To those who keep saying "proof-of-brain"...
To everyone that has been shouting at me about proof-of-brain, and specifically, how "bidbots break proof-of-brain". Please, stop for a second, head out to the real world, gain some perspective - do you even hear the words coming out of your mouth?
"Proof-of-brain" is an absolutely meaningless attempted-catchphrase invented by someone at Steemit Inc. Have you seen the Trending page on Steemit today? If this is proof of brain, then this is some kind of bizarre, highly corrupt, reptilian brain.
You could say, Steem is "proof-of-wealthy". Those who are rich here will dictate all terms and allocate all rewards. Period. There's no requirement for any brain activity, circlejerk all the way by licking whale balls.
And for those saying how bidbot activity is somehow worse than circlejerk... No, they are both abysmal. There's negligible point in discussing how one is 1.2/10 while the other is 1.0/10. It doesn't matter. (Indeed, I am guilty of this, for a long time calling the above a "marginal gain". I was wrong. It doesn't matter.) Go to any other social network or publishing platform, you have vibrant communities with engaging content discovered for you. Some of it is festering piles of shit, sure, but that's the vast majority view on Steem, not the outlier. The system has failed decisively, if you really care about Steem, it's more than time we collectively got our heads back out of our arses and radically change things for the better. No amount of delusion and hopium and incremental "upgrades" on a fundamentally broken platform will fix things. Indeed, that is the very definition of insanity.
End rant.
PS: Apologies to content creators. You have my utmost respect. I'm sure you will see my intention was going on a general rant.
I'm on the goddamn trending page.
Show me the time I licked balls for that slot.
I fucking dare you.
You got over 18000 comments to dig through. You got 809 posts. Three fucking years of working my ass off. Hundreds if not thousands of images, all produced by me. Thousands of hours of work. Hundreds of thousands of words published. Out of all that. Show me the time I kissed anyone's ass for anything around here!
If you think all it takes is three years worth of festering SHIT and buttkissery to get anywhere around here, then take a damn good long look at what I've done, and call it SHIT and ass kissing to my goddamn face.
If you didn't lick balls, you either: had rich friends or paid for the spot, or got very lucky.
No. I started with nothing. I didn't know anyone. Then I worked my ass off.
I didn't pay for the spot. I don't buy votes. You can read SEVERAL posts of mine indicating plenty of reasons why I don't buy votes.
If I'm lucky, wtf am I doing here? Shouldn't I be out playing the lottery?
Can you not give ONE content producer credit? This is what pisses me off the most about this place. Assholes come along and always downplay the efforts of those who made something of this place. It's always something else. If you want to ignore ALL of that work I put into this blog and ignore all of the engagement, fine. Be ignorant. "Rich friends." You can simply SCROLL down and see quite a few posts with very low rewards. Why not try something like that before being a dickhead? Hmm? Why not look before putting your foot in your mouth.
You're insulting the integrity of all those who decided to genuinely support my work.
Good question
Would you prefer I wasn't here?
I don't care either way
You do, though.
he does, he's just licked to many balls and forgot how to say what he really thinks, it's due to months of not years of ball licking anti-gag reflex training
i think you definitely should, or shouldn't, yeah fcukit... i admit i care either way
If anyone deserves trending, its you with your totally normal posts, not whacky or probably made on drugs. probably.
And on tomorrow's episode: @NoNamesLeftToUse scoops his brain out with a spoon!
Good job dude :D
Im proud of you :)
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And I like monkeys!
Hats off to you, Sir!
Would you believe a normal brain made that?
Never! :D
Yes.
Good. Some people like this stuff I do.
Sure, it pisses me off a touch when someone comes along just to throw me under the bus like that. I'll survive! There's no need to insult the integrity of those who support my work. Some of these folks have had my back for years. They did nothing wrong.
No one's throwing you under any bus. I'm sure you don't remember, but I was one of the earliest people to discover and curate your content, and respect your work here.
I obviously made a general rant, and for every rule there's the exception. There may be one or two good posts on Trending, but I'm sure you'll see where I'm coming from when I rant about how most of it is shit.
I remember.
I'd like to see more entertainment and variety on the trending page. Things that would appeal to more people, including outsiders looking in. There were big changes recently. It's still fresh. We'll see Steem only content like this for awhile, then the honeymoon will be over and we can get down to brass tacks. You can only have one "this bidbot now votes" post and we all know that doesn't make sense to an outsider, but apparently, that made people excited and the post became popular. Soon that'll be gone. Soon all the posts about the changes won't exist and that stuff will be replaced with whatever else.
