exhilarated & extraordinary!

Well thats what im seeing, 1 out of every ten trending is worthless. We have lots of excellent bloggers on here getting completely ignored why 2 min read posts about daily market trends make hundreds from vote bots. Your concern is not just yours. Steemit needs to grow and i hope @ned is right and that smart media tokens should help even the playing field over time.. otherwise your concerns become problems and problems make global adoption impossible.

but, who will buy those tokens, when they're only sold for steem? The same ones who are driving the current trends on the platform today.

Well until fiat is no longer a thing we need to create more fiat gateways and I guess inflate until its to expensive to stop the progress. Who knows, everything feels very 50/50 these days. Too many crooks too few dreamers.

IDK if I'd call them crooks. it's all within the rules. Hard to know if they'd try to do it the same if it weren't. Some would, some wouldn't.

Wanna see crooks though mark this is the kind of stuff that can happen.
https://steemit.com/scam/@dizzyjay/scam-alert-do-not-send-them-sbd That is criminal, that is yesterday. We have to self police a little here. But you are mostly right with where you stand on it its these rare cases that get me going

Well, I think as we move toward a totalitarian collapse of world govts, this kind of stuff is going to need to be handled by the citizenry, in the digital and real worlds, they're going to be too busy trying to enforce compliance, until they finally implode under their own weight.

But, part of me says, if you're gaming the system, you get what you deserve from guys like this too. LOL

True! I agree, as you said the system will collapse and thats why we need to focus so hard on creating distributed ledgers so when these centralized organizations collapse we dont have another 2008 financial crisis. Thats what satoshi nakamoto gave us. Not just bitcoin, but an open-source ledger system that makes the world able to keep the value when worlds collide, there is no race, religion or country to it. Its just an observer, and a protector. Based on mathematics and not politics. Leaving the policing to us as a society. Cool right? Actual liberty.

Yep, but all they see is another investment product.

You are right .I personally think that there should be no process of buying votes becaue i have seen a lot of articles that have only one image and got alot of upvotes.I believe that only quality content should go to trending page :)

it can destroy steemit for sure if the buyer of these up-votes makes a bad quality content but I think it will be positive to the community and the author if the author is really making good content as this will give him a better chances that his good quality content be seen by more users on the community and I think in this case it won't be harmful
that's just a point of view

I respectfully disagree. The best chance for good content getting noticed is when that is the clear driving force like it used to be, before you could buy upvotes.

yes, you are right but all I mean is there are some users with high quality but don't have a chance to be seen by other users because nobody looks at the new page and they will be hardly seen and maybe never seen but if you think a little, you will know that I agree with you not disagreeing because those minnows with high quality lost their chance to be seen just because the shit trash on the trending page with bad quality who just got there before their high SP and bought upvotes with big amounts
so, we are at the same direction not the opposite one

Great thoughts and an interesting discussion item. I have mixed feelings about the vote buying and renting. All of my votes are used for good content and for people who are working hard as curators and community builders to build this ecosystem. Even from a self-interested perspective, as a Steem holder, supporting good content and growth builds long term value and is a much better use of my voting power than simply selling it.

However, not everyone wants to engage with the content all the time. There need to be good reasons to hold Steem and some want a faster return. Also, the biggest issue here from Day 1 has been the imbalance in voting power. Kevin, you and I have spent the last 18 months or so supporting good content but also helping Steem climb out of that hole by giving under-rewarded users a chance to earn rewards for their work (and hopefully save some of it to increase their own voting power).

So I am sympathetic to those who want to rent or buy votes on their posts. I did not need to go through that, but only because I was fortunate to start here early. It's not easy for most people to get votes and rewards. I can see how renting or buying would be quite tempting, especially in the beginning when it's hard to get noticed.

