RE: AskSteem: Are you going to make use of the downvote pool? Why or why not?
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I am trying to understand why this post now. Why not before the decision was made? Or did the opinion of the majority not really matter?
I will not be taking part in the flagging game. I have flagged, but rarely and only if I see something very bad (a scam which can hurt others) - and if the poster shows me I am wrong, I instantly unflag.
I refuse to stand as judge over posts that do not meet my criteria, as I've seen that others do enjoy them. Also, I have seen flags by those like trashit, which were made because of political reasons (someone who mentioned he watches Alex Jones) or the post is anti-vaccine. The wording of the flag-comments on trashit are vicious or, at best, real nasty. He programmed his flag-bot in this way because he has been delegated over 25,000 SP and feels powerful, but I have not seen any good posts by this fairly new 'trash' account.
This is supposed to improve our platform?
The way I see it, we have a few choices, under the new regime. We all go ahead full steam and flag everyone we do not like, or else, we look at ways to stop others from flagging us.
Tying this in to the curating changes (taking from authors, not the 25% as it is-was, but 50% and, as was said in one of the posts by those in power, maybe at next HF we can go to 80% for curators and 20% for authors, because, as was said, authors are not important to steemit, only the curators are), I do not find cause to feel optimistic about the future of this platform.
I also would like to know how we can protect ourselves if we are targetted by some nasty people, can we, for instance set our setting to Deny Payments? Would that prevent flagging, or could they still flag so as to affect our Rep (this is I was told by someone else). Is it true?
As for the curating. I refuse to write stories, spend hours on them and then have a few of those who upvote me take the lions share. It is NOT as if the curators are using their own money and therefore deserve a big thank you. They are using common funds without cost to them, but because they think a post will do well and earn them money, we must increase the rewards to them? BS.
I know that of those who upvote me, most do so as a way of rewarding me for the post, or by some as a way of thanking me for supporting them when they first started on steemit. Those are the kind of reasons that evoke good feelings and help generate friendships, which makes the platform a nice place to be. Your way, I think, will bring about the opposite.
A sort of PS here: It also means I am going to have to withdraw almost all my witness voting, as most of them support the changes of this HF, even if only because they feel obliged to.
Which leads me to the question: Of the members with a Rep of 70 or above - how many of them have never upvoted their own posts, or those of another, so that they get upvoted by that person in return? How many have ever purchased a vote or promised, 'follow and upvote me and I will follow and upvote you'? But now, that they have high reps and strong SP, they want to ensure we cannot do the same as them? Why? Are we really meant to bvelieve they are being altruistic and acting for our own good? (sorry, but I am not that much of a 'snowflake').
I am considering denying payments for my story posts, only allowing them if I make a news or political post. I am certain that by my doing so, I will be contributing to the platforms by my stories, while not funding leeches (those who are not satisfied by the current 25%). I can get rewarded on some of the alternatives which have sprung up recently.
Higher curation rewards would make bidbots less profitable. People will probably self-voting less often.
I'm sorry, but though your intentions may be good, you are either young or know very little about human nature. Actually, you know it will not work out the way you say, which is exactly why every post I've seen about this HF and Flagging, they always talk about flagging those who self-vote.
You think you can create by force an Utopia, but no dictator has ever managed it and they will not manage it here either. People will be idealists for a while, but they get tired of it and revert to their natural natures.
Which is why I have been trying to convince everyone that this is wrong and that it will kill Steemit.
The only good thing that might come out of this is that maybe someone who has the knowhow is watching and seeing how Steemit went wrong, they'll devise a healthy and practical platform.
The sublinear reward curve is about to exponentially crush all votes under the almost linear cutoff.
The little votes are about to count for even less.
Only flagging abuse not currently getting flagged will change that.
If they repeat the whale experiment, this might not be sooo bad.
? There were plenty of discussions before such as the post by @vandeberg when he took a deep dive into the downvote pool. This comment is coming off as passive aggressive already off the gates and "you guys only care about yourself and not about the smaller users/majority" so not sure I want to bother reading the rest.