Too soon, @liberosist. I put up with a lot of shit here over the past two years. Shit posts with paid votes gaining fake trending status meant none of us actual content producers could get anywhere here. I waited over two years to see some kind of change. Anything was better than nothing. I don't mind waiting a few more weeks and allowing things to settle down before assessing the situation. For now, a lot of people are working towards something many in the community wanted for a long time. This effort so far has led to a lot of positive change for many people and the momentum is growing. Nobody was expecting perfection straight out of the gates.
Yes, you made a general rant I just so happened to be in the crossfire. Someone who doesn't know any better sees your post, then sees me on the trending page and guess what? Suddenly I'm the bad guy, yet I did nothing wrong.
I have left a clarification and an apology. I hope it's clear now that I don't see any content creator as bad guys.
It was just a bad rant. I thought "licking whale balls" is a funny visual, and I went with it.
hey! ball licking is an art form too.....literally of course
We still have a long way to go.. but it’s improving. Circle jerks are just as bad as bidbots and if anyone says otherwise they are lying to themselves.
But what you are doing here is blanketing all authors that are seen as “popular” are either circle jerking or licking whale balls. Which is not the case and short sighted on your part. So remove your own head from your ass.
Many are working to make this place better, unfortunately many others are so used to the money grab that they just can’t help themselves. Even going as far as convincing themselves they are the good guys.. it’s amazing what money and greed will do to people.
We need to work to make this place more about community and less about money.. but considering our tools and front ends are not exactly intuitive to that just yet.. it’s not shocking that many are just sticking around for an upvote. BUT.. I think many more are here because they see something special and it’s our job to pinpoint that and make that the new culture.
Stop acting helpless - You have been the leader of one of the most well known projects on this platform for years. Slap yourself, wake the hell up and be apart of this change you are so desperate to see.
Otherwise you are no better than those who piss you off so much.
You know where to find me when this rant motivates you to do something.. my rants generally always eventually motivate me to do something.. even if it’s just to not rage quit today.
I apologise, I didn't mean any disrespect to any content creators. I have edited in that apology to the post, and I'm sure you'll see that I didn't mean like so. Perhaps it's a language barrier or cultural disconnect, but I don't feel it's necessary to demarcate every exception to the rule to express an opinion about an overall situation; at the same time, I totally understand where you're coming from, so yeah, sorry.
Anyway, you didn't have to respond in detail to some shitty rant, lol. I appreciate it regardless, but if you want to make this about community and not money, you should change the protocols to reflect that. Right now, with stake-weighted voting and high inflation, it's all about money. That was the whole point of my rant.
And yeah, you're absolutely right, I'm no better than "those", and my time on Steem has been the greatest failure of my life. I recognised that, and gradually starting in 2017, moved on back to things I'm better at and enjoy vastly more. Still, I have nostalgia for Steem, and still hope some day years down the line it can find a sustainable niche for itself, so I have been hanging around here off and on, the occasional rant or two. :)
I love rants, and I respect you.. it’s why I felt the need to kick you in the ass rather than roll my eyes and move along. As I know you care and I know you get it.. and I also know you are damn frustrated and I don’t blame you one bit.
No apology needed, just pointing out what I felt was an unintended oversight in your words. You know me, I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut 😉
Btw, some of my rants are my most popular posts.. keep the rants coming .. and my DM is still always open.. as I don’t think what you have done here is a failure.
It's probably better to roll your eyes, leave some snarky comment and move on. I'm a lost cause, lol. Unfortunately, Steem has to improve dramatically (replace stake-weighted voting, remove SBD, release SMTs, Communities, remove Steem Power, etc. etc.) for me to take it seriously again.
To be clear, it's a personal thing. I'm far happier doing other things away from Steem. I'm aware that my work and those I collaborated with in 2016 were crucial to Steem's evolution, and I have no regrets. But don't bother kicking me until the above expectations have been met. When all of that happens, I would be happy to be active again.
Till then, it's going to be the once-in-a-blue-moon irrational, nostalgia-driven, rant-filled trip!
I’m still going to kick you and randomly nag you.. it’s just what I do.
But I do understand and respect that you are doing other things that make you happy while also still feeling a connection to this place. Not sure what it is about it... I’ve tried to rage quit so many times and just can’t do it 🤷♀️ So I understand the pull.
Anyways I’ll leave you be and stop my ramblings... have a good one.
looking forward to your next rant.
Haha, there isn't going to be another rant for a very long time. But I'll continue observing Steem, of course.
Its a simple fix I stated before. Steem should limit people voting for a particular person like 3 times a week. Maybe once a week, five times a week or whatever lol
It will make the curator curate other authors.
Just an idea
Dude..
I cant even find enough stuff to vote without dumb rules like these..
Just cuz many of my favorite authors stopped Posting after the last great fix.. ^^
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That is not possible because it is decentralized. Anyone can vote by proxy or have multiple accounts at anytime.
It can be voted in by witnesses and that’s why we have #new steem to curb bad actors.
