing, does that really have to happen from Steemit alone? Witnesses, app owners, authors... anyone in the community can put together larger marketing projects and seek funding to implement them.

I totally agree it does not need to come solely from Steemit, Inc. In fact, probably the best move Steemit, Inc. did for the whole platform was to lay off 70% of its staff and switch to survival mode. It clearly informed the rest of the stakeholders that:

When they emerged from "survival mode" there's no mention of STEEM Power. The final sticking point is the ninja-mine, but we can just just proceed as if they didn't have it. There's not much value in STEEM Power. It's not being marketed. It's a dead end unless someone else starts marketing it. And no one is marketing STEEM Power right now. So time to move on to Steem Engine based solutions or something else on the second layer.

You are employed by Steem(it) and you feed people propaganda.. kindly go fuck yourself

Thanks

YOU HAVE BEEN @kawaiicrushed LIKE THE LITTLE CONSPIRITARD BITCHES YOU ARE!!!

False.

Don’t amuse the retards. They bask in their ignorant statements.

Propaganda Nazi <- INERTIA

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmaomrePUSDb5ddqThbkTcv8mWhpYMSvfo5GiSrfnrAeTB/image.png]

Created July 13 2016

SAME DAY (WITHIN 24 HOURS OF JOINING) YOU MAGICALLY FOLLOWED THE TOP DOGS OF STEEM. NO LEARNING CURVE OF WHO IS WHO. JUST STRAIGHT TO NED/PFUNK etc etc. YOU ARE ONE OF THEM UNDER A SOCK PUPPET. YOU MIGHT FOOL THE SHEEP BUT YOU SURE AS FUCK DON'T FOOL ME.

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZSk9bthZGEu8FFbNSZVSVeMNCccbfwoi8dHiih4VrGBv/image.png]

the SAME DAY you joined you magically followed:

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZiG8RdoabrdPkAuWrMzPrjdGDXRs9usGWYndSo5pVu7m/image.png]

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmfFu4QW1fmZNrnNhwWryfKuA3PGDxYMy4qhhEyatCFxnv/image.png]

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQA8n4uy9SQBHZFkcPVBLuMyHYom5uc44zygDmWeCz2BM/image.png]

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmPBA1XRDpoKVnPnouoS2XCYifZBPDE6hHgNdziCZo7wBG/image.png]

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQme4ZWfKvo6HxMwjU3eSFrNsVpJGEQkuQcdm5So3Gk9fkU/image.png]

and we all know WHO HELLO IS. Why of course he is one of the biggest dogs here and ID # 368. He also came just a few accounts before good old Bernie.. your bud who you comment on and support like glue.

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmdgNBRfFZoKbFmpwC4CJu59JwUjcR9FhuWiFjBLDwUPy8/image.png]

There are tons of messages of you giving out MINING INSTRUCTIONS you LYING MOTHER FUCKER.

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmV5TQHGfgtMe4n7fpVXWFVBS83D6KcSfKEsQjw4pazwBT/image.png]

INERTIA WORKS FOR STINC, IS AN ORIGINAL MINER, AND IS A SOCK PUPPET ACCOUNT.

I HAVE MASSIVE SHIT YOU SAID WITHIN 24 HOURS OF JOINING THAT PROVE YOU ARE NO "AVERAGE BEAR". YOU FOLLOWED TOP DOGS, YOU GIVE DETAILED MINING INSTRUCTIONS TO THOSE WHO WERE STUCK. YOU ARE A FUCKING SOCK PUPPETING LITTLE BITCH.

YOU HAVE BEEN @kawaiicrushed LIKE THE LITTLE CONSPIRITARD BITCHES YOU ARE!!!

HF21 is extremely bad. People who put in the effort to make blog posts get their rewards cuts. People just upvoting get more. Even whales get increased curation rewards just for clicking on an upvote button. Maybe the best strategy for everyone is power up and delegate their complete SP out to get automatic rewards and do nothing. Have they gone mad?

Thanks for sharing your views.

Do efforts on blog posts equate to value? If some people work harder than others on a post, does that make the most more valuable? How are you defining value here? If a post is considered "valuable" does that value change the price of the STEEM token?

"Just upvoting" with a non-linear curve no longer means they will get a meaningful curation reward. They have to upvote stuff other people agree is valuable. That means effective curation. That means more generally-accepted-as-valuable content rising to the trending page. That, hopefully, means more investment in Steem and Steem Power by brands who want to be associated with this high quality content site.

Delegating SP to effective curation systems would actually be a good use of SP. Some might say it's a better use than posting valueless content and self-voting it to get a reward. One fills the blockchain with crap, the other improves content discovery and has the potential to make Steem look like a better investment.

Edit: btw, your "have you gone mad?" statement fits nicely into the post I linked to first in my article: https://steemit.com/relationships/@lukestokes/we-disagree-are-you-ignorant-immoral-or-stupid

Well, I see you still have a really different opinion. Nothing stops bots/people from finding the most profitable posts to upvote to get the most rewards. Got nothing to do with the value of a post. So we will see that the top popular bloggers get the most votes. People will cluster around those. Newbies will have a lot of difficulties getting popular when blogging. We will have more a "winner takes it all" thing. Self votes also become more profitable I think?

I do not really believe most people buy Steem to make Steemit better (it's a pity, but that's the case I think). Most just invest in cryptos that will give them the highest ROI. If you delegate SP out, those people/bots will in a lot of cases 'optimize' their votes to get the highest ROI.

You're highlighting many of the reasons why I was in support of a linear rewards curve. Unfortunately it didn't work out that way and it was just gamed even more. Yes, the little guys will get very little. It will go back to being more like a lottery as originally designed and as outlined in my post. I do think more of the reward going to curation combined with the ease of downvotes (and hopefully tooling to make content to downvote easier to discover) have the potential to change things up this time. We'll see.

It's not really a lottery when there is near-linearity among everything above 16 STEEM. It should be quite different from the original n^2.

Thanks for clarifying. I need to go back and re-read the deep dive post on the curve change. I'm not the best at the maths.

I have never downvoted anyone. In some cases down voting might be a good option. However I have mostly seen that downvoting is being misused. Like "oh you don't share my opinion, well I will downvote, and if you continue posting the same thing, I will continue downvoting everything you put on Steemit".

