Steemit necessary changes
Steemit is great social network and every day it is evolving.
Last few months we have steady growth and thanks to @penguinpablo we can track current state of Steemit. We are approaching to 1 million accounts but more important number than that is how many daily active users we have.
As of today we have around 60 000 daily active users and this is almost double than few months ago.
More and more people are joining Steemit and most important thing is to involve new users easier. First week of using is crucial. If people get disappointed, they will quit using Steemit. More important thing than that is that they will trash talk about Steemit everywhere and probably they will reject many new users.
Many people come on Steemit with intention and expectation that they will earn money without real effort. When they realize that it is not possible, they quit. Probably they will trash talk Steemit but I don't care about them. There is no way anywhere to earn money without doing anything and this users are not important for network.
MY CONCERN IS ABOUT NEW QUALITY USERS WITH GREAT IDEAS THAT CAN BRING QUALITY CONTENT TO STEEMIT.
To keep them on Steemit we need to change some things and MAKE STEEMIT MORE FAIR.
If you are new user and even if you are writing great blogs and comments, it is very hard to advance on Steemit.
First of all if you don't have money to invest in tipping bots then your blog nobody will see.
Bots are not profitable if you think that you will earn more SBD with using them but with buying upvotes, your rating will increase and your blog will appear in trending column where more people will see your blog so they are necessary evil in my opinion. I am using them but I don't like that.
BOTS are FIRST thing that I would CHANGE.
If you have money, than even if you publish some bullshit, with tipping bots you can get upvotes for that and be rewarded.
This is very bad for Steemit and it is destroying quality of network.
SECOND thing that I would CHANGE is way of UPVOTING.
Human nature is that lot of people are selfish. I am not like that but I understand selfish people.
BECAUSE OF SELFISHNESS LOT OF PEOPLE ONLY UPVOTE THEMSELVES.
They are saving upvoting power for them and they don't upvote any posts.
Because we can't change human nature, we should change way of upvoting.
I WOULD SPLIT UPVOTING POWER IN TWO SEPARATE PARTS
First part would be for self upvoting and second part would be for upvoting posts of other people that you like.
Like this, by upvoting others posts you will not take upvoting power for self upvoting. I am sure that this way we will increase number of upvotes for good posts.
I really believe in Steemit and I am enjoining using it. I am not here to earn money, and earning money on Steemit should be just follow up for using social network and bringing good things to it. I am upvoting all things that I like and I don't care that because of that upvoting power for myself is lower.
My opinion is that in life you need to give and then you will get.
I am not judging if anyone is different than me and because of different human nature we should adjust Steemit to become more FAIR.
I would like to hear more opinions how we can make Steemit better.
Love getting more viewpoints of all the different ways of using and promoting on here. I just started using steemit regularly (joined a while ago) and still figuring out all the angles here to be most effective with voting, lending, powering up, ect.
That wouldn't help as many users are having multiple accounts which are upvoting each other.
'Diminishing returns' for upvoting the same accounts (own ones and others) several times would be more useful.
Apart from that one should think about changing the reward curve.
Agreed. Self voting is not an important issue. A user with 2 accounts would end up in the same result..
Why on Earth do we need a blockchain?
Without that what's published could be changed at any time.
The reward system would not be able to be provably fair. We'd have to trust that one entity maintaining the records is not changing numbers behind the scenes, etc
digital Double spend, immutable ledger...
Your title is wrong, you are talking about Steem, not Steemit. Making changes on Steemit ( which is just a website) is meaningless.
The Steem blockchain is open, so how would you get rid of bots? By making the blockchain operations only workable by Steemit? Steem is a diverse ecosystem. Doing so would kill the hundred of Steem Apps that exist such as Busy Drive Utopian eSteem, etc. So how would you do that?
Self voting is an issue. But if we implement your method, whales who want to selfvote will just create dummy accounts
Rather than imposing rules, I believe that with some time, the community will self regulate, more and more initiatives aim to punish the abuses and reward those who deserve it. Of course it will take time and that won't be easy but that s the only way IMO.
Thanks @stoodkev for reminding everyone that there's a difference between wishing Steem would change in some way and having a technical proposal that could actually push the network in that direction. It turns out to be extremely challenging to engineer incentives without unintended consequences. And in a free market where upvotes have value, I don't see how you could successfully regulate vote selling.
Curation rewards are somewhat of a regulator... you have more incentive to vote for good content that others will subsequently upvote than bad content. But push the pendulum too far in this direction and people will start only voting based on what others like.
Totally agree. I think it is already generating this tendency of just liking what others like.
I wouldn't kill bots but there should be some criteria that will stop possibility of upvoting shitty posts.
