Steemit Forum #3 - "Voting Circles = Good or bad?" Open discussion
In these forums we give you all the opportunity to express your opinions about the situations that have been expose in the former posts, it all will be moderate as neutral as is possible, keeping the respect for each point of view.
Forum nº3
Voting Circles
In this forum we'll discuss about these so-called "voting circles" that seems to be causing some fuzz around all Steemit
What do you think about voting circles?
Do you think they are necessary for some users or that they are simply abusing Steemit?
For those who do not know, a voting circle is basically a circle of accounts with large or medium amount of SP controlled by one or more users to self-vote themselves.
It may be legal to invest your 3.5 million dollars in 5 different accounts and then auto-vote and see a good income in the medium term.
But... it's okay?
What happens when those people end up occupying a large part of Steemit and its reward pool with unsuitable posts on the platform just for the sake of generating more profit?
What happens when the posts that are trending are really redundant and unnecessary? Those who invest in these accounts, usually do not read the posts of the community, its main focus is to generate a profit according to the investment made and then continue investing. Do not you lose the sense of the platform?
Or, at least, doesn't it feel odd?
There is a tendency to cross the line between the correct and the legal in these issues on several occasions. This is where morality comes into play in conjunction with the legality of the system.
What do you think? Should it be penalized that only a small group, thanks to its own money, monopolize Steemit? Or is it just capitalism acting in a decentralized system? We await your comments on this, always attentive to read them as arbitrarily as possible.
- This is the beginning of a serie of forums, more is for coming, we hope that you could take part in the work to preserve the integrity of our comunity through your ideas and arguments .
LET'S UNVEIL THE TRUTH
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I think its not ok how some big guys get the money out of steemit. Voting circles, reward pool abuse, bots, multiple accounts, plagiatrism, ... I constantly see all this and ask me is this really the intention if steemit? I see some lonely people trying to make a better steemit but I cannot see much effort from official people to address these issues.
But maybe u have not seen that steemit is beta? ;-)
They might change all this for a better furure steemit experience...
Just my thoughts. J
This is not easy to answer.
There are investors, who DO support the community and invest significant amounts of money into this system for the joy to build a social media network and observe what their money does for people. If there wouldn't be an attractive ROI on top, it is questionable if those investors would still support the community.
Other investors only crunch numbers and don't have a particular interest in the content, but maybe also not abusing the system and accept a ROI on a moderate base.
Then there are those, who abuse the system as described above. Altogether it has an effect on the whole system. Question is if the abuse activities outweigh the other performances on the whole. I do not know the answer. Does anyone know?
A healthy system can handle abuse. There is no system on earth which is not abused and where some people profit more than others. I do not care so much about the abuse and the greed of others. For I am not a greedy person but also, of course, think in terms of profit making. I make sure to not get aroused or rage about it. Doesn't do any good and makes me sick and unsatisfied.
I guess in order to stay healthy or stable the individual users should not let themselves be encouraged by abuse. Do your thing, cooperate with others, hold the community spirit high and have as much fun & fruition as possible. It could be over one day, it could go on. Nobody knows. Endure some uncertainty and if you do have the feeling that it loses its attraction, look for something better. Meanwhile a lot of experience and knowledge might have passed your heart & mind.
Because steem has no fees and there is no "tax" to speak of it encounters the same problem all other coins have. Investors will seek to maximize their profits and as long as the system's code allows them to they will do so.
It's just a roundabout way of going about it is all, and it's damaging to the perception and growth of steemit and the steem economy because ordinary users pick up on the behavior of these bad actors and know that steemit is not really a meritocracy. Regular users want to know they are one among many whose vote results in an article or piece starting to trend upwards, they want to add comments and their own creativity when re-blogging, they don't want to have to play strange minigames when tagging their posts, they want to be able to feel like themselves and feel relaxed in an environment where people shouldn't really care too much if you're being offensive to the sensibilities of the receivers (at least to a degree).
