Meet Steem's #1 Author!

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)

How does the top author on Steem earn more than twice as much as I do? I was curious to find out after looking at https://steemwhales.com/trending/?d=30 and seeing the @mindhunter is receiving 2.23 times more rewards than I am. I opened Evernote and started taking notes.

Here is what I learned in two sentences: the top author is currently earning $10,000 to $20,000 a month from discrete upvotes directly on comments that are then upvoted at the very last minute! To be more specific, @mindhunter earns about $20,000 a month mostly with comments such as "Me too" which get upvoted for $60 several times every day! See the picture below!

How The #1 Steem Author Earns $10,000+ A Month!


After looking at steemwhales.com we may notice that @jerrybanfield is currently in the top 5 somewhere. I am very grateful to be one of the top authors on Steemit and I am always seeking ways to improve because I already know what I am doing. I have millions of followers that consistently see the posts and videos I make about Steem. 2 or 3 times a day I make a new post with nearly all of my creative energy funneled into Steem. In other words, being a witness and author on Steem is what I do full time.

Now, I looked on the Steem Whales trending over here, 30 days authors, which anyone can go find here: https://steemwhales.com/trending/?d=30

I looked to see where I am at in the top author rankings today.

I'm very grateful that I'm at number four right now.

I was amazed to see that the person earning number one is making about two and a half times what I'm making. Therefore the top author may even be making as much as $20,000+ a month doing this. I went with $10,000+ to be conservative.

Now, I went to look at @mindhunter's profile to discover what exactly does he do? What can I learn from them?

#1 author on Steemit


Here is the current number one author on Steem: @mindhunter

A 72 reputation is very high. He is a philosopher with 29,000 posts, thousands of followers, and not following anyone.

Very interesting!

So, I go look at some of the posts to see how the posts are made. Here's a quick video in one post. Is this made by the author?

I am not sure, it might be, I have not actually read any @mindhunter's posts or ever seen them before, which is why I was shocked that he was the number one author because I'd never seen or heard of him.

Then I started scrolling back and saying, "Okay the numbers don't add up."

How is it @mindhunter can make photo posts like this, earning four dollars and getting 25 views, and becoming the top author?

This just doesn't make any sense.

So I kept scrolling and scrolling because I thought I must just be missing something.

Then I started to find some posts all made 12 days ago. This is one of the posts with a picture and $65, top-up voters, you can see exactly who voted it here.

$66 on a post seen by 21 people with 9 comments.

If you want a little comparison let's see a post of mine here. Here's a post I made that was seen by 685 people on Steem, and that I sent out to all my social media networks, to tens if not hundreds of thousands of more people, 679 votes.

Very generous upvotes for $215 in 16 hours, that's outstanding.

So the amount of views roughly correlates to my other votes.

I was curious to learn how it is possible to get posts where you just post a picture, and maybe this is the author in this one, and you get $79 with 26 views.

Well, interestingly enough, it seems that if the same people with a lot of Steem keep voting, you can just consistently do short posts like this and earn very well.

So the majority of the earnings are really short posts like this, over and over again, that are earning a lot of money.

Here's $84 for a quick video, 62 votes and 85 views.

I've continued to just look through and learn more.

Here's a picture of a cat.

$80 for this picture of a cat posted 17 days ago with 29 views on it.

Therefore, if you just roughly correlate views to earnings, or if you looked at that last post I did over here, it got 600 and something upvotes for $215, which is about 30 cents an upvote.

By comparison, if you look over on this cat post, 29 votes, that's about 10 times as much per view as I'm earning.

This still doesn't add up though because the total amount earned is two-and-a-half times what I'm earning. Now it can make sense here, but what about these recent posts, what's going on these recent posts?

Now it looks like more recent posts like this one got hit with a big down-vote, which removed almost all of the rewards on it by newsflash.

There are then several other posts, which have this massive down-vote on them.

So then with these huge down-votes wiping out the author rewards, I started to wonder, “Okay, how is it possible this author still earning?”

So I dug a little deeper and I went into SteemD, and then I noticed immediately upon just looking on the first page that these 100% upvotes come in all at once from these three different or four different accounts.

So I discovered these are all on comments.

This is a post from eight days ago, and then the upvotes are coming in right here on the comments.

Now, these upvotes are extremely well done, because the upvotes were put in at the very last minute, only giving people that want to flag these upvotes 12 hours to down-vote them before the rewards are paid out, very smart system here.

What's happening is the author is now making comments that you could easily find if you went through the comments. You should be able to see these upvotes in, if you can see the newest ones and scroll up the comments, upvotes have to be made when they're 6 days old.

So today's comments just came in right here. I could down flag these comments which would remove some of the rewards, but the author would still get the majority of the rewards. Meanwhile, I would have to use all of my voting power, which then I would not be able to give back to any of my existing followers.

In other words, it doesn't even make sense for me to even try and do anything about this, other than simply sharing it and making sure this is shown in the light. I'm not saying this is right or wrong. I'm saying we should be aware of how @mindhunter is earning receiving $20,000+ a month in rewards out of the same pool all of us are paid out of. Right now the top author is currently earning $20,000+ a month from discrete upvotes directly on comments that are then upvoted at the very last minute.

Some of these accounts have upvoted me in the past as well and I'm grateful for their upvote.

So there are several accounts voting up comments at the very last minute, and then sneaking under the radar with every day, hundreds of dollars of rewards from Steem.

This is done on a bunch of different posts, on some of the author's own posts, imagine that you get to make a comment with a few words and you earn $60 off of that comment.

"Jerry, you're just jealous because this system is even better than yours."

That's reasonable, you could also say that I'm impressed when someone's worked out a system to discreetly slide comments in.

You can see that not every single comment is upvoted up, but then there's one that slides in out of lots of other comments, which don't earn anything.

Then this last comment slides in and gets $65 on this post.

Extremely clever, you would have to essentially intentionally go to war on this one. If for example a person who is flagging them down before would have to sit there and watch comments exactly at the six day mark, and then hit them with the down-vote. Even then there is always all kinds of different strategies that could be done to get around that as well, which is why this is so interesting to look at.

You can just see comments after comments all over the place on different posts. This one is not a post by the author themselves, but a post by another author.

Now, this strategy might be even better if these comments were posted on trending posts, because they'd look legit then, and you could even get more uploads by other people on them and get more exposure, although I'm not sure if more exposure is the goal in this scenario.

There are lots of these comments hiding all over the place, and these are the newest ones. These could be then flagged down like this. I could put the flag up and remove it, but that would use my voting power.

I'd rather vote someone following me up than essentially try and take rewards away from someone else.

I've looked and found just over and over a bunch of these different comments like "Me too!"

Imagine saying, "Me too!" and you can earn $60 for it. I'd probably be saying, "Me too!" all day.

Look, I'm not showing you this as some angel who does everything right.

I posted a picture in my boxers and got $344 on it, so I'm not coming to you as some saint here who is just perfect.

I thought this would be interesting to show you. For further reading, see this post shared in the comments by @celsius100 at https://steemit.com/steemabuse/@mindhunter/a-message-to-newflash-a-sock-puppet-account-of-transisto-stop-downvoting-my-posts-and-acting-like-a-sociopathic-socialist-whale


#2 author on Steemit


Here is the number two author on Steem: @tamim

Now, the number two author has eluded me a bit, I still can't quite crack their system on it. I've taken a look over at their profile on Steemit and I still don't quite understand it.

Looks like this other author is just doing a brute-force approach, just doing a bunch of posts every single day, and then voting them up at the last minute to avoid being flagged.

If you look down at these posts then you can see this is an amazing strategy, because the author is just straight upvoting their own posts.

This author has 540,000 Steem and is literally single-handedly voting up almost completely their own posts.

This author can just literally vote their own posts up and there seems to be a clever strategy that's being used here as well, instead of trying to vote their own posts up and risking getting them in the trending category, whereas if the author voted their own posts up immediately they could guarantee landing on the trending page.

