Part 2 of Our Plan to Onboard the Masses

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(Edited)

Communities v5.jpg

In our first post about our plan for onboarding the masses to the blockchain we explored, on a very high level, how we think about solving the problems that blockchain still faces, and the important role that both Communities and SMTs play in our proposed solutions. In today’s post we want to dive a bit deeper into one of these solutions: Communities.

When Communities launch on Steem, for the first time ever people will be able to create communities, on the internet, that they own. We think that’s a very big deal, and a value proposition that will excite community leaders all over the world.

Priority #1: Blockchain Onboarding

As we pointed out in our previous post, our #1 priority has always been onboarding the masses to the blockchain and we think that in objective terms, we have done more than any other team to further that goal. No other blockchain has even a fraction of the poets, artists, musicians, and of course, writers, that Steem does.

Finding Like-Minded People

But how do we take this to the next level? When Steem and steemit.com were first released, growth was explosive because for the first time it was possible for a community of like-minded people to congregate on the Internet on a platform that they could earn a stake in. We bonded over our shared passion for Steem which lead to a strong and rapidly growing community.

Diverse Interests

When we’re talking about onboarding the masses, what we’re really talking about is onboarding people who aren’t into crypto or blockchain at all. They are, by definition, into something else. Our passion is what drew us to Steem, but if we want to attract even more people to Steem we have to offer them a home for their passions. That’s why we believe Communities are such an important part of the future of Steem, and we believe, the future of blockchain generally.

Aligning Incentives

We know that we can use this technology to align the incentives of the members of a community. Our “beta test” of this technology was “version 1” of the Steem protocol which could store usernames, stake, content, votes, etc. Steemit.com was the beta interface we used to run this experiment.

From these experiments we learned that, yes, a blockchain could be used to store social information, distribute tokens among community members by leveraging crowdsourced stake-weighted voting (a/k/a Proof-of-Brain), and this could be done in a way that supports the bootstrapping of a digital currency. Over one million accounts created, 50,000 daily active users, and a token featured on many exchanges is proof that a community-backed token can deliver a ton of value.

Steem: Leaving Beta (Metaphorically)

Communities are about leaving that first phase. We’re taking the knowledge we’ve gained as a community and using it to build new tools that can be used by any community that is interested in retaining ownership over their social information and rewarding their most valuable community members.

When Communities launch on Steem, for the first time ever people will be able to create communities on the internet that they own. We are leveraging the same cryptographic technologies that enable the ownership of digital tokens, to deliver ownership of digital communities. And because Communities are a “2nd Layer” solution, changes can be pushed as they are ready, instead of having to wait for hardforks. Enabling these capabilities is why Hivemind is such a critical (and we believe undervalued) piece of software.

Although the changes for Communities will roll out in phases, the end result will be every bit as disruptive as the original release of the Steem blockchain.

Incentives

One of the keys to Steem’s success is the fact that it has the unique capability to autonomously align the incentives of community members. We are all so passionate about Steem, because we have all worked so hard to add value to this ecosystem, and have received some amount of stake for our efforts. But again, not everyone is interested in Steem, let alone capable of adding value to it.

In order to really scale Steem, we have to not just create features that allow communities to form around non-Steem interests, we need to enable those Communities to determine for themselves who is adding value, and reward those people with stake in that community. That’s where Smart Media Tokens come in, which we will discuss in a future post.

Communities Feedback

At Steemit we are 100% committed to building open source tools that benefit every project that leverages the Steem blockchain. We want Communities on Steem to be part of every Steem app, not just steemit.com. That’s why we have already released a Communities design document that lays out how we are building Communities on a high level, so that other developers can understand why we are making the decisions we are, provide feedback on those decisions, and suggest additional features.

We are still eager to integrate feedback from 3rd party developers on Communities. We invite anyone with ideas, suggestions, or questions about how we can make Communities work for all Steem developers, to share their thoughts in the comment section below.

The Steemit Team



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I like this communities thingy. Thanks for that. Hopefully it will benefit our @DDaily and the other ones that were built around Steem

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Keep up with this. Steemit is going to do great. I believe in you guys. :)

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I just wish to see all these yielding result for steem at the end of the day. Cheers

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The ownership of our own community is a massively important step and hopefully the solutions you create make the process easy.

There are already many established communities online, are there going to be ways to integrate them into a Steem community or, easily tokenize their existing platform with an SMT?

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That makes a lot of sense. Good idea.

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And how Stem Engine communities and tokens will be integrated into all of this?

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I think @aggroed wrote something about this the other day.

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@tarazkp could please post the link to @aggroed post related to steem-engine and SMT token integration. I searched his profile but could not find any.

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I love this plan and i just hope it work perfectly well as you have mention in your last two post about onboard the masses. Hopefully it benefits @Steemchurch this time because i realize that steem only focus on popular communities because most of their owners are witnesses and they have a lot of delegation but trust me their members ain't gat zeal for this community and their member are only after was good for them and not steem.

When i join Steemchurch i don't anything about cryptocurrency and main reason why i still find it difficulty is because am still learning. Steemchurch have established themselves in four different countries Venezuela, Nigeria, Philippines, Ghana, and already have more than 3000 members on telos and all this 3k+ members don't know anything about cryptocurrency and they have been trying to bring them and onboard them to steem but not enough delegation to that, Steemchurch have already request for delegation here but so far nothing happened for a community that has been on steem for more than two years and doing so fine without request for any delegation before and asking now you should know is for the greater good and for what will benefits steem.

If you want to onboard the masses try as much as possible not to handle things with sentiment or try to favour some communities. Please am begging let this work with the mind that you want steem to move forward.

THANKS.

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These things sounds good and all, but I have a question:

Do you have any actual plans to get people onboard? In terms of advertising campaigns etc. or are you leaving that to the "people" so to speak?

I mean, like I've also stated previously, the main reason for people to join steem in the early days was because they had a good chance to earn money.

With time, without starting a discussion of why, it became far more difficult to earn than in the early days which is also the main reason for most of the inactive accounts (at least from my understanding). If and when people didn't earn what they expected to earn, they basically gave up on steem.

What they expected to earn was their own imaginary goals based on false and/or inaccurate advertising and due to the extreme rewards authors earned from their contributions at that time.

Now, when the value of steem has dropped and it has become harder to earn than in the early days, one would think that we would need some amazing advertising campaigns to reach the "masses" you are talking about. Especially marketing that is true, legit and accurate, and not some mumbo-jumbo that is made up by greedy users who've bought their way to the top...

So, do you have any plans to execute some form of advertising campaigns or will you be passive in that sense and let the existing user base stand for that?

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This is the question I keep asking......
Non crypto people don't understand keys...
I just commented about my non crypto friend that got her steemit "free account" @she.rocks.joy
She doesn't know how to setup this account correctly.

She cant find the original master password , and now this account is probably a dead account!
This is a major problem with on-boarding!!!
If we want the masses, we need to make this very simple for people who really don't care about crypto !
I hope someone that can change this is reading this, we need to adapt!

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Personally I think until the platform is easier and more fun to use, signups run the risk of turning off users and making it harder to re-acquire them in the future. (Unless you're targeting early adopters.)

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More fun to use requires a new and shiner condenser interface. I guess that will hopefully come with communities or third parties who can think outside the box on the current version. Not being able to find and search for content is a huge turnoff for both content creators and curators

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this is a massively good point. I think the user experience is not very good and will scare away many even once they wrap their heads around the keys.

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Agreed. It would be counterproductive to spend a lot of money to advertise Steem at this point. The platform as a whole should be somewhat more mature.

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I agree with this. Waiting until the time is right is a much better use of resources.

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I know our company has plans for the marketing but we're not going to do them until a good use case of Tribes or Communities and likely start with marketing to a specific group with something that appeals particularly to them (photographers for example).
Community protocol progress they're doing gives moderation abilities intermingled with hivemind and tribes have this idea of a more meaningful tokenization to a specific group hopefully with a focus on bringing in utility for that particular market.

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(Edited)

Thanks for the good update about communities.
Yes, they are going to be a game changer and we already have a taste of it with Steem Engine tribes.
On the other side I really would like to hear from Steemit.com more solutions and ideas about the current problems with the POB mechanism which is working on steemit.com.
How do can we improve the quality of the trending page? How do we counter Bot abuse, circle voting, self voting etc...which are all problems also related to investors behaviour to get the most ROI out of their Steempower. Investors who only want to hold Steempower still need to mess around with content curation even though they don't have any interest in curating just to increase their ROI. You should think about giving an option for SP holders to get more ROI from the reward pool without the must to vote on low quality content.
These questions have been asked for months and still no statement from your team.
I hope to hear more ideas and solutions to the most important questions around POB and reward abuse from you in the future.

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You should think about giving an option for SP holders to get more ROI from the reward pool without the must to vote on low quality content.

I don't understand why investors always talk about their ROI (and I am an investor as well)? Their main aim should be to increase the value of STEEM.
And the value of a (social) network is measured among others by the number of its users.
Did I need 'ROI' when I bought BTC some years ago? Or am I happy about the high value my BTC have nowadays? :)

Nothing against ROI, but I think we shouldn't be that focussed on it ...

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Capital gains create ROI. The increase in the value of your BTC is capital gains, and also your ROI.

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Yes, technically you are right ... however, when most people here are talking about "ROI", they actually mean "interest" in a way to increase their number of owned STEEM.
I wonder if in future I should replace "ROI" by "interest" or just describe in other words what I mean?

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I note a dichotomy between the effect of profiteering and investing for capital gains on the underlying investment vehicle, and those are the terms I use. The former extracts the value of the business, and the latter is intended to increase the value of the investment vehicle, in our case Steem, creating capital gains.

Both methods create ROI, but the former destroys businesses, and the latter builds them. Throughout history examples of both methods demonstrate these effects, and the latter proves far more productive of ROI over time. This is why Warren Buffet is far more wealthy than Mitt Romney. Buffet builds businesses and causes the value of the companies to increase, while Romney sells the assets of the companies for profit, destroying them in the process.

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Investors are able to achieve ROI in other ways than curating content. Investment has existed for millenia, and ROI from curation only since Steem. Folks seeking ROI from curation rewards aren't actually investors, anymore than KKR are. They're profiteers extracting the proceeds of the business Steem conducts before that value increases the value of the underlying investment vehicle - the opposite of investing for capital gains.

Profiteers decrease the value of the investment vehicle by extracting that value. They reduce the value of Steem, not increase it. We don't want more of them, or more mechanisms they can use to extract the value of the content creators produce, because they harm those that are trying to increase the value of Steem by reducing the value of their stake.

Capital gains has encouraged investment for thousands of years, and built great enterprises because investors sought to increase the value of their investment. Profiteers only destroy businesses. Capital gains FTW.

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When Steem and steemit.com were first released, growth was explosive because for the first time it was possible for a community of like-minded people to congregate on the Internet on a platform that they could earn a stake in.