I would much rather see good content get curated and rewarded for its merits rather than votes being sold and rented to anyone, but everyone deserves a chance and not everyone has been getting it, absent those services. So they do fill a need. That probably results in some lower quality content, but I also feel that we need to move beyond the expectation of only long posts getting rewarded. We need to reward people (at an appropriate level) for short form posts, links, memes, photos, videos, music, comments, and other activities and participation, not just long writing. Hopefully, we find those organically.

Finally, it's a free market. If voting power has a value, then that indicates a gap in the system, and I think people should be able to trade in it. We may see the same thing in the future with bandwidth as that becomes a desired item. And in the end, 😊 I don't know what effect all of this has on the content, but as long as people are engaged and participating and attracting others, then we'll see where it goes. @richardcrill

The length of a post has little to nothing to do with its value in the community. Is it creating conversation? Is it adding to the overall value of the community it was aimed towards? To me, it goes back to the foundation, the "proof of brain" concept is the only thing separating our steem, from every other shit coin on the market and if we don't defend those principles, soon it won't matter.

You are absolutely right @richardcrill, this is destroying the steemit
and this must be stopped. . .
I have seen some low-quality content on trending page and some high-quality content that Even don't have enough views. . .
and I have also noticed that here Everyone is voting for the author Not for the content

People make post and they don't get any votes and so they are forced to use bid bots.

And u just got it bang on mate..How do newcomers like us trend with content because we got absolutely no one here..Just on our own..We got no huge backup which can really vote us and make our thing trend here..There are very few who support the content, and in fear to that we dont even feel like posting anything, thinking it might go waste..So we just try to share our views at other posts just to give other ideas about ourselves.Thanks for bringing this out

very good post, we come to the same conclusion steemit is characterized by its quality content and with this vote buying what it does is infect the platform with bad content and discourage people with good content to follow on the platform

It’s not black or white. It can be used for good and used for evil. I think a great solution is to actually have the bots approved and screen content that’s being upvoted. The good content should get whitelisted and the crap content should get blacklisted and even flagged.

Original content that is meaningful and adding value to the community should have a fighting chance and these bots allow that.

They already can and do refuse or pull upvotes for abusive or scammy content and blacklist users that do that. But they can't really do that just because its not good enough. where would the line be drawn?

I think these bots actually work against that. Meaningful, original content that adds value does have a fighting chance here and it used to have a lot more of a chance, when whales where looking for ways (like trails and guilds) to upvote good content instead of just selling their upvote.

Yeah I do agree with that and it'll be a tough line to draw...I'm conflicted about it too because on one side, it can help people out who are coming onto the platform who have a sincere desire to add value...on the other side, some spam punks can just spam a gif and rape the pool.

I like the idea of whales delegating their upvote to others who are actively searching for good content. Like the way @Ned delegated steempower to @dtube - I think that was a great move. Now DTube is actually growing and people are challenged to put better content and have better video quality in their videos...I hope it doesn't destroy steem and the optimistic side of me thinks that it'll somehow work out, especially since we're having conversations about it. The whales are listening. At least the ones that care about the platform and their investment.

Either way, super thought provoking post. Thanks for sharing.

I found the Hot section is more valuable than the Trending section.

Yeah actually that's where I found this video. Lol

yup

Interesting. I'll have to give that a try instead of Trending.

yes it can be true but i believe won't happen but nowadays lot of comment/vote are already bots.

This is excellent, this dialog needs to grow, else SteemIt will be viewed as a shilly joke and eventually people will walk away. I'm still quite new and trying to orient myself here. I don't understand all about the different types of bots and tricks people are using to "game around" the idea of actually creating interesting, quality content. I do see the horrid shit on "trending" and it's clear that the workarounds are producing results unfortunately. Thus far my strategy to push my content forward (short stories, which of course are subject to personal tastes, but, do take me many hours to outline, rough draft, edit, etc - and it is not something I started doing last week....15 years in the making here), content I believe is thoughtful and of high literary quality, is to interact (as much as time permits) in the spaces where people who I think will like my content reside. I try to find the literature curators, provide feedback and thoughtful comments on their ideas/projects. My first story here was upped by curie...I looked through the content of the associated curators, interacted with them, introduced myself when appropriate, etc. The vote buying bullshit is certainly here, but we all need to push as best we can to get eyes on the good content - not only ours, but others as well.