If they voted all these new posts up right away, every single one of them would go on the trending page. I imagine the author is looking at this and figuring if they did that they'd probably risk getting a lot more down-votes.

What the author does is very smart. The author is upvoting these posts after they've been around for a few days, then they don't go on the trending page because they are five days old.

You can see that at about five days old, the author then drops their full upvote on the post, and their full upvote is worth so much. Then they are earning the second highest amount on the entire website just by voting their own posts up and a few other people are voting them up as well, incredibly clever system.

You can always use steamd.com/@username to see whatever is happening in the backend of a user's account, it's an incredibly helpful tool.

I'm impressed to see this system, which is just incredible.

I hope in sharing this system with you that this is useful to see what is going on with the very top authors on Steem and some of the incredible things that are possible that you can do on Steem.

I've just simply looked at the results on SteemWhales.com, I've presented them and this is part of the downside. If you use systems that work too well you may get a lot of attention with them. I'm very grateful to be the number four author.

#3 author on Steemit


Here is the number three author on Steem: @papa-pepper

Papa-pepper has very much a similar posting strategy to me. Papa-pepper writes for Steem all day every day, has a big following and consistently is trying to contribute as much value as possible to Steem.

As it seems, the other top authors are consistently doing the same thing, therefore I hope looking at this has been useful for you today.

Thank you very much for reading this post and learning with me here today how the top authors are earning $10,000+ and as much as $20,000 in the case of the number one author, using some incredibly smart systems that are getting them hundreds of dollars of rewards every single day, in some cases without even needing to do more than say, "Me too!"

I love you, you're awesome. I hope to see you again soon.

Thank you very much for reading this post, which was originally filmed as the video below!

The feedback on the video was so positive that I spent about $100 to get this post created for you here out of the video, and then edited it prior to publishing! I appreciate you being here and I hope you have a wonderful day today.

If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?

Love,

Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk

Shared on:

PS: Witness votes are the most powerful votes we make on Steem because one vote for a witness lasts indefinitely! Would you please make a vote for jerrybanfield as a witness or set jerrybanfield as a proxy to handle all witness votes at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because when we make our votes, we feel in control of our future together?

Vote Jerry Banfield Steem Witness

Or

Jerry Banfield Steem Proxy

Sort:  

Hey Jerry,

with this post you lost me as a follower. I might be small and I don't matter in the steemit ecosystem, but it shall be a food for taught. This post is to underline that you should be first, at least this is what I understand from it. You try to present the two in front as scammer upvoters. They might be, but let's put it this way, you also upvote your own comments. Most of the minnows would be instantly flagged for it. As you got already a lot of traction people will just upvote everythig to get the curation reward.

Regarding the first two. Yes it is wrong what they are doing, but why don't you just flag them and then presenting this in here. I think 99% in here think they are wrong, but nobody has the balls to just send one flag. Well I might get flagged for this comment.

Regarding the witness vote. I don't know why I shall vote for you. You speak mostly about how much a witness makes, not about what a witness shall do. Most put a tremendous work on the platform and don't post anything as their are busy to keep the system running. Just check github to see how many people are involved, but are not having your visibility.
Also trying to bribe the whales to be a witness is so wrong:

You should be a witness for the things you do in the background not for the post you do. @nanzo-scoop told you already this:

Like said, even if I get flagged for this, it had to be said. If I would have been one of the top whales I would probably get some pretty good dollars for the comment.

hahaha yo tambien!!!

Thank for all my followers and fans. You too!

Priceless haha well done

Get More Upvotes and Followers : https://steemfollower.com/?r=1966

Touche, good sir. But I think this one is played out now.

(Do not reply to this comment with me too. Argh. Now it's guaranteed to happen.)

Me neither @lexiconical

Thank you for posting your thoughts, despite the risk we all take when doing so in any controversial topic.

I think it's a little unfair to call those "bribes", but I get your point. I think it wound have been appropriate for nanzo to keep the 20 and shrug. One could also interpret this as Jerry's way of paying for the time of a whale, which is valuable and could be otherwise spent not reading transfer messages in the wallet. At least he bothered to check how often they each voted for him, thereby having a reasonable reason to assume they might support him.

"Most put a tremendous work on the platform and don't post anything as their are busy to keep the system running. Just check github to see how many people are involved, but are not having your visibility."

I totally agree with you. However, if one is capable of outsourcing part of the technical work, could it not be potentially valuable to have a more public witness (whether that be Jerry or not?).

"Like said, even if I get flagged for this, it had to be said. If I would have been one of the top whales I would probably get some pretty good dollars for the comment."

I have been very pleased to see that the community has done very little comment flagging here today. I'm also happy to see you with those "pretty good dollars" you mentioned!

Thank you for posting your thoughts, despite the risk we all take when doing so in any controversial topic.

I'm coming from a former socialist/communist country, where freedom of speech was forbidden. I will do fight, even with risks for this fair right that so many take for granted.

I think it's a little unfair to call those "bribes", but I get your point. I think it wound have been appropriate for nanzo to keep the 20 and shrug. One could also interpret this as Jerry's way of paying for the time of a whale, which is valuable and could be otherwise spent not reading transfer messages in the wallet. At least he bothered to check how often they each voted for him, thereby having a reasonable reason to assume they might support him.

He already posted that he wants to be a witness and the posts have been already voted by the whales, and if they real have read the posts and wanted to make him a wintess they woul have done it, without the incentive, so for me it is still bribing. Why did he not send to lower guys that voted him as a witness? It is economics, I would buy myself also in when if it is needed and the system allows it. This is to get back to the point. I do not condemn that he is doing it, just the way he tries to come out clean and point the finger on others.

I totally agree with you. However, if one is capable of outsourcing part of the technical work, could it not be potentially valuable to have a more public witness (whether that be Jerry or not?).

The point of the witness is not to outsource the work. Let others do it, that have the passion for it, not for the money. I wonder if 50% of the witness would still do it if only the elcetricity and machine use would be paid, but this is another topic.

I have been very pleased to see that the community has done very little comment flagging here today. I'm also happy to see you with those "pretty good dollars" you mentioned!

I'm happy also, because we can have an open debate with normal arguments.
Also I have to thank you for the normal reply, with marked points. I like having constructive discussions, where we can find solutions.

For the record...

A bribe absolutely requires quid pro quo by definition.

There was no quid pro quo here. This is a sales tactic used in marketing, soften the target with a gift. It's distinctly different than an offer that requires quo to get your quid.

This may be a semantic argument, but I think we should call it what it is, a sales tactic not a bribe. You can't have a bribe when you are allowed to keep the quid and not even respond to the quo request at all.

It's not really spam either, because if spam came with a $15 reward for doing nothing, we'd all be like "gimme more of dat spam".

It's a marketing tactic, and he's an internet marketer. I suspect that alone is enough to turn you off, as I've noticed a lot of other people with a similar opinion (honestly, including myself).

We can debate around this for hours. I was born in a country where corruption is endemic and a lot of the "gifts" are kept without doing the requested thing, as nobody will try to announce that he tried to bribe someone. For me, this marketing tactic is acting as a bribe. The "gift" is to influence one on the decission of doing something, which could have been done freely till then.

According to Merriam Webster Dictionary a bribe is:

1
: money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust police officers accused of taking bribes
2
: something that serves to induce or influence offered the kid a bribe to finish his homework

Also I thank you for the constructive comments.

I was being a bit of a pedant. I still don't think this is a bribe because what is given is given freely before any chance of whether there will be a reward is known.

However, if you had used the word "corruption", I wouldn't have made this objection. Not that I'm saying it is or isn't, but I wouldn't have pointed this out.

If you called it "vote-buying" or maybe "pandering" (an option with a negative connotation), I would have been 100% unable to do anything but agree.