Please refer to my other reply just made...
why would you make it personal? How is that the only example you could think of when there's literally tons of shit posts on trending with 99.99% stake from bid bots behind their votes in an economy where the majority of stake is locked up in bid bots enriching the owners and delegators and yet everyone is crying about 50/50 being so bad cause it just makes the rich richer and ignoring the fact that even if it helps get some of that stake off of bid bots and back to curation or curation projects it will have done it's part and most authors will be better off because of it. On top of that we will have the downvote pool to make sure that whatever stake remains on the bid bots is used on things deserving the promotion and those misusing it will get their rewards removed fast and the returns the bid bots provide for delegators will be reduced thus driving delegators to further delegate to curation projects that return higher curation rewards because they go out of their way to find good posts possibly from new users.
If ya'll can't seem to see that all these changes, working together with one another, will be good for the platform and their authors, combined with using downvotes appropriately to downvote abuse such as the example above so that those rewards go back to the deserving users that don't get downvotes and if you're not alone doing the downvoting on an account but many follow you it will not give the downvoted account a reason to go out and retaliate on all the accounts, if they are a big user in power of doing that then it will get noticed and other bigger accounts will step up and counter their damage because there will still be way more voting power than free downvoting power.
Anyway, I still went ahead and read your comment but please try and be more openminded to the changes, things can't get much worse around here lately and these changes will surely not make them worse, they may not be perfect but we can only improve from there on out.
I admit you have not convinced me - not because I want to be difficult, but because all I see is a number of assumptions about the effect of these changes. Of course they have to be assumptions, since there is no previous history of such a situation on another platform, but I do not see a practical approach being adopted. For instance, make changes one at a time, so that you can clearly see when one of them is causing more harm than good.
I am trying to help someone in Venezuela. They have a low SP (even with my delegation) so they only earn something when I help - and a few others do so. I can see them being worse off now, for who is going to care about them? This last week the child got sick and was taken to hospital. The hospital did not have the medicines needed, so the mother had to rush off to try and buy some from a private clinic. They are already struggling to buy food, so this expense has knocked them sideways. When a post was made about it...of course Steemians rushed to help (I am being sarcastic). I will send some today, but it is not enough.
There are various groups helping Venezuelans, but they cannot help everyone; it is necessary that small but capable of helping people like me also choose to help one or two. My vote is 1c - so if I cannot send them something by buying votes, I cannot help - and I love the posts and effort being made so as to feel they deserve my support.
Keep in mind, if I buy them (or anyone else) a 5Steem voting package, I am using my money, which already belongs to me - yet you want to have the right to steal it (from my point of view it does remain theft, since I paid for it). That is one thing nobody seems to mention. You see someone gets a 10 or 100 Steem upvote from upvote bots, but that is not what was earned; most of it, maybe 90% is money taken out of earned money and by taking it, you are stealing money that does not belong to Steemit. Once the money is in my wallet, it is supposed to be mine, so I am being damaging, though you are right, Steemit does benefit from having my money stolen and put back in the pool.
Oh well, it was a bit of a rant but by replying I have assumed you wanted a debate and to know why I am not happy with what I see being proposed (and put into effect). Yes, it is what I fear, all these good intentions rely on theories by idealists without pragmatic attitudes or experience. We want it to work, so it will work.
Anyway, why get upset with me? I'm a small fish compared to you and whatever I decide,my influence is not likely to be felt....is it?
Not upset, you say this:
yet seem to have a lot less experience and understanding of the platform than most on this post. Again not trying to offend you but you're making assumptions and bringing forth examples that only happen a minority of the time.
Why do you think people would use their downvotes to downvote genuine posts that have "earned" rewards compared to having bought them from bots. "earned" cause nothing is earned until payout is through, upvoting and downvoting is only a tool to allocate the rewardspool towards accounts. Then yes you go on a rant talking about your altruistic endeavors, and even though I believe I've been rather altruistic myself even though I'm not in the best position either and currently powering down at these low prices, I do have to ask if you understand how the markets work. You realize for every Steem that gets sold there has to be a buyer, for most rewards you allocate to users that end up selling that Steem there has to be a counter investment back into the platform in one way or another. It can't just be "they are here and they are active, let's help them survive", what are other platforms or cryptocurrencies doing for people in need? Why is it that I only hear about a $60 dash donation and how dash is making big waves in venezuela on the internet but nothing ever comes out of Steem? Where is the marketing and the investment back to continue keeping this platform and relationship with Steem healthy so that it won't just dry up and bring everyone under considering how many people are relying on it. Well I haven't seen much of it, many like to complain about rewards yet have not remained invested. Many like to complain about changes yet only think about them from their own, often times shortsighted viewpoint.