Yep, that happens, but so does people extracting thousands of dollars by self-voting and voting via sock puppets on completely useless (often spam) content. Just because most people don't see it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It's usually done on older posts as comments to avoid being noticed. People complain about low rewards or a low STEEM price, but often they don't understand what causes those things. People extracting value from the Steem rewards pool is a big part of that. At least vengeance based downvotes can be countered with upvotes.

I just read this, please tell me this is not true:

Under HF20 a post receiving $1 in upvotes would give the author $0.75.

Under HF21:

The reward pool will be 10% lower to fund the SPS.
The CLRC will reduce the payout by a further 40% compared to linear.
The payout to the author will then be 50% (rather than 75%).
I make this: $1 * 90% * (1 - 40%) * 50% = 0.27 under HF21

So broadly: $0.75 under HF20 vs $0.27 under HF21, a reduction of about two-thirds for smaller payouts.

If the $1 vote was a single vote from a single account, then yes, the non-linear curve would give a different result by design. This will hopefully prevent comment farming and self-voting we see which leaves more of the rewards pool for valuable content. If it was a number of votes, then I think you'll begin to approach the same amount as previously. See the deep dive for details and examples: https://steemit.com/steem/@vandeberg/reward-curve-deep-dive

The end result is, yes, I think the author rewards per post will go down. If that's too much of a problem, people may want to try other experiments like https://palnet.io or do what I suggested in my post and hide the $$$ to figure out what motivates you to be here.

Thanks for the info!

> If the $1 vote was a single vote from a single account, then yes, the non-linear curve would give a different result by design.
>If it was a number of votes, then I think you'll begin to approach the same amount as previously.

Hey Luke. Does the number of votes matter? Wouldn't it be the same payout irrespective?

Otherwise people would just split up their large accounts into smaller ones, which negates the point of the CLRC change.

The number of stake weighted votes matter, as far as I understand. The stake part is important.

There is no trivial way for a bot to find the most profitable posts to upvote because the curation algorithm is designed such that voting on anything is equally profitable at any given point in time. To tell the difference requires anticipating how others are going to vote which in turn requires evaluating some aspects of the post. People and perhaps some forms of AI can do this, but simple bots can not.

Self-votes are not any more profitable, there is actually no change there except: a) small payouts are penalized, which will include a lot of small self-votes in practice, and b) with cheaper downvotes it is hopefully more likely that undeserved self-votes will be downvoted (though it is not guaranteed this will happen)

But let's say there are a few popular bloggers, wouldn't that mean that people with automatically votes more and more for a few of the top bloggers to get the highest payout, even when a certain post is garbage?

First of all, it goes linear after about 16 STEEM, so based on current prices, once the payout goes above $6, piling on more votes does not increase the payout on one such post more than another.

Second, even generating a high payout for a blogger doesn't directly benefit you as a voter, unless you are the blogger and are self-voting, which is a different issue.

> it is hopefully more likely that undeserved self-votes will be downvoted (though it is not guaranteed this will happen)

I think we will need easy-to-use tools for finding these posts and downvoting them. Without that, it's unlikely people will spend time doing this and these changes kind of need this to happen for this to actually improve things around here.

I don't think there is any real shortcut apart from people being willing to subjectively use their downvotes on payouts that just aren't worth it to Steem to be getting paid what they are. Which very well may not happen due to a variety of reasons.

When I say self-voting (and vote selling) that is a shorthand for posters opportunistically extracting more than their contributions are worth. There are many ways for that to happen other than the obvious and literal self-voting that can be easy found by tools, including multiple accounts and sock puppets, vote trading, purchased votes, games, social engineering, etc. and this is not at all a complete list.

You're right, the time and effort (as well as why bother to get involved) factor is a major consideration.

> that can be easy found by tools

Know of any projects actively working on this we might support through SPS?

Maybe my comment wasn't clear. I do not think this can be helped much by tools.

There are probably some existing apps that identify literal self votes but I don't think that is very useful and I wouldn't support much SPS funding for that. If we did build a super-duper self-vote finder, then milkers will just get more clever and the investment will have been largely wasted. There is no substitute for voting based on value, which is almost entirely subjective, or at least requires "intelligence" to assess.

If that's the case, what value is there in making the downvote pool easier to use? If no one will use it and no tools will be built to help people use it more effectively, what's the point?

I don't think we know that no one will use it. That is absolutely a risk to HF21 "working" but it could also turn out that people use it. For example, there has been a lot of talk about downvoting certain prominent and high level reward milkers. The potential for low-level milking is severely reduced by the convergent linear curve. We'll see whether that actually happens, though. Many have doubts, including myself (just not sure).

Rationality is something to start with. Evidence is the next step.

It is shown, that communication networks have an "intrinsic" value. It emerges from the number of users and is described by network-laws like Metcalfe.

• Odlyzkos Function V = a × n log(n) a: USD/MAU
• Metcalfes Function V = a × n² a: USD/MAU²
  (MAU = monthly active users). [Odlyzko and Tilly 2005]

It holds for Facebook, Tencent, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash and it will hold true for Steem. It is independent of our belief system.

Studies:
Facebook and Tencent: Zhang et al. 2015
Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash Alabi 2017
Bitcoin: Peterson 2018, Civitarese 2018
Valuation of DLT: Vitalik Buterin 2017

Of course, in the end, your are right, people value the shares/token by buying, but a network with 2-Million users will never be worth nothing and a network with 2-billion users will always be worth more than the smaller network.

A Hardfork shouldn't focus on anything but user experience. This valuation model was popular in the Dot.com Hype. Jeff Bezos understood it immediately.

> >>“If there’s one thing Amazon.com is about, it’s obsessive attention to the customer experience end-to-end. Internet, Shminternet”<<
>>"In the longrun, there never will be any misalignment between customers interest and shareholders interest"
<< - Jeff Bezos 1999

HF21 proposes a "DAO" which´s voting-model is based on stake (Focus on Shareholder needs). Stake is extremely distributed and makes any voting obsolete. One account (e.g. steemit) can outperform anybody and will always win. Opposite of decentralization and DAO.