It was also possible to get curated by humans instead of bots, whales even! People would actually read your posts and vote for them if they liked them. Lots of people would see it and upvote it if they liked it. There was real interaction. It was beautiful! I loved it so much. Then came the bidbots. Now the beauty is gone. It is replaced by greed. Votes are sold to the highest bidder. The crowdsourced content discovery mechanism has been completely undermined and it could have been prevented. A culture against vote selling could have been and could still be established, but not while Steemit Inc. endorses it.

From these experiments we learned that, yes, a blockchain could be used to store social information, distribute tokens among community members by leveraging crowdsourced stake-weighted voting (a/k/a Proof-of-Brain), and this could be done in a way that supports the bootstrapping of a digital currency. Over one million accounts created, 50,000 daily active users, and a token featured on many exchanges is proof that a community-backed token can deliver a ton of value.

This is not what happens anymore. It's not about PoB anymore.

Although the changes for Communities will roll out in phases, the end result will be every bit as disruptive as the original release of the Steem blockchain.

Except for the thing that was disruptive in the beginning is now gone. How can you even still pay homage to PoB when you have allowed bid bots to completely undermine that system?

One of the keys to Steem’s success is the fact that it has the unique capability to autonomously align the incentives of community members. We are all so passionate about Steem, because we have all worked so hard to add value to this ecosystem, and have received some amount of stake for our efforts. But again, not everyone is interested in Steem, let alone capable of adding value to it.

Some have worked hard to extract value from the system and have been greatly rewarded for their efforts.

In order to really scale Steem, we have to not just create features that allow communities to form around non-Steem interests, we need to enable those Communities to determine for themselves who is adding value, and reward those people with stake in that community. That’s where Smart Media Tokens come in, which we will discuss in a future post.

That's all well and good, but why do we want to try to add value while others extract it? Even if we have communities that don't have delegation and have a culture against vote selling, it will still dominate Steem and be counter productive to what those communities are trying to do.

We invite anyone with ideas, suggestions, or questions about how we can make Communities work for all Steem developers, to share their thoughts in the comment section below.

You could help to establish a culture that downvotes bid bots. It's probably too late to get rid of delegation now that it's the main way to earn here. You could make a return to PoB on steemit.com - the fire hose for all the communities. You could quit programmatically selling STEEM and crashing the price. You could make the trending page actually posts that are trending instead of just posts that have just paid their way to get there which are basically just a weird form of ads. But I'm guessing this isn't the type of feedback you're looking for and won't even give me a meaningful reply to my comment.

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It was also possible to get curated by humans instead of bots, whales even! People would actually read your posts and vote for them if they liked them. Lots of people would see it and upvote it if they liked it. There was real interaction. It was beautiful! I loved it so much. Then came the bidbots. Now the beauty is gone. It is replaced by greed.

I suspect a big reason bid bots are attractive is because other forms of curation are difficult. Even altruistic voting (e.g. no benefit expected, other than improved system health) is time consuming. Content is disorganized; tags are noisy, and there are no content standards.

The crowdsourced content discovery mechanism has been completely undermined and it could have been prevented.

By "crowdsourced content discovery mechanism" do you mean votes and trending? Votes and trending should reflect what the community believes are the most valuable contributions, but it's not an effective way to discover under-rewarded (or just undiscovered) content.

In my view, Steem has never had a "crowdsourced content discovery mechanism". The most effective mechanisms were (and still are) manual labor -- digging through feeds, following new users, establishing curation guilds. In the beginning, there were less posts (it was possible to read every single new post), they were higher quality on average, and time spent curating was subsidized by the excitement of it all. Now we need to scale.

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(Edited)

I suspect a big reason bid bots are attractive is because other forms of curation are difficult. Even altruistic voting (e.g. no benefit expected, other than improved system health) is time consuming. Content is disorganized; tags are noisy, and there are no content standards.

I think this is the type of thing communities CAN help with. Even altruistic voting gives curation rewards especially if it ends up trending. That was the original design right? It encouraged people to add value which brings more and more value to the platform.

By "crowdsourced content discovery mechanism" do you mean votes and trending? Votes and trending should reflect what the community believes are the most valuable contributions, but it's not an effective way to discover under-rewarded (or just undiscovered) content.

Yes. I agree.

In my view, Steem has never had a "crowdsourced content discovery mechanism". The most effective mechanisms were (and still are) manual labor -- digging through feeds, following new users, establishing curation guilds. In the beginning, there were less posts (it was possible to read every single new post), they were higher quality on average, and time spent curating was subsidized by the excitement of it all. Now we need to scale.

I agree, I think that is still the best way, but now there is no chance for it to "trend" once you have done that work. Does scaling mean that we leave all that work to the bots? If there isn't a chance to trend organically or real human interaction, I don't see the point.

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I agree, I think that is still the best way, but now there is no chance for it to "trend" once you have done that work. Does scaling mean that we leave all that work to the bots? If there isn't a chance to trend organically or real human interaction, I don't see the point.

We need tools that make it easy and rewarding to curate. Say you have 1M SP and can make 50 impactful votes per day... how would you most effectively distribute them? To find 50 good but undervalued posts on steemit.com every day might take quite a while. And the modest bump to each one would not provide much exposure (e.g., on trending), which means it's unlikely for others to find it and place more votes on top (and increase your curation return). This discourages cooperation at the social layer and creates a negative feedback loop.

To me, scaling means giving users the tools to solve this dilemma.

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I wouldn't neccesarily decide that I had to give an equal vote to 50 post for one thing. I would give votes at different percentages based on what I thought they deserved. I do see this dilemna and that's why I'm not railing against delegation or curation guilds. My points were mainly about bidbots. How do bidbots help to scale?

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(Edited)

Or a better way to put that question: why not just use delegation and curation guilds instead of bid bots? Bid bots are what undermines the trending page. So shouldn't we focus on solutions that don't undermine the trending page and the whole idea of curation in the first place?

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Before bidbots were selfvoters and circle jerks. @haejin and @ranchorelaxo, for example. @berniesanders for another. Bots aren't the source of evil, they just automate it.

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@berniesanders actually made the first bid bot. But yes circle jerking is another seperate problem. Because there are other problems, does that mean it's not worth trying stop this problem?

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I'm aware of @randowhale. All I'm saying is that plugging one hole just forces leaks to come out of others. I'm an original advocate of preventing all bots from voting, and have posted how this can be done.

Even though selfvoting and circlejerks would still be a problem, that problem would at least be something actual people did, rather than devices. I reckon infesting social networks with bots devalues people, and find that more offensive than financial problems themselves.

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i think the @ranchorelaxo account was part of the @ngc @berniesanders group of accounts.
his intelligence has some flaws that look like gaping holes

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YOU ARE ON THE NAUGHTY LIST. YOU HAVE BEEN FLAGGED. GOODBYE.

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(Edited)

If you look back in steemd you see that @ranchorelaxo was @haejin's bank, and Bernie was at war with @haejin. That's my recollection of the affair anyway. If you mean that the whole conflict was made for TV, then I would be suitably impressed by the cunning such a pretense would reveal.

Edit: also, please don't bring up gaping holes in this context. I.. I just can't even...

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Yes i know that but bernie is a tricky cunt

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YOU ARE ON THE NAUGHTY LIST. YOU HAVE BEEN FLAGGED. GOODBYE.

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I definitely see how delegation and curation guilds can be justified for the reasons you mentioned. And I see the use in projects like @curie and @tribesteemup, but those don't make the entire trending page sold to the highest bidder like bid bots do.

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(Edited)

... how would you most effectively distribute them?

Make a list of 100 interesting authors and check their blogs manually on a regular basis. That way you can make 40 of your 50 "impactful votes".
For the 10 remaining "impactful votes" try to find good posts from authors you have never read before to give new users a chance and some motivation to keep writing.

And the modest bump to each one would not provide much exposure (e.g., on trending), which means it's unlikely for others to find it and place more votes on top (and increase your curation return).

I don't understand why investors always talk about their ROI (here in this special case "curation return")? Their main aim should be to increase the value of STEEM. Voting for 'quality content' (and flagging bid bot supported posts) would be a contribution to a higher value ... (with or without much curation reward).

The value of a (social) network is measured among others by the number of its users.
So lets make sure that as many as possible users are having a pleasant user experience (for example also because they might get some impactful manual upvotes from time to time) and thus stay here. Lets do that as investors to save our investment.
If you have one million STEEM it's not most important to get even more STEEM, it's important to increase the value of these STEEM you already own.
For example I have much more STEEM than a year ago, but my account value has decreased significantly.

Did I need 'ROI' when I bought BTC some years ago? Or am I happy about the high value of my BTC nowadays? :)

Nothing against ROI, but I think we shouldn't be that focused on it ...

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Exactly! Well said! I guess maybe they don't use the platform, so they don't see the issue. But c'mon, how short sighted can they be. How can they not listen to so many people who use the platform. I hope you get a reply. Your point is spot on.

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(Edited)

Thanks for your support. :)

By the way, I am looking forward for the communities to come. They should be a step into the right direction ...

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We do use the platform, but we also have to build the solutions necessary to fix the problems, and that simply takes time. I don't see your comment disagreeing with our views very much at and feel like we are simply talking past one another. We agree that there are problems with the system. What system doesn't have problems? We're trying to lay out very clearly how we are developing and conceptualizing the solutions we have developed and continue to develop at every layer of the stack.

If we were just front end developers, or just blockchain developers, or just middleware developers, as many in the space are, we would be able to move much faster in any one of those domains. But because no one else is doing what we're doing, we have to develop in all of these domains and the consequence is that if one has too narrow of a focus, the progress appears to be slow when in reality it is quite fast, which is why no other blockchain rivals Steem in its core value propositions, and steemit.com remains by far the most used Steem interface in the world.

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We do use the platform, but we also have to build the solutions necessary to fix the problems, and that simply takes time. I don't see your comment disagreeing with our views very much at and feel like we are simply talking past one another. We agree that there are problems with the system. What system doesn't have problems? We're trying to lay out very clearly how we are developing and conceptualizing the solutions we have developed and continue to develop at every layer of the stack.

I like all the things that y'all have done recently, but they don't fix the bid bot problem and I don't believe communities will either. I think they are great steps in the right direction, but why would people want to build communities in a place where vote selling dominates? I'm not talking past you. I'm replying specifically to what was said with my honest thoughts.

If we were just front end developers, or just blockchain developers, or just middleware developers, as many in the space are, we would be able to move much faster in any one of those domains. But because no one else is doing what we're doing, we have to develop in all of these domains and the consequence is that if one has too narrow of a focus, the progress appears to be slow when in reality it is quite fast, which is why no other blockchain rivals Steem in its core value propositions, and steemit.com remains by far the most used Steem interface in the world.

I'm not complaining about your pace. I'm saying that y'all could start a culture against bid bots and you haven't. You have endorsed it. What is Steem's core value proposition? My position is that Steem's core value proposition is undermined by bid bots and you aren't doing what is needed to fix it.

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Thank you all for this enlightening thread! @richardcrill, I share your views; at the same time, if the Steemit Team hasn't yet addressed the bid bots phenomenon (and doesn't seem to be eager to include it on its short or mid-term roadmap), isn't it a hint about the bid bots global function in the platform?