Ok I don t disagree with the intention, but how do you plan to achieve that?
What does shitty post mean? Is that a concept that someone can code? Or every post should be reviewed manually? Then how do you verify that?
I think that people behind bots should do self regulation. In comment here from @ebargains which help I am using is nice explain.
I strongly agree with the self regulation comment. In fact, most bots already started to self regulate and imposed different new rules/restrictions on their voting processes, including and not limited to 3.5 days post age limit, blacklists for serial abusers/scammers, etc., limit of upvotes per user per round.
All in all, most stakeholders do realize that preserving the value of the network is the number one priority. Add features and efficiencies will come with time, but we must all make sure that the network itself is valuable and not corrupted.
Keep in mind that bots also have human operators behind them, and most of the operators are constantly on the lookout for up and coming new authors and curate/upvote/resteem content manually as well. At least I am :)
This is exactly what all people behind bots should do. Self regulation. To make Steemit better.
Hmm, I never thought of bots that way. Thanks for rhe insight.
@stoodkev - agree with your points: Steemit will likely self-regulate. I would argue that it already is self-regulated. Many posts that are innately stupid or just contain a pic- might have a couple one-liner replies, i.e."cool pic man" and this type of post will rarely make it to the Trending page where the big money is made. Good comments! Upvoted & followed.
Mob justice? Social justice?
Sounds scary :P
Steemit needs a better UI, so, I disagree with you.
I meant for the kind of changes he was mentionning, and that are at the blockchain level, nothing to do with UI.
For the UI, I couldn t agree more with you, as a matter of fact I created SteemPlus extension to solve these problems.
I saw it, personally I don't like it, needs better UX. ;) See if you can "steal" the UX from steemkr. Good luck. :)
"BOTS are FIRST thing that I would CHANGE."
How? Or are you just navel gazing into a fake utopia?
"I WOULD SPLIT UPVOTING POWER IN TWO SEPARATE PARTS"
I more or less suggested this, but the problem you get is that it does nothing to stop vote trading/vote rings. They just vote each other for their "other" stake.
But, it would help reward generous voters who don't participate in such methods.
Bots can only be changed by self regulation. In their interest is also that Steemit is successful and with better content Steemit will be better. Two separate voting is not perfect but is better then current situation. If we all together improve and act less selfish then we would have much better Steemit. I am fully upvoting every good post, some of them are yours, and I don't care if I am gonna have less voting power for me. But truth is that lot of people are not like that...
I don't see it, why is two votes better than 1 vote? It's not, it's only another hoop that the people intent on exploiting it will inevitably go through by upvoting in between themselves like @lexiconical said. It then makes everything more complicated and gives more obscure places for people to hide in and abuse.
Some of them will manipulate for sure but not all will do that. It is not perfect and nothing can be perfect bit I think that is at least little bit better than now.
It's not, it's more complicated, therefore that's no benefit, then it doesn't solve what it sets out to solve or improve considerably on what it set out to improve so as to justify the change, and in doing that it creates only more crevices and nuances and therefore more possibility for abuse, which a lot of little abuses is the same as a few big ones but a lot of little ones makes abuse look much worse than compared to a few big ones.
Dwinblood made a nice gesture, which should be extended to everyone and it's a shame that it's not obvious enough: try to put yourself in the abusers' shoes so you can evaluate your proposal.
Opinios can be different and maybe you are right and I am wrong. What is your opinion how we can improve Steemit?
Steemit is a private company, you mean Steem. Steem is improved by little things or huge things, which usually are a lot of little things in disguise. The best one would be to have some integrity in what you believe in and how you act, which means that good intentions aren't ok if it goes against what you believe. If you believe bots are a problem then mean that with your actions. There's no end to hypocrites that complain about being forced to use bots. They are an option that is there, they aren't forced upon any in any way. They delude themselves to believe that earning upvotes should be effortless and not gruelling and getting engagement should always be positive and agreeable. Everything comes in time, ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find.
People have made many suggestions.
There is always a major problem with them. All it takes is using multiple accounts, so the people that seem unfair would be unimpacted by any such changes.
The solutions are not easy or we'd have already implemented them. :(
The problem is this is a very new thing, and the problems we need to try to fix have never actually been seen exactly in this format before because this is a totally new paradigm.
This means there likely are solutions, but they are likely to be difficult, and require some seriously out of the box thinking.
So keep thinking...
Yet to save yourself some time in the future try to play devil's advocate to your idea.
If you can figure out how to get around your idea then the unfair people will be able to as well. Multiple accounts can get them around pretty much anything you propose.
Also we shouldn't EVER do things just so we can say "We did something".