See what I mean about me having a penchant for playing Devil's Advocate?

Ok, let's put it as vote-buying from whales. Pandering would be to redlightish for the level of the discussion we are having here.

Gladly to find common sense.

As I said you can initiate a bribe and the guy can keep it without delivering it, but this is another part of the story.

There ought to be a term for a failed bribe that gets kept with no reward.

"The idiot tax" is already taken by the lottery here in the US...

Huh? He's not exposing them as scammers...he is simply analyzing them and sharing what he discovered. You should should be grateful for Jerry's content!

I think he presents the flaws of the system, but only on the ones on top of him. It would made more sense to see the top10 including him what tricks they are using.

It is the same like comment upvoting, a flaw in the system. This is how I see it. I don't find them right, but this is only my opinion.

Why should I be grateful? Okay, he does a great job as a content producer but I said something else, I said about the witness stuff, which is a little different than the content.

this is better than floyd mayweather vs conor mcgregor

Pick a random fight, and most chances are it will be better than floyd mayweather vs conor mcgregor

Let's get Alex to pose.

That made me laugh :)

This is not the point of the discussion.

But to give you an answer: As if we would fight on social media, I can quit from the start to keep losses low. If it is a fight like the one from last night, most probably I would be the winner, having some basics in contact sports and being in the heavyweight category, aiming to reach cruiserweight category end of fall.

They should change Heavyweight to the Battleshipweight category, and whatever comes under Cruiserweight to Destroyerweight.

This would satisfy my hierarchy-of-naval-vessels-tonnage desires.

Lol.

Because of your well tought comments, you gained a new follower ;)

You too, Alex!

[ This is not the point of the discussion. ]

Oh yes, it bloody well is, and you know it. You are pretentious, arrogant, and quite frankly, a flaming idiot. He called you out perfectly with that meme. You're attacking Jerry for no good reason to somehow show off as the moral superior.

Address the flaws in the Steemit system he has exposed, or STFU you miserable cretin.

I think you did not read the whole post or if you did, not comprehend it.

I try to summerasize it for you: One shall not blame others on gaming the system if he does it in another way. Blaming others when you do almost the same stuff is the thing I addressed.

I did not say that I'm moral, just read the thread.

On another note, as one that claims to be a rational conversationalist, you got flammed very fast, cursing without any reason. I did not bring any insult and with the other commenters, we had a decent inteligent exchange. Let's keep it to a certain level.

There are flaws in the system and not few, some of them can be corrected, some not. I would have the problems addressed not the users, like for example @tamim did not post for 9 days when the post was made, so to bring him in this in was pointless. Just name calling.

Incorrect, you attacked him as part of the moral authority. Rather than deal with the issue that he has presented, you immediately criticize him for not living up to your moral expectations. I can't stand people like you.

Lol.. I think it is pointless. Hoped for a constructive discussion but all that came was a video from a bad singer with some self upvote:

Thanks for this, as I'm convinced of doing the right thing with the comment and pointing some of the flaws out.

You pointed out some serious questions that Jerry should answer. Replying with a Kesha song is ridiculous, and bad taste. Thanks for the comment, and I hope you get a response.

As for Jerry, I am sorry that people keep re-steeming your stuff into my feed, however you did point out some interesting things about those two top authors. I feel like they are both scamming the system based on what you reported about them.

I shall thank you for the comment. I think the response is clear. He will probably not answer it and he will let it go ;)

It will be good if this scamms can be blocked. Some understood it before the post and stopped. Look at @tamim. ;)

Alex,

Jerry did give you basically a meme for a reply to your thorough comment. I hope he is able to find the time to rectify that situation.

I replied to your other comment as well, but I'll ask a potentially more important question here.

Would you mind citing where Jerry does this:

"You try to present the two in front as scammer upvoters."

I took another quick read and these sections seemed to conflict with your claim...or is it all based on your interpretation of his implications?

"In other words, it doesn't even make sense for me to even try and do anything about this, other than simply sharing it and making sure this is shown in the light. I'm not saying this is right or wrong. I'm saying we should be aware of how @mindhunter is earning receiving $20,000+ a month in rewards out of the same pool all of us are paid out of. Right now the top author is currently earning $20,000+ a month from discrete upvotes directly on comments that are then upvoted at the very last minute.

Some of these accounts have upvoted me in the past as well and I'm grateful for their upvote.

So there are several accounts voting up comments at the very last minute, and then sneaking under the radar with every day, hundreds of dollars of rewards from Steem.

This is done on a bunch of different posts, on some of the author's own posts, imagine that you get to make a comment with a few words and you earn $60 off of that comment.

"Jerry, you're just jealous because this system is even better than yours."

That's reasonable, you could also say that I'm impressed when someone's worked out a system to discreetly slide comments in.

I think he tried really hard to be diplomatic and definitely called nobody a scammer?

Thank you again for your initial comment, both interesting and potentially brave to say anything negative around here.

How does the top author on Steem earn more than twice as much as I do?

For me, reading between the lines, was it like how this guy can make more money than I do? I found it tendetious as how can it be someone better.

In other words, it doesn't even make sense for me to even try and do anything about this, other than simply sharing it and making sure this is shown in the light. I'm not saying this is right or wrong. I'm saying we should be aware of how @mindhunter is earning receiving $20,000+ a month in rewards out of the same pool all of us are paid out of.

It is showing in the light, but with what purpose? But putting the spot on someone we divert it from someone else. I wanted to see a solution for the reward pool hijacking. All I felt it was, only pointing out the two top earners and their wrongdoings, not directly said, but to be understood as this. You can read it in most of the comments.

If someone puts a problem on the table, also shall come with at least of a solution and if he is part of the problem to admit it. This was my point on the whole post.

Jerry did give you basically a meme for a reply to your thorough comment. I hope he is able to find the time to rectify that situation.

He is busy, like most of us are, we are self opportunistic individuals, some more shameless than others. So if he does not give an reply or something than that very bad song(de gustibus non est disputandum), it is ok, he made a statement. As already said, I'm to small here to have a major influence, would have been a bigger whale, the answer would have been more elaborated. From the economical point of view he is doing the right thing, focusing on the big players, not the small fishes as they don't bring him money, just are looking better in statistics.

As a fan of the rule of law and innocent until proven guilty, I don't think "reading between the lines" is enough to accuse him of "slinging shit", as others have done in this thread.

I don't want to "sling shit", and my intetion is far from that. My start comment was to show that pointing someone out, when beingin the same boat, without coming with a solution is wrong. I'm far from a morale guide and did not invest the amount as Jerry did, which is need to be said. I only say that this post is so wrong put from the essence of it. I always had mixed feelings, one is that he is doing a good job investing, presenting and bringing people to steemit(which he does) and the second is that of shameless opportunism(which we all might be guilty of, but on different levels). The post hits rather the second one.

I didn't mean you said that, btw. There is actually a guy down the thread using that exact phrase to describe this post.

I think this post was a great service by Jerry. I have considered writing a similar post, but was afraid it could get my blog nuked. I've been flagged in the past for pointing out things like this, and I wasn't even naming names.

Jerry was large enough and had enough support that he could take this risk. I strongly believe he was telling the truth when he said he was nervous to post it. I have spoken to the man in person and he is IMO much less of an opportunist and much more of a giver than he may always come off in videos.

At our steemit meetup, nobody but me even offered to help setup, clean-up, or pitch in money. Jerry paid for the whole thing (hundreds of dollars), organized it, and paid for the food, beverages and supplies. Aside from me, nobody else even brought any food or drinks or did a damn thing.

Not a far-reaching anecdote but this is not a money-grubber we are talking about here.