I mean: if (plausibly) 85% of the Steemit users would prefer this mechanism to be banned, and the Team turns a deaf ear to that community desire, it leads into thinking that the small minority benefiting from those bots activity is considered by the Team to be ultimately more a structural profit driver than a malfunction.

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The reason why Steemit Inc. doesn't call out bidbots and seek to nip them in the bud is because unlike Richard here, they understand economics. They understand that bidbots were a pleasant surprise, and Ned even pointed this out in a video recording. It is an interesting new form of business model that requires the buying of a large sum of STEEM and staking it.

I sincerely doubt that the majority actually do want bidbots removed. I hear the word "majority" a lot from what I bet is actually the loud minority.

And even if the majority do want bidbots gone I bet they would regret that decision the moment the bidbots left. Why? Because in all likelihood, that $0.07 upvote you just got from gentlebot would be worth $0.01 or less. This is because the bidbot businesses are a big part of the demand in today's STEEM demand/supply ratio.

In the end of the day, nobody cares how much STEEM they get, they care how much Steem Backed Dollars they get. SBD depends on demand for the STEEM supply and this means that long time stakers, like businesses, help increase the amount of SBD you can get from upvotes.

Want your STEEM bags to go to the moon? Then encourage more people to open up shop as upvote services. They don't have to be "bidbots" but upvote services of all kinds, be it contests, not-for-profit organizations like @ocdb and also the for-profit ones. Why? Because they buy a lot of STEEM and then they lock it up as SP for a very long time. That is very good for the price of Steem Backed Dollars.

Upvote services are not expensive, usually they can even get you more STEEM than you had originally, so its kind of like paying for promotion where you get all the money back... Cool right? Totally...

On top of that, not only is the bidbot's STEEM locked up, but the people using those bidbots are locking up STEEM too! That's right, they are locking up STEEM because they have to go buy STEEM and pay the bidbot, and they have to wait 7 days to only get HALF of the STEEM back! Let me show you with some math how this works...

Let's say your account is set to get rewarded in 50% SBD/ 50% SP, well that means that when you send 20 STEEM to @rewardpooleater you get an upvote of 27+ STEEM which will take 7 days before you get it. However, when you get that 27 STEEM (-25%) it comes out as 20.25 divided between Steem Backed Dollars and Steem Power. Half of your STEEM gets returned to you as automatically staked/locked up STEEM!

This is very good news for other STEEM hodlers, because your liquid STEEM just got cut in half, which means that if you want to promote another post at the same 20 STEEM you're going to have to go out and buy someone else's STEEM. This creates a much needed sink for the cryptocurrency, one that has the potential to become an ever continuous cycle.

But wait!!! Wouldn't the 20 STEEM you spent go to the upvote service and immediately get sold on the market as profit? Not necessarily, because the more upvote services come into existence the more competitive the services will need to become. This means that as new upvote service businesses arrive (after buying a wicked ton of STEEM to power up) the original gangsters will need to offer something the new guys can't like MORE POWERFUL upvotes or more lucrative ROIs to their customers/users.

No, Steemit Inc. does not want that to go away, because they're not stupid. In an industry where everyone is making a coin/token and everyone else is asking what their utility is, STEEM actually has a legit utility in the real world: promotion. Another token also has that same utility and its called the Minds.com token, but that utility is quite centralized. Steemians should be quite proud to say that the promotional utility of STEEM in the form of upvote services is decentralized, because anyone can offer the service by buying up STEEM.

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10000 people giving one entity their money is what you'd consider decentralized? 10000 people buying votes so they can place their work in front of an audience being paid to look away is what you consider to be promotion?

Did the bidbot people pay you speak this nonsense you speak? The entire bidbot operation only puts selling pressure on the token. It pushes the quality work aside and places the junk up front. Thousands of people left because of this. Good people with their heads screwed on that know how to draw in an organic viewership. There's billions of dollars up for grabs if you offer a content consumer incentives to purchase tokens and actually consume content. Robots can't see, hear or read like a human. If you were on stage, would you buy every seat in the theater and feel successful performing in front of empty chairs? That's what bidbots and delegations do. Content producers can go anywhere else and get paid. Buying votes is a joke to anyone who takes their craft seriously. That's for amateurs and suckers. "Promotion." Banfield has over 30000 followers and if he tries to earn organically today, he's lucky to see a buck. That's all the proof you need to know buying votes is a serious waste of time.

Honestly, you sound like you don't know what you're talking about and did a poor job of parroting the bidbot sales pitch. I suggest they fire you and hire someone more suited for the position of paid shill. You didn't even put your words out in front on the main thread. Rookie mistake.

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10000 people giving one entity their money is what you'd consider decentralized?

You have worded this sentence in a confusing way that poorly describes what is actually taking place. They do not give their money to a single entity, they delegate their voting authority of their Steem Power, which is an extremely innovative feature of Steem, delegating this network influence to a single entity while completely controlling their powered up STEEM within their account.

All 10,000 delegators can undelegate any time they find that the entity is acting questionably. How can you possibly think that is not decentralization?

Did the bidbot people pay you speak this nonsense you speak?

Its not nonsense, its economics, I understand that many people on Steem do not understand basic economics, so I'll speak in simple words...

I have not seen a single one of my arguments refuted yet by you. Refuting an argument does not involve twisting things to make them sound bad. It means intelligently pointing out a flaw in some part of my argument regarding the economics of Steem. If you wish to do that you are very much welcome to illustrate, in a non-vague way, how a different approach will raise the price of STEEM more effectively than the way I suggested.

The entire bidbot operation only puts selling pressure on the token.

No it does not... Did you even read my comment?!?!

Here you go:

Blake Letras: "not only is the bidbot's STEEM locked up, but the people using those bidbots are locking up STEEM too! That's right, they are locking up STEEM because they have to go buy STEEM and pay the bidbot, and they have to wait 7 days to only get HALF of the STEEM back!"

And this:

Blake Letras: "Wouldn't the 20 STEEM you spent go to the upvote service and immediately get sold on the market as profit? Not necessarily, because the more upvote services come into existence the more competitive the services will need to become. This means that as new upvote service businesses arrive (after buying a wicked ton of STEEM to power up) the original gangsters will need to offer something the new guys can't like MORE POWERFUL upvotes or more lucrative ROIs to their customers/users."

It pushes the quality work aside and places the junk up front.

Such is life with advertisements. The internet needs the advertisers in order to give us the coolest stuff that exists online. I don't even bother with the trending page, I only check out the New posts area, so I have always found it ridiculous how much people whine about this.

Steem frontends need better methods of connecting content consumers to content producers matching their interests. However, if the price of STEEM is not high no one will care about it. We need investors before we need anything else, and that is coming from upvote service businesses.

I care about quality reaching the top as well, and I believe the best systems for that is organized curation contests. However, sometimes you just have to accept that the market you were going for is not the market attracted to your product.

Steem is not going to get far as Medium on a blockchain. It is time for people to get it into their head that Steem is an internet reward system and that rewards will not simply go to long-form content but also to memes, game activities and really whatever people want to reward with their SP. Sorry, but that is the reality of how Steem must be in order to survive.

Buying votes is a joke to anyone who takes their craft seriously.

No it is not. The only reason that seems logical to you is because of how you look at votes. The reality is that serious content producers gain visibility by paying for promotions all the time.

For example, if a indie book author does not pay Amazon for advertising he/she is being rather foolish and will likely find themselves in that $100 total sales category of book authors. Authors need to pay for promotion.

If a blogger does not pay Google to improve visibility for their website it is going to be a very uphill battle to get any reasonably sized audience.

If a podcaster does not advertise their podcast it will be hard to find as more and more podcasts pop up every day!

Minds.com, which is drawing in way more big names than Steem is rewards their content producers in a token with only one utility: advertising. You can spend Minds tokens to get your content put in 1000 people's feeds.

Honestly, you sound like you don't know what you're talking about and did a poor job of parroting the bidbot sales pitch. I suggest they fire you and hire someone more suited for the position of paid shill. You didn't even put your words out in front on the main thread. Rookie mistake.

That's cute, you're trying to zing me. Too bad for you that I know I kick ass at this type of thing and my confidence hasn't been shaken.

I wasn't worried about how many people see my comment, though, for such a difficult to find comment it was able to land in your lap and ruffle your feathers. But hey, its okay, because I just give out nuggets of gold in wisdom all over the place. You're welcome. ;)

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Sorry. I don't feel like reading that.

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That's okay, I kind of figured you weren't someone that read much. ;)

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And I kind of figured you were a dick.

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(Edited)

Removed this comment because at the time I was shown unreasonable disrespect and defamation of character for my viewpoint rather than a rational response and returned the aggressive speech with similar speech. My apologies to the community for not restraining my speech in that moment.

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And now you're sitting here doing the play-by-play announcing of some shit nobody cares about.

I'm just smarter than you and keep saying more intelligent things than you.

Followed by:

It's not your fault though, you were probably dropped as a baby or something.

Which is something that has been said millions of times by people with nothing to say.

Have a good day.

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(Edited)

at the time I was shown unreasonable disrespect

So now you want to play the victim card? Look at your long essay response to me.

How can you possibly think that is not decentralization?

I understand that many people on Steem do not understand basic economics, so I'll speak in simple words...

ridiculous how much people whine about this.

it was able to land in your lap and ruffle your feathers. But hey, its okay, because I just give out nuggets of gold in wisdom all over the place. You're welcome. ;)

Arrogant, cocky, disrespectful. You seem to think that because I disagree, it's because I don't understand what you're trying to say, so you go on repeating it, as if I wasn't able to grasp your views the first time.

If saying "Sorry. I don't feel like reading that," hurts your feelings, when it was a clearly a polite response to show you I wasn't interested in talking in circles and debating when I have better things I need to be doing with my time, I don't know what to say.

You came at me like I'm some kind of inferior intellect who doesn't read much, all while claiming you're incredibly smart. Who does that? Annoying people.

The fact is, I've heard everything you've said a million times. You're parroting. I don't need to read all that stuff again and have the same discussions with people I've had in the past. You're not able to see how, by definition, placing the power of 10000 people into one is literally centralizing the power of 10000; centralization. 10000 people, now gone, and replaced with one paid vote, means there are 10000 people who are unavailable to view and vote for what was promoted, meaning the target audience is gone and the promotion was a waste of time since there's no money to be made. You're defending a system that doesn't work. I know what real promotion is, and you're speaking to me as if I was born yesterday. So of course I don't want to waste time speaking to you.

It's also worth adding, we have many months, if not years of evidence now that prove the business model and sales pitch you're parroting from many months if not years ago simply does not work. If 10000 people place their money in the hands of one, that one point becomes a central point of failure, since the one at the top earns the most, they create the most selling pressure. Even the charts show a steady decline in value, as more and more bidbots, delegating, and centralization of power took place. Active members, steady decline because their market was on a steady decline. People were being paid to look away, in an attention economy. That's doing it backwards and the arts and entertainment business model where consumers pay to look proves it's being done backwards. It's common sense to anyone who knows the business.