Ralph Merkle (the crypto guy Merkle trees are named after) actually wrote a paper on DAOs and why they need to be democratic...the paper is peer-reviewed by Buterin, Hoskinson, and others

maybe I'm to dumb to get the point, but HF21 forks the users away. Even Larimer said Steem was intended to be a DAO, organized by the users.

I agree the user experience has been mostly ignored when it comes to Steem (both for the developers dealing with the APIs and the reference implementation demonstrated by steemit.com).

You make an excellent point about the value of networks, but social media is slightly different than a physical network, but I'm curious to check those studies out and see what comparisons can be made to the social media examples.

> Stake is extremely distributed

I think you meant to say poorly distributed, yes? Steemit and early minors have a huge stake made worse by the early massive inflation. I remember this post from almost three years ago calling out how crazy that inflation was.

I'll definitely check out that paper by Merkle. Thank you.

> HF21 forks the users away.

That's a bold statement. Can you elaborate?

I powered down in March based on the extrapolation of user-loss, hard decision but I tripled my token. And as soon as Steem stabilizes I can power up even more. This is bigger than us, it is important to have a social-media DAO.

> That's a bold statement. Can you elaborate?

Maybe I misinterpret hardfork-21. I hope so:

Wealth always follows a powerlaw, this is what I meant by extreme (right, you can call it poorly distributed!). In the case of pareto-distribution (80/20) 20% can out-perform the majority. Within the top-20%, its the same --> 20% can out-perform 80%. For exsample the account @steemit holds 31Million SP

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUJcJPnsztVd5LMiqqn3Xt3YcbKFCykxYi6NfzAqm8uca/image.png]

when they leave, the problem does not disappear, powerlaws in free market are inevitable.

When we quantify decentralization, we see that wealth is never decentralised.
[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUY618vYArqw8xvY8QsunNF351yeB1WpSCotfRLBx1oc5/image.png]
[quantifying decentralization with "Nakamoto" (Gini) coeficient]
it is near to total inequality. HF-21 transfers this distribution on the proposal-model of Steem and establishes mathematically an anti-DAO or centralized autonomous organization. If whales would respect the wisdom of the crowd, this would be no problem, but IF is never good. Up to this point, it was shown that people make short-sighted decisions to maximize individual profit. This is rational but not sustainable. Self-votes are the best example. If we had used all the self-votes to vote on Influencer (we already had channels with some million followers) or just other people, by now, steemit would be a top 1000 Website.

Thank you for your effort to communicate with the community!

Having worked within a DAC/DAO structure for over a year now with eosDAC. I guess I disagree that the SPS will be an anti-DAO. Unlike self-voting, voting for a proposal is a very visible activity. I think it will cause well-intentioned stake holders to use their stake more effectively by promoting action which benefits the network. Stake holders who want to maximize their own individual gains can't easily do so with an open, public proposal system. We can look to other cryptocurrency projects like Dash, SmartCash, and BitShares to learn from how their proposal systems have worked. Now, if it's not a real DAC (like the SteemDAC idea I've been thinking about) then there's opportunity for collusion, bribery, and such because things are not done transparently on chain. I guess we'll just get more of the same in that case. I don't think the 80/20 rule can be solved though. Pure democracy systems have their own tyranny of the majority problems. What seems to work is having a solid group in the 20 percent who understand how to improve themselves and those around them. Ideally, the custodians elected by the community would be those people.

> steemit would be a top 1000 Website.

Unfortunately, that right there highlights the disconnect. Steemit, Inc never had this as a goal from the beginning and that, I think, is a big part of why things have been so difficult around here. Steemit.com was just a reference implementation of what's possible with Steem.

This post is supported by $1.34 @tipU upvote funded by @lauch3d :)@tipU voting service: instant, profitable upvotes + profit sharing tokens | For investors.

> I powered down in March based on the extrapolation of user-loss

You are a genius! I've started in June, but didn't repeat in autumn :(
Why, because I kept believing that those with millions, those who are/will lose millions are smarter than me and I believed they will make several good decisions.

Unfortunately, I was wrong

I know that I'm no genius (that's the problem, we are not and even if we are, you cant calculate the future, you need simple heuristics to eliminate estimation-errors), this is why I rely on simple facts and heuristics.

But Steem is not doomed, the crew of the ship is doomed :) Easter Island 2.0

:D yes, extrapolation is tough. It's a strange feeling, when you see the soluion which is simple, and living in a horror of wrong decisions (politics, business, familly... )

Yup, not working like this!

WARNING: IF YOU REPLY TO THIS ACCOUNT YOU WILL BE FLAGGED, YOUR REP WILL BE HARMED AND ALL OF YOUR REWARDS WILL BE REMOVED.

The 'featured posts' section of Steemit.com has become the Stinc propaganda feed.

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbKogzwMBXQFrKuMXtHbTxp1xMMbXbNwCFUigCAG3Xtdv/image.png]

Their hand is in the cookie jar.. of course they will feed you any shit they are told to say and behave as if it is the gospel truth.

Only a moron could fall for this shit

YOU HAVE BEEN @kawaiicrushed LIKE THE LITTLE CONSPIRITARD BITCHES YOU ARE!!!

Realmente este hardfork21, no apoya a los nuevos usuarios su apoyo va dirigido a los curadores , bien es cierto que ayuda a escoger mejor la calidad de las publicaciones a votar, pero hay a autores que merecen un buen voto y esto desmotiva y por lo tanto la afluencia de usuarios abandonan y el movimiento de la criptomoneda asumo que también baja en el mercado. Compartire esta publicación

The point of rewarding curation is to, hopefully, reward people who find those authors who deserve a good vote (especially new ones) and ensure they receive it. Curation rewards are much higher if you find a great post early before anyone else compared to just voting on the same author over and over again. I'm hoping curation services powered by real proof of brain will become popular so that good authors can get discovered and rewarded.

I think HF 21 is a step forward,,, the only way to progress is to implement what we think can be good and if we fail just try again.

Downvoted because I don't believe you should be a top 20 witness.

Good luck to you, in the end the STEEM power holders will decide.

Agree this is just propaganda by Steem(it) Inc to protect their $$$ so the price doesn't take while they DUMP MILLIONS on the market!

YOU HAVE BEEN @kawaiicrushed LIKE THE LITTLE CONSPIRITARD BITCHES YOU ARE!!!

