RE: A Gangsta Sherlock Would Be an Awesome Dream - Steemit Sock Puppetry Continues?
The problem is the down vote. YOU who have vastly more power than me can down vote / flag my content so I get zero pay or if you choose just reduce it because the system allows it. There are 51 Whales last time I looked at out of almost 100,000 people. If I decide I don't like something you posted or up voted it or any of the other 90,000+ people decide we don't like it we cannot down vote you to zero. It creates a caste system. For me the solution is to stop down voting things because you think it is getting paid too much, or disagree with it. As long as this disparity in power allows those with power to reduce others with power then the LOGICAL response is going to be those people are going to post about it. There is also a little bit of hypocrisy. The argument to explain why they down vote so the money returns to the pool for everyone is hypocritical when they turn around and consistently vote for subjectively average content to $1000+ which takes far more from that pool than they were supposedly returning to people. My answer to this would be to remove the down vote, and only allow the flag for plagiarism, spam, and abusive posts. Some disagree... yet if that were in place now I highly suspect you would not be seeing these types of arguments. You could not use your power to crush people. IT does become an attack. So if you expect to wield that power in such a way it should be obvious that those that cannot really defend themselves from your attack are going to respond with investigations and words. In reality the actions of the down vote of the very powerful do more harm to the perceptions of the potentially new people to the platform than you realize. It is the number one reason close to a dozen people I tried to recruit are not posting here at this point.
Or, when they vote for sock puppet accounts that they admittedly created. Yes - that is absolutely hypocritical. For someone to refuse to acknowledge that point and continue to downvote information that exposes the ones creating and upvoting the sock puppets is utterly laughable.
"I'm going to downvote your post because I don't want it draining money from the rewards pool by exposing people who are actually draining money from the rewards pool."
Yeah...that doesn't work. My $0.25 on this post did not at all compare to the thousands of dollars in rewards per week going to the identified (and even ADMITTED) socks.
There are not anything close to 100K people on this platform. The vast majority of those accounts do not correspond to people.
Nevertheless, people have unequal shares of ownership, thus unequal votes. They also pay unequal shares of the rewards and unequal shares of any market losses. Guess who pays the bulk of those?
I do not disagree that the stakes being uneven and the largest stakeholders having so much power is undesirable. That needs to be fixed with stake distribution, which is exactly what is happening with nearly all of the largest stakeholders powering down (if that were not the case, it would be something to be concerned about).
I consider constant posts harping over that fact and making accusations against people over disagreeing about the manner they choose to use their votes to be content that is not helpful to the successful the platform and rather is harmful to it. No one comes to Steemit to read about whether the largest stakeholders have too much power or not, whether they are voting to promote posts by themselves or their friends (which once again is explicitly allowed and is one of the reasons people are supposed to buy SP). I consider that directly harmful to my investment and I will apply my votes accordingly.
I don't believe you. Downvotes are very rare outside of a small number of incidents of griefers mass-downvoting, something that was dealt with reasonably effectively by the community.
The top reasons people decline to participate, not only in my personal experience by widely reported by others are: 1) too much content about Steemit itself and a small number of anarchist and cryptocurrency topics; 2) interface lacking in expected features (and too focused on blogging when the user isn't a blogger); 3) small community; and 4) more recently, hostile, negative vibe with too much drama.
@smooth Quote from Smooth above: I don't know how to do the quote thing in comments. "I consider that directly harmful to my investment and I will apply my votes accordingly."
Per usual, I appreciate your direct communication style, and I agree you can vote and flag according to your power and preferences .
I fully understand your perception that posting about how votes are used ultimately hurts the platform, but I don't understand the lack of willingness to also acknowledge, what David is posting about isn't a secret and that behavior is also hurting the platform.
If you could step away from your whaleness for a minute and put yourself in the fins of a minnow who is... Unconnected. Not an aspiring Author, but a decent writer. The message from yourself and others is "write better content". When really what is creating votes isn't content, but rather networking. (not a bad thing on a social network, so let's acknowledge it)
I don't know how to say it any clearer than new users feel like they could write Shakespear and it likely won't get any of the Steem pool, because the steem pool is already allocated to the whales, witnesses and friends or sock-puppets of the whales. <---- If I knew how I would bold that last paragraph.
Thank you for taking the time to read and interact with the users, and I agree with your stated reasons 1-4 on barriers to user adoption.
Yeah, I can do that and I imagine it sucks. But unfortunately whether @kushed (along with others) supports the writers he recruits to the platform by using his SP as he deems worthy or not, the life of an unknown minnow trying to make it is still going to suck. So again, this comes down to not trying to actually make things better for anyone to any meaningful degree, but negativity and trolling rooted in jealousy (of others who are better connected, have more resources, etc. and generally have it easier).
I don't know how to fix that, other than the usual advice of hard work, self-promotion, networking, trying to find mentors and sponsors, etc. (as you correctly pointed out).
I appreciate your often critical but nevertheless thoughtful feedback.
BTW, search google for "steemit markdown tutorial". They will teach you how to quote and format.
@smooth, I agree with you regarding @kushed supporting who he wants. You just acknowledged the sucky experience of a new user. Don't we need them? As a team, can we focus on how to make it better for them? Tired of arguing and ready to look for solutions.
Oh and thanks, I will learn how to use the SteemIt markdown tool. ;)