To say he has to propose a solution or he can't raise the issue of who the 2 top posters are, is wrong.
I really liked how you point out he is quite the political artist and mails money around for votes. That seems to be all the rage on steemit; the part I enjoy least.
I can afford to just do my thing and be happy; but I do like to understand how it all works too. Thanks for your great comment to Jerry; he's fine to not attempt to try to defend what is in the record he knows he can't take back.
I find it interesting he wants to be a witness, but I probably would not vote for him unless I see more from him than content and bribery.
You have a new follower ;-)

Jerry, I hope you are simply busy at the moment as I believe you would do well to respond to this in a less meme-worthy fashion. There are fair points on both sides and an easier compromise here than on other issues.

You two should start here: "You try to present the two in front as scammer upvoters."

man kesha sucks so much! lol love how you found a way to monetize VEVo videos lol its like, u got 59 cents for keshas music video LOL i wonder if youtube is gonna get mad at us for that? Im sure they will! We should cherish these good times on stemit while we are big enough tio make some money but small enough to stay under the radar!

I agree with Alexvan here, when you see something wrong happening you should do something about it and not use it to defame someone else for your own good.

Actually I think he is doing something. He makes members aware of an intrinsic problem of the platform, which is a first important step of thinking about it and finding solutions. I don't think single users are to blame 'morally' to exploit a system if the system allows it. So it is not the point if @mindhunter or @tamim act 'morally' wrong or not.

But in my eyes it is obvious that extensive self-voting, comment voting and other (completely legal!) 'tricks' can be dangerous for Steemit in the long run. If only a few are doing that, the system will handle it, but if more and more users are getting aware, that self-voting (without writing long, elaborated articles or communicating with other members) is the most easy and effective way to make profit here, then more and more people will do exactly that (they have the right to do it actually). The consequences will be less communication between users, low quality articles, frustration of newbies, and of course a low Steem price. So even if extensive self-voting may lead to some short term profit in the long rung it should be counterproductive.

As I don't blame single users like @tamim or @mindhunter (as I said, people will always 'game' an exploitable system - and by the way I also upvote my articles and some comments), I think we should try to improve the system, so that it will be at least more difficult to exploit it.
Actually all recent changes made it more easy to upvote oneself:

  • unlimited numbers of articles per day (now some users just put 10 minimalistic posts per day and upvote them with full strength).
  • a fourfold stronger voting power of 100 % upvotes which make it very comfortable to make a maximum of profit with only a few votes.
  • a linear reward curve + the option to delegate Steem.

Actually all these changes also have their advantages but combined they favor self-voting a lot. Therefore I think we should collect ideas to minimize the effect of extensive self-voting and similar methods. I also haven't found any really good solution so far, but at least some ideas:

  • for example one could limit the number of upvotes which one can give any other (and also the own) account within a certain time frame. So that one would be forced to spread ones votes (I know, with many socket puppets self-voting would be still possible, but not such easy anymore).
  • the same could be valid per IP address. A limited number of upvotes to any account with the same IP address like the own one ...
    (These ideas may be inappropriate - I hope you will find much better ones! :) )

Maybe @jerrybanfield's article was not completely altruistic, but in my opinion he pointed out a real problem about which we should ponder to find suitable solutions.

I note there are other problems that stem from the same cause, which is weighting VP with SP. Perhaps the worst problems faced by Steemit is that this weighting scheme makes a Sybil attack on Steemit able to control the code trivial (all you need is enough money to buy enough witness votes), and PROFITABLE to those from whom the Steem would need to be purchased (all of the largest holdings of Steem were mined, before Steemit even existed), and the fact that weighting VP with SP makes Steem a security in the eyes of the SEC.

While the SEC has yet to set (publicly) it's sights on Steem, I am pretty sure it will, sooner or later.

I have posted on the only solution I can see to all the problems this weighting scheme causes, including exactly this rewards pool mining scheme @jerrybanfield points out in this post, and that is changing how VP is weighted. That is the only way to change how the SEC will consider whether Steem is a security, for example.

I have done my best to advocate for solving these problems. It seems to me that those who are either minnows and eager to be able to take advantage of these same design 'features' (vectors for attack) don't want it to change, and those unable to understand it is a problem, and those presently being advantaged financially by it (particularly those that mined their stakes, who are millionaires on paper), are manufacturing opposition to fixing the problem, for the reasons listed above.

Because of this I do not expect Steemit to fix the problem(s), and therefore the price of Steem is likely to continue to languish, rather than rise to reflect the potential of the platform to overtake Fakebook, and the capital gains that would inure to those who have invested in Steem to fail to materialize.

Fortunately, Steem is open source, and I know that at least one fork of Steemit is being written as we speak that intends to a) do away with the mined stakes, and b) weight VP with reputation in order to solve these problems. I am sure Calibrae will not be the last fork either, so if it doesn't succeed in solving these problems, another will arise, and another, until the lessons learned from each failure finally produce a platform that will kill Fakebook.

I personally am not focused on financial rewards from Steemit, although I am on Steemit because it offers them, and offering them has created a community the discourages trolling, and encourages polite discourse - a fantastic boon to social media platforms.

At first I thought Steemit was a fair and brilliant platform capable of growing to the point of leaving Fakebook in the dustbin of history, but after I read the white paper, and had conversations with witnesses, devs, and profiteers, I realized it cannot do so without changing how VP is weighted.

I could be wrong about whether Steemit will make the necessary changes to weighting VP, but I highly doubt it.

We shall see what the future brings.

The more I learn about how Steemit works right now, the more it becomes clear that the system is much too easily manipulated by people who can invest from the outside with fiat to get voting power. There must be a formula to figure out how much $ to invest X number of accounts to reach a sweet spot in voting power that can then be used make sufficient profit to justify the time spent - if you just vote for yourself.
That is very much not in keeping with what I understand the spirit of Steemit to be. I am very curious what the fork you mentioned will bring. I agree that reputation should be more heavily weighted in determining voting power, not financial value. Financial power = voting power is what made the world we live in what it is, and it is being replicated on a much much smaller scale here.

"Financial power = voting power is what made the world we live in what it is, and it is being replicated on a much much smaller scale here."

Clearly, you get it.

I agree that there is a break point where it is simply too profitable to self vote to bother with curation anymore - although some whales still do so. That they do is strong evidence of their personal dedication to Steemit, and one of the things that gives me hope, and causes me to continue to rail at those will listen, and try to advocate for changes that i think are necessary to prevent Steemit from suffering fatal injury.

I have posted on such topics before.

There is no fate, but what we make...

Sarah Connor


GoogleSkynet3-500x250.jpg


We seem to fighting a loosing battle against lobbies everywhere, in every single aspect of our lives...

And now we also have to fight BOTs on the dark side.

Sometimes I wish for the rise of google, so the battle becomes fairer...

Battle is never fair, nor victory just. Nonetheless, we shall either be free men, or the war shall have been lost.

Not all company is good, and only good company will meet the victory of liberty haply. We must consider carefully our allies, that we not be led astray.

Google has certainly arisen to an extent that every matter we must treat involves it, and whether it is allied against us, or with us, time and truth will tell.

I was just pointing out that he was trying to talk himself as the actual top earner, because the others are faulty and have issues, like comment voting, but he does the same, votes his own comments. If some low minnow will do upvote his own comment for a longer time he would be blasted by some other whale.

He bought his witness rank from the top whales, just check the blocks with the SBD sent to top whales. Now he can start implementig solutions on github, but no, we needed all to know what a top witness earns and how @tamim or @mindhunter cheat the system. By the way, @tamim did not post anything in the past 9 days, only resteemed.

Like said, the approach was what got me to post the comment. Don't try to appear clean and shift the blame on others, admit your faults and flaws, come with a solution and let's discuss it. Just throwing a blame in a room will not bring us forward.

Steemit has flaws, of course, some can be solved, some maybe not, the real witness are working hard on it, and deserve to be paid for their effort.

I see that your comment was writen in a constructive manner, which I appreciate, and most of the things I have to agree upon. I hope you take my comments also in a constructive way.