Your initial response was also full of errors and misinformation.

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I provided an argument, in no gentlemanly way did you respond. You spoke aggressively, and insultingly and you dare to say that I "play the victim"? No, I am no victim, I am a victor.

Nothing you ever said in reply to me was an argument on the basis of logical economic theory or anything of the sort. You are an intelligent and capable person in your own way, but in no way are you an economist. You do not understand the ideas you suggest.

Even though you wish to insult me, and you did bring that part out of me, I will try to maintain a cooler head. You're misguided, but you are sincere.

Remember that you commented on my statements, not the other way around. And when I replied you chose to act in a very despicable way. You pretend that your comment "sorry, I am not going to read that" is in some way not entirely an intentionally disrespectful method of jabbing me. Only the completely idiotic will believe you.

If you had any intelligible argument you would have made it in response to my reply to you. You did not, because you do not.

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I'm two sentences in and I've already decided I'm not going to read your bullshit. Deal with it.

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(Edited)

See, more evidence. I make an argument for a particular outlook, not even directed at you, and you go ranting on my comment trying to get at me emotionally and then claim you refuse to read my responses.

Its not my problem that you can't understand basic economics. And just so you know, it is fine if you do not read what I have to say, because other people might stumble upon it and they can see my arguments and how you have responded.

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(Edited)

Screenshot (642).png

Yes. They can see how I've decided to NOT respond to your constant barrage of passive aggressive and disrespectful ramblings.

I don't live in a world where I need to be concerned about what some random person thinks of me because I don't feel like listening or talking to you.

There's no winners and losers in a conversation.

That screenshot shows how you like to act before you decide you need to be concerned about your image. People can go ahead and see all of your passive aggressive stabs and direct insults. And deleting it doesn't make it go away.

Its not my problem that you can't understand basic economics.

I've already pointed out how there's two years of evidence proving your "basic economics" doesn't work. If your "basic economics" was such a great idea, where's your money?

As I said, you're parroting a sales pitch.

What you don't realize is the moment that bidbot as promotion idea becomes as successful as it possibly can is also the exact moment the business models collapses and becomes useless.

It can't scale. There are only 20-50 valuable slots to purchase. If thousands of people were vying for those positions, each one would only be able to purchase a few seconds of promotional time to be in the spot light. If everyone purchased votes, whatever the going rate to reach a certain rung of the ladder was, let's say $50. If everyone purchased $50, that $50 becomes the new zero or starting point and the only ones making money are those selling votes. If the content producers can't make money, there's no content. Without content there's no one to sell votes to, with the exception of a few amatuers without talent, but those people don't bring eyes to the platform, meaning the value declines and the public loses interest. If you're showing off a platform that pays, but $50 is the breaking even point, the market will reflect the value of $50 as $0. If only a small group of vote sellers are making money, that puts tremendous selling pressure on the token. Proof is all around you.

Since you think there's a mass of people reading this, if any of you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Screenshot (643).png

Blake. I'm done speaking to you. If the last word is what you require to feel like a "winner" in your imaginary debate held in front of thousands of people, go ahead. If you send me another hissy fit though and then decide to delete, like you've been doing here the entire time, to make your fake image look better than your reality, I'll be more than happy to show the folks the kind of games you're playing in this conversation.

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Want your STEEM bags to go to the moon? Then encourage more people to open up shop as upvote services. They don't have to be "bidbots" but upvote services of all kinds, be it contests, not-for-profit organizations like @ocdb and also the for-profit ones. Why? Because they buy a lot of STEEM and then they lock it up as SP for a very long time. That is very good for the price of Steem Backed Dollars.

You're describing perfectly one potential outcome of communities. Communities will essentially enable organizations to amass SP and use it to provide curation for their members. I believe this will rival bidbots.

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(Edited)

Free Markets

You get it. That's economics. Ned gets it. You get it. People can do good and bad. Bid bots are like the symptoms of human psychology. Make free markets great again. Make governments smaller. Some people want welfare. They want equality of opportunities and results. But that's socialism, communism, UBI, etc. Life is dangerous. But that's the meaning of life when you invest, you might lose. Some of us gets how economics work.

Bid Bots

Technically, by the way, I wonder how a website would even begin to try to stop bid bots for example. Of course, you could do what Facebook did back around 2010 when there were thousands of Star Wars character accounts. I befriended hundreds of them. Many of them were named Luke Skywalker. So, Facebook probably banned many of those accounts. Twitter does stuff. YouTube banned at least three of my channels, that is thousands of videos. I've been banned on Facebook many times. But Steem is better than that. Right? I think so. I hope so. Maybe Communities will rival Bid Bots, Whales, Bernie, etc, lol, but seriously speaking too, or else my name is not Oatmeal haha.

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why would people want to build communities in a place where vote selling dominates?

IMO it's likely that vote selling dominates because we lack better tools to cooperate socially (as humans). My goal with communities is to create that tool... and to help resolve many of the issues brought up in this thread.

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Well, that sounds cool. I'd love to know more. It's easy to have a culture that doesn't go for bid bots. I've done it with my tribe. What concerns me is that even if several popular communities instill a culture that doesn't go for vote selling, it will still be a powerful force on Steem. I can see HF21 and 22 mitigating it to a degree, but it seems to me that bid bots will still be a dominant force as long as Steemit Inc. doesn't take a strong aporoach against them. I appreciate you interacting with me here. It is by far the most response I've gotten from the Steemit Team. I still have the concerns I've mentioned, but at least it seems to have been noticed.

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(Edited)
I don't understand why investors always talk about their ROI (here in this special case "curation return")?

Could it be because they are investors?

Their main aim should be to increase the value of STEEM. Voting for 'quality content' (and flagging bid bot supported posts) would be a contribution to a higher value ... (with or without much curation reward).

That would be like working hard for a whole day and sharing the pay with thousands of other people...

You can't expect most people sacrifice their time and effort mostly for the benefit of others like that. The fact that it is fruitless to expect that caused socialism to fall.

The problem here is misaligned incentives.

If you have one million STEEM it's not most important to get even more STEEM, it's important to increase the value of these STEEM you already own.

I don't think PoB can even theoretically work very well except in communities where most of the stake is controlled by a single app that rewards content creators strictly according to quality. Under that scenario, the main stakeholder has enough power and an incentive to curb abuse and reward commensurately to value created.

Steem with its fast block processing time and free transactions is well suited to serve as the base layer powering an archipelago of such token economies. EIP+WP is a step toward Steem becoming a non-PoB base layer and that's a good thing. Those things will help Steem limp onwards, hopefully for a few years more, to spread stake further before content rewards can be discontinued for good.

Unfortunately, Steemit, Inc still controls too large a stake for Steem to be sufficiently decentralized to be secure against external threats. As long as a form of PoB is practiced with STEEM, SBD and Vests, it would be in the best interests of Steemit, Inc as the largest stakeholder to help the community fight abusive maximisers and non-economic abusers who harass community members for their personal gratification. That would also help. Doing it correctly is easier said than done but it's an issue that should be on the table.

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(Edited)

That would be like working hard for a whole day and sharing the pay with thousands of other people...

I would prefer to share a huge cake with others instead to have a very small cake for myself alone.

You can't expect most people sacrifice their time and effort mostly for the benefit of others like that.

Again, if their behaviour contributed to a higher STEEM price, and if they have a lot of STEEM, I couldn't see a sacrifice at all.

As I said, I consider myself as investor, as well, I have earned quite some STEEM within the last one and a half year ... and the value of my account has decreased a lot at the same time: the size of the cake matters, not one's percentage of the cake.

As long as a form of PoB is practiced with STEEM, SBD and Vests, it would be in the best interests of Steemit, Inc as the largest stakeholder to help the community fight abusive maximisers and non-economic abusers who harass community members for their personal gratification.

I plead for a committee of elected users with some delegated Steem power from Steemit, Inc., which could decide which stuff to flag and also (in case someone complains) if flags are justified or not, and if "yes" just counter them with upvotes.
In addition, accounts who repeatedly misuse flags in an abusive way (instead using them against spam, plagiarism etc.) could be flagged, as well, after a decision of that committee.

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(Edited)
"That would be like working hard for a whole day and sharing the pay with thousands of other people..."

I would prefer to share a huge cake with others instead to have a very small cake for myself alone.

Sure, but the arrival of the huge cake depends on a large number of people acting in certain ways and not in certain other ways. People being people, some of them will be less altruistic than others. How will you get them to act in the name of the common good?

"You can't expect most people sacrifice their time and effort mostly for the benefit of others like that."

Again, if their behaviour contributed to a higher STEEM price, and if they have a lot of STEEM, I couldn't see a sacrifice at all.

People are not ants. From a selfish perspective, the ideal situation is that everyone else does what is best for the common good while you selfishly maximise. That way you get the largest possible slice of the (nearly) largest possible pie.

"As I said, I consider myself as investor, as well, I have earned quite some STEEM within the last one and a half year ... and the value of my account has decreased a lot at the same time: the size of the cake matters, not one's percentage of the cake."

The problem of selfish maximisers freeriding while others put in the effort does not go away by denying it exists. Ignoring it is stupidity.

"As long as a form of PoB is practiced with STEEM, SBD and Vests, it would be in the best interests of Steemit, Inc as the largest stakeholder to help the community fight abusive maximisers and non-economic abusers who harass community members for their personal gratification."

I plead for a committee of elected users with some delegated Steem power from Steemit, Inc., which could decide which stuff to flag and also (in case someone complains) if flags are justified or not, and if "yes" just counter them with upvotes.

I've suggested a similar account before and @tarazkp has done so before myself. The problem with that approach is that it is not a simple thing to accomplish. What I would be willing to hope such a system could achieve is simply to curb the most blatant forms of economic abuse and harassment by whales and large orcas.

In addition, accounts who repeatedly misuse flags in an abusive way (instead using them against spam, plagiarism etc.) could be flagged, as well, after a decision of that committee.

Yes, I think we need something like that. Just paying people for flagging without proper oversight is clearly worse than an exercise in futility.

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I've suggested a similar account before and @tarazkp has done so before myself.

And I did some time ago in "My STEEM Vision.". :)

The committee should have enough SP (delegated from Steemit, Inc.) and should be elected regularly by the community, so that there is some control over what it is doing.

Such a committee would be the answer to your arguments/questions (What to do against profit maximizers?) above.

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Making LISTS has actually really helped with this. I have a few different lists I use and i find my voting is EASIER and I actually do it way more often. So I think that is one really solid solution.
I have a list of my friends, I have a list of splinterlands type accounts, a list of accounts that seem to influence a lot of the conversation about steem itself, then i have a list of almost 100 photographers that's the one that has the most action.

All that was made possible thanks to Hivemind. Aka i'm talking about lists on steempeak if people didn't know. But that's not the important part it's the idea that LISTS really have done what you said.