Steemit, Inc has wasted too much time perpertuaing an essentially discouraging economic model for too long. All my belief in Steem (and Steemit) was shattered with the advent of bid bots and their huge success. Steemit, Inc leadership seemed to be uninterested at thar time. Many people left. I did too. I won't have read this post but for our facebook connection. This is the first post I have read about HF21. I'd read a dozen more to arrive at an opinion and see what my Steem holdings can expect in the future. I had read almost all the posts linked within this so it was easier to finish reading it in one go.

>I was a supporter of trying the linear curve becuase and in the beginning it was exciting to see everyone getting some little bit of reward. Unfortunately it was too easy to game the system.

Yeah, and this was pointed out many times by people who were not in favor of linear rewards for precisely this reason (and there were other reasons too). The rationale was questioned long before the HF was officially proposed and implemented and Steemit, Inc. was asked directly why linear was suddenly preferred, in light of the previous rationale for non-linear. Those questions were pretty much entirely ignored.

But I'm curious...

How did it take two full years of economic and social destruction through a variety of abuses and exploits for this to come up again and finally be addressed? That is the truly mind-boggling aspect to all of this. What has Steem's "leadership" been doing, other than completely ignoring every call to scrap linearity, as well as other terrible protocols?

I would say that our consensus witnesses have been mostly derelict...again. We still can't even get much insight from most of them about the current proposed fork. Meanwhile, I've written a post for each of the two components of this fork, engaged on other people's posts about it, and I'm not even allowed in the witness/investor/cool people club chat where these discussions allegedly take place. Isn't that kind of ironic?

Steem is a blockchain supporting social interaction. In the three years I’ve been here I’ve had a number of negative social interactions with you personally. I like many of our ideas, just not how you express them or how you’ve treated people in the past you’ve disagreed with (from my perspective). If you acted in a more socially positive way, I think you’d get more support as a witness. I was surprised and grateful not to see any direct personal attacks in your comment here.

I’m not trying to be a dick pointing this out, I’m just giving my perspective. I hope it’s well received.

And yes, the Steemit leadership hasn’t really put a focus on improving the economics of STEEM or on improving Steemit.com. Hopefully the SPS will create a structure for the community to move things forward directly. Maybe we can start with people using the community GitHub repo instead of the Steemit, Inc one.

As for the linear curve, I do think it could have worked if more people downvoted and more people cared about fairness than greed. The previous curve was kind of ridiculous with thousand dollar posts on one hand and quality posts getting pennies. I think iteration, change, and experimentation is good. Let’s do it quicker next time.

You have been decentralised.

Yeah. Decentralized by the centralizers.

The funny thing here is - Luke seemingly doesn’t even realize that I was also (actually, primarily) referring to him and his witness cohorts when I refer to our “leadership.” He also conveniently ignored the direct mention of consensus witnesses, which he is and has been for a long time.

But it’s cool that he uses his typical passive-aggressiveness to give me “his perspective” about my typed internet tone. As usual, he missed my point about irony and used the opportunity to try to marginalize once again - as most of our “leadership” has done in the community for three years.

Isn’t it a lovely culture that they’ve cultivated here?

The more things change...

Centralisation by Accumulation isn't all that much better than having an unelected Supreme Soviet. Having both rolled into one is fatal.

"What makes STEEM valuable?"

I don't know, but I sure hope we find out soon! :(

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmSPsaYq1QKYUb5RxgMpjRhcCuXmuNKuckucVJVfdBrKDm/image.png]

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmd6giV6rv2cCS9TC2Q6fFz1eCsWjLDXmfFB4Cak9gnLFC/hardfuck.jpg]

YOU HAVE BEEN @kawaiicrushed LIKE THE LITTLE CONSPIRITARD BITCHES YOU ARE!!!

I totally disagree. It is'nt purely about the steem, it is about the freedom of speech and variety of writers that are in one place. I would strongly avoid having a downvote. It is one of the most positive social media platforms out there. The steem aspect is a bonus! This is my first post, after I lost my password from my initial account. Please upvote me if you agree. Many thanks :)

Read my post about the true value of Steem (relations, reputation, rewards). You may not “totally disagree” as much as you think.

The mechanics of writing sentences in this article is very odd and hard to follow. Is English your second language?

...no?

In the three years I’ve been posts here, that’s the first comment of this kind I’ve received. I often get the opposite, in fact, thanking me for explaining things in an easy to understand way.

Could you be specific and maybe provide some examples? I always appreciate opportunities to improve my communication.

I dunno. The only draw this place - or the token itself - ever really had for me was the fact that I could get paid for my content. Beyond that, I have very little, if any, interest in the whole thing.

I really doubt I'm the only one.

I feel Steemit could have been given a better chance as a self-imposed game of people competing for content popularity, powering up to get noticed, and staying powered up to show loyalty - and the whales rewarding loyalty.

I was regularly buying and powering up at the beginning because I was engaged in the game of trying to be a trending author, getting the big rewards, and trying to the big shots to autovote me.

The game is what motivated me to buy.

What motivation is there now, though? I an buy, buy, buy all I want, but the big votes are gone, and all go through bid bots now. So, yeah, I can pay $200 to get myself a spot on trending, but all I get back is the money I put in, so in the end, I gain nothing. There is no point to use this site anymore. And with that, there is no point in being interested in the STEEM token anymore - outside of pure speculation. I'm holding on to the STEEM I have just in case of some crazy, irrational Korean pump from out of nowhere.

The big cost of the bid bot business has been the loss of the most captivating part of the site: the lottery effect.

"This might be the post that attracts the big vote that attracts more big votes and earns me a spot on trending."

"Oh, that wasn't it. Well, maybe if I buy some more and power up, I increase my chances of getting noticed."

And again and again.

But nope. It's all bid bots now. There's no manual curation, it's all predictable and predetermined. It's just not... fun anymore.

And I get what all of you big shots are saying about the content itself not adding value, and not being enough to really take the token anywhere - but I feel that the game that surrounded the competition for content rewards had something going for it.

It's not like I'm saying anything along the lines of "Oh, I'm such an artist and I deserve blah blah blah", I just enjoyed the game.

And as that game came to an end, I powered down, stopped caring about this site, and gave up - only visiting it from time to time to see if things had changed.