I hope you take my comments also in a constructive way.

No, I will flag it with 100 %! ;-)

Thank you Sir :))

you guys are right.. it is bad for steemit and I didnt feel very good about it as a minnow.. while I do my best to create valuable content someone who has enough SP earns just with one image or meaningless comment.. it wont be that bad if the posts were good.. steemit shouldnt allow this and it is bad when someone sees steemit just as a way to get money...

Because their are advantages to current 'problems', perhaps the right solution is do what the steem white paper suggests, in its crab parable. Let the big boys take down the big boys who rise too quickly or 'cheat'.

In other words, first warn the abuser and ask his motivation, then publish this abuse and last of all 'take them down' kindly. Once they are 'tackled' as in football, do not keep kicking them. Chances are they have something to offer, even if it is just demonstrating system weaknesses.

HF19 has been well, perhaps this is strong, a disaster.

Sooner or later the most elaborated post will always get the best rewards. Self voting won't hurt the community

I disagree. Just check accounts like the one of @tamim or also @sandrino. They make huge rewards by upvoting their own posts again and again. For example @sandrino just overtook me in the SteemWhales list by doing nothing but upvoting his own posts.
As long as not too many users follow these examples, it won't hurt the platform too much, but if more and more members recognize how lucrative it is under the current conditions, it actually could be the end of Steemit.

If the gaming is allowed, unfettered, sooner or later, that will be inevitable result - everybody just gaming for up votes, which will kill it, like you say.
I don't see the ethical stance changing, which is whats is needed, before implementing any changes.
And certainly not from the current big players?- why would they? - its the game they want.

What is the process for actual change on steem? How are ideas implemented into the actual code and who does it? Have changes been made before?

The last thing a charlatan would want you to do is call them out while they are performing. This is precisely what Jerry has done. It doesn't matter if he serves to benefit or not, what matters is that there are people exploiting Steemit, and the public deserves to know about it.

Defaming people who have done immoral acts is the moral thing to do. If you don't, then they are free to continue. The only reason I can see for wanting to protect the immoral in this way is if you are one of them. Defending your own by any chance Elias?

silentwrath i guess you can look at my profile and find that i'm not, and i think Jerry also said that they are smart to have a strategy and that he should've had a better one. so...

I think Jerry is just trying to raise awareness in the community about potential flaws in the system, rather than to accuse others. He's always trying to build and improve Steemit. Just my 2 cents.

Thanks for you opinion. I ranted about the way he did it, attacking the two top earners in front of him and their flaws. It would have been better to present the top 10 or 20 including him, with the system gaming they do. As you expose yourself and point out the flaws in the system, you are not vulnerable to comments from others. I did not say he does not serve steemit, it would have been unfair, because he is producing content and brings loads of people in here.

You are 100% right!!!

Uh oh a $60 comment! is @mindhunter behind this? lolol

Sarcasm :D

I will donate the SBD from this post to a social cause.

its all good , i was just joking, and hey you should donate an upvote to my Steemit Africa friends @tj4real and @bania and @mcsaam
@tj4real is getting oots of afrian userson steemit hesin Ghana, Africa, and he has some amazng projects were working on im helping him organize a big steemit advertising campaign for africa, and he just needs lots of supporters and followers to help him upvote his fundraising pots, he has results, hes trustworthy and hard working and also @stellabelle and I wanna send more USB solar chargers to arica so they can all stay online longer (smartphones run out of battery fast especially whenonlien!) africa has a lot of existing wireless infrastructure that is usable they just need more smartphones and smal solr carger backups OR more pocket battery bricks to kep their phones charged

anyway we need to promote more mesh network decentralized interneyt and satelite recievers from outernet we need thsoe BRCK portable wifi backup generators, we need ays to get internet to evryone in africa, get cheap $40 android smartphons by the box and hand em out to people in exchange for signing up to stemit and peopel can geta LOAN to have a smartphone, solar USb charger and $50 prepaid internet for a month, , and they can signup on steemit nd show the program they used in their introduction post, and end up making $100 off their FIRST post to have enough to then pay back the steemit proga, whichg usesthat money to then buy ANOTHER $100 africa inteenrt kit wiyth usb solr charger, smnartphone,a nd one month of prepaid mobile data, 9e need a longterm soltion for free wifi to africa and developing countrues) but yeah we could use steemit to rowdfund so many new steemit users in dveeloping world, and now @tj4real is on his way to ecomning a steemit whale, i convincd him to save most of his searnings as stempower which he has, and now he will be able tp uopvte all the african users who deserve upvoptes, he will be there for his fellow arican stemit users in http://steemit.com/trending/africa and we should all go in there wen we can and sprinkle some upvotes to African steemitusers ! even if a small number of Africans are on steemit, when they start making money they become beacons of hope for the people around them in reallife! This is how steemit spreads best via word of mouth, when a minnow becomes a dolphin and they are able to show people steemit and the money theyve been able to make!

Thanks for the info! I do use @treeplanter a lot, to reforest a part of Africa. And I totaly agree with you on this. Africa needs a little push to selfsustain itself as a continent.

I like this @newsflash guy

Seems like he uses votes wisely

I did not check what he voted till now, but he brought the comment on top and also made a small shield for it as who will take the risk to downvote it and risk a flag on other post.

He got balls, I like it!

@alexvan, this is quite an insightful post and you raise a lot of important questions about motives. I completely agree with you that being a witness is about work, not self aggrandizement.

One thing that i think needs to be kept in mind is the 'techniques' used by the self voters. You asked Jerry, why he didn't flag them? Fair enough. But they also were voting at the very last minute to maximize their gains. So, although i agree with the sentiment, he kind of has to go out of his way in order to do that.

But all in all, great comments.

Lots to ponder here, cheers

Hey @v4vapid, thank you for the comment. It was one of the few that understood it. I was happy, that so many people responded to it, with their own comments, but most have been taking time to do it in a propper way, keeping the discussion to a certain level(some exeptions, but them we can ignore). This is showing me that steemit is on the good way, even if not all agree on the same topic. I'm happy to be able to have another opinion than others and still not to hold grudge and to agree on other topics. This is my image of the perfect society, to be free to have different opinions and still to respect the other.

My comment was just showing the principles of the witness on one side and not defending the top2, even if @tamim had stopped 9 days before the post (so it was pointless to point him out). I would have not made the comment if the top10 would have been presented, including himself with their good and bad voting patterns. This would fair to say, pointing the flaws in the system for all.

I'm more the sinner than the saint. I do use the bots to get more visibility on the post. My comments I do never upvote. But this is all my choice. It is how I see the impact on steemit and on the reward pool.

Bravos , Mr. Van , bravos. This needed to be said . I'm glad you are not a kiss-ass


1205ba92.png


Many of us are afraid to speak the truth because one can hurt a whale's ego , and therefore , be flaged .

I too know the feeling of being afraid of writing something I know is right because I fear being actually not just having comment flagged but having someone coming in and flagging the last 7 days of work i've done, which makes me wonder if it is even safe to do a lot of steemit posting all at once and if we should space out our work or maybe use multiple accounts to give ourselves a backup? I am totally public about who I am exactly on my account because i was a victim of identity theft and i wanna make sure people know what the real me looks like so no one can impersonate me etc but i now see that i will need to have a second account with followers and anonymity to keep myself safe incase something happens to my account where i somehow loose my rep or followers or get flag attacked by someone bigger than me, and unfortunately as steemit gets bigger will just have more psychopaths joining who will find it fun to flag people to fuck with them

and we do have to be careful about rewarding people for bad behaviour but we are humans too who are we to say what i bad behavior? Well actually we can define bad behavior and i don't care if you disagree but doing things like Spamming copy paste messages or leaving one line 'Follow and upvote me please!" is bad behaviour and i know 99.999% of you agree! and there's plenty of things we all know is bad and we need a way to protect people who get flagged unfairly without taking away any power from even the potential abuser.... becvause that person evenfi they are abusing their steempower (lol absolute steempower corrupts absolutely or Steempower tripping) so anyway even if they ARE abusing thgeir steempower, they still havethat right, but then the community has the right to flag them back as a group after warning them to take away flags or suffer flags tjemselves, and if that doesnt work we can send the user to like a special list where we give them enouigh upvotes from whales to balance out any potential flags given to them in an attempt to wipe out their earnings... i think this will happen so rarelythat we will not even haveto have many spare iupvotes around to fix any potentiual probelms and we have a whole tribunal and everythingwhere we have the user get on steemspeak.com discord voice chat to actually TALK aboiut the situation and we hold a court rom type thing with @frystikken as the judge or we vote on a judge but this was we can have a soret of systemn to deal with this stuff without taking away flagging roi something drastic like that

maybe make it so you cant flag someone more than a cartian number? or make it like so u need permission from like another RANDOM user to flag the article???