We should do it if we can't figure out how to exploit it, and we see that it doesn't negatively impact people that are not being unfair.
We must also realize that reality is not FAIR. It is impossible to make something completely fair.
We can try to get closer to fair though. :)
I agree with you that two voting is not perfect and can be easily manipulated with multiple accounts but I am sure at some degree it will be better because not all people would do that. Beside that, if they have multiple accounts then they need to spread SP across them so their rating would be lower on some of that accounts and maybe they will be dolphins instead of whales :-)
Reality is not fair but we can at least try to make it fair as much as possible...
Doesn't work that way.
We had a whale who was #7 in power. He likes to flag stuff he doesn't like. I've seen posts go from $200 to $0 on this person's whim.
Eventually he broke into many accounts. Spread his power around.
Created some voting bots that people like to send money to so he made a fortune off of giving people up votes with other accounts people didn't know were his.
Yet it was still the same guy that was okay with "voting however he wanted" even if it crushed someone else.
He has many such accounts and several voting bots. I personally think at this point he may be the single most powerful person on the steem platform. He is very smart when it comes to these things.
In his defense he has supported some good causes too. He is human. We all have good things and bad things.
My only problem really with him was the "It's my power and I vote how I want" and the fact he couldn't make the leap to "these are my hands and I use them how I want" doesn't mean I should be choking and attacking people.
I figured it was better to just ignore stuff you don't like, and up vote what you do like.
He disagreed.
And like I said I suspect he is the most powerful person on the platform. It is simply spread across multiple accounts.
Spreading across multiple accounts does not decrease how much you can do with power. All it does is make it a little more tedious to login an vote with each of them, but most people just use a bot to do that.
I can't say that you are wrong but at least we can try to make Steemit better. All my life I have tried to make thing better. Even here, I am nobody, with no power to change anything and maybe my suggestions are wrong, but at least I am trying the way I can to make Steemit better. If you have some suggestion, you should say them loud and maybe somebody ho have power to change things will like that.
Easiest way is to say thing are like that and we can't do nothing with that...
Trying isn't good enough. That's why you need to polish your suggestions, maybe when they are good enough, will trying again work at making it better, but trying to make things better by offering suggestions that won't make it better, is not "at least" something you ought to be mildly proud of. It's indeed quite easy to say anything, even that things are like that and you have to accept them, it is harder to accept them and use the tool for what it is though, and a lot of times you have to know the difference between what you can change and what you cannot because trying to change some things isn't "at least I'm trying to make it better".
Just criticism whithout any suggestion is obviously only thing that you do...
I didn't have any suggestions, to me the problem is not yet a problem or rampant flagging.
I agree with this post, bots need to go, BUT at the same time I love them because you can use them to get exposure by getting on the trending page for the whole steemit world to see and also on the promoted page so your post keeps being seen.
All that leads to followers, upvotes, resteems, and comments which leads to more success on form. It is deceiving to some people though because they see a post and wonder how it got some many upvotes, not knowing bots were paid for the upvotes. Much like this post I see you paid some bots.
Upvotes definitely red to be changed, because you’re right people are selfish and don’t realize that when they’re selfish on steemit that it doesn’t do any good to the community, just themselves. And if we get a community that is “just for the selves” then we really don’t have a community at all.
If I vote for a minnow artist because I think they're stuff is amazing, it's incredibly annoying when someone comes along with a few dollars to push them aside and cut in line. These people just end up quitting... and I tried my best to help. It's so selfish buying those votes and pushing people out of the way, I don't see how anyone can call it "success".
If I give someone a trophy, they EARNED it. If someone buys a trophy, then acts like they're "successful", where I come from we call that a fraud.
If more people with high rating are like you, Steemit would be better. But most of them are not like you...
If people quit because others promote themselves or others promote them then they are quitters and would have given up at the next adversity, but I am the Bah so throw some caution to the wind. It makes no difference to me though because it's always been promoted work, so they feel that it's worth that much, being mad about that isn't a helpful reaction because ultimately this is an issue of supply and demand and not a question of personal integrity or morality.
It's a shot to morale, which in turns kills work ethic. The same thing happens on the job if someone shows up, acts shiny on the surface, kisses ass, then gets the job promotion before others. Before you know it, the workplace is full of brown nosers and productivity slips because the actual workers were kicked to the curb and left for greener pastures. Quitting doesn't mean they give up life, it means they're looking for something better.
There's genuine promotion and then there's folks just looking for shortcuts. Those ones taking shortcuts are causing many others to stress. Those taking the shortcuts are contributing to centralization of power. All of that money is going to a handful of bot owners. There won't be much supply and those bots will be in high demand. I don't see why centralization of power makes people feel so good, but whatever, it's not me paying to screw the place so I'm not to blame.