Your point is very clear though. The whales selling votes are diminishing the value of their own Steem, they are defeating themselves. New, better methods for delegation needed? More Curie like projects? I still need to learn more in order to have stronger ideas. Anyhow, nice work here @richardcrill

>If the trending page isn't about high quality content, then what are we doing here? What's the sustainable value proposition?

Someone get this guy some robes and a throne, the king of the trending page has arrived.

Does seem to be a problem. I post decent videos here with thumbnails, tags, etc. But no one watches them at all unless I push people from other platforms here...

The problem is from the outside its starting to look like a complicated ponzi scheme, since the only way to be on this platform is if you buy steempower or buy votes from people with steem power. Or scheme the system with bots which most people wont want to do morally...

Maybe Im missing something and just dont understand the system... but thats the problem, ive been around a while, learned alot, but it still doesnt make any sense, gonna be hard to develop a mass market with such a confusing barrier to entry, and people blatantly gaming the system...

I'm new here on Steemit (1 month), I wanted to post so many things as an artist, photographer, composer, videos, blogs about nature and hiking adventures, but something happened to me that I find myself now spending more time learning about Steem and everything involved. I find it fascinating and blockchains and other crypto currencies in general. I've been thinking a lot too recently, but still very new to this and I still plan to post many things, but thinking a lot. So this is why I like this video of yours too. Thanks!

Hey @richardcrill,

hope you are great.

I'm therealwolf - founder and creator of smartsteem.

It seems that there are quite a few people who are upset about the recent #1 Trending Post about smartsteem. And I can understand that.

Vote-Buying is currently the black sheep and everybody thinks that it destroys Steemit.

But the funny thing about this is:

You have uploaded your Video on d.tube but address Steemit - as if Steemit is the most important part in this whole scheme.

But the truth is: STEEM is most important.

And STEEM - as a blockchain - doesn't care about bought votes.

STEEM doesn't care where the votes are from.

And eventually - a lot more application will be build ontop of STEEM which might also not care about content or if votes were bought.

And for Steemit - in my opinion:
Communities will change a lot.

You can create your own little community there, where no voting-bots are allowed and where you only find posts to topics which you are interested in.

And you can even decide who is able to Post in these communities. So you won't have the problem anymore of seeing Posts which you are not really interested in.

And to address another point of yours:

you said that vote-services result in bad content reaching the trending page. But the truth is:

A LOT of good content ALSO reaches the Trending Page BECAUSE of vote-services.

And even if there were no vote-services. This wouldn't change the fact that users can upvote each other - in a circle. Regardless if the content is good.

Now - last but not least:

Buying Votes will result in nothing, if the content is bad

Buying Votes could be a short term strategy to get some attention, but this won't change anything if the content is bad. And currently - buying upvotes will result over the longterm in lost-money. As the biggest reward is the gained visibility.

Which is useless - if the content is bad.

So - what I mean with that is:

Vote Buying and Selling are tools for users through which they are able to shape their own future on STEEM - but these require quality of content and hard work.

Best examples for that, are:

@flauwy and @spiritualmax.

Both have used vote-services but are also producing great content. And both don't even have to use them anymore, as they have enough followers to grow organically.

Upvoted for visibility

Hey man, I'm obviously aware these DApps that are encouraged and helped by steemit inc. to grow on the STEEM blockchain. As an investor in STEEM and owner of some SP(Vests), I care about what is rewarded through them especially Steemit.com

I am looking forward to communities for many reasons, but not the ones you mentioned.

I appreciate your dialogue here, but my point remains that vote buying if it continues to dominate the trending page can defeat the original idea of rewarding creators for providing great content and curators for finding it.