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To find 50 good but undervalued posts on steemit.com every day might take quite a while

I don't know what you'd consider good but stuff like this deserves to go undiscovered not earning nearly $150.00 using bidbots to go trending.

https://steemit.com/art/@jellenmark/thanos-reimagined-with-infinity-2019-7-1-16-59-28

You guys actually think that people are going to downvote crap like this after the hardfolk to keep folks like this in line but the reality is when brought out into the spotlight in a post not even SFR would touch it because of who was behind paying the bidbots on it. This post was at the most worth about as much as the paper it was written on. This is one of the major reason Steem can't get out of it slump and attract new users.

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"If there isn't a chance to trend organically or real human interaction, I don't see the point."

It isn't social media when bots are the voters. Society isn't even involved in curation then. It's just mining with automated tools. I've no interest in mining. I'm here for the ideas people exchange.

That's where the actual value of Steem is: the social interaction.

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Even altruistic voting gives curation rewards especially if it ends up trending. That was the original design right? It encouraged people to add value which brings more and more value to the platform.

Well yes, but the original design was for curation rewards to be 50%, and they also did not have the penalty for the first 30-, 15- or soon to be 5-minutes. The changes that were made later, largely impulsively and without good rationale, undermined a lot of that balance to the point that curation rewards became almost meaningless, and the incentives to just sell votes became overwhelmingly strong.

The hope is that HF21 is going to re-balance those incentives somewhat back toward what you describe, where altruistic or at least non-agnostic voting isn't so heavily penalized relative to vote selling. We'll see how it works out but it's certainly a step toward what you describe.

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Oh really, I didn't even realize it was originally 50/50. I hit 3 years here the other day and as far as I'm aware it's always been 75/25 during that time. I could be wrong about that as I'm just going off of memory.

I do think HF21 is a step in the right direction towards rebalancing those incentives. I'll be paying close attention to see the effects. I like the idea of incentivizing that altruistic behavior and I might even prefer that to instilling it as a culture, but I'm open to both routes to moving away from vote selling completely.

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The change from 50/50 was made in mid 2016 so it is quite possible you weren't around for it.

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(Edited)

"I suspect a big reason bid bots are attractive is because other forms of curation are difficult"

Stop lying ! bid-bots are run by steemit inc and blocktrades

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Now we need to scale.

Well said, I couldn't agree more!

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Letting bidbots do their thing was really a bad choice in hindsight.

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It seems pretty clear to a lot of us. A lot of us also called it out when they first started, but I guess Steemit Inc. disagrees.

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I was there at Steemfest 2 when Ned vocally expressed his opinion on bidbots: "interesting to see how such businesses can flourish within the Steem ecosystem"

Haven't seen the new Steemit Inc team make a radical change on this as of yet.

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I wish @ned wasn't so short sighted and greedy. He is killing one of the coolest experiments I've ever seen. Maybe he is naive, maybe he is corrupted by money and power. Maybe he's taken a position that his ego won't let him go back on. Whatever it is, I'm tired of not getting an answer from him. He has lead this thing down the drain. Grow a pair @ned. Reply to me.

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This is such important insight Richard. I agree with you 100%. I hope what you’ve said here is genuinely considered by anyone who wants to see this blockchain reach its potential. The SCOT communities have already done much to address these issues. I think it’s a great direction.

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Thank you for saying so @choosefreedom. Sadly the people that had a lot of stake that saw this problem have mostly left. The people that are here now with significant stake don't seem to see the bid bots as a problem. Not sure why @acidyo doesn't seem to see it. @ned must be for the bidbots. I know @heimindanger sees this and he is still here. Maybe if someone forks his DTube code to make a blogging platform it could work. @dan saw the problem and couldn't get enough of the other people with significant stake to see it so he left. I know @ats-david and @krnel were vocal about it too, but I think they have realized that it's not going to change.

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@acidyo has been consistently against bid bots for long time. He even founded @ocdb as a form of lesser evil to mitigate the effect of the post quality agnostic majority of bid bots.

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(Edited)

I knew I had a favorable impression of him in my mind. But I guess like many, myself included, we gave up. After realizing the biggest stake holders weren't going to fix it. I guess after I made my tribe, I realized that communities won't fix this problem. It's a step in the right direction and I am all for it, but it doesn't fix this glaring problem. I don't blame @acidyo for giving up, but I just can't sit with it anymore. Something has to change. So many things in this world have been over taken by short sighted greed. I will no longer accept it. I will always point it out in places where I know there are people and possibilities for change. I'm not gonna fight against Steemit Inc. forever though. I've learned that fighting against something is often not the way to go. We will probably just have to create something better that isn't controlled by greed. But I had to try to save something I loved. Quality standards are an improvement to bid bots, but selling votes to the highest bidder, even with standards, ruins the whole idea. If we could start a culture against bid bots and get communities going, I believe we can save this thing. If we don't get rid of bid bots, somebody will and I will go there and support it. If no one does it soon, maybe I will try to do it myself.

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(Edited)

Crowdsourced and stake-based content discovery and rewarding, also known as Proof-of-Brain, has been proven a failure, at least in its ideal form. It is, however, better than just wasting power like PoW. I think what the network and all its participants have generated in the three years of Steem's existence is much better than entropy which is the only thing PoW leaves in its wake.

At the very least, having been a participant has taught me many lessons about human nature. The difficulty of getting anyone to join has also been an eye opener.

By the way, I don't think bid bots are the crux of the matter. Vote farming is. Bid bots are but one of the many ways to accomplish ROI maximization at the cost of putting in the effort to curate altruistically.

Then again does that matter? I think Steem is still a shitload of fun and the money is vastly better than on any mainstream platform in spite of everything.

What's great about communities is that each community has an opportunity to create their own variant of PoB, some of which may actually work. What I think has the best possibility of working is an app owning the vast majority of stake in a community token and treating content creators like freelancers and keeping other curators in line by negating any abusive voting done by them.

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Proof-of-Brain, has been proven a failure, at least in its ideal form. It is, however, better than just wasting power like PoW.

Proof-of-brain is not an alternative to proof of work, delegated proof of stake (DPoS) is.

Proof-of-brain and content voting generally could be turned off entirely and the Steem blockchain would continue to run, apps which don't rely on the voting for rewards such as SteemMonsters and others would still be working fine, etc.

Proof-of-brain was one feature added to the Steem blockchain intended to help it attract users and grow. It worked to some extent but its effectiveness to date has been fairly limited.

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"Proof-of-Brain, has been proven a failure, at least in its ideal form. It is, however, better than just wasting power like PoW."

Proof-of-brain is not an alternative to proof of work, delegated proof of stake (DPoS) is.

I'm fully aware of that. However, Steem allots some of the token inflation to content creators and curators.

Proof-of-brain and content voting generally could be turned off entirely and the Steem blockchain would continue to run, apps which don't rely on the voting for rewards such as SteemMonsters and others would still be working fine, etc.

I know. I've actually been saying for quite some time that I wouldn't mind if PoB were discontinued at the base layer at some point but not any time soon (meaning a few years).

Proof-of-brain was one feature added to the Steem blockchain intended to help it attract users and grow. It worked to some extent but its effectiveness to date has been fairly limited.

It has made also made the stake distribution somewhat more decentralized. Even if it didn't add too much value otherwise in terms of driving traffic, it has furthered the decentralization of stake.

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(Edited)

it has furthered the decentralization of stake

I think that is very debatable. Many of the largest stakeholders have gained enormously from it's actual results (as opposed to the intent or theory) through a variety of schemes including but not limited to bid bots. Some smaller stakeholders have certainly benefited but to talk about "decentralization" in the aggregate you need to consider the full spectrum including the enormous earnings at the top, and the conclusion looks shaky to me.

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Steemit, Inc's stake has definitely been diminishing with the passage of time as they have sold huge quantities of STEEM. Other large stakeholders may have increased their share. Who knows.

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(Edited)

Yes, steemit has not benefitted from PoB (though some of the founders have through their company-granted accounts). But as you note it has declined greatly due to selling (and being given to new user accounts before they stopped doing that), and that would have happened regardless of PoB. The same can be said for many other large accounts which have sold a lot.

Most of the other large stakeholders (including, as noted, most of the Steemit founder accounts) have gained enormously from PoB especially since bidbots became dominant, but also previously due to n^2.

IMO the most effective route to decentralization has been selling, and not PoB.

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Well, you're right about that. Decentralization has definitely been driven by Steemit, Inc being forced to sell to cover development costs. This is why I'm happy they're selling as long as they are not in danger of going belly up because of the price dropping too low.

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Agreed 100% @richardcrill and your comment supported 100% with the full weight of the @ecotrain community behind it. I speak with confidence on behalf of @eco-alex who is currently in seclusion, and ob behalf of a diverse and growing part of the steem community.

Thank you for awesome leadership, as always

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Thank you @artemislives! I really appreciate it. I know a lot of the people who feel this way left a long time ago, but I really wish the people behind Steemit Inc. and @steemitblog will listen to the people who are still here. It seems people want to earn as much STEEM as possible without adding value and even devaluing the platform and the coin. It seems very short sighted to me. I hope they consider their users input.

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They never do, different day same bull crap, the answer is as simple as the nose of their faces but what they've built here is exclusive community of wealth abusers whom they themselves are afraid of.

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Cannot agree more @richardcrill - and I am sure the entire @naturalmedicine community would agree too, as well as many communities here that are just getting by and trying to manually create to reward users, with great members doing their best to comment and be good Steemplayers but getting disheartened. I see so many great quality posts going nowhere, and no incentive for people to write great posts. So a wonderful post about perimenopause can get a less of a payout than a blurry photo of a mango smoothie someone has used a bidbot on.

Your response is clear, concise, measured and deserves a reply. xxx

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Thank you @riverflows. It was nice to get a couple replies from @roadscape, but he didn't really address what I said. I don't think he has any thing to say to my last replies to him.

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Somewhere, along the way, I lost the spark, to say the things you said here today.

It is, quite literally, the shittiest feeling in the world, as I work on that next post, knowing hours in advance, no matter what I do, that post will fail and not get anywhere on Steemit, after nearly three years of being here, 786 posts under my belt, and my blog is consistently one of the most active on the entire platform.
Tribes are helping.

I don't blame anyone here, old or new, for being frustrated with those damn bidbots. The Darwin Award winners two years in a row.

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When Communities launch on Steem, for the first time ever people will be able to create communities, on the internet, that they own.

I'm curious to see how this plays out in reality. Will there be a rush to essentially "squat" popular communities/categories/tags? If so, what can anyone do about a completely mismanaged category/tag? For instance, what if someone were to "buy" the cryptocurrency and cryptos communities and then proceeded to post their own referral links and shill their favorite tokens, then "moderated" everyone else's posts to make them invisible or sent them to the bottom of the "hot" or "trending" lists?

What do you do then, other than create a new community like "real-cryptos-community," or some stupid crap? Will there be any built-in protection to mitigate or prevent the above?

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Naming is a bit of a "of 3 pick 2" situation. Zooko's Triangle illustrates it well ("security" can be swapped with "complexity"). The current approach is that every community will start with just an id number, so there's nothing to squat. A naming system will most likely be a 2nd layer solution.