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You neglect that some users have thousands of accounts. All your proposal would do is make them more powerful relative to normal users.
🤣
All well-stated. 👏
Proof of brain was a dumb slogan and never made much sense.
The idea is to allocate rewards to people who bring value to Steem, which is a collaborative process of stakeholders. (I'm not making up this goal now, it was literally stated in the original pre-launch white paper). 'Stakeholders' and not 'users', because it is stakeholders (or 'wealthy' as you somewhat snarkily call it) who are, at least under the current inflation-funded system, paying for all of the rewards, so it is stakeholders who get to decide where those rewards go.
Bid bots, vote buying/selling/treading, circle voting, self-voting all break this ability to collaboratively reward valuable contributions, which are supposed to feed back into making Steem grow and improve.
Now that we have made at least some basic game theory improvements that were obviously needed years ago, perhaps we'll see some improvement in the outcomes. It might not be the system or outcomes that everyone wants or expects, but it should, hopefully, at least be somewhat functionally better.
Fair enough. I hope too that it is functionally better, I do feel it'll be in a very niche community that it is now, but have doubts it'll scale to critical mass when deindividuation kicks in and abuse fighting fails to scale beyond the very top of Trending. Granted, critical mass feels so far off, it doesn't really matter right now, any improvement is better than nothing. But, for me, it's simply not enough, and a "marginal gain" at best.
As I've expressed several times before over the years, the current paradigm is simply not for me. Of course, I respect everyone such a system does work for, but I'm sure most will see inflation-funding is simply not sustainable, and plutocratic rule doesn't make it any better - particularly when crypto is tending to consolidate around proven and (relatively) decentralized markets like BTC and ETH; and the stated goal of building an economy around Steem is over.
Whilst simply leaving the platform is the easiest solution, and I've done so to a great extent, I'll exercise my right to rant about this a couple of times every year, with the hope that Steem will pivot to a more democratic and sustainable model over time.
A very reasonable perspective.
when you left, where did you go?
any other plans than waiting?
how about a community fork, finally?
I meant, I was one of the most active users of Steem between mid-2016 and mid-2017. I've gradually reduced my activity to "very occasional" because this is by far the worst social network on the internet, and people here are content with the current paradigm, only looking to make minor, insignificant changes. Obviously, this is not the right social network for me, so I'm no longer an active user.
Have you found some which fits you better?
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Literally everything is better.
Lol I hate the Proof of X rhetoric, it's so lame. No one in the real world talks like that.
Pretty much, and you can see it in the general design of Steem, lol. Everything is way over-complicated for no good reason. It's almost like the people who built this social network haven't interacted socially with other people...
Do you think crypto nerds have friends and social interaction in real life? They don't.
Login: Username + Email + 12 seconds on slow internet = done.
Problem solved
Steem is not Steemit. Interfacing with the blockchain isn't limitable in that way.
I know Steem is not Steemit. I'm just pointing out a fundamental flaw that is the major obstacle preventing any hope of mass adoption and thus a perpetuation of circle jerking. Whether or not its practical or even feasible is irrelevant to me. This is how people expect things to function in 2019, not 'sign up within a week, pay, or contact somebody with crypto that can go through a service for 25 cents, then they have to delegate currency to you otherwise you can't p ost anything for a while' or whatever.
We'll never see a thriving blockchain without that (I know steempress and indeed we are working our best on ways around it)
Well, there is a way to end bidbots, circlejerks, and self voting whales. The Huey Long algorithm. End the profitability of profiteering, and end the extraction of rewards that should be going to content creators.
Enable content to deliver rewards to creators, and thereby market Steem with that content, while removing the objectionable unfairness that has driven so many away from the platform, and a complete reversal of the current plunge in users, market cap, and token price may become possible.
At least tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of ordinary people navigated the shoals of delayed gratification to get on Steem, only to be driven away. If what drove them away is instead driven away, new users may come, and if enough of them do to raise the token price, ex users may even come back.
That's what it will take though.
You're totally right, and unfortunately, it's not possible on a blockchain to replicate the experience standards set by the likes of Reddit, Twitter, Medium etc. A partial solution, as you pointed out, is to build centralized frontends on top of the blockchain. That can effectively solve the user accounts, moderation and curation problems. However, that will still be far behind on performance and scalability, as one has to rely on the very slow and extremely inefficient Steem blockchain.
Honestly, I don't think the laggy platform matters a lot to new users, or users thinking about coming here. It's the savage profiteering and opinion flagging that drives them away withal. It's we who have tolerated those and remain here that care about UI. People will put up with blockchain speed if it comes with the rewards blockchain promises to deliver.
Steem hasn't delivered, so people haven't put up with it.