By the looks of things, STEEM is now below 70 in Coinmarketcap, so it looks like I'm not the only one who stopped caring as the focus shifted from the content creation game to other things.

Maybe the problem was people thought it was supposed to be fair even though the originally white paper made it clear it was a game designed as a lottery and not to be fair.

People left before because it wasn’t fair. Then people left because it wasn’t a game. Ultimately, STEEM has yet to demonstrate value to the masses. Maybe Libra will help people realize they’d rather have something not controlled by large corporations (see @andrarchy’s recent video on that).

¡Saludos, agradezco su tiempo y contenido explicativo, cuente con un servidor!

But the market says STEEM has no value

People, users! User are giving its value. Have you noticed that the total market cap is static, 120-130M. Why? Because the number of users is the same.

It's true for every single social network, steemit as well.

*don't tell me that Steemit is not Steem. Just don't.

"Just don't" because you don't want to hear it or because it's not true or because... why? It's fundamentally important to understand the differences between Steemit and STEEM and the cryptocurrency nature of this system that provides rewards in real tokens of value. Just saying "we need more users" is like saying we need air to breathe. It doesn't provide much useful information.

Other social media platforms do not provide rewards. Those that have tried, have failed (I can name them if you want). This is fundamentally different and that needs to be appreciated if we're to come to any form of consensus on how to improve things.

I'm glad you asked.

Is Coca Cola, Coca Cola Company?
Is Golf, VW company?
Is Windows, Microsoft?

No. None of given examples is not the company. However those are the Top Brands. If Golf sales are low, VW is in trouble. If CocaCola becomes 10th most popular beverage, CocaCola Inc. is in trouble. And if Windows makes something so bad that it's less prevalent than Linux, Microsoft is in a big problem.

SteemIT is the flagship, a case study what/ how you can make some use off a coin that pays likes in crypto. If that product is not working, the whole concept is wrong and there is no value.

> Just saying "we need more users" is like saying we need air to breathe. It doesn't provide much useful information.

How this can be written so it's understandable?

According to every known model in economy, value of something that is network-like has one variable, number of users. Some models use log(), other are making some exponents, but in the core, there is a number of users.

If you don't believe me, take some stats from archange and compare the number of users with the proce.

You want some practical ideas, here:
* forget about the fee for sign-up. Fee = scam in 99% of cases. Total profit from that is not even 1000 $ per day, just forget it, those are peanuts
* instead of supporting the same pointless authors, try to make a contract with someone who is making valuable content. Seriously, make a contract
* And for Christ name, make "guest" option. What is the point to have a blogging platform, that is not accessible by regular people? and if you want to interact with it, you need to pay? or wait for a couple of weeks?

> Other social media platforms do not provide rewards

Yes they do, but you don't understand what the award is!

Facebook = communication with all my friends, cool links, ability to buy/sell stuff and to interact in various gorups

Instagram = nice girls climbing mountain, daily dose of beauty, priceless

You can't buy love. If you try to buy it, it's called prostitution :D
That's the catch, if the product is good, people are going to use it for free or they will even pay for it.

If it's not good, and not having WYSIWYG editor is not good, people are not going to use it even if you pay them, because it's not worth it.
Also, if there is no selection - there will be no interactions.

How do I know? SteemSTEM made their own Front-End. We were not able to bribe our users, those who are writing for steemSTEM to use it, even for the additional 5-10$ per post. Why? Because it was not user friendly.

So, again. if you want this place to survive:
* make some contracts and pay competent people
* make sign-up seamless. learn from SNAX
* create "guest" option, so anyone can interact
* make Trending page worth looking at

Repeat it for 6 months - become rich

You're giving good answers for how to make a social media application more popular and used by more people. You're not giving answers on how to increase the value of a cryptocurrency token.

When you say things like

> learn from SNAX

The disconnect becomes clear:

https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/snax-token

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYQuXCBZLUqtzQTtMGY8aL7WaGsQEuzjjMiME2SFRp8Lt/image.png]

There's nothing there. No trading volume. No value.

Maybe it will come later, but maybe not. I've seen too many failed attempts at social media with financial rewards to think they will succeed. I see STEEM (and, importantly, Steemit.com and other front ends for the Steem blockchain) still here.

Talking about making things free, making guest options, etc highlights the fundamental disconnect within the Steem community which has been going on since the beginning. Nothing on a blockchain can be free or it will be exploited. That's a defining characteristic of blockchain technology that is unavoidable. No amount of wishing it to be different will change it. Someone always has to pay for resources on a blockchain.

I've been talking about these misunderstood expectations for over two years. I highly recommend giving this a read:

How Managing Expectations Can Grow the STEEM Ecosystem

> If that product is not working, the whole concept is wrong and there is no value.

And yet we're still here, even with a flagship that has basically not improved much at all. This, I think, is due to a failure by Steemit, Inc to focus efforts on improving this interface. Maybe now that we have Steem Engine and a way to tokenize other projects like https://palnet.io we might see more innovation and improved user experiences coming.

I should have clarified that by rewards, I was just talking about financial rewards. I completely understand that if the experience was better here and all their friends wanted to move (like they did from MySpace), then hurray, we'd all be happy.

You have some good ideas here (such as contracting with massive brands or media companies). I'm hopeful the increased curation rewards with HF21 might improve trending ("might" is not even a positive feeling it will). I'll give you a nice vote mainly for clarifying the exact disconnect many people have when they think about the Steem ecosystem. They think about a website or about social media without realizing what they are really upset about is a low author or curator rewards payout which has everything to do with blockchain and cryptocurrency realities reflected in the token price and little to do with anything else.

"Someone always has to pay for resources on a blockchain." So delegating to projects that abandon steem, like dlive was a better use of resources?

Dan finally has figured out guest accounts on 3speak, something steemit.com should have been doing years ago. Not everyone needs or wants to control their private keys. Delegate to a guest account that many users can use until they earn enough to pay for their own account. Simple enough and users don't have to wait weeks or sometimes never to get their account. I had a friend sign up and she never got hers.

I got tired of trying to make a difference, so I stared cashing out 6 weeks ago, another 6 weeks and i'll be fully out on all my accounts.

