RE: Dealing with the Steem leeches
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I wrote you this post.
Though it's mostly about the points you touched on, but didn't get into -- about the give and take of steem.
Not about the core of your post, which was about eliminating abuse and unsustainable gaming.
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There is so much to say about Steem. I have to set a focus for each post. Yours was interesting too.
Yea - I did my best to be respectful and just share opinions about what was worth sharing opinions about. I'm not familiar with the consequences of flags, or the economics of buying votes, or self voting, etc. Not really a radical thing to say -- that people on this platform are looking for rewards, but I read through the recent announcement about the power downs, and there are a variety of opinions.
I think it would be ideal to be a long term SP holdler. Better to cash out when the market is high.
Treat it like a long term investment.
But, initially, I thought "this is an excellent opportunity to secure working capital to channel into my business -- and I'm already creating all of this regular content, Let's just try and put it here and see what happens." -- Still here.
If you want the money now you can use a service like likwid that gives you the Steem and takes a cut. Or you take 50% Steem rewards so you can use that. I am powering up everything as I am not desperate for the money. I consider myself to be fortunate.
There's also the possibility to sell work for Steem. I've bought stuff by other artists for Steem, but the low price makes that less attractive for now.
All I want is for people to think about whether others should be able to take a slice of the finite rewards whilst not contributing anything? Our stake gives us a say and that is one benefit of powering up. If just ignore the abuse Steem will go to shit and we all lose.
I'd rather post and accumulate, and succeed financially in other areas in order to maintain my minimum financial needs.
But I've only made 8k/year or less for the last 3 years as an artist, and I've just been stubborn about not getting a job at a cafe, and instead working full time. So, I can understand why it would be attractive for someone to want to withdraw a portion of their STEEM on a regular basis to pay the bills, or on a quarterly basis to invest in their business, or even an annual basis to make major business costs. It could be a total game changer.
That and the Venezuela argument are both excellent reasons why people would adopt a more short term mentality for reward extraction.
If you have time to respond to a question, I'd be curious what you think of the voting system sort of auto filtering those people out?
Even if you posted 4 shitty posts a day, and self-upvoted, you'd probably only get like $30 a month, and your hourly wage would probably be worse than if you had just done gigs on fivverr.
Doesn't that sort of automatically disincentivize abuse?
I#m fortunate to have a job that cover the bills, so Steem can be a hobby for me. It has great potential for creative people to earn from their work. It really needs a bigger audience to make that viable, but a few people do well already.
I'm not sure what you mean about filtering. Self-voting is only really worth while if you have a lot of SP. For now some people can get a good return on buying votes unless we take action. A couple of dollars profit per day may be worth it to some.
Some people do thorough investigations that uncover voting circles and sock puppet accounts. If these are exposed then the bigger accounts could cancel out their rewards. I would hope that more users would lead to a better reward spread, but if we attract lots of scammers then it could get worse.
We shall see.
I'm confused at your comments here.
I earn a couple of bucks a day just by posting daily. Sometimes it has dropped lower, but that was when I was posting in a lower value SP value hive.
Aren't Hives technically loosely associated voting circles? Like there's no obligation to vote for others in your hive, but it seems like the inclination is to vote for your friends or associates, and if you're within a hive, then the idea is that you might be more inclined to follow those people, and thus form improvised voting circles.
I suppose buying votes is sort of like "I pay you less than I receive but more than you would get by voting otherwise".
Seems like a lot of effort when you could jut share good content on a regular basis, and get about the same takeaway -- I guess what I mean is that if that's the case -- and there are diminishing returns for gaming the system, then those people will self-elect to remove themselves.
As in, the amount of effort required to get a couple of bucks a day versus the amount of time, and hassle, and diminishing returns over time -- would lead a person to pursue a more fulfilling occupation.
Thus filtering people out people.
I suppose your purpose in flagging and downvoting is to accellerate the amount of hassle and diminishing returns in these accounts.
Hives/communities are intented to bring people with shared interests together rather than having to follow everyone who might post on that topic. A lot of people may stay within one community, but I have broad interests.
I try to help make anti-social activity unprofitable. If those people do not want to work with the community they can change their ways or leave. I prefer the former. If we do nothing then more will buy votes, self-vote, plagiarise and 'circle jerk'. There has to be a disincentive to do these.
For now a couple of dollars per day is all most of us can hope to make, but in book times I was making nearly $1000 per month. I did not cash it out, but it was a little scary. Others made thousands on a post in the early days, but that is less likely to happen due to various changes.
As I said, this is really a hobby for me. I want to do what I can to help Steem, but if it makes me rich in the long term that's a nice bonus.
Gaining influence/SP here allows me to do more good, but also brings some responsibilities to use it well. Bigger accounts also earn more in curation and in some cases will get more support as people hope for something in return. The more big accounts we have the wider we spread the load. I have tried to help small accounts grow with @tenkminnows so they gain influence and feel they have more stake.
I think the circle jerking might be useful for onboarding existing communities.
