TTR - The Failure Of Greed
Take some time to read both of these - the original post that motivated me to write this:
https://steemit.com/steem/@snowflake/enter-a-whale-s-mind
And the passionate response here:
I haven't been here long, only 135 days. That's 36% of a year. In that little-over-a-third-of-a-year I've had run-ins with bot comments, self-voting, botted-vote-gangs and low-effort copy-pasters like this one.
Are there people here that create original content on Steemit? Absolutely. I feel I can count @gric, @aci7, and @eveuncovered as Steemit friends and fellow creators, among others that I follow. They are industrious and clever, inspiring me to write things and post comments.
But that isn't the whole picture. Steemit has a problem that I'm not sure it can solve.
By creating a link to power using piles of tokens, Steemit aligns incentives towards profit, not originality. If a whale likes a post but gets more return from a vote-bot - they're going to use the vote-bot, leaving deserving posts languishing in the dust.
This is a major flaw.
How does it get fixed? I'm not sure.
There are plenty of suggestions, but all the talking in the world doesn't mean a hill of beans if the big guys don't agree and push through some changes.
So, I'm going to change my posting interval - instead of original stuff every day with no reposting, I'm going to post once a week and monitor for improvements.
I'll still support people and comment on posts worth commenting on, upvoting where its appropriate.
But longer term I see Steemit becoming a forgotten experiment if there isn't progress made to curb the exploitation of the system. So what, just one creator dropping off, right?
An avalanche starts with one stone.
See you next week.
It's a shame I won't be seeing your stories in my feed anymore. But you do have a very good point. I truly hope this issue gets addressed somehow. I curate for muxxybot (it's how I found your account too) and the amount of muck I have to wade through to find good, original content is mind-boggling. Believe me. Anyway. I do hope I'll still get to read your stories from time to time.
They will be there, just not as often.
I appreciate you reading my stories and giving support, and you nominating them for muxxybot.
The wind in my sails just went out once I read about the witness garbage. Maybe things will change, maybe they won't.
Guess we'll see.
I was posting daily when I first started but it seems that the system doesn't reward that unless you get lucky and put on a bunch of autovote lists, which seems only the highest earners get put on and then more people piggyback onto them and it just compounds the issue. Bots are a fundamental problem with social media platforms but it looks like they are here to stay. I do like the curation stuff like curie, ocd, muxxybot etc. that seems to be one of the only positives with SP delegation. Hopefully changes are made so that the platform doesn't implode on itself.
You've hit it on the head precisely. It seems the system is geared such that once you "make it", there's no time for anyone else - hence the self-voting witness debacle.
I appreciate you reading my stories and giving support, I just can't justify putting in a lot of creative work to Steemit now after finding out how the "big dogs" use it.
Bravo!
The issue is quite frustrating and I would hate to see a valuable contributor like you leaving because of it.
As I have commented on other posts about this matter, I don't think its necessarily a flaw in the "system". Its what people make of it.
Unfortunately at the moment it looks like the revolution is eating its children, because all steemians are equal, but some steemians are more equal than others. So the "flaw" lies in human nature and we try to control the gene that helped us once to survive as a species with moral and ethics. Unfortunately not a very powerful tool, when it comes to greed and profit.
In situations like that I have to always think of Gandhi who supposedly said: "you have to be the change you want to see in the world" and to all those who think they are to small, remember the Dalai Lama when he asked: "have you ever tried to sleep with a mosquito in the same room?"
I will be here for a while longer, just not posting as often.
The story about buying votes and gaming the system just took the wind out of my sails. While I value the real live people that comment on my posts, how many are just bots tick-tocking away?
I've heard the same sentiment that "Steemit is what you make of it", but I'm not convinced - only because the ecosystem seems to encourage and reward mindless automation. I have no tools to fight this. I can't flag every bot post and still have resources left to reward real creators.
That means the system has an inherent flaw that if left unchecked, means the eventual ruin of the whole thing. Just like a single tree root can crack pavement and foul pipes, the weeds of botting and automated money-suckers is a real force.
I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'm not seeing it so far.
If Steemit is the person sleeping in the room, the real question is - "How many mosquitos does it take before the body is drained dry?"
We're watching that play out right now, and I'm not optimistic about its chances.
I understand very well, what you are saying and for me as an artist there is an equivalent to this in the real world, that I and my colleagues have been dealing with for decades: The art market! A few rich folks use it to make insane amounts of money by manipulating the system in their favor.
Does it mean I stop painting, because they won't let me play in their sand box? Sure, I get frustrated, when some retard throwing a brush at a canvas leaving a red blob gets 10000 times more for his "art" than I do for something I worked on for a long time with love and devotion. But then again, I feel privileged, that I carved out my own niche and that I can make a decent living as an artist.
So, what does it mean for me being here on steemit? Everybody knows, there are some major flaws. Funny thing is, I think half the reward pool goes to discussions about that...
But there are lots of great people here adding extraordinary content. And that's the part I like :-)
We create our own "neighborhood" in this virtual city and it will always remain much more alive and interesting than the bank district ;-)
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STOPI don't know. Steemit is like the outside world. One cannot fix it, only deal with what flaws it has. As long as I can find people here who seem to surf on the same wave I am still loyal. I don't care so much about the trending page. This page is like mass media to me. It shows all the crap and dark sides of humanity and is taken way too seriously.
A forgotten project: that also may be the case one day ... or not. Who knows. Funny that you mentioned the same article. As a response I posted an article, too:
https://steemit.com/steem/@erh.germany/enter-a-mermaid-s-mind-an-observation-of-the-steemit-system
I just freed myself from that crazy pace I put myself into. I wanted to prove something to myself and after having proved it I felt exhausted. Now I am much more relaxed after pausing and only writing once in a while. Which might be seen ridiculous from the outside to say a one month break is even a real pause. ... But in these fast times, it actually is long.
Writing this while sitting on my balcony with birds singing and lovely spring temperatures here in Hamburg.
Goodbye for now.
P.S. I've got a lot of texts in my pipe. Do you have any preferences? I can offer an article over AI or metaphoric stuff about Buddhism:)
The only reason I still lurk here is to see if it does get fixed.
I'm not optimistic.
After seeing other waves of greed and exploits being used to drain the Reward Pool, I've concluded that Delegated-Proof-of-Stake is flawed. Maybe there is no way to fix it, after all.
As for texts, if you have something interesting - a writeup would be fine and I'll read it on your blog.