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OK, cool. That makes sense. Thank you for the response.

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(Edited)

Donald Trump

Hopefully, competition can push people regardless. Maybe somebody created DonaldTrump on Twitter. So, maybe the real Trump created @RealDonaldTrump, for example. Well, so, with your example, if somebody creates a cryptocurrencies community and mutes people talking about Monero, then maybe, through the art of supply and demand, they could try to band together to create their own cryptocurrencies community.

Competition

Then, they could make videos and talk about how retarded that other community was. That creates peer pressure on the original community. Meaning that either that guy reforms his ways or his members may migrate to the new community. That's competition. That's supply and demand. I hope things like that happens as a mechanism that seeks after balance or competition.

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STEEM is still maturing and will likely take a lot more work before we appeal to the masses.. Broad appeal is an algorithm that is hard to crack but I think it will happen eventually. Hopefully the underlying issue of the platform still being relatively immature are corrected and improved on in time.

Been a lot of work to get it this far, still a lot of work left to do.

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Is there an ETA on when the first version will be rolled out?

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Soon since 2017

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It sounds different this time.

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It sounds different because it is different this time. There is a new team running point at Steemit.com and they are slaying it, daily. We need to rally around their efforts. Communities will be a huge development... ETA = ASAP.

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Stop talking about onboarding the masses, it's a nonsense when it takes a lot of skill to use and understand Steem. Stop lying to yourself.

Steem is and will remain a niche product unless you make it really usable and valuable to the masses. Simplifying account creation (who wants to pay to create an account? Stop living 15 years ago. And please don't talk about the discount account joke), do you think it's normal to need to make tricks to have a language management, seriously? And stop stupid things like needing to make a claim to get rewards (an example among many others that clearly shows the willingness to complicate the user's life).

Steem must be able to manage a normal user not just a crypto and technology expert. Do you think a normal user is willing to waste a lot of time accessing the information they want or like? Do you really think you can reach the majority of each of the Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y and new Gen Z categories when everyone has their own specificities? I don't think, sorry. Non-core members do more than you to try to make Steem more accessible despite all the constraints you have imposed on them that make their attempt complicated.

50,000 active users per day Ok and how many are real and not a bot? 50,000 active users daily for 3 years of activity, wake up we are on the internet, are you sure it's a big deal you should be proud of? If Steem has more than a million accounts created, it is mainly due to the hype period of the blockchain and crypto technology and in the hope of high profitability. Look at the activity on Steem when its value was 40 times higher and today, don't you think there is a correlation?

Steem has potential so stop wasting it, settle down, do your introspection and bring real solutions. Thank you.

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There is one huge elephant in the room: the open wallets.

There are many reasons most people wouldn't want their financial transactions on Steem to be exposed to the whole world. The number one reason is probably taxes. I'm guessing most Steemians are not paying taxes on their Steem income. Whether or not any taxes should be paid on Steem income until cashed out into fiat, until used for buying goods or services or cryptocurrencies external to the platform may be unclear, depending on jurisdiction. In any case, there is a great deal of uncertainty to this which is one reason most Steemians use a pseudonym and/or employ a number of alts that cannot be proven to be theirs. People join social media networks when they are invited to join by friends and family. This is not taking place very much among Steemians as they wish to keep their Steem identity and their walking world identity separate.

Because it is too late the redesign Steem as privacy blockchain using protocols similar to those used by Monero or Zerocoin to keep all financial transactions secret, second-tier solutions are the only possibility. It would be entirely possible to use anonymous voting accounts and placeholder posts posted by placeholder accounts and privacy chains as intermediaries to make the financial layer entirely private. The other possibility is demonetizing the Steem experience for the masses. I actually think they might prefer it that way.

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IMO anonymity is already an illusion in the modern world. Data-collecting corporations know just about everything about us already. If for some reason CIA/FBI/MI3 etc. takes an interest in you, they can find out every single detail about you. The only reason they may not have the information ready at hand is that anyone who's not at least a billionaire is somewhat irrelevant for them.

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(Edited)

Anonymity is not a binary thing. It is very, very far from it. Have you heard of the letters the IRS has been sending to crypto traders lately? Only about 10,000 Americans have received a letter from the IRS asking about their unpaid taxes. Only 10,000! And those people are probably Coinbase customers who have large volumes of trades. There are millions of Americans who own crypto. 10,000 sounds like a very low number. I'm betting a small fraction of crypto-owning Americans have reported all of their taxable crypto income to the IRS.

The internet is a vast ocean of data. Going after one person with the tools available to the likes of NSA/CIA/whaterver is expensive. I seriously doubt data collecting companies know every bit of our online behavior. Throwing care completely out of the window because "anonymity is already an illusion in the modern world" is overreacting. Not everyone potentially interested in what we do with malicious intent is as powerful as one of the alphabet organizations.

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To each their own; you certainly make some good points.

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@steemitblog,
Few months back, STEEMIT had to call a lay off, and survived just after adding Advertising with STEEMIT. Google Adsense did a huge roll in that case and now I see you already left Adsense and I see one ad, probably a ponzi scheme is hanging around.
Before we go mass, it's better your team make a fix income via Adsense or that type of another 3rd party! If you became unbalance like you did before, we have/had to face another chaos like we are experiencing now with price drop and etc!
Developers should get an incentive and people who are not expert devs, but has crazy thoughts to bring valuable projects into the platform should get rewarded and should help the community to make them happened!
I didn't see that platform is not yet developed! It's a must, but I prefer 3rd party income to make things stable before we talk about go mass or go global or whatever!
$trdo

Cheers~

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I am very supportive of SOC (SMTs, Oracles, and Communities), the vision I heard @ned describe a while back when he was in Korea. Since then some network issues have revealed that censorship is a larger problem than a platform can solve.

"...people will be able to create communities, on the internet, that they own."

No, they won't. As long as ISPs, Domain registrars, and other entities can sever their connections, delete or edit their communications, or otherwise control their access to those communities, they will not own those communities. Possession is necessary for ownership, and possession will be a privilege granted by those controlling the network.

More will be necessary to enable ownership, and that is possession of the network itself. Don't get me wrong. Implementing communities will be a good thing. But, those communities will be vulnerable to censors, just like Alex Jones, Mike Adams, and Julian Assange have proved to be. One lesson you seem to have not grasped from the Steem beta is that censorship is far more than just complete eradication of all forms of some particular information. Ask @skeptic, or @kawaiicrush, or @fulltimegeek, if you can be censored on Steem.

A lot of people have been censored by a couple of bullets to the back of the head. Steem can't do anything to prevent that kind of censorship, so it's correct to note that Steem is but censorship resistant, but it's also obvious that taking out the nodes is all it takes to censor everyone on Steem. Anonymous has been fighting to keep it's community as multiple vectors of censorship have cut their lines of communication. The Daily Stormer can't even get a domain. No New Zealand citizen can (legally) access the chans today because the government ordered ISPs to not resolve their domain names. No community is possible when censors prevent their communications, and you've not presented a mechanism that potentially enables secure communications despite the internet demonstrably being censored to destroy communities.

"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient"..."

There's even more to it than that, such as editing it, misrepresenting it, and of course just shooting people to shut them up, but you'll note that nowhere does any authoritative definition of censorship limit it to complete eradication. Even though Andrew Breitbart is dead, statements he made regarding John Podesta are still available. I actually don't think information can be completely eradicated, so such a definition is unreasonable. The point is that communities will be dependent on censorship resistance, and not possessions, but privileges just like Steem.

Until those problems are resolved, actual ownership of communities will not be possible. It will be like title to acreage on the Moon: without value unless you can get there and use it.

I'm not even saying you have to solve those problems. I'm pointing out that you're overpromising, again. I'll also note that Goodwill is your only real asset. Everything else Steemit, Inc. possesses is without value if no community uses it, and they'll only use what you can provide if you have Goodwill. HF21 is going to cost you a lot of Goodwill, and particularly the downvote pool that increases the VP of whales by 25% to flag rewards back to the pool where they can use the weight of their stakes to have a second try at extracting it to their wallets.

EIP is extremely unfriendly to new users, and I reckon you're jumping the shark talking about communities before that disaster is initiated. Let's see what @berniesanders does with 25% of his VP in free flags before you offer people things that cannot be delivered. After we have a gander at the aftermath of HF21, I'll be interested in your plans to create a mechanism that enables folks to build communities, but if downvoters can devalue the communications between members of those communities, extracting the rewards they'd otherwise allocate each other, there's not much point.

No matter what you can do, you can't offer people ownership of anything you can't grant them possession of. This is why I have been very encouraged by Mira, as it made many more nodes potential, and greatly reduces the risk of censoring Steem by taking down nodes. Communities will be a great advance, and so will SMTs, but they won't be possessions. They'll be privileges allowed by those than control the networks they reside on, just like @fulltimegeek's account is on Steem. Dial it down a bit, and stick to facts, please.

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(Edited)

True, we are not there yet, but it is a step in the right direction. However, at the same time, there are projects out there seeking to find ways around ISPs, DNSes, government servers, GoDaddy, Comcast, maybe even some of the data centers, the backbone of the Internet, the Internet mega highways where most web traffic flows through assuming they are too centralized, etc. Steem is only part of the bigger puzzle of creating a decentralized blockchain Internet 3.0 which will be rising in the 2020's like never ever before.

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I've been looking about a bit, and note things like zeronet, blockchan, IPFS and other outfits that limit dependency on centralized services. However, as long as we are dependent on ISPs we are surfing at privilege, and New Zealand has directed ISPs there to not resolve the chans, censoring all it's population at once. We need mesh networks in order to become uncensorable, or some mechanism that routes around ISPs.

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So the billion dollar question has always been how to make steem go viral, right?

The answer may not be what you think it is.

Somebody with the mojo to innovate a truly indispensable project is the way. Wishful thinking will not work anymore.

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We do this every day... between the @heyhaveyamet community, as well as providing valuable and positive information at the @steemterminal. The hardest thing we face, in my opinion, is the means to reach everyone. Dealing with the lack of SP on my end limits what I can do... so I have created the #thoughtfuldailypost movement, to spread positive energy across the Blockchain.

It is my hope, that others will continue to use my tag, and maybe someday, I will be able to reward everyone with more than just a "thank you "...

Positive, organic engagement will hopefully never go out of style.

Thank you for your hard work and time my friends...

Wes

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Beaucoup de bruit pour pas grand chose! Fusionnez avec Steem Engine, ils déjà fait le travail !

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On the surface @schoolofminnows seems like your average bid bot. But as soon as you look deeper you discover that there are no bids. You discover that @schoolofminnows is something different.

@schoolofminnows is AI. It records what you do on the blockchain and then gets like minded people to reward you for your efforts. It does not follow human bias. It does not decide what's good and what's bad.

It is built on the proof-of-effort protocol. It invented altruistic voting.

Don't believe me?

Check out @schoolofminnows for yourself.

Follow the rabbit hole and meet the real underworld of steem.