So instead of attracting users who genuinely engage with content and use social media for fun in their free time and tapping into the largest potential userbase, we are left mainly with two (really one) groups of users, those who want to earn income from steemit and have invested or have the potential to invest a lot, and those who don't have much income in the first place. To make it even more clear, I'm saying there is a reason that steemit attracts the kinds of users it does, and it's highly segregated into the haves and have-nots, and the composition of the groups are a very telling indicator of the health of the system. If it were not for outside speculation forces outside of our control we would not have seen the price growth or the user growth that we have, because user growth correlates tightly with the former, and has little to do with the "quality" of the content here.
Practices like egregious auto-voting and circular-voting stifle the competition and draw attention and funds away from more deserving content, but it's not like anyone on steemit really cares what is said, they just set their voting trails to autopilot and know others will do the same for them if they have enough voting power. This guarantee of income really damages the incentive to strive for greatness when the poster knows they can get away with middling or mediocre content and still receive a large payout.
You know the problem is bad when, upon investigating a decently large SP lender here on the platform, I happened across a message from a beneficiary complaining that other recipients of SP delegations had been abusing the power of the circular vote by posting without disregard for content. I'd like to think that there are others who feel the same way as this person does about being a part of such voting groups, but I don't think many are going to so openly question an opportunity to generate such huge profits on the bare minimum level of effort needed to not get the attention of some of the larger downvoters.
Steemit has to disentangle the notions that you can force large investors to actively post on the platform to generate returns and the idea that we can be bigger than the mainstream social media websites, because the current model simply does not work and will not achieve those dual goals. Make steem and steem power a more attractive passive investment in its own right (there are many functions they utilize to achieve this currently, but they are inefficient and require time investments that many larger investors will not bother with, they have better things to do with their time, and it's doubtful they will want to spend the majority of their time maximizing returns from what is but a sliver of their portfolio), and make honest, active posters and community members feel like they are on a real social media website, not a business or workplace slash pseudo auction house and lending institution.
Can you or cant have more accounts??
I'm a newcomer, but I watch videos and I read about steemit few hours per day for a week or more.
And I saw on several vlogs that people say that you can have more accounts but yesterday I saw in FAQ (in more places) that it is forbidden.
It says:
"To create an account on the blockchain, it costs STEEM tokens. When you create an account through Steemit.com, Steemit Inc. is supplying the tokens to pay the account creation fee. In order to prevent users from abusing the paid-for signup and creating multiple accounts, we need to be able to verify that each user is only signing up for one account."
Also it says:
"Each user is allowed only one paid-for account created via Steemit.com, however users are allowed to create multiple accounts on the blockchain. Creating additional accounts on the blockchain requires users to pay their own account creation fee for any additional accounts."
This is definitely an issue and voting circles in this sense goes against the idea of a dac imo. i don't believe this is a result of capitalism in decentralization i think its a case of these systems being new to us and we fail to adapt. i have a quick post about setting a community standard on my page if any one is interested.
I think for some guys here this isn't a platform for blogging, for them this is a platform for generating money by investing in steem power. I Totally agree with you "that they are simply abusing Steemit".
Steemit is not a business model, It is a community which has its own ecosystem and when you try to exploit resources of the ecosystem it gets ruined.
IMHO it shouldn’t be allowed as it just rapes the reward pool and no new content is found. User NGOS is a perfect example of this circle jerking
Your observation is good. Fake people always try to find out some short cuts to success. It should be legally prohibited, beacause it is like slaping on the face of hard working people who put time and effor to prosper in the community.
Maybe you should delve more deeply nto the first comment of this post:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@spectrumecons/don-t-let-greed-destroy-steemit
As of now, they are legal (via code) and thus justified. What incentives exist within and around the platform to stop someone from being a greedy asshole? Such activity is simply mining in a "proof-of-brain" system.