RE: An Update On My Curation Habits and Why You're Better Off Buying Your Votes and Earning Peanuts
I was always told that if I had nothing nice to say, I should keep my mouth shut. For better or worse, you are the antithesis of that virtue. Always ready for a rant... and I love it! I'll take a page from your book today, then, and hope you don't get too upset with me about it.
I'm not shy to admit that we see things a little bit differently. I dislike bidbots for different and, in my opinion, more important reasons that impact all of us much more than arbitrary post rankings. As I've stated many times before, it is my experience that the real users of this platform don't look at trending. Anyone who holds any real amount of experience on this platform is open about their inability to even look at the place without gagging.
In the long term, then, it doesn't really matter who is on trending. What matters is how much stake we are centralising in the hands of bidbot owners or, worse yet, the extremely large SP holders they lease delegations from.
You see bidbot users as competitors, as people who are paying to put you down. You can choose to look at it that way and, if you run the numbers, you're not wrong. But Hanlon's razor is always in my tool-bag. I carry it with me wherever I go and it has not failed me yet.
Are bidbot users keeping you off the trending page? Maybe. Probably. Does the blame lie with them? It is certainly arguable... but is that their intention? Do these people buy their votes with malicious intent?
Hanlon's razor says no. So don't hate the players... hate the game. Sure, it's your right to call hordes of minnows two-faced sacks of shit for getting the wool pulled over their eyes... I just think it's misguided and damaging to your overall goals.
That's all I came to say.
It's not just me they push away. I am leaving though. Can't do this anymore. I don't want to pay those people just so I can work here.
I didn't call all the minnows two-faced. There's a few out there, I didn't mention names. If they read this, they'll know who they are. The one's I'm not talking about, they should know who they are as well.
Nobody's stopping you from working here but yourself. If you need to go, go. I'm sorry. That sucks. I like your work. Lots of us here do, too. To us, it's hella unfair to lose you because the engagement and exposure we provide isn't good enough for you. But nobody's going to tie you to a chair and beat art out of you. Besides, we're too tired from trying to make a difference, over here. We can't hit the button any harder. We've failed you.
One of my favourite Steemians once wrote:
Everything you said there is beautiful. Everything you said there is still true. I still hand out money for free to people whose presence and work I enjoy, and I am still often rewarded for providing comments (I've even posted one or two times in 5 months!).
I get that the place isn't the utopia it could have been without human greed. It's still better than most anywhere else. That's my opinion.
You have an ingenious creative mind and I have no doubt you'll take it wherever you go. So wherever that is, crypto-centric or not... drop me a link; let me know.
Take care of yourself, man. <3
I think I responded somewhat to this in my newest post.
Great comment overall but I do not agree that people do not look at stuff that gets promoted. Ads for Coca-cola works, marketing works. Promotion works. Yes as you say don't hate the players hate the game. The game can surely be tweaked so it will be better for everyone. We are still in the early stages of testing new platforms with Tokens. People want to get visibility and some are willing to pay for it so they can save time and energy.
There is no denying that an attention economy is being built. The platform would do well, however, to incentivise distributed mechanisms for promotion. As it stands, bidbots and those who delegate to them receive a disproportionate percentage of the reward pool indirectly by selling their share of it for (on average) more than what it's worth. The curation rewards that the rest of us get are just a nice little bonus to them.
I agree with @NoNamesLeftToUse The Writer/Artist Himself on several points and one of them is: the bidbot abuse must be addressed somehow, or soon there will be no reason for actual content creators to be here. I don't like it but it's basic maths. More and more people delegate to bidbots every day. Eventually honest curators are just going to run out of STEEM.
I know that's a terrible pun. It was my best attempt at comic relief. Unfortunately it has been a miserable failure. Sorry about that.
We had the chance to change the current advert-centric model prevalent in the mainstream social media, and for a while here on Steem it was working. I don't think we need to give up on that. Promotion and curation can co-exist peacefully... and the first step is bringing back curation by changing our consensus rules to beat the bidbots at their own game.
You're just as gullible as someone who falls for a cheeseburger advertisement.
Haha. Yes! 🍔😀