Yes, of course, there are bigger issues, but technical performance and scalability is a significant one. It's not the lagginess that's the bigger concern, it's the scalability. Right now, to the end user, it's fine - there are only a few thousand active users, and you only need to have a few SP to be active. But imagine if it goes up to hundreds of millions levels of activity - it'll cost a pretty penny just to make votes and comments. Not to mention, even after MIRA and other improvements, and despite very limited activity only 3.5 years into this, it still takes an entire week to replay a bare minimum Steem blockchain node. Who knows how many weeks it'll take for a full node. You can see how scalability is a very real challenge that makes social networks ill-suited to blockchain.
There are protocols that make replaying the entirety of the blockchain unnecessary while still enabling confirmation of the data, gossip about gossip is one, and recently another method of hashing has arisen. By using such protocols, very low latency nodes are potential, and greatly enable scalability.
I'm not a dev, so my grasp of the cutting edge may not be relied on. I do note that technical advance eventuates, and expect it in this field as it ubiquitously impacts all. These are not the limiting factor anyway, as there's no need to scale up unless gaining users actually happens.
As long as automobiles were hand cranked failure prone devices limited to <60 mph speeds there was no need for highways. Until the social platform potentiates demand, scaling will not be demanded. Regardless of chickens and eggs, both problems require solution for Steem to survive.
I'm sure there are ideas, but it takes years to develop. Steemit Inc spent most of 2017 and 2018 focusing on scalability, which is why there were no major updates in the last 2 years. A hardfork with major protocol updates used to be every 3 months before, then it stopped while they focused on a broad range of scalability solutions - RocksDB, RC, MIRA etc. Scalability always comes before adoption, this is absolutely not a "chicken & egg" problem.
And to what end? Reddit, Twitter, Medium etc can already handle a million times greater activity. Why even bother? I wrote about this before: https://steemit.com/blockchain/@liberosist/why-blockchain-social
Not when configured as recommended for a minimum (witness/consensus) node. It takes about 5-8 hours on a low end system except with 64 GB of RAM (a memory requirement that is designed to increase relatively slowly even under heavier use).
MIRA allows running in less RAM but with much worse replay time, an optional tradeoff.
Full nodes are slower but still only a day or so with good hardware. Again, tradeoffs between cost and time exist but are optional.
So far it is still workable, and could still scale somewhat while remaining workable, while the developers still plod along at making improvements. How their pace of progress will go from here on out I don't know.
Is it really that difficult to get an account nowadays? I myself was not bothered back then. I waited a couple of days, no big deal. What is it with payment and the inability to post? What was concretely changed? I know my friend agmoore did not mention any of that, she created a second account some months ago.
... Why the hurry? Why do we need the masses fast? ...
I hear different views on that "getting an account" procedure. When everything is free and fast it will be one day facebook or twitter. I wouldn't want that, for my part. I'd like to see a different social media where the crowd shows a different/unusual/so far not perceived mind and learns to organize in a new way.
I think you should watch this:
https://steemit.com/tsp/@steem.marketing/the-steemit-podcast-interview-w-justinw-and-vandeberg
big changes coming to steem. communities and smts will be big and all of your concerns will disappear.
Lol, I've been hearing this since 2016. It's always that one...big...thing... that'll transform Steem, cure all of Steem's woes and onboard the masses. In 2016 it was the new economics; in 2017 it was fairer reward curves; in 2018 it was RC; in 2019 it's EIP and SPS; in 2020 (?) it's SMT. Actually, SMT was supposed to be "early 2018" and Communities "by the end of Q2 2017", lol. I don't doubt that all of these are helping turn a 0.5/10 product into a 1.5/10 product, but it's so far away from a functioning social network.
Anyway, you've been telling me the same thing since 2017, and likewise, I've been telling you the same. So let's not keep beating the dead horse. Call me when Steem is a good social platform that is competitive with Reddit.
That said, I'm looking forward to Communities. Or, should I say, I have been looking forward to it since 2016.
This time it is happening:) A little bit more patience is required. In the meantime we do the best with what we have.
Well, I admire your optimism and perseverance. Hope it all works out... Some day, or decade.
This is basically right but the management changes seem to have been somewhat of an improvement from what was a rolling dumpster fire. Now it is only a minor shitshow perhaps.
We'll see.
Please think several times before you forward any of the steemit announcement or shilling, we already have had too much of it and one of the reasons for frustration. It doesn't make a sense at all. Do you think we are that much of dumb?? I personally started to take them as a joke. No offense.
You should watch the video. You may find it interesting and it might change your mind.
lol same SMT bullshits? sorry I don't want to hear about it anymore. Tell me when it finally comes into reality then we may talk about it. these guys never feel ashamed talking the same shit again again
Trending = proof of nepotism
Just visiting to say thanks for liking my travel blog.
I understand your rant! There's so much garbage on Steem but a few of us out there are still making good content!
!giphy cheers
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