I can see why people do it of course. Like I said, it is the most profitable way to make money in the short term right now, but not in the long term in my opinion. Vote selling is a short sighted way for whales to profit with steem unless it is being used to help find and promote the best content through many things like trails and guilds that have developed standards and have hard working curators- Instead of the the highest bidder.

The fact is that vote buying has got some low quality stuff to the trending page and unfortunately I see this trend continuing for now.

No disrespect sir. You do your thing. I'm just giving my opinion.

Hey richard,

no disrespect taken. I understand your point of view.

But I disagree with your view on how vote-buying is the root of all evil.

The truth is, that even if people were buying no votes - nothing would stop people from voting each other, regardless of the content.

Let's say I know you IRL - and you're a good friend of mine. And I have quite a bit of SP. Chances are high, that I upvote your post, not because of the post itself, but simply due to the nature of our relationship.

And this is as far as I know - also how it is supposed to be as Steemit is based on the concept of social media likes.

Example: Facebook

Let's say we are also friends on facebook and you post a 1 liner saying: Just watched Black Panther. Best movie of 2018! And additonally you posted your last status update over 6 months ago and I'm happy to hear something from you.

I would give that post a (100%) like - as I personally also liked the movie Black Panther and because I'm happy to see an update from you - but the content of the post is objectively not high quality - which translated to Steemit would mean: not worthy of a big upvote.

Do you understand what I'm trying to say with that?

The problem is not vote-buying per-se but the way that STEEM is currently programmed and how everyone is sharing one big pot of reward-shares.

And honestly: vote-buying and selling is currently a way for the blockchain to evolve. I don't say that vote-buying will be here forever - I'm pretty sure that this is not the case.

Because as soon as communities are here - people can decide if they want to allow vote-buying.

And I also believe that vote-buying happened because of the way STEEM currently works. Otherwise, small players would have NEVER had the same opportunity to gain reach as they currently have.

I remember when I was very new on Steemit. At one point, I was spending 4-5 hours on one post and when I finally published it - it received 0.02$ upvote-values.

I was devastated!

Why? Because I had no influence about how many people that post would reach.

The only thing I could do, was: to post it and then hope that some people with higher influence would read and upvote it.

Not because of the rewards - but simply to get into hot.

Root of all evil? What?
At this point, it feels like you're not trying to understand me. There is nothing educational in these long winded comments for me. Just try to answer this:

What is the sustainable value proposition for vote buying?

Now don't give me a bunch of obvious bullshit about why people do it. I know why people do it. How will it add value to the platform? Especially over the long term? My position is that it won't. It will continue to get lower quality posts to the trending page, which lessens the value of steemit or any steem dapp it happens on.

It adds value by giving people without Steempower a voice that is not dependant on some outside-curator.

I can see how it may temporarily give someone with enough money more visibility, but I don't see that adding value to the platform now or over time. Do you think it has affected the trending page positively or negatively so far?

It adds no value. Period. It robs those same users of their profits and sends it to whales and consortiums, without the checks and balances of the downvote.

The only way would be to remove the affect of voting completely you can't take one away and not the other

No, that's not true.

How do you imagine it working?

Because the essential problem is that steem power creates rewards through what is basically POS mining represented in a different way, correct me if I'm wrong. Steemit uses this in a way that represents this as upvotes that pay people money. Now the question is, are the rewards that are generated by your steem power yours? Well presumably not otherwise no one could be said to be stealing or abusing the reward pool.

And this is where real difficulty comes in. Steemit decides what is valuable by way of the upvote, except this doesn't indicate QUALITY or even indicate popular opinon. Youtube does it by way of number of views and upvotes (as well as downvotes) because they generate revenue through advertising so they dont care if it has a lot of downvotes (and youtubers who know this will still ask people who didn't like it to downvote). They care about participation, views, comments, likes, favourites, and the average watch time etc.

The fact is this is a far better detemrination of what we consider valuble content than Steemit uses. Steemit uses a system that doesn't determine value from any of that. All it cares about is the power of the vote. So one single vote can be worth more than hundreds of others.