> ot everyone needs or wants to control their private keys. Delegate to a guest account that many users can use until they earn enough to pay for their own account

Imagine the situation, you found out something that triggered you and you want to comment.

Normal approach: write, submit, end

Steemit vision 3025:
* you need an account
* now pay us 3 Steem, what a hell is Steeem
* or find a steemian, what a hell is it
* or give us a dollar! What? Who asks me for a dollar?
* but not on the official site, but on some shady whatever website
* or wait for 14 days

Hey, people are not that patient while waiting for their iSomething products

Agreed, it's not at all ideal. Again though, someone has to pay. Nothing can be fully "free" or it will be an attack vector for the chain which could destroy everything.

My g-d you are disillusion. Someone has to pay... lol...

Do you talk to people like this in real life or just online?

Yes, blockchains have real constraints because the data lives forever. Every single blockchain project on the planet has hard costs which have to be paid for. Witnesses on Steem pay for storage in exchange for part of the rewards pool. If we're misunderstanding each other, please clarify so we can have a productive discussion.

You wrote,

>someone has to pay

No, you have to pay, and you can forget about passing the bill to me...

Obviously delegating to a project that never intended to stick with Steem long-term while while pretending it did is a disappointment for us all. Has nothing to do with "free" resources on a blockchain though.

I agree that not everyone needs to manage private keys. Most people don't want that responsibility. That's why much of the cryptocurrency space (including Steem) is ahead of its time. The delegation model is what Steemit, Inc was doing for quite some time. As to their sign up process taking so long or not responding, I don't have an answer to that other than to use a competing sign up service or start your own. Again though, someone has to pay.

I understand not wanting to try anymore and moving on. Many have and many more will. It's unfortunate that Steem hasn't yet lived up to the expectations that were created by it.

I agree someone has to pay. Who do you think pays for google's servers? The advertisers that run on their platform. These advertisers pay a lot because they have a lot of users. Do you think steemit's witnesses could run google's servers with the income that they make?

Increasing the amount of users is critical to keeping steem as a cryptocurrency afloat for many years to come. So far it's mostly survived off of speculators, but the speculators, are getting smarter and the days of people throwing crypto money at anything with a blockchain developer are over imo.

I see two main options for bringing money in. 1) bring in more users, then you have more traffic, which means more advertising moeny. 2) bring in more users to dapp games, these people pay for in app game coins or other things that brings in money. Dapps are always a risk because as we've seen with dlive, they can jump ship to another chain overnight.

In either case users are important, and they need to be increasing. The alexa ranking of steemit.com is steadily declining. Do you think speculators are going to buy in if the user base is shrinking?

Unfortunately, building UI's with aesthetic design and user friendliness are not steemit inc's strong suit. These detract from users wanting to join and stay. Along with other things like opinion flagging and excessive use of bidbots rather rewarding content with POB.

My main point is that until these fundamental issues are addressed, the userbase and revenue will potentially decline, putting the steem blockchain at risk of fading away, or at a minimum, just existing with only a few diehard fanboys. Not a lot of revenue will come in if the traffic keeps going down. The speculators and investors will be looking at growth, as they should with any social network as a way to judge it's value.

Who is going to pay the witnesses and blockchain developers when the investors and speculators leave due to declining users?

> You're not giving answers on how to increase the value of a cryptocurrency token.

People, you need to read science :D
No feelings, guesses, but facts, like this:

[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYTwTuF6GuWNt12V27g3DtbRETp1dNZSQST2HNZH8uNB1/image.png]

I will repeat, again - number of users
Because if you have users, they will spend time or/and money, so you can sell them stuff or commercials.

> I see STEEM (and, importantly, Steemit.com and other front ends for the Steem blockchain) still here.

I see that it lost 90% of marketcap it had 1.5 years ago. It's worse than Venezuela :)

I see that it lost 90% vs Bitcoin. I see that it used to be in the top 30 coins, now it's not in the first 70 coins.

> making guest options, etc highlights the fundamental disconnect within the Steem community which has been going on since the beginning

What community? We have 10.000 active users.
FB group for buying/ selling photo equipment has 20.000

What on Earth can you do with 10.000 people from all over the globe, with different social status, different needs and different interests? Nothing...

> And yet we're still here

Yes we are, other 90.000 people who were here - are not here
After plane crash, all those who are alive are - alive, nothing bad happened...

I'm not saying nothing bad happened. I'm saying a major mistake was made not to focus on Steemit.com and make it a world-class social media site.

That said, without the back-end technology improvements, the chain wouldn't have been able to support the growth that would have caused. I remember when this site was falling flat on its face with the few users we have.

So we have people rightfully saying: We need more network effect within this social media site to make it more valuable. Unfortunately, that has not been the focus.

If we're going to say we need more people using the STEEM token to make it more valuable, I also agree, but you can't compare that to bitcoin (IMO) because investors are (again, IMO) staying away from STEEM because of the confusion related to Steemit and doubts about the inflation going towards things which don't provide value to a cryptocurrency (in their minds). Content creation and curation don't automatically translate into more users of the currency itself.

My "and yet we're still here" comment refers to centralized sites which tried to reward content creators and curators and are completely gone now. Like completely. No users, no website, no company, nothing.

My one disagreement with HF21 is the downvote pool. This will only further arm those who are abusing downvoting already. If one does not downvote now then they are not likely to start. If one does downvote now then this will mean more amunnition to do so.

Downvotes should cost more not less so as to cost abusers more in my opinion.

It's a tough situation in that people extracting rewards which don't increase the value of STEEM keeps investors away and keeps the narrative going that Steem is just a scam for scammers. The downvote, in theory, is supposed to prevent that via proof of brain.

If people abuse the downvote and remove potential rewards from those who are contributing content that actually could increase the value of STEEM, then that's certainly a problem. I don't know how much that actually happens (since it would be counter productive to the SP holder to do so), but I do think people take flags and downvotes personally and get very emotionally upset about it (even enough to leave). This, I think, keeps major brands and well-known content producers away. That, to me, is the real problem with the flag/downvote. It creates a negative emotional experience.

If everyone was able to get over their ego and not worry so much about it, maybe it would be okay. :)

Maybe just removing the "click here to show this low rating post" aspect of Steemit.com might help.

>...since it would be counter productive to the SP holder to do so...