There is this weird entitlement when it comes to Steem and at the same time the thought process of "someone else will take care of it". For every post that gets spammed in my DM's daily instead of using the share functions to share it onto other social media platforms and bringing in new users we would probably be doing a lot better. Yet most people just think about themselves and their short term gain. I'm not pointing this at the people you mentioned cause I understand their situation is dire but not many other Steemians are doing much to help the platform that introduced them to crypto, possibly changed their lives or if anything let them earn some rewards instead of making rewards out of them like most centralized platforms do. It's almost like no one deserves it to begin with, or at least that's what it has been feeling like lately.
So that was a counter rant to your rant, from someone who stayed powered up for most of my 3 years, powered up around 20k sp above $2 and is instantly being pointed at for powering down by other community leaders and rumors start to spread if i'm leaving steem for good without bothering to ask what's up or what I'm doing. That's Steemians for ya. You might be right that not much will change with the HF changes, as it seems in this thread most will not downvote, i.e. risk their cozy post rewards to downvote bid bot abuse that's just been taking their rewards while enriching owners and delegators for the longest time. Band together and see to it that deserving posts get the rewards and help the little guys get some rewards with the new curve. It might be that the negatives to the downvote pool will outweigh the positives, who knows, maybe that's just who we are and I guess then we will all deserve eachother at the bottom of the coinmarketcap ranks. One thing is for certain though that keeping these same rules going with the leeching of accounts such as haejin who has been using his buddy's account to self-vote garbage placeholder content that gives no benefits to Steem or kingscrown who doesn't bother taking longer than 5 minutes to write a post but invests all the time to get as much rewards as possible from anyone that gives in to his dms while votetrading with a delegation with as little skin in the game as possible or other votetrading groups that think we are going to get anywhere if we don't curate the way it was meant to and make that competitive instead of this safe proof of stake piece of shit that this blockchain has become with the same faces on trending every day and the same shit every day while everyone just thinks of their own ass no matter if it will cost everyone this opportunity to make something great off of Steem.
Anyway, not in the best mood so a lot of what I may have said might be emotionally driven, but at the end of the day who cares, it's not like there are many readers around today anyway and I haven't been one for caring that something will be "permanently on the blockchain" in previous rants either. I like to say my opinion and that's kind of how I'm feeling lately, if the new changes won't help us in any way then I don't really know, I'll probably still continue my attempts at distribution with ocd&ocdb, etc but part of me will be dead inside.
I did not mean to depress you. Of course I can see much that is positive about steemit, it is why I am still here, but when those who have the programming abilities seem to make the decisions without talking it over first (I know not many see it this way, but a very large percentage of Steemians are also heavily invested in Steemit, if not in SP, then in time as they struggle to make it a better platform for others), I get the feeling that we count for nothing (especially thanks to people like haejin). He was my first case of seeing the abuse of downvoting (flagging). A Nigerian had the clever idea of making a post on how to grow enough food to feed your family on a tiny piece of land - because so many are starving in Africa, without reason.
haejin flagged him until his rep went to zero. When I asked why, what was bad about his post (?), haejin replied, 'because I felt like it' and some of his hanger-ons threatened me, demanding I stop complaining. During that day, he damaged another ten or more for, again, no reason. I contacted Patrice for help and was told haejin is too big to fight. So, if HF21 knocks his socks off, I'll stop moaning (at least, I'll try to).
...and now you want to tell me I should keep my rose-tinted glasses on and believe in the better nature of Man guiding our members?
Have you checked the nasty comments 'trashit' makes as he /it flags comments? I get the feeling that behind that bot is an evil or at least, nasty man. There are more like him, so, to be okay with flagging for free, I would need to know there is an impartial group who will examine and correct such abuses where required.
Anyway... relax with some good music and tomorrow is another day...closer to the day you tell us about your new project. I love it when I see people taking the initiative to create....or take a risk to give birth to what was only an idea.
My best wishes for success.
