Steemit Winter Update: 2017 (As it should have been)
[In the original post, there was a video here. If you watched the video, you will know that it basically just said you should read the text below. This video served a double purpose of getting steemit's official youtube channel some video views, and wasting our fucking time]
In this post, we want to bring you up to speed on what is happening inside Steemit, as well as give you our perspective on the successes (and failures) of the past year, let you know what we see as our mission going forward, and provide some insight into what we have planned... However, there are far more important things to address, so we will have to cover that in a later post.
It has been our responsibility at Steemit Inc to assist in the fair distribution of STEEM across the network. We have fallen short of this responsibility, and so we offer to you our sincerest apologies. Our inaction in regards to pay-for-vote bots has reversed the distribution of STEEM on the network, and now a few "bad whales" are quickly expanding their stakes, and their ability to cause further abuse on the platform.
We had attempted to use curation rewards and voting penalties as a way to influence the higher SP holders to vote for the best content, in order to earn the most curation rewards. This was how we planned to have STEEM distributed over the network. We unfortunately did not foresee that some of those high SP accounts would simply stop voting on community content, and instead sell their voting power to the lower SP holders, whilst still laying claim to the curation rewards in the process, maximizing their take of the rewards pool.
This will soon lead to a new era of megawhales, with the dolphins losing their power to influence the reward pool. We would advise you that if you were all able to simply avoid using these bots, and let the voting power they hold go unclaimed, then the power of your own votes would elevate so you could reward one another more; but we know that not all the community would stop, and the few that chose not to would see more rewards for their deceit. This would not be fair.
Instead, as a means of combating this dystopian megawhale future, and reversing the reversal of the distribution of STEEM across the network, we have decided to make a number of useful delegations.
Yes, that's right. We are going to cancel our wasteful 1.5 Million delegation to @steemcleaners. We realise that this service does not offer any value to the community by upvoting their own overly frequent and hardly useful posts, and taking a sizeable portion of the reward pool in the process. We've also had enough of their satirical comments which they spam to prevent spam, which they also upvote, earning dollars by the minute every day.
Furthermore, we can't really justify giving a 1.5 million STEEM delegation to an abuse-fighting initiative, when they overlooked this cry for help from a member of our community. We had to instead wait for @son-of-satire to try to help this person, and to follow that thread to discover a crucial piece of evidence that @steemcleaners should have been looking at 24 hours ago- a piece of evidence significant enough to tie a prolific and successful Steemian to a hacking and thieving network.
Yes. We shall be removing that useless delegation, especially as the initiative has now paid themselves enough SP to do the job without the delegation. We can now instead offer that 1.5 million delegation to a few members of the community with a fucking spine, who will use that delegation to turn minnows into dolphins, rather than dolphins into whales or whales into fucking krakens. We have seen delegations being used well and would like to see more of this in the future. We will delegate to active and unbiased curators who favour quality content over the circle-jerk and this-for-that mentality that has hurt our beloved Steemit.
We believe that if we can provide a few community-oriented whales, who will seek out and reward the best content, or encourage initiatives that do, then with a higher frequency of worthy content being rewarded, people will be less inclined to pay for their own vote. There'd be little reason to if they knew there were other whales out there who may still find and reward their work, without looking for a payment.
We do not know how we will choose these delegatees, but we are open to suggestions in the comments. Perhaps if enough of the community agree on a method then we will have a good starting point.
It is a shame that 2 hours in and I am the 14 th to vote on your post.
You will have difficulty finding people who are able to read enough posts to do the job required, and still be unbiased and even-handed when handing out the money.
I wish you luck in your endeavours.
I agree that such a thing would be difficult, but I do not believe impossible. Also, thank you.
If we have more people like you on Steemit,it would be even better place than it is now.I am inspired by some people here that commit themselves full time,with lot of effort to make Steemit better place for all of us...I share your opinion that bots are not generally good for Steemit,because I saw what bots did to Twitter and other similar social networks...I want to talk to other human being on Steemit,not to machine...Keep up the good work,and give your SP to someone that deserves it!
Lol. If I just arrived on this post, my first thought would be that you were the author on another account trying to paint himself the perfect candidate for a delegation. I feel the need to state on the record that I am the shittest curator on the platform. I simply don't enjoy consuming as much as creating, and the majority of my voting power goes towards comments on my posts. I think the perfect candidates will have some creativity of their own, to give life to initiatives that can benefit the community. But I feel they must also be very active curators who vote on a wide variety of content.
This rules me out, though if they were actually to hand out a few delegations, I would make a suggestion of @dreemit. I don't know how that woman finds the time to read and comment on as much as she has done, but this is the sort of person I think ought to be getting a delegation.
The type that avoids the politics and focuses solely on building a community around their self. We have many of this type on the platform, though I know no others well enough, and therefore am unable to trust enough, to nominate for such a powerful position. But I genuinely hope people do make suggestions, because the ones being named might just be the people I would like to meet.
To address your point on bots, I think we have seen a lot of abuse tied to them. But, it is like anything else. It can be good or bad depending on its intent, and most of the ones on here have bad intentions-- though often are disguised as good ones.
No,it is not my intention to paint myself as a candicate for SP delegation...There are a lot of people here that try to make Steemit better...I myself really love what @jerrybanfield, @aggroed,@stellabelle and some others do....But you are right that we should be aware that megawhales will make Steemit different than we want,and other thing to be careful is that these megawhales may form groups and power down at once,etc.
I meant not to suggest that you were fishing for a delegation. Only that your comment could have been interpreted as me trying to get one for myself, using you.
Aw, I'm blushing ;)
@son-of-satire This post is very important, I sincerely started using the bots without knowing the impact that this could cause, people should know more about the risk we have of using the bots. Resteemed
Most of the new users came into steemit based on the advertisement of "make money". They see boys, and the number of people using them, and think, "oh, that's how I make money!? Sweet, That's easy!" And to your point, they don't know that it's utterly killing the ecosystem of new users.
People need to vote on each other's content to make this place work. Using bots only hurts those who are using the bots. It creates the growing gap between the whales (or kraken) and minnows. Unfortunately, whales don't see it that way. Some truly believe that they're doing more good than harm, no matter how much you try to explain the math and social impact. They "don't have time" to vote on others because they're "too busy" with other ventures. But they still want to get paid for doing their other ventures by using their existing power to expand their future influence. That doesn't sound too altruistic anymore, now does it?