But, I think that the hope would be that the communities that are onboarded would be permeable, and then their interests and votes would expand outward.
A patron of mine is involved with several erotic roleplay / roleplay / fandom servers on discord. Science Fiction Space Opera and a whole network of Final Fantasy oriented RP servers and that sort of thing. Another community that I mentioned ought to join steem was darknest forums, and a 100 days of making comics challenge group.
These sort of pre-existing groups would be incentivized to jerk each other off when they enter, because they already have pre-existing community ties.
Sort of like how I assume most people within OCD or Creativecoin or Palnet are more inclined to vote for one another.
It's difficult to get people to take the leap for some reason -- Kind of dumb. Would be really neat to see whole groups of exhibitionistic roleplaying theatre blogs on steem.
.:.
I'd also like to see hives that are more project production focused, -- similar to a decentralized artist collective. I've basically tried to structure something like that myself, by creating a DAO for artists, but It's hard to do that. People only want to replicate what has been demonstrated as an outstanding success.
I think in that regard, it would be useful to invest into steem and gain orca level or something so you could be a magnet and then focus your re-enforcement efforts toward a small group of people to build them up and such.
Also, I think it's probably best to focus that effort within currently existing hives, moreso than starting new hives.
But then we're talking voting circles again.
Seems like a lot of these tools are double bladed or something like that. Like, circle jerks are undesirable, but also one of the natural inclinations of growing communities.
Seems like the answer to this sort of thing for the communities would be to derive life sustaining value from an external source -- like a USD Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign associated with the graphic novel / comic work that is developed on steemit -- to make an obvious association.
Then you could still build up SP for people here, and then get more people who assume the responsibility of building the steem community.
Doesn't answer the questions of inevitable withdraw or what a sustainable rate of withdraw is -- But I guess that's something each individual needs to figure out. Seems like there ought to be some common wisdom besides, hold until you can't and then hope you can cash out before the bubble pops.
People will inevitably support those they know or feel affinity for. Circle jerking and mutual support are variations of the same theme, but we already see groups voting up each others junk posts purely for profit. In some cases there are hundreds of accounts involved, but it may be just a few real people. Some people will attempt to counteract those.
There could be benefits to groups of people moving to Steem, e.g. a band and their fans. The fans could vote up the band's posts, but that should still leave plenty of votes to support others too. The band could offer music, tickets or merch for Steem. They could do what they might do on a Facebook page or a forum, but with a financial element. There are plenty of minor bands with thousands of fans who could have a real impact on Steem activity.
I've been discussing Steem with some friends on Facebook. They bring up the issue of complexity, but that is a side-effect of being decentralised. One is very concerned that certain far right figures are active here, but that is a free speech issue. We can have total freedom or submit to someone having overall control. I think freedom is preferable.
I see -- concerning the hundreds of accounts involved within a few real people -- that's quite the scam.
Yea you would just need to be able to pull them onto Steem -- I'm an artist, and I've found that it works better for me if I meet people where they want to be already. So, if people are comfortable on Patreon, they'll stay there. If people are comfortable on Kickstarter, they'll stay there.
It seems like I ought to design an erotic comic that is for ETH and STEEM, and then serve people in those spheres and derive fans that way -- from an existing pool of people who have already drank the kool-aid.
It's very difficult to get people to change platforms.
I don't understand why a person would negate a clear offer for a financial incentive within a social media platform, while still participating within a platform that is familiar to them, but is purely extractive.
Or, when I tell people "Patreon is the most affordable way for you to regularly access my content" -- and it's true -- some people would rather still pay via Kickstarter -- cause it's only a 1 month commitment, even though it's 2x or even 3x more expensive.
And likewise, People who hold ETH or Steemians, are not likely to become my patrons. But, if I found an effective way to monetize within STEEM, it would probably work out well for everyone involved.
It seems resistant to change to me -- but I've got a more liberal / exploratory disposition than the majority of people I've met. Which I think you could say about a lot of the people in the cryptocurrency space, as well as a lot of self-employed artists.
Steemit seems like a good onboarding point for ETH, and maybe other projects, though I have mostly just been learning about ETH and STEEM, and some of their respective ecosystem components.
Hopefully Steemians understand that the balance between Liberty and Tyranny involves rejecting people who claim their liberty by abusing others.
You kind of have to take some of that 'far right fear' stuff with a grain of salt -- in my experience.
Progressive left leaning hippies think that Joe Rogan is the antichrist.
Which I think is stupid.
But, I could see how racist and xenophobic posts would taint the public image of steemit. Hopefully people flag those when they come up, and blacklist the people making them.
I know what you mean about how hard it is to get people to move to a different platform. There is more to the value than what you can earn.
There is the @fundition project on Steem that funds various creative efforts, but I have yet to understand how that works. With people earning here it ought to be possible to do some good crowdfunding, but it requires people to build the apps to support it.
I've done a post pointing out some of the obstacles people have brought up as stopping them using Steem. I'm interested in what people think of those.