Now that I know who you are (OCD) it brought back some memories,. When I first joined and posted my stories, I was given some nice comments and upvotes from OCD. I wondered about whether I should do something, maybe there being something to join or in some other way contribute, but I found it too confusing and after asking a question or two and not getting any help, I guess I forgot about OCD (as they also forgot about me, I guess).
I have been presented this argument a number of times and I think I understand when it comes to upvotes coming from the pool. Let me personalise it, as it is easier to write:
Say I make a post, but know that because most of my supporters are now elsewhere, I'm not going to get more than 10 to 20 cents. I look in my wallet and having over 10Steem, I send to SmartMarket 10Steem, in the hope of earning anything between 0.50 to 1 Steem. So, I invest my $10 for anything between 4.5 to 6 days and get a return.
Then along comes someone who says, "The upvote rewards do not belong to you and I think you are making too much, so I am downvoting you down to a reward of 0.50c
Can you see that I am actually having $9.50 of MY money being taken from me? If they went after whatever PROFIT or ROI I'm hoping to make, the argument that the rewards are not mine would make sense.
It is clearly stated, many times, that once the 7 days are up and the money is transferred to my wallet, the money is mine and nobody is allowed to take it from me.
This is what I am looking to find an explanation for. Why am I wrong to feel this way?
You aren't, the whole ecosystem is wrong to force many to buy "profitable" votes in the first place instead of having stakeholders curate or at least passively delegate to curation projects looking for what is worthy of curating and supporting. That's what I'm hoping the HF will fix, even though n^2 was too high and I realize with the new curve many minnows will see their own voting power diminish further I hope that the initiatives to curation will increase. The sad part is that some are in the position with their "services" to profit by even giving you profitable votes, this is something I addressed with @ocdb by making it fully non-profit for us maintainers and is the reason why it grew so big in SP and we're gonna try to do our best to keep it non-profit and fair to people after HF21 and hopefully with some more flagging power behind crappy bids they will slowly lose some of their delegation and more power will go back into curation instead. I'm not one to hate on for profit projects as long as they bring some value to our platform, but coding a bid bot, which 90% are just copies of @postpromoter and making anywhere between 5-15% off of every bid + some times also taking the curation rewards is in the end just taking rewards from everyone since we all share the same pool. It's annoying that people fail to see that that biggest threat to Steem have always been bid bots as they've centralized the stake to sell it for "attention" and sometimes profitable votes while mostly just enriching the owners and delegators and costing us distribution, active and good authors and less stake for curation. With the new HF we can hopefully at least have smarter bidders that will promote actually good posts knowing not many will find a reason to downvote that, as I'm sure not many downvote your posts either since you don't overbid nor promote crappy content.
That's what I am hoping to change and even if the outcome is not gonna be great and will open ways for a lot more abuse it literally can not get worse than what we've been dealing and ending up with in the last few years, imo.
Let's see how it goes, I'll be trying my best to use my downvotes as efficiently as possible and I've already come to terms with never earning any post rewards anymore due to retaliation, if anything it'll waste some more of their downvote power.
Okay...I'll stop making waves and keep my fingers crossed as I hope it all works out as you want it to.
If you do not mind...I did not know who to ask and you seem to be knowledgeable enough to maybe give me an answer (I hope you do not feel it is presumptive of me)
I worked out that each post was costing me about 23b RC. I worked out what I'll need for 4 posts and delegated (sorry, this is on my 2nd account, which I did not create to make money, but for posting my story in bigger chunks for readers who enjoy reading my story - I find that limiting my posts to 2 to 2.5 pages does not give the reader enough for them to get caught up in the story (I read, in real life about 2 or 3 books per week, so I tend to empathise with my fellow-readers, whether they feel that way or not).
A month later, I am struggling to make posts and I see it now requires about 31.1b RC per post.
I've been wondering why the RC required changed and all I could think of is that as the value of Steem changes, so does the number of RC required to cover the costs. Am I right?
I don't believe RC changes with the price, it's more about the usage and witnesses can adjust that if necessary in the future. One theory is that @misterdelegation delegated to @steem recently so they can claim more accounts as they were running out due to demand so them and everyone else claiming accounts is probably the reason to the cost increasing.
Thank you, appreciated.