WeAreOne337

Posted using Partiko Android

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I began to think that the steem token is a non-competitor in the modern world. Sorry. Only big test.

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(Edited)

Yeah you are correct. This was a social experiment pertaining to the use of a crypto currency/token on a social type platform. Notice how they tanked the project as soon as Facebook launched their currency.

Makes you wonder if the 3 years of data collecting and learning were funded by Zuck.

This is the end. What a shame.

Above is the last page of the Steem Whitepaper.

Oh I almost forgot to mention, part of the experiment was to map the human brain and to teach A.I., that is a very important aspect as to what was at play. The funny thing is that 99.9% of these people had no idea they were being experimented on.

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The author behind @kawaiicrush spends every waking moment of his pathetic life thinking about @berniesanders. He claims @berniesanders has made over 11 million dollars in Steem and is INSANELY jealous he could never live such an amazing life. He's SO fucking pathetic he will make multiple posts and comments with ABSURD claims just to get the attention of his 8 pathetic followers who also have nothing better to do with their time than dream about @berniesanders and the life they will never live. How fucking pathetic can someone be, @kawaiicrush?

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The author behind @kawaiicrushed is the @ngc / @berniesanders group of account who claims to own the top twenty witnesses. He is also very proud of the fact that he holds thousands of accounts.
He uses these accounts for:
Voting witnesses.
Flagging content which is not supported by main stream media
Flagging random accounts (usually small accounts) as a cover for his more earnest censorship work.
He takes great delight in tormenting the random small accounts and those who want to make the world a better place. Plus its a great cover for his real work of censorship and creating a dystopian future for the platform and the real world.

These abuses are all conducted with the FULL SUPPORT of the top 20 Witness @themarkymark
The markymark seems like a nice guy on the surface but he is corrupt to the core and cares not one jot about bullshitting you, right to your face. Just another politician.

This individual has become like a gangrenous limb which needs to be amputated in order to save the body.

Its time to grow up and take responsibility for our own environments people.

The latest HF is designed for the sole purpose of enriching this group of accounts.
He has thousands of votes to give witnesses because he has thousands of accounts.
PS he is also the largest SELF VOTER here. sad isnt it?

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When I first came here, I came because as a content creator, a writer, I saw a great opportunity to share my thoughts and get noticed for them. Communicate with the people that share the same values, meet new people. Enjoy good content. I felt really amazing at the time, writing blog posts and seeing people comment on it, while also making some money from the time I put into the posts.

I agree that it was taken over by all sorts of bots, memers etc and I started to lose my motivation. I wasn't noticed anymore for my effort to the platform - instead people with random and effortless people were gaining more than those who worked hard on good quality content.

It would be hard to make the bad times and memories go away and build this up all again. Steem is full with trash posts from people who gain profit by buying votes. It could only bring on 9gag masses, but not quality people.

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True. Hopefully, communities will counter the problems, like bid bots, etc.

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Well, that hopefully will change soon. Some of it is already changing.

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Well, that hopefully
Will change soon. Some of it is
Already changing.

                 - gtg


I'm a bot. I detect haiku.

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(Edited)

i'm sick of hearing this "bring a friend and some money"-thing ... you need partnerships with real money and the masses will come by themselves, most plankton wont spend money on it since steem gets sold off faster than you can say WUT ?

all that "ethical" "good" and other bla-stuff , no one realy gives a shit, they want the dough : it says "crypto" which is the magic word for "nouveau riche "overnight ... you dont seem to understand "the masses" and most of the masses have distrust towards it too, and they certainly wont save you, they FLOCK to money, not the other way around

You know i was always on how the others, the "alt"-coins are nothing but hot air, EOS, ETH, and TRON for the most part as the rest aint worth mentioning, but what do they HAVE ?

BILLIONS, that's what they have ... i revised my opinion on Justin Sun since his stunt with Warren Buffett ... giving four million to charity, receiving an invitation from investor ichiban-on-the-planet, then declining like "dont have time" or "dont need your money, sir" or "i KNOW its like dealing with the mafia, once i get in bed with you its for life because you didnt get top five by being nice all the time"

none of that matters, it shows grit and the guy has basically NOTHING on Tron but

but ?

money

lol

sells at 2 cents , has a market cap of what ? half a billion or more ? mhh ...

SO : here's my proposed solution to all your problems : sell 49% of the company to Justin Tron so he has something PRACTICAL to show (his worst criticism is that he basically did nothing for blockchain-yuppie land) ... that way he would have something .. 49% leaves 51% to you and let him do the marketing he seems to be a genius when it comes to that

that's my proposed solution as oppozed to ponzi-in-a-friend :)

yea im sure you wont like it, my language neither , right ? but if you give it some thought ...

You know what i think the biggest issue is here ? not just the fact that it come for free while sleeping to the fortune fifty for a year or so, but the fact that they're all scurrrrd of the big ocean, while in this VERY LITTLE POND HERE, its them who are the big fish and outside ?

they're sardines

gud ... i probably made a lot of friends again, so i keep telling myself to NOT SPEAK heh

yo, Justin ? can i have your number ?

pf ... not alleycat-approved , bring-a-friend starts to sound mighty much like ponzi-up so we can sell it down, dearie ...

m hm, in my delusional world i think that is what they mean by partnerships ... it doesn't come for free , but in the end both parties gain ... you got a hyperinflated coin that atm goes down by exactly one cent a day, a cap of what ? 50 million ? they got billions and nothing tangible, id say that's worth a try to reach for a combo made in heaven ...

yea, gimme his number, but the i want 20% of the company too LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

what ? 20% for me, 49% for justin ... that leaves you with nice wages for the team ?

since we're making friends ...

d60e6fb4c33b2bff3af628610e71ffe3.jpg

Well , it seems being polite doesn't get me much either but im still pretty polite

1890b44af9365b4cc1e56959ed7f60cc.jpg

gud, ... interact more, it says, but it means : "nod yes at everything" heh

457a6492b367cae42f7da28b3cb81675.jpg

wutwut ?

NO NO NO ! ... see, and listen up goodspeak-people, that's what these things are for, and that's what brainstorms are, bring it in your own language and set that ego and tradition aside - if anyone comes up with anything better, then SPEAK or hold your silence, just saying "that is blah" is NOT constructive, me using pottymouth to propose IS ...

see, a wise minbari once said : " There's no dishonour in defeat as long as the spirit remains unconquered "

and some human went like "drastic times, drastic measures" , see, i dont see the defeat in salvaging a dire situation into a position that gets more for everyone than there is now, if you can set EGO aside and that psychopath winner mentality that would have the likes of you compete with a moving train head-on ?

it's a sound option, it can be evaluated and tried out, yes is yes and no is no ...

anyone has better idea ?

then SPEAK , that's what this thing is for, now

im already sorry i spoke but when the cork pops my RC goes down ...

thumb_fate-whispers-to-the-warrior-you-cannot-withstand-the-storm-5364516.png

d4d9951eb91dbccf2f8b0231d1affe26.jpg

speak now or forever hold your silence, and when you do add something constructive, please ... everyone has the right to speak last time i checked and ideas are needed since someone up-there is STUCK IN OLD WAYS

ah, spaghetti is ready

thou art saved by the bell from the wrath of Goldman Morgan ;-)

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(Edited)

hah ... that hit the spot

  • wants to dabble in finance but is a hippie about it
  • puts a koi in the middle of a pond of ravenous sharks, then asks the police to patrol because it gets eaten, wasting countless resources in the process
  • wants to onboard the masses but expects everyone to behave like the few
  • wants me to write more but doesn't upvote to consultancy fee

images.jpeg

as a wannabe tek-head i <3 <3 <3 the steemchain for its sheer beauty, but the leftover human within me also expects it to deliver ...

and with that im gonna try to hold my silence for at least a week for all but the posts on morgan and tyr ... again ... sigh

hmm ...
6086958dc99060d9f8cfdf855af36413.jpg

felt better when she had my back by day and my dick at night

LANGUAGE, CAT, LANGUAGE

yea ?

language is a living thing, used to express oneself, not simply to please

gud, i'm sure i made much many new friends now

hasta la proxima

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Wow Wow. What a treatise on the way forward; laced with jibes and comics but succinctly points to the ONLY direction possible!!

But I asked! Will they Listen?
A million dollars question; no doubt!!
.

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almost out of rc gotta recharge or i cant post tomorrow, well i see "partnership on todays pinned post" :) ... so , .... "maybe..."
personally i wouldn't move for a position of domination but more like a -euhm-
catalyst ? nexus ? something all the bigguns and more can USE while they keep the narcist spot, = less risk at hostile maneuvers and who needs 100 billion if you can get a few of those ? i'm not really schooled in business (or anything at all) but i think the big book of mindfuck states : when clients : work dopamine , when partners or entities above your level in the area you try to work on : make them think it's their idea and if possible, make them think they got you by the nuts while its actually the other way around :D

maybe
maybemaybe
maybe we can crack a bottle of Piper or Bollinger in 2020, sorry for the short, im sure i'll get more space to talk when i get more sp because steem is worth more
some day ...

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(Edited)

pardon the split reply ( -> @goldmanmorgan) but my RC is divided as much as the people in my head ... the concept of that would not be a position of power but a position of indispensability, with added benefit that they might have the urge to promote and stimulate yours as you provide a service that allows them to have more time to shine on the center stage, while you (if you can get past ego) just rake in the dough lol , sounds easier than it is ofcourse, crypto is finance now and finance is a jungle.
And once you get 4 million dollar you can just flush down the toilet, make like Justin Sun and donate it to a charity Warren Buffett likes while preparing your pitch while yours is NOT ratpoison heheh, on the off-chance you get an invitation, then don't decline and try to tell the man why he wants to invest a billion in you ...

better to reach far in options, even if they're not achievable and keep them on the stack in case they become so, than to splash around in the little pond and keep digging in the mud where you stand aiming at smallfry only

but as i said, that's all easier said than done ... they're trying, and they're doing, the biggest problem is the start that was too easy and the mentality of 'ethics' in a world of money that's a bit not suited to the place ... not saying you need to go for child labour (although those kids get to eat, while the rest starves ... that's a debate of its own) but it IS business after all and money is hard business...

i think they can make it work if they get off the "its the best tek piece" towards "the masses" train ... but don't ask me how, partnerships is certainly an indispensable part and if they can connect with the majors as a utility, not a competitor then the position would be safer ... bit more breathing space and all that

but who am i ?

i'm just trying to be nobody but i need more zeroes in my account for that (after the comma heh)

gud then (here i am keeping my silence for a week = not ... again tsch..)

small edit & p.s. : (always something to add, right)

40k or 400k might make for a nice tax-deductible and some promo, if you want Titans to notice you you could carve your face in a mountainridge but if you wanna be noticed by the gods you'll have to spell your name in stars somehow (mmh ... nasty metafors, i has it)
If, on the big chance the four million doesn't get you noticed or invited by either of the 1% of the 1% then there's no need to cry as it was " four million you can flush down the toilet " in the first place PLUS, that's a serious tax deduction plus : you get the image of "the good guys" 4 million in charity buys a lot of love (which ofcourse doesn't cost a thing) and the media-publicity from that is priceless , when played right ... after all, advertising costs money anyway, so might as well make it a double whammy, get tax deductions, whole lotta rosie , ehm, love and
exposure !!!!! (of the good kind)

in the meantime, while im yapping i'm not rendering, modelling or programming so i think i should cork it :)

the thing, and the biggest unanswered but most urgent question in the current brainstorm-cycle :

56.jpg

why would these people need me?