Quitting from a social media/public forums because people promote themselves through large stakeholders based on a overwhelming demand for those promotional services is still a very poor reason to quit. In the real world centralization of power happens by the hand of those bosses. Here centralization of power is insignificant to people that are like me, who will speak and upvote regardless of how many flags or how much resistance there is because to me centralization of power in that respect doesn't affect me in the way that actual centralization of power would. I hoe that those that left did so because they considered the alternatives (none) and decided that they are better, but that's not likely, they probably went back to the mindless facebook newsfeed.
Hmm interesting. I hadn't thought of it like pushing minnows out of the way, I thought of it a bit like Facebook ads.
also calling people selfish for self-upvoting is absurd. it's like if someone was handing out free money and i went to take it and as i was walking away you told me i was selfish for not letting someone else have it
They are not selfish because of self upvoting, they are selfish if they do ONLY self upvoting...
fair enough
Tokens like Steem acquire their power and new value from increasing network externalities. Unfortunately, the steep learning curve to the site and difficulty for new contributors to break into the system makes it impractical for a lot of new users from participating much at all. Steemit should be relentlessly focused on growing new users and nothing else, best achieved by:
-partnerships with existing social media sites;
-outreach to new users that focuses on the ability to basically get paid to do what they already do for free on reddit, Facebook, and their own blogs.
The potential is there but Steemit seems focused on protecting its existing power-users instead of trying to find one. I just joined and would never have heard of this place if not for my overzealous deep reading of every relevant cryptocurrecy subreddit. There is a lot of user engagement on this site for experienced users but the tutorials and FAQs are weak, new users like me are flailing in the dark, and there is no marketing investment from Steemit whatsoever as far as I can see.
Working on getting listed on new exchanges is of no value if nobody wants to buy the token. The token achieves its value and power not from its concentration in the hands of a small number of power-users, but by expanding the userbase to the point that you have lots of people who have a genuine use for the token. My two cents.
I see that this is your first post. Welcome and good luck on Steemit. I like your comment and agree with most of it :-)
Tokens like anything of value is acquired by belief, and power is no different.
Steemit is a company that holds the hosting for the front end of the system, and when I say the front end I mean that they host noting else, you can create your own front end, youc an even right now FORK this, like GOLOS and make your own steemit that is focused SOLELY on growing new users through whatever whorish means available: such as contracting with the devil.
Steemit isn't about "basically get paid", the idea is economic freedom, read the whitepaper.
I am still waiting on a detractor of steem to fork it and I have challenged numerous people to do just that.
In other words, you might as well save your criticism and get hard at work because none of that is constructive if you understand the ethos behind steem, you're basically explaining how we can rape, murder and kill on the market when we aren't even remotely interested in inflating and blowing up steem as some kind of slut, what good is it gaining the whole world if you lose your spirit in the process? The spirit of steem and steemit has not been Hype, has not been Partnerships with the Devil, has not been masive onboarding, because all those things come from people that are simply and solely interested in profits, numbers and those are at odds with the values of quality. People will come, nobody is going to jump on the first wave, or the second or the 5th but eventually those that happen upon it will accrue, and this is a mathematical fact that as long as there is no better place than steem, more quality AND much more quantity of quality, steem will remain supreme, and I credit it mostly to the values and ethos and WHY behind steem.
as a newbie to this system (less than 4 month) I am facing what you said personally! I dedicate some of my upvoting power daily to NEW posts which I find interesting, but they make little money in the end so I don't get much Curation reward.
I try to write quality content, but no one ENGAGES and SEES them.
I even had post which a whale liked (as he commented) and confirmed it was useful for him, but didn't upvoted! :)
I had a post similar to yours, I described Steem has a great business Idea, but not a great business model. it's not sustainable.
sustainable business model needs:
I believe steemit can use parts of ORTHODOX business models like adwords and adsense to make these goals, combining them with the current model
no, we cannot, because we are decentralized and there is no consensus of introducing anything remotiely compromising to that, and as many are completely against whoring ourselves out or our abusing our attention by the very things that 90% will turn off one way or another, only so that people have it EASIER.
Steem is not a business.
Got your point and i do agree with part of it. But i cant stop thinking about the sustainability of the system.
Because sustainable growth is sustainable right? Or because insane growth is sustainable? I would beat people over the head with their favourite word like this for paragraphs.
I respect your opinion, and i have mine: sustainability matters and it will be possible with reasonable growth and benefit for hard working middle class
The only thing that matters is WHY you believe that.