This had been my thought as well until becoming a delegator to @freezepeach and following help requests on their Discord channel. There is a consciencous effort by some to flag posts not because of reward disputes or poor content but simply because they disagree with the poster (often from another post entirely).

In the following link everyone who made a comment was flagged as well as the post. You can see that the post has nothing that could upset anyone but a ghoul and you may well recognize many of the commentors as valued Steemian content creators.

https://steemit.com/palnet/@lyndsaybowes/oooooohhhh-pretties

Downvotes should cost more and not less in my opinion. Many are being driven off by these fiends. You know who it is. It is no secret.

@lukestokes, I don't know if my understanding is right but in my opinion some aspects are really powerful:

Developers

Definitely these beings should empowered because they are developing Working Product and Ecosystem.

Investors

Large stake holders can use their stake to curate valuable content or projects which will inturn add value to those content which will help in boosting of Site Rankings And Visibility.

Bid Bots

Promotion is ancient method to promote particular Product, Project or Idea but here we all saw that, unfortunately reward pool consumed by lot of content which doesn't had true value for that much of rewards. Hopefully this change will bring the true idea of use of Bidbots and that is, Promotion of Project, Product and Idea.

Content Creation And Curation

In my opinion hype transfered different knowledge about this platform and many pursuing this platform as just limited to the Blogging. But this is Social Media and here every Network have equal space when they hold value. At the end of the day, at this time if we just not see our own benefits and focus towards Steem's growth then in my opinion there will be time when rewards will not matter that much because masses will see the value and we all going to become pillars of future giant Technology who stood strong and Transformed and Adapted all the changes no matter how much painful it was by keeping all Human Emotions aside which is generated in the competitive world.

Wishing you an wonderful time ahead and stay blessed.

Posted using Partiko Android

> When it comes to difficult contentious decisions which impact what people value, it's very important to keep our emotions in check and do our best to argue from first principles. Too often when we disagree, we fall into the trap of thinking someone is either ignorant, immoral, or stupid. This post is directed at those wanting to have a rational discussion about the coming Hard Fork 21 of the Steem blockchain, which is certainly a contentious decision to be made.

Agree

> I think a good starting point for the discussion is figuring out a shared understanding of value itself. Most people haven't done this. To say "We should do X because it will make Y more valuable because it improves Z" we better have a clear understanding of X, Y, and Z. All code improvements are supposed to be about making things more valuable over time. HF21 makes some claims about how it will increase value, so let's start there. I can only speak from my perspective, so I will refer to many of my posts to give further context for my perspective.

I agree, although it is important to stress the hypothetical nature of the situation. Just because they are supposed to do something better does not mean that it has to be that way. Mistakes are made and mistakes are paid for.

> I'm operating under the assumption that you've seen my video on What is Financial Value? which, in summary, states financial value is simply a shared story we collectively choose to believe. As more people believe a story of value (special rocks, shells, tally sticks, gold, silver, coins, paper fiat, cryptocurrencies, etc), it becomes a reality. There is no intrinsic value, only some stories that are better than others based on specific context which become more widely held as shared belief.

And yes and no. Actually, Luke said about it in the film. The financial valuation is not the same as useful.

> When it comes to the Steem blockchain, let's sincerely ask what aspect of the chain we value. Is it the purchasing power of the tokens? Is it the decentralized, uncensorable blockchain which stores plain text and links to media which can not be completely censored? Is it the relationships we build through interacting with like-minded individuals around the world?

Here we have an attempt to find a useful value for Steem.

> Over time, I also realized the problems with extrinsic motivations alone surrounding my involvement (i.e. "Get paid to post!"). I had to continue posting because I wanted to intrinsically, not because someone was putting a carrot in front of me.

So Steem's neutral and it's about writing? Wordpress! Will Luke start blogging on Wordpress? You'll find out about this in the next post. (No)

> HF21 (which we'll get to here eventually, I promise) brings things back to this approach just a bit from the current linear rewards curve where everyone can get something, even if they are the only ones self voting on their own content.

Very interesting, and if your promise doesn't come true, what will happen?

> The next major breakthrough in understanding for me was realizing the Steem blockchain and STEEM token is where the value is, not the Steemit.com front end or Steemit, Inc or (potentially) even the content hosted on the chain.

What is the value? Is BCash so highly valued by having a decentralised memo.cash platform? Steem's financial value comes from speculation. People watch Steemit.com and judge. The interface is fatal (because the interfaces on Steem are weak). After two years I came to the conclusion that the content does not matter.

Of course, they also evaluate other parameters, such as the financial situation of Steemit.com, which is low. Of course you can say - Hey, Steemit is not Steem. Technically true, but who knows about it?

> To me, this is a sign that what we've been doing is not working, if we consider financial rewards (i.e. that thing completely supported by the token price) as an important part of the value Steem creates for us.

I agree, but there's only one problem you don't talk about. You say - Hey, our efforts have failed. I will write - what efforts? You didn't do anything. Once a year you will do Hard Fork, which is a disaster.

> Hopefully at this point we've set some foundational definitions relating to value, and we've shown the current system for creating value in Steem has not be working well compared to other cryptocurrencies. Now we have a choice. Do we leave things as is and just celebrate the existing benefits we get from the Steem blockchain

And I'm starting with propaganda about how great it is here. But we're gonna try to ask some questions here.

https://steemitimages.com/DQmT5kELzm4KsaHDEA37tiD8BGxgZNkZbBde7kor4TvP4TK/still%20waiting.gif
Wow, we are the best!

• Zero fees, That's great. What about spam, which is huge on Steem? For such a small network? Let me remind you that about 3-5k people are active every day in the Steem network (including bots)
• Energy-efficient DPOS algorithm.
• Built-in, on-chain governance.

What about the centralization of the project? Let me ask you another question. Does a person have the right to vote in the Steem network? The answer is - No. Unless your name is Ned Scott.

But I'll even ask you another question. Are there any debates between users who will be hit hard by Hard Fork and people from STINC? One that has been going on for months.

Did the Witnesses ask what people think is wrong with Steem and what should be fixed? Or, as usual, not?

The truth is that DPoS is a system of totalitarian power for the witnesses and rich people who control these witnesses. But hey - energy efficiency!