OOOH i like that Joint flagging permissions like a sort of Multi Signature Wallet deal where you haveto like get teh permission of a random steemit user picked at random to actually go ahead and flag a user IF they have a certain amount of Steempower maybe

For abuse and spam there are steemcleaners. Just report them in here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScCZuBdZmqg4FcOWcpF_nfvZ0_6rQbZJfnbUJjtglepuwcAhQ/viewform

It is anonymus and it is not based on once taste but on abuses.

well it was anonymous heh

but its one guy tho, hes fair but what if someone takes his account? see we need a group system decentral

but hey steemcleaners is like #1 now look
https://steemwhales.com/trending/?d=30

so i cant argue with that. gotta respect that

There are many in team, it is a shared account.

By the way, that many open tabs!!! I have 29 open now :)

:O You should write a post with the title "steemit hacks"

I will not, as the hacks will not be blocked and more will abuse them. I will try to reach the steemit team to do something about them. I do use also some hacks, so I will not play the morale saint in this story.

lets see if he has the courage to respond to this comment. People trying to act smart by exposing others are not that smart.

He already did with the video, he will not come with an answer as I'm irelevant on steemit. I think the discussion is closed for now. It is pointless to navigate around it.

I have been following jerry on mainly on youtube and I have always had a visceral feeling of punching him the moment he starts talking. (Thats my bad) but today was the last straw. I am done with him

I think this is not the best approach. If I can come up with an answer, I will just walk away and ignore him. Today I did unfollow him because the post was what I said before in the comment.

I don't care about the face or voice, I care about the data.

I see he brings new guys o steemit, which is good and needs to be appreciated. The crypto info also, nothing to argue.

The post today showed the blunt opportunism where shame was left aside. This was the comment targeted at. If you do something, stick to it, don't highlight others faults by hidding yours.

Also to be a witness needs some more than just braging about money. But this is how I see it.

I don't understand why you say minnows would be flagged for upvoting their own comment ?

The @sadkitten initiative is a bot flagging self upvote abuse and you'd almost have to be doing only that (not upvoting others) to be targeted.

Did not know about @sadkitten. I've seen some minnow with low numbers because of selfvotes. Some other that are bigger tend to downvote them. Usualy the bigger whales don't get a flag for selfvotes.

A bit jealous? Me too ;)

No, not this is the point, just read what I have writen. I don't care how much money one makes as I'm a capitalist by nature. The point was that the two who make the most money have been presented as steemabusers and the third is clean, where it is not. This is it.

Ok I see. Thanks for showing us these details. Have a great weekend

FREE Author ATS tokens - Get 75 ATS tokens for FREE everyone that joins.

This needs a flag by @steemcleaners

Consider yourself off my list of following.
Did not mean to piss you off? I was offering you a gift.
How ungrateful?

Posting links like this is just spam. You could have started with a comment on the topic, and after some other comments just asking if I would be interesting in something like this, than, if I said yes you would have given me the link. It might be also my fault that I did not take the time to explain this.

please except my apology

You don't have to apologies for this. Just keep in mind that some will flag you for it, as it is not wanted.

@jwolf warned me, but also said that others have flagged me??
What small minded people? when your offering them a chance for free money?

Just incase you want more free money;
get 50 Free WCX Tokens: https://wcex.co/?ref=pk2TBNdg

Well said, to me it now seems Steemit is mostly a play between people who have more powers here. There is still room for creativity here, because truth always prevails sooner or later. But many members quit as a result of frustration.

The people who are on top, should start a trend where they would manually look at some of the new people's post and upvote them , to encourage people coming here. Otherwise, soon steemit will be left with only people who have already lot of power and will not add up many people, thus leaving the overall health of this echo system in a bad health.

Hello @sanjeevm, most people, if not all who join steemit do it for the financial rewards. I did it. But most don't do the math, it is a long term investment and if you are trying to get rich quick on it will probably not make it.

Only a few can make a living out of it. This either invested a huge amount of money, which is also a high risk investment and need to have a decent ROI on it. Others who make it on here, post very good content and are seen by people with influence.

So if you believe in it as I do, just stick for the long run, it is only in beta.

Agreed, I believe Steemit will give returns in the long run.

almost forgot!............. Me too! : P

wow super useful insights thanks!

I already knew about most of this and I know many people did. I'm glad you're bringing this up the way you did.

Whether or not these are voting abuse depends on everyone's individual opinion.

I still think the idea of vote cancelling brought up by @dantheman in the past should be looked at closer.

The idea is pretty simple, anyone who would want to cancel all the votes of someone could set up an option and cancel each of the people they want to cancel.

These cancelling votes would be anonymous.

We could set a % of our voting power to cancel someone else votes and this would be done automatically.

I love the idea. There could be some pitfall. First the @steemit Inc account shouldn't be allowed to use this function.

What would Smart Ballots and Kamikaze voters mean to Democracy?

Being an Anarchist, I like to work from first principles. If I assume the popular political theology is morally acceptable means of making decisions regarding what people may or may not do, then I would like to add a new voting system and means of fully “expressing ones vote” that I feel would truly capture a legitimate outcome.

In other words, if all people are equal and entitled equal weight to vote for what ever they want, for what ever reason they want to, then it should be possible to express your opinion as the exact opposite of someone else. This is a perfectly valid opinion and deserves as much respect as their opinion. After all, you could just as easily say that they are the one who is adopting an opinion opposite to your own. It is not possible to say who is positive and who is negative, they are merely reflections of equal value with no beginning and no end.

The act of negating someone else’s opinion does not require you to know their opinion, because you are free to change your opinion to counter theirs as fast as they can change their opinion. The outcome will always result in a net vote of 0.

...

If man does not have a right to counter balance another man in the political system, then the game is rigged. His right to cast a vote that expresses his wishes has been denied. He has been given a false choice rather than a free choice. After all, if you cannot express a vote that is exactly opposite of someone else, then that means not all opinions are on the table. It means that the people who get to decide the options are the rulers, not the voters.

Negative Voting and Steem

...there is currently no way to “down vote” an “up vote” and therefore, the system is unbalanced and subject to abuse.

...

What if instead of down voting a post, you could down vote a voter? When you down vote a voter you nullify their voting power with your own voting power. It is the moral equivalent of casting equal and opposite votes on every post without offending the posters.

Under such a system authors who vote for them selves and curators who vote robotically would be negated. Only those who vote responsibly would remain.

Origin of the Right to Vote and how the system denies this right

For each person who chooses to vote rather than negate there exists another person who was not negated. This means that there would still be a large body of voters whose opinions could be polled.

This body of individuals would be the least polarizing group. A group of people whom have been pre-filtered by the masses to be the closest group of representatives that could be found. Everyone that was eliminated was a “polar opposite” of someone else and thus represent the set of least representative. Those that remain are therefore “most representative” and their subsequent votes will be more in line with the masses opinion than any other group of representatives.