Why is anyone surprised that people are buying and selling votes? Why is anyone surprised that this leads to objective crap being highly visible and highly rewarded than quality content? This seems so obvious but I haven't heard anyone point out how the issue here is literally at the core of how Steemit works. You can't have a system where value is determined by something which has nothing to do with quality and then be surprised that quality isn't connected to the payouts. The power of the upvote is what literally GIVES it value, it has nothing to do with the content at all.

I said the only way would be to rremove the effect of voting, because the problem is that those with more steem power or access to it are able to gain a more powerful effect over the system. They can upvote any old crap to the moon, or flag something to death and they can overrule any number of others so long as they have enough voting/steem power. If they couldn't it wouldn't even be possible for these vote bots or flagging bots to exist. You could think of this as the same problem of centralisation.

They will have to work out another way to indicate what the community considers quality and that will have to be thought of very carefully because it will need to totally change the nature of the reward pool and how upvotes work. They will have to change it at some point because this will only get worse and worse. It can't be fixed by just getting upset about it, this is the basis of the entire system. If they don't figure it out competitors will simply solve it for them.

> The fact is this is a far better detemrination of what we consider valuble content than Steemit uses. Steemit uses a system that doesn't determine value from any of that. All it cares about is the power of the vote. So one single vote can be worth more than hundreds of others.

It's almost as if you have completely missed the idea of Steemit. The idea was that if you had stake in the platform you would want the platform to succeed so you would be rewarded for curating good content while at the same time improving the platform by drawing more users and investors in that are finding that good content online. Obviously lots of people are like sheep and vote only because they think others will vote on it too. Something I work to do the opposite of actually.

> Why is anyone surprised that people are buying and selling votes? Why is anyone surprised that this leads to objective crap being highly visible and highly rewarded than quality content? This seems so obvious but I haven't heard anyone point out how the issue here is literally at the core of how Steemit works. You can't have a system where value is determined by something which has nothing to do with quality and then be surprised that quality isn't connected to the payouts. The power of the upvote is what literally GIVES it value, it has nothing to do with the content at all.

Who is surprised about that? Not me. You started that paragraph so well and then you completely missed the point.

This was working really well for a while. Before you were here. The information that is out there is still bringing people in. Unfortunately now the trending page is much shittier than it used to be. Now the dynamic is vote selling and this has clearly caused lower quality content to get more rewards as you pointed out.

Upvoting bots are fairly clear to identify. One solution that makes sense to me would be to simply mark posts as ads that have paid there way there, like google does. Personally I always skip those because the organic search results are always better.

I would go on, but this is kind of exhausting. If you don't understand what I've already said then there is no point in going further with this conversation.

It really sounds like someone feels bad about buying votes and is trying to justify it.

But, that is a function of the community, this is not. It's all about profit and it's skewing the entire platform. Not only is it taking over the top of trending most days, but the level of delegated sp is taking the number of larger votes inside the eco-system down, making building followers less profitable than it has been in the past. Get this, the only thing that's different about steem is the community.

The problem with this statement is this, the vote bots are currently handing out 20% of the rewards, so what is going to be available for a community that doesn't allow bots? We either have a concept based on "proof of brain" the ONLY thing setting steem apart from every shitcoin coming down the pike, or we don't.

Search google for: "steemit content crusader", and click on the first link. You will see how much people don't care and mock those who value quality content. I have been mocked in my earlier time here, by that author, and others in the same "clic" in the steemit chat "price" channel that focus on money. I am pretty sure I was the main one being referenced in that post (because I was a highly rewarded author at the time), as I have been in others who mock what I stand for. Notice that at the time, that post was #1 on the trending page. #1. Few people care for quality content here it seems.

I don't look at the trending page, ever. Not once since I came back. It's the same deal as it was in the summer of 2016, winter of 2017, summer of 2017. It's always the same: mostly crap.

Hey @krnel, glad to see you here. I've been reading your witness server tutorials and they were quite informative!