> From HF21: SPS and EIP Explained, we see this is about decentralization, sustainability, and funding valuable projects. Steemit, Inc, in my personal opinion, hasn't done the best job of managing this blockchain. I've mentioned this before here and here as well as a possible solution of my own relating to a SteemDAC which I figured talked about here: SteemDAC: A Plan We Can Start Today to Decentralize Steem Governance. Maybe this failure was due to inexperienced, centralized leadership. Maybe things will turn around if we decentralize more.

So we're starting to act as the tragic situation of the platform. In my opinion it is stupid. If the platform worked very well, you can think about opening up to the community. What we need now is fast moves, which the decentralised government is not able to do. In turn the HF21 itself from what I noticed does not solve any of these problems. Or which point introduces it? The possibilities of whales are increasing.

Even Luke himself is showing good projects. Good = those that in total belong to whales and have powerful financing. Other projects no longer have money then they are not so good, they are not popular (can not afford to spend thousands of dollars on Bidbots).

So, in short, projects like Steem Monsters will earn more, and hundreds of smaller developers will see the middle finger. How nice. But let me ask you something else. I found quite an interesting interface - Steemblr. It is quite small. Will it get support or not?

> To me, the key point here is "which increases the visibility of such counterproductive behavior". Keep that in mind as it will come up again. You can learn more about this change here: Reward Curve Deep Dive. Essentially, linear voting was tried and creating more problems than it solved. I was a supporter of trying the linear curve becuase and in the beginning it was exciting to see everyone getting some little bit of reward. Unfortunately it was too easy to game the system. Instead of going back to what we had before, we're trying something new and that, to me, is a good thing. We should get more information which we can continue to iterate with.

I'm not in a position to say anything about it. It was a long time ago and it was Steem's beginning. Was it better or worse? It was different.

> Unfortunately "bad actors" is still mostly undefined or if there is consensus on what bad action looks like, some accounts are too big in terms of Steem Power to do anything about.

Yes, it's probably an irreparable error.

> This, I think, is one of the most contentious aspects of HF21. Humans have trouble with loss aversion and many will see this as "Hey, I'm an author and now I'm losing part of my rewards. This sucks! I'm leaving!" It is possible some quality authors will leave because of this. I'll argue they may be here for the wrong reasons as mentioned above in the The Steemit $$$ Challenge post. It's also possible we've had many other great authors who came here, posted fantastic content, got no notice or rewards what-so-ever and left. What if those authors might come back or others like them might stick around if eager curators who are now twice as motivated to find them out and promote them actually get them some attention and rewards? I think it's at least worth trying. The current author rewards system is too easily gamed, and I don't think changing the rewards curve alone will fix it. I'm concerned this will create more Steem Power rewards for bots over time, but I've been trying to get people to stop using bots for a long time with little success:

I agree, but not exactly. Tokens are the only thing Steem offers. Does Steem have good interfaces? No. But maybe the economy is good in the network (shops)? No. Are the projects good overall? Steem Monsters is not a very good game, but it is also not a very weak one. It's 4/10. Maybe 6/10. If you've played different card games, you'll notice it right away. If someone didn't play - maybe they like the game.

But it's practically one of the best projects on Steem.

It doesn't change the fact that 99% of users are for money. How many people turn off monetizing entries completely? After all, 50 Steem Power is enough for fun. Or maybe this fun on Steem isn't there and never was? Why the changes in the reward system?

The answer is simple - apart from propaganda, Steem offers an easy way to get Bitcoins. I used to believe in Steem myself, but it turned out to be a fraud. He was overwhelmed by his own power.

> Remember how we talked about "which increases the visibility of such counterproductive behavior"? Well this is where that comes in again. The only way to have working Proof of Brain and ensure rewards are distributed to valuable content in a meaningful way which Steem investors and speculators might respect is to use our votes effectively

Hmm ....? I would have had to look for it, but I think he said earlier that the content is not of such great value.

> Could this cause more "flag wars"? Yes, it could. We already have accounts like @berniesanders who flag content based on personal issues with the author and not based on the quality or value of the content to the Steem ecosystem. It's possible this could increase after HF21. It's also possible that it's a real problem we have to solve today anyway. Imagine for a moment you're a huge multinational brand and you really want to get involved in blockchain technology. You want your content onchain and you look to Steem as the answer. You task your marketing team to come up with your first post and when the CEO goes to look at it, he sees this:

I used to wonder myself how to solve it on the current system and I have my own thoughts. But ... I've always heard - you can create your own interface that doesn't hide posts! We solved the problem of hunger in the world.

All in all, why does he have to use Steem like you have a platform for e.g. EOS? EOS Publishing (Discussions?) or Voice.com (in the future)? And dozens of others?

> We seem to have this discussion with every Hard Fork, so I won't repeat it at length again here, but it basically comes down to this: Every single wallet, exchange, application, payment processor, and service provider that relies on a Steem node will have to do a full resync of history every time we make a hard fork because these are consensus-breaking changes. That means everyone has to agree to them or else the tools that don't upgrade will stop working. With our low token value, it's possible some exchanges might consider delisting us instead of putting in time and money to resync their nodes. That means fewer hard forks are better.

So don't make Hard Forks. They say there are cryptovalutes that they don't make, but I can't remember the name ... Bbbbbbbitcoin?

> To increase curation rewards and create the SPS pool, many think the witnesses should also decrease their pay. I'm actually cautiously in favor of this as well, even if it's just one or two percent. That said, it's important to remember within DPoS that the security of the chain is directly related to the value of the rewards given to the block producers who secure it. If that value is too low, high quality witnesses will not stick around and it will be easier to attack the chain. If the price of Steem goes too low and witnesses can't afford to run servers (or choose not to), the entire value proposition would be at risk for everyone. That's a systemic level risk which is important to consider. If HF21 is adjusted to take some rewards from witnesses (while, ideally, spreading more rewards to backup witnesses to further incentive more decentralization), I'd be in support of that. As it is, I won't reject this Hard Fork if the witness pay is kept as is.

This is a powerful problem of distributed decentralized networks, which roughly does not exist in federated decentralized networks. However, I have heard so much that I am an idiot, because Mira makes the server maintenance very low and if Steem is worth more than 1 cent then it should become a witness to server maintenance, so you can take away 90% of their pool.

@lukestokes