...

If you believe that voting is a fundamental right derived from our human nature, then you must also hold that negative voting is the most expressive means of casting a ballot and representing yourself.

All other definitions of the “right to vote” are a statutory right or privilege granted to a person or group by a government. However, this definition is in contradiction to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that government authority comes from voting. Therefore, government cannot have authority to define the source of its own authority. If you believe government gets to set rules on voting, then you believe voting isn’t a human right, but a government granted privilege that can be revoked. In other words, you believe that government authority is derived from some other source than the will of the people expressed through voting.

Let's restore the right to vote by allowing people to express their anti-representative and negate their vote.

The Politics of Negative Voting

People are irrational yet believe they are perfectly sane. They will take personal offense any time anyone attempts to expose the disconnect between reality and their own delusions. This isn’t a reason to abandon a system of negative voting, but rather a reason to implement it. Anything that forces people to come face to face with reality and stop hiding their violent tendencies behind an anonymous voting box will lead to a more civil society.

I don't agree that some blockchain mechanism that doesn't exist yet and has the potential to harm the value proposition of Steem is needed when there is already the ability for any Steem stakeholder to downvote the posts or comments. There are also scripts available to automatically downvote accounts' posts or comments. If you really care about the allocation of the reward pool, use your stake to downvote posts or comments you believe are overvalued.

Every propositions has the potential to have some undesired effect.

There still some difference with what bot can do as these aren't anonymous like what was proposed by Dan.

I do use my stake to downvote some posts and comments.

I still think Dan's idea of vote cancelling has some interesting points. I don't know about the feasibility of implementing it but I still think this particular idea has some merits.

Hy teamsteem ,, happy to know you ,, regards from itikna09, great success greetings, do not forget the vost and his comments blog @ itikna09, follow me ,,,

While I'm coming around to the idea myself, I think it's potentially dangerous if there isn't substantial direct oversight, which might be hard.

Forgive me if I am ignorant, but wouldn't the suggestions above simply accomplish a similar (and theoretically, more user friendly) version of this function you noted?

"There are also scripts available to automatically downvote accounts' posts or comments."

Should using your own influence tokens to entirely counter someone else's influence tokens indiscriminately be user-friendly? I mention it as a possibility, not as a recommendation.

Indeed, you did. It seems to me that if we make it possible via script, it might as well be fully supported (or removed). Having it be partially controlled by a technical barrier to entry seems to me, at best, a half- or temporary-measure.

It's more about being correct or not. Planes aren't user-friendly but they can't be to accomplish what they are build to accomplish.

It is the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do?

I understand your concern. I think they is more ups than downs to this proposition and that's more of an educated guest on my part than a absolute truth.

@teamsteem thank you for your feedback here because it took a big leap of faith to write this post and share this with fear of everything going wrong in mind. With what you shared we have an outstanding discussion here and I enjoyed reading what @dantheman had to say in the articles you shared along with your quotes summarizing.

After months here as an author debating the need for negative voting and the 12 hour negative voting only period, I am now happy for it even if that means sometimes I am on the receiving end of the negative votes. We all should have the option to express our opinion and use our Steem Power to vote as we see fit even if others do not agree because each of us have the other option to vote the other way.

Read more about the history of this at https://steemit.com/steemabuse/@mindhunter/a-message-to-newflash-a-sock-puppet-account-of-transisto-stop-downvoting-my-posts-and-acting-like-a-sociopathic-socialist-whale. Thank you to @celsius100 for helping me see this because I had not before the post.

@jerrybanfield
I'd like to add a site http://steemvp.com/ helps you to dig deeper on your future works relevant to this. Here is a detail of mindhunter, you can see the top accounts offering him more reward. Hope you get my point.
SteeM.V.P..png

Let the people be free!!!!

I see that you had time to reply to @teemsteem but didn't had the time to reply to @alexvan? So you just ignore negative feedback ? This ain't the way a witness should behave

The original system of democracy was like this in ostracizing votes (canceling?). Hi friend! :)

I'm not sure I understand. But I can say vote cancelling was never implemented on Steem!

Hi Soulsista!

Yes, the original greek system of voting (democracy, not representative democracy like we have in these modern times) had a "downvote" if you will, vote called "ostracism." Ostracism. Not vote canceling, but outcast votes.

Oh now I remember hearing about that. I had totally forgotten though. That's pretty cool knowledge. Thanks for the link and sharing.

lol. Thought you could use my upvote! ha ha.

I quite liked that idea, but apparently it was very controversial. It would have been a much better approach to "the experiment" of several months past.

These cancelling votes would be anonymous.

This would be nice - is it possible on this blockchain? You could match up the exact time someone's votes were canceled with the exact time someone canceled the votes, match the amounts, and then it would lose anonymity.

That is something I wondered since Dan talked about it. It seems almost impossible but maybe there's something I'm not aware of.

In my last article I introduced the concept of smart ballots that would automatically vote the opposite of a person of your choosing while maintaining full secrecy of their vote. @dantheman [Source]

Thank you @teamsteem for your post and yes I do think having a downvote option would be a great solution for post like this and abuse

your welcome hahahaha

It is impossible for @dan's proposal to be more anonymous than sock-puppet accounts already provide, as @biophil has pointed out.

I'm not saying that it's possible, it seems counter-intuitive but Dan seemed to have hint at it being possible. He's Dan the main architect of this platform.

Well, it is conceivable that some code could be crafted to make anonymity, but presently, the most anonymous mechanism is sock-puppets, and even that, as @sherlockholmes has showed, isn't perfect.

People will always find a way to game this system, I think what we need are incentives that encourage the type of behavior we want to see.I would even suggest having a portion of the daily rewards delegated to real people that the community trusts to find abuses and use that Steem power accordingly.

I like this idea a lot.

We have to remove the economic (and time) penalty/opportunity cost of flagging and curating this site.

I spent several hours flagging child porn and plagiarism just 2 days ago, but I would have been much better off (from a personal perspective) if I'd spent that time authoring posts or replying to my commenters.

Hell, the people that do this for police stations have to be put on rotation so their minds don't explode. It's horrible work. Plus, I was probably doing something illegal by even being in the posts to flag it...more unrewarded risk.

Thank you for that service. It’s like you are wearing the cloak of invisibility and protecting us from evil!

decentralized blockchain technology means=

I am new to Steemit and just learning how it works. Based on your info, I guess I need to invest more into steem to have people falling over each other hoping for me to bless them with an upvote.

LOL @drbob1. I kinda agree with you.
Sorry @jerrybanfield and @teamsteem, but basically what you are saying here that if we learn how to abuse the system and cheat, then it may be okay, depending on how we look at it.

Of course, I am glad that @jerrybanfield brought the subject to light, but it is incredible that many others knew about it and nothing was done to make the system better for new users.

We, the new users, suffer so much because no big guys take the time to look at us, and in the rare occasion someone with decent SP votes for us, they use 1% of their votes. While here @mindhunter having possibly 3 friends beside himself voting his 2-words comments with full power.

If we want to become successful, All we hear is that we should write amazing posts. We shouldn't beg for money. We should work hard. We should be patient. We should and we should....
Yet, we never know what a good post is, since no one tells us whether our posts are good or they are just down right crappy. And here I see someone posting a picture of himself (He is not a hot or sexy girl even) or his cat and getting +20,000 a month. Not sure what I should say or how to describe my feelings. @jerrybanfield I guess you fit the sexy criteria in your boxers, that's why you got over $300 for that post?

Sorry, I don't mean to be sarcastic, or maybe I do a bit. But, really!?
I am afraid to try posting my picture in a bikini or something only to find that I made $0.01, just because I don't have rich followers. That will be devastating. I better not try it (sigh)

How can I convince such rich people to become my loyal friends like that? Anyone is interested in supporting me to grow so I can vote their comments last min and we all make big bucks? or maybe I should just do like @tamim. Just spend thousands to grow my SP and eventually get my money back with kisses on top?