And to what you just wrote:

> I don't look at the trending page, ever. Not once since I came back. It's the same deal as it was in the summer of 2016, winter of 2017, summer of 2017. It's always the same: mostly crap.

You are correct. How many upvotes or how much rewards a post receives, says nothing about the quality of that post and even less about how important it is for yourself.

But I'm pretty sure that communities will change a lot.

And honestly - when people say that it takes too long for it to be implemented - why don't they help SteemitInc to develop it?

How will communities change a lot? They will have two choices, issue their own coin to sell FOR STEEM, with the main possible investors being the same whales gaming the system now, or continue to draw from the same rewards pool. If you read the white and blue papers and even listen to Ned's latest talks, he constantly makes reference to the quality of the content? Why? Because the quality of the content ESPECIALLY content that is internally promoted, is the value of the site, and the underlying value of steem itself.

You are definitely right. I feel like I was "born" into this awesome ecosystem that is steemit and now before I know it it's changing into what is more representative of lamestream social media! Resteemed.

Vote buying leaves the platform open to becoming a lot like other platforms clogged with ads. How long before McDonalds is buying votes? Or Coca-Cola?

Oh my gosh. That concept terrifies me.

This comment sponsored by Taco Bell.

Seeing how it's not terribly expensive to get on the trending page, I'm surprised it hasn't happened already.

Or is it? Maybe it is. It definitely will before too long, if Steemit keeps growing.

The trending page being “trash” will, thanks to the free market, if it remains, end up driving folks away from Steemit, which will be a good market signal to others that the behavior needs to stop, resulting in social consequences such as flagging and ignoring said trash, or the bots being abused.

I find nothing wrong with using services to boost one’s posts. It’s a great tool for good authors. What you are doing here is what needs to be done. Voicing your free market opinion. If these articles truly are trash, you should raise up a small group to flag them down, and even the bots they use, so they can be “blacklisted” from the services, if that is what you feel is right.

There’s nothing, however, fundamentally wrong with Steemit it even “vote buying” in my opinion, though. Let the market decide, and Steemians take action.

kafkanarchy84,

I believe that the majority of community members are adults. Having said that, I believe strongly in the idea of self-policing. I believe we have it within ourselves, but there seems to be a prevailing attitude that you post as much "trash" and eventually it will stick. I agree with you wholeheartedly, that if the "trash" remains on the trending page, it will end up driving folks away from Steemit. Yet, like richardkrill has done, posting about it, making others aware, is one step in the right direction.

Vote buying isn't illegal....as far as Steemit is concerned. Try that in politics or in business and its called bribery, influence peddling.

I am new here, and I, like richard and I assume you and others, enjoy steemit for the community and the decentralized system, the self ruling, rather than being ruled. I guess it is an issue of awareness, and what's good for steemit as a whole, rather than just the individual and their desire for wealth, fame and power. It didn't start with steemit, and it won't ever end.

I will continue to generated quality posts and choose to let the merits of my work, speak for me. I won't use vote buying, just because to me, it indicates I don't believe in my content, I believe I need help. If it's good, it will eventually be recognized and rewarded. Is it a harder route to go, sure, but more pleasurable, because it is results that I produced alone.

I’m glad that someone with sufficient heft has spoken up on this pressing issue. The 1st priority of Steemit should be high quality content. The second should be wealth inflation.

Nice Richard, good on you for being so bold. This will definitely drive people away if they see what's happening here, in my opinion.

Post a picture of a coffee table, get a payout of $200.

Post good quality useful content, get paid out $1,26

This has to stop!
Upvoted

I have been back and forth on up-vote bots. I recently tried them again and ran the numbers. It isn't coming out as profitable as they seem at first. Looks like I'm pretty much breaking even.
I have also been thinking about how it increases the concentration of wealth on steemit. These bots just make the whales richer while the minnows are left with pennies for gains. I think I'm done using most of them. I will still be supporting and using @treeplanter because I believe it is a good cause. I will be using it to upvote other people more than I use it on my own posts. How many people send a bid on behalf of someone else? Not very many. I think that is the tell that voting bots are being driven by the greed of the steemit user base.
The trending page is broken in my opinion. Need an trending page ranked by organic upvotes. On reddit stuff rises to the top because it is good.