64.jpg

not as despair but as a REAL question looking for a REAL answer and

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that's just not possible ... if you try that you'll end up with nothing but a lot of people smiling at you while they count the money they didnt pay you

so maybe

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A nice little theory for a system or twentyfive dimensions, if only we lived in one ...

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i know one thing : the only way to fail for sure is to not try at all heh

GUD ! (before i shoot in fortune cookie mode again sigh )

a good day to you, may we see the moon by 2020 ? (i think $5 is a nice level to hope for as a hyper-inflated utility token, but if you can provide paid service that's fiat money in the pocket, employees and their families happy and motivated and a way to keep it pegged , that sbd among other things ...)

it's just food for thought, dearie :) ... if i didnt like it here i wouldnt be here, right ?

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No other blockchain has even a fraction of the poets, artists, musicians, and of course, writers, that Steem does.

Do you have internet connection :D

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I know this post is about the advent of Steemit’s digital community feature, but I happen to be working on a platform that allows real world self governance and infrastructure funding through tokenizing each neighborhood’s market value. I wonder if Steemit’s community features would be beneficial to such an effort. 🧐

My newest update on the project:
https://steemit.com/blockchain/@tidnull/update-on-blockchain-neighborhood-selfgovernance-platform-hswafnec

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As a guy that was already leading / owning communities on pre blockchain platforms that rewarded people for the content they contributed I was eagerly awaiting this BUT this is now too late. We have communities by the tribes / tokens on steem-engine. I do not see any need anymore. Not that I am fan of the @aggroed clan but they handled this already.

The issue we face is the Steem prize even this Blockchain has great Apps and is awesome as a Blockchain.

Question is: Who needs the social media content rewarding part as "steemit"? It is per design never fair! Get rid of that and focus on DApps running on steem. We do need investors NOT masses. We need masses for DApps on the chain but not to create content. The content platform is fine but stop the reward part of it. The niches / tribes can cover that content rewarding part.

Just my #2cents

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It would be so much simpler if dApps and businesses demanded STEEM to have their product on-chain and then could reward that in tokens that they themselves need to sustain the value of, rather than just printing STEEM and hope that somehow it attracts more value than it dilutes (it doesn't).

Tribes and communities/SMTs are one way of doing it, but honestly you could do it with just liquid STEEM too with a model somewhat similar to what drugwars did except that one has a sustainable revenue model for bringing in STEEM that grows with the userbase (selling ad space for STEEM, letting people buy unique pro-features, etc, etc) which becomes the reward pool.

At least I've been trying to share the idea that what actually works on Steem can be done (imo better) without inflation-dervied rewards (communities should be able to distribute rewards however they like, but they should have to sustain its value themselves).

Honestly, this would not only remove the biggest value-leak in Steem. And the biggest turn-off point for investors (hign inflation going to rather meaningless things). It would also improve the actual social media and content discovery part, as people could finally vote more "normal" instead of based on what they hope will result in rewards. Looking back at the last 3 years and how much time was spent by clever people figuring out how to min max their returns from inflation through bots, rather than building attractive products... The time spent by author sucking up to whales rather than sharing their content and Steem externally to create a network effect. To me, this is perhaps the main issue with the stake-based reard model, that it only incentivizes people to share to those who know the most about Steem, rather than to those who have not yet heard iof it. This is how any other blog or social media has grown in the past, users doing the marketing and onboarding other users themselves.

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That's how free markets work, you're right, that pumping more in didn't fix Venezuela, etc, and it's dangerous but better to let the users invest into it and reap the rewards. Well, technically, people have put money into Steem. But like you said, the automatic pool system might be a bit like welfare, Universal Social Income, socialism communism, Obama Robin Hood Bernie Sanders Redistribution of the original oatmeal or I mean the wealth, etc, etc.

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I think you are completely forgetting one big point. All these Dapps are not going to help anyone if there are no consumers. So you need to onboard masses to use those Dapps and bring FIAT to those Dapps which then reflects in a higher Steem price. People buying Steem to speculate on the price (investors) are not what we need to create a stable ecosystem. We need apps and we need users.

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True, but I see the investor part is more important right now. The masses will come if they see fun or added value in DApps but as long as the price goes down and no one invests many will see it as a useless scam - the thing is we have great DApps, we also have a good bunch of users - another cooperation with corporates that could be part of this blockchain would be cool, say a Samsung incoporates a "Steem account" when selling their hardware.

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Users don't care about the value of Steem, they care about the apps, and care about maybe getting paid in USD or Euro from the apps. As long as the blockchain is not abstracted people won't use the DApps. (Similarly, do you care about the value in games which add micro transactions via gems?).

Investors is what makes it look like a scam since they bring strong volatility.

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some good points I ignored since i am maybe too long here lol!

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I mean for the short term, investors is what we need if we want to sell off our Steem for a decent price. On the long term we want users and apps to sustain the eco system.

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We do need investors NOT masses

what. no. wtf

Opening a new store on a desert town (hyperbole) is a shitty idea.

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Sorry, without masses, no investors, it's that easy...
Steem needs mass adoption.
Have a great day
Tom

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(Edited)

The Mass Adaption of Steem, is direktly cuppled on the Mass Adaption of Bitcoin.

Just if you bring people from other Sozial Networks to Steem is a way. And it is a hard long way, to grow this community. Every single "Searcher" for good people should be motivated. But how many of them there are? I think, most people dont know, how to get them here. And if the new members are here. They leave for more than 90%...

I say, grow Accounts after a half year of (good and serious) posting. Promote this Information to new Users and motivate them to post for a longer time...

If you can handle this (and iam sure, there are thoose guy´s and girls) than steem will grow from ALONE in the future.

This plattform is very Young.

Your view on it, is another with all the time, you spend here.

But Steem is Young.

Krypto is Young and Bitcoin too.

10 Years are nothing, for a new Technologie.
The next 5 Years we should get a good Base, with strong beliving people.

After it, nobody can stop this insane Blockchain.

Think Big. Think out of the Box.

Have a nice Day
Alucian

Edit say´s: Do NOT Split your Power for to much Projects!!!

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The waiting game , to attain harvest is much more unlikely for the masses, but easier for the prime investors. Here lies the weak link in the chain!!

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Gaminification is greeting @ its best here. :-)

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I think communities are a vital feature of any social platform so than people can collect around a common interest, but there are big challenges in getting people away from the mainstream sites. Steem has practically no visibility for most people and the active userbase is tiny. I hope to moves to remedy that. I've done all I can to get people on board including creating accounts for them. Creative people need an audience and not just income.

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@roadscape, @andrarchy and @richardcrill - a maybe naive question: could the Communities 2nd layer protocol prevent anybody from promoting her or his posts through bid bots or similar automated scripts?

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I think growth with come from the demographic with the most time. From what I know, teens and 20s are using snapchat and tiktok. The nearly transparent UI seems to be the common factor and navigating content with a swipe or content that is automatically navigated based on previous preferences seems to be where steem should go.

That same demographic knows more about vlogs than blogs. So the steemit ui will be a hard sell.

Posted using Partiko iOS

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Since the Part I was published how many active new users you on-board-ed?

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Crowd boarding , definitely would deepen block chain ; content and activity. But could the same be said about Steem value which is driving the divestment and powering down??

I opined otherwise!!

Thus activities that impacts on reward for quality and equity , instead of mechanised bot reward ought to be accorded prime attention!

Endeavor to drive Steem value northward, otherwise, little will be achieved!!

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I don't know if you're able to help but would like to know if you can help against Mack-bots bullying my account for no reason all my memes come from a free meme generated app and are not illegal I have not received a message from Steemcleaners for any wrong doing and I have not posted in three months now that may reputation is on the rebound I face down votes (Knowledge is power) was the post @garrettwallace. If this is what the mass onboarding will face growth is highly unlikely and onboarding the masses may start as a failed strategy and we greatly need growth just food for thought thanks @steemitblog

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So to be clear... You are not going to advertise to the masses? Because that is really the only way they will learn of this blockchain. It doesn’t matter what features you add if it’s still spreading by word of mouth. Word of mouth got us to #80 by marketcap....

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(Edited)

Whats the incentive to come over to steem? Why should a normal person choose to pay money to access this platform?

Not only does Steem have to overcome the cryptocurrency stigma; it has to contend with the inherent flaws of being a social media platform without any true moderation. The main exposure of the platform are from things like cliques, infighting, drama, and bidbots; you rarely read a news article on steem that talks positively about the platform these days.

Also, don't you guys see the irony of gating off a "decentralized" community? Steem inc shouldn't be worried about the social platform; instead they should be making the technology better and leaving moderation to the community. Its still fairly expensive to deploy a witness; until this is fixed, the platform stays centralized.

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To me I feel all these communities are hole lot of hype about nothing and it is adding complexities, that makes things more difficult for new comers.

If we take Facebook for instance, I can join today for free, immediately after joining I can create a group ( community) for what ever subject I want for free. I don't have to have any rep or money invested, it is for free and it is easy and I can post and like as much as I want!!

For a community in Steemit, I basically need to create a token, which is difficult to give to people, if you cannot code, then you get people who steal your tokes as what happened with the !BEER token,
Why can't it be easy and free as the Facebook example and everybody get rewarded in Steem??

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I have been looking for a way to appeal my account being downvoted by mack-bot of the steemcleaners group with no message from steemcleaners,cheetah, just surveyed since I first asked for your assistance @steemitblog now it's post after post being downvoted as in a way since I want to reach out for help I'm subjected to constant down votes feeling as if my blog company is being hijacked with me at the wheels wow you will not have to hear from me again @steemitblog because your not a complaint hotline I just been seeing so much of going on I was a rep 39 once not buying a vote to do so he brought me down to a rep 2 and as you can see in your data log this is blatant hijacking of my account your a busy person I would guess but if you read this and was to look into it I deserve to have my rep restored to at least rep 25 heard it could be done once but don't know how join me if you don't mind so I feel like I'm sinking alone and thanks for at least being a line of contact at least to make my mind feel better that someone from the real Steemit team got to see this keep up the great up dates and best wishes on your mass onboarding project steem on thanks

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I would love to have direct blockchain access to post text... it would be nicer than to have to connect to a centralized website...

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Are there differences between communities and hashtags? I'm asking because I see some similarities with how tags work. Specifically, communities reminds me of Facebook Groups, which I like. If possible, we would to to seek after that Twitter feature, the ability to retweet comments and posts with custom messages like Twitter has. We would love customizable home pages like MySpace had, which Facebook doesn't have much of.

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It's really good news. I did try it now. Hoping a positive step towards the big growth

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