You got it, and that second thing, not the damn trending page, is going to be the issue. Communities can't solve that inequality. From what Ned has said, the communities will have a choice, draw from the community rewards, and face the bot vote competition, or create your own coin you can sell for steem. And who will be in position to invest in those communities and have the largest voice? The way it's set up now, it will only continue to increase the gap. But, if whales were forced to earn through content, like everyone else, it would slow their growth considerably and bring more equality, which I don't think is what they want.

Hey @richardcrill is there a really definitive difference between vote buying/selling as the "promote" ability for anyone's post here on #steemit?

[IMAGE: https://res.cloudinary.com/hpiynhbhq/image/upload/v1519676013/llwf9d9nbtchdlssga6a.gif]

yes im agreed with you.

there are certain things as a steemian that we all know that is against the steemian way. even though we know we can shitpost, we know to atleast give it our best to create quality content. things like begging for upvotes and leaving weak comments like. "followed. follow me back" or "upvote for upvote. as a steemian we should all keep to the steemian code.

as with all creations. people might use them in ways that the creator never intended or had little knowledge of what users will do with it. nobody knows how the technology will be used until people play around with it.

but yea. even the whales should lead by example. i mean, i'm guilting of self upvoting and buying upvotes but i also feel like minnowsupportproject was designed to pump up accounts so they can eventually not need to pay for upvotes. i have 1,100 followers and i doubt any of them read my posts. only a small handful of people.

I see most of these comments have entirely overlooked your point about the posterity of Steem, and what is best for it in the long run. Unfortunately I have seen this a lot with users, especially those only interested in posting and cashing out. Everyone loves/wants/needs money, I get it, but as you said, a lot of people are here for the community too. I too feel as though bots will tear Steem apart. That is a saddening thought, as this platform has allowed me to be the most social I have ever been. I love Steemit, I have met so many amazing people and I only want what's best to keep it around as long as possible. Thanks for your voice on this.

Thank you @bethwheatcraft! Well said!

Well, I've cashed out my SBD from the very beginning, but still want steem to be successful long term. If it's not, then I lose a source of revenue and audience building. I'm 100% opposed to the bots, so not everyone looking to maximize earnings is opposed to competing for community attention.

It is us eating our own tail as we often do. I feel like in history because we moved slower in our societal evolution, the creation of new societies and then the subsequent problems unfolded over the course of several generations. People have short memories, even with our written and oral histories, the majority of people are not aware and repeat the same mistakes. The good news is since things move so much faster with the tech, anything we do gets to the problems really quick. The U.S as a global civilization -> weeds took just about 200 years, not 2000 like Rome for example. Now with global internet the blockchain societies like this grow and get into the problems in just 2. Because it is happening at a speed most of us can see, we will FINALLY have a larger portion of humans aware of it, which I believe is how we will finally come to grips and solve it. It won't just be well read philosophers and teachers trying to sway society of an unseen possible problem. That is our only saving grace, as we have seen the teachers/spiritual leaders/philosophers cannot move fast enough to save a majority from themselves. It is why I actually still feel excited about blockchain/decentralization and places like Steemit . There is hope, and I see many people undertaking actions and solutions <3

I have been having a few of those thoughts recently and im new here since new years eve ad have recently touched on this in a few of my blog posts so far. I'm doing my best to use my social media skills to attract new people here and educating them but then I just constantly see a whole heap of whales that just seem to have monopolised this platform and don't really care about the long term new blood. I know the introduction there is a whole bunch of how to get started tips but there is certainly to much crap rolling downhill from whales that make a few thousand from some of the worst quality posts I have ever seen. It is such a huge effort right now it seems that those that a re winning right now have to create some kind of lottery fund to be seen. Not enough help at all from those at the top sadly and I know there are those whales who do help and look to educate new people but I have certainly met a lot who came here and gave up because they put so much effort in their posts and can't justify why some piece of crap made a couple of thousand. I do believe that the long term building genuine relations sharing value etc will work but it seems like a place where only the strong will survive. We are all human its hard not to think of the financial benefits but its hard to focus on just the fun when you see the growing amount of trashy posts in the trending. Would it help if more people exercised their downvote or does that leave us vunerable because some one with a higher reputation could wipe us out?

Yes, I think that could help, especially if whales did it. But like you said, it's risky for non whales, and not effective unless enough people join the effort, including whales.

The culture is changing. I fear unless we change the culture or the code, the problem will persist. However, I have not lost hope.

I love this platform and thats the reason for this conversation. I will continue to focus on creating quality content and improving myself and helping others do the same.

Vote buying already is destroying steemit. The only ones defending it are the dope dealers. They don't care about the neighborhood. That's why it was so easy to compare this situation to the impact

Crack Cocaine

leaves in it's wake.

Pretty simple stuff. Enjoy the post if you have time to read it and notice the comment section. People are sick of it.

[IMAGE: https://steemitimages.com/DQmPsQNTi7ktsvEZaH4QN1huiuB1HSsvk16JgXMo8nr5kja/Jesus_drives_those_who_buy_and_sell_out_of_the_temple.jpg]

The best way is to change the hot and trending page... some kind of algorithm like facebook :)

Thank you, @richardcrill, for daring to care about this platform, demanding quality and taking the unscrupulous to task.

Just earlier, today, I posted this notice on the wall of a witness who was guilty of, precisely, what you speak of:

"I wish on a platform like Steemit, with its noble values, money didn’t talk so loudly. This in a sense is what we escaped from in other places, real and virtual to try and pursue an ideal experiment, here.

I wish, too, that bots were seriously looked into. How can quality content providers or artists like myself, who might have talent but no money, compete with money-hungry, unscrupulous folks who buy votes & upvote themselves, regularly, to the top of trending lists?!

I know the world is not fair, and I don’t believe in complaining, but I believe in the promise of Steemit and have only been here a few months & hope to stay & grow."

The only way co tent should be trending is by users upvotes or number of resteems or views. Or by the authors own money paid as a form of advertising.

Bots are too confusing and put new users off ("come to our decentralised and free social platform.... Where most of the votes are bots and paid for. Where we pay bots and cheat the system to get random crap to the top").

This isnt how Steem.it can grow. I came here all excited, wrote honest posts, voted, read, just to see that the whole thing is controlled not by users and good content, but by a few tech savvy folks and their bots.

What we have here now is a nicely centralised platform that shows you junk on the landing page (hello new visitor, we're full of shit), and isn't curated by readers for readers.

Whats the point?

Thank you for putting this in such perfect words!
I've been on this site a few days and really was shocked by the amount of lazy, badly spelt and worded posts were trending. Almost every post I have commented on so far and has had random bot accounts comment (i have nothing to do with them, they just keep appearing and commenting), one was called catbot and just started hyping off a load of cat facts on a picture of my cat...
I thought the whole purpose of this website was to stop the promotion of spam, but that's pretty much all i've seen on it! That's the human race those, a platform that offers to pay us, of course it will get abused as people are too lazy too put the hard work and effort in themelves to create decent content. Shame really :( I know it would be impossible for the website to moderate all of the bots and spam. It kind of ruins ir for everybody in the long run. I guess us hardworking, original posters will just have to work even harder to get noticed then, lol....

great post upvote and resteem have done

I think it's worse than just the trending page In fact, i think it undermines the entire mining process, which makes steem less valuable. Here are my thoughts. I wasn't as nice. https://dlive.io/video/markrmorrisjr/958f7b21-24f1-11e8-ac93-0242ac110002