I am kinda feeling sad and discouraged now. I always believed that hard work pays, but it's just so sad to see that cheating is being rewarded and on top of it, left alone to thrive.

Am I being too emotional here? Sorry, it just has been shocking news for me to read.

Thanks @jerrybanfield for sharing.

Rewards = Quality * Reach.

You are thinking it is this:

Rewards = Quality.

This is why Jerry can make money off of the post you refer to. It's a lot braver post. If I post that post, it only hits 1250 people. Jerry hits 10x that. He's performing for 10x the audience, math would suggest he get at least 10x the rewards.

The reason we all tell you to work harder, make good posts, etc is because that is the only way to succeed. Some abuse does not negate this.

Apologies for the post promotion, but I think this post I just wrote is aimed directly at you. I hope it helps:

Steemit, like Life, is a popularity contest

PS - Chances are good I would vote you more than .01 on your bikini post. You know, because of the implication.

Sunny - Implication.jpg

Hahaha. I love your (PS). Thank you for supporting myself esteem ;)

Yes, you are absolutely correct. Both Quality and Reach are very important. Quality bring reach again and again, while reach support quality more :)

Thanks for the suggestion. Sometimes promoting is important, because it is hard to figure out where to find the quality read.

Many Thanks again and happy to meet you and everyone else here :D

Don't forget to count the extra followers you get from each post as a "form of reward". Everyone you get could be that one who resteems you to the right people for a big upvote.

Wait. What? You get followers as a form of reward? Do tell...

I just mean that every follower you get is going to increase the expected value of all your future posts. So even if your payout isn't that great, if you got more followers, you "earned" future rewards.

Will keep that in mind.

Thanks again :D

Thank you for breaking up my reply feed with something that doesn't annoy me.

I read a post asking the users to justify "Why SteemIt isn't a Waste of Time"

SteemIt isn't "sold" as anything. It is a platform where people can earn Steem from "Stake based voting" meaning the more stake you have the more your vote matters. Some users write marketing type pieces which are just their own opinions.

There is no promise of quality content although the topic comes up a lot.

There is no promise of earning.. comes up a lot.

No agreed upon marketing plan.

Anything you read that lead you to believe differently was just someone's opinion. @whatsup

The greater the risk you are willing to take the stronger your faith in your opinion and the greater your resulting profit or loss will be. @dantheman [source]

The money/Steem people are making on Steem is money that is coming from the investors. You are right about that. To make Steem people have to convince other people they should "pay" you for the work you've done.

People abusing the system are destroying the value of the currency they are trying to get their hands on. There need to be at least 51% people looking to spread valuable content for Steem to be worth something.

I agree 100% people who are just "printing money" are destroying its value... and thus steem it still only at $1 and change...

I'm unclear on why you quoted my post here. Is that is response to me?

The vision was, is people shouldn't be able to be bad actors because there are others of the same size that have flags to fix the problems. The system has all of the tools built into it to fix the problems. If you are concerned about the problem... Why not just deal with it.

I quoted your post cause it's a nice thought that seemed fitting as it describe Steem pretty well. People shouldn't feel entitled to anything more than "Stake based voting" reward system, all the rest is someone's opinion pretty much.

Thank you for the clarification.

The money that was mined before Steemit even existed, as most Steem was, isn't from investors, but from those that were 'insiders' and who were able to control the code that permitted mining.

There are investors in Steem, like @snowflake, for example, who did not mine their large stakes in Steem.

Most of the Steem in existence today, isn't doled out as upvotes, as upvotes don't draw from your personal holdings, but rather the rewards pool, was mined before Steemit even existed. The value of your upvote is BASED on your holdings, but does not draw on them.

Steem is not produced by upvotes. Votes merely disburse the Steem that is created otherwise, through a different mechanism, and supplied to the rewards pool.

For this reason, when @mindhunter buys votes from @snowflake, he draws down the rewards pool from which we all are paid rewards, in proportion to the value of the upvotes we receive.

In other words, those scams mean more for the scammers, and less for the rest of the authors. They get more Steem, and we get less, because they draw down the pool and leave less in it for us to split.

I know all of this. You also misunderstood some stuff. If no investors ever bought any Steem then the price of Steem would be 0$. The price of Steem comes from investors.

I could re-start a Bitcoin blockchain from 0, if nobody mine any, no matter if I hold thousands of them, they will be worth 0$.

I know about the reward pool and how it work. I was here in May of 2016 and I've been spending 40 hours a week on Steem ever since...

No investors will buy any Steem unless Steemit will grow, so the platform needs to be able to resist scams.

Satoshi did exactly that, and whoever he/they is, he's got a lot of BTC now. There are no 'dividends' from hodling BTC, and no use case beyond it's original novelty, unlike Steem, which is driven by Steemit.

I know you are one of the old guard. I know you are dedicated to making Steemit become a platform capable of crushing Fakebook. I don't know why you consider my comment to be aimed at ONLY you, as my response to you was intended to extend the information to the wider audience that will read them here.

I just think that making sure that people have the information I included will help them to understand better how Steemit works. Most people, I think, still don't know that the votes they receive don't come out of the upvoters personal holdings, but out of the rewards pool, and that's an important distinction - particularly as vote sellers aren't selling their money, but the common resource we all depend on for rewards.

Good points.

I don't consider myself from the old guard but more like an early adopter.

Excellent post, thank you for this explanation.

Best easy explanation for how the reward pool works yet and very clearly defines how high powered self-voting decreases others' rewards (even if it is only a few cents from each user, the impact across the board is significant). And I think the investor issue is what should be pushing for a solution here, people don't invest in companies where they know abusing the company's infrastructure is tolerated, unless they plan on abusing it as well.

Your comments are right on the mark. I have many times posted on this matter, and when my posts and comments reached witnesses and devs, and they deigned to respond, the responses were simply "we don't agree.", rather than substantive expositions of their disagreement, or ended up being some prompting that has resulted in Steemit being forked, i.e. Calibrae.

"...@mindhunter having possibly 3 friends"

@mindhunter was outed as buying @snowflake's votes, and @snowflake as controlling the other accounts also doing the upvoting.

You are not being too emotional, but rather being discouraged at this kind of manipulation is exactly what the white paper states is the reason for downvotes and flags to exist at all.

It is sad that mere lucre has turned out to be a cryptic Steemit-killer, yet, unless there is a significant revolution in how our votes are weighted, it is inevitable IMHO that a Sybil attack will, sooner or later, be undertaken to control the witnesses, and those whose (mostly mined) stakes will be purchased to do this will become millionaires - in some other currency than Steem, which will insulate them entirely from the consequences of the platform being taken over.

Steemit is marketed as 'decentralized', but, since wealth is perhaps the most centralizable thing of all, and Steemit is simply able to be bought, with enough wealth directed at the largest stakes, Steemit is not decentralized at all. Steemit is no more decentralized than any stock corporation controlled by investors.

Only equal votes, or votes weighted by reputation - the judgement of the community as to the value of the account holder - might be able to actually be decentralized. Money is the most centralizing of power mechanisms, as we see in the world around us today.

Dear @valued-customer, Thank you for approving my comment and thank you for your comment on it.
These information are amazing revelations for me. My age experience in terms of cryptocurrency and steemit is not more than 3 months. Yet I am finding so many mind blowing info everyday I get deeper in the issue.

I totally agree with you. We all say this platform or that cryptocurrency are decentralized and its our way to freedom of speech and fair chances, but in actuality, those who monopolize the platforms and cryptocurrencies by voting/mining or other means are actually centralizing it from within. Very subtle but dangerous. Because in the outside it still looks the gate to dream-land but in the inside, it is actually the gate to grim-land.

Lets hope steemit will not end up like that and will retain the benign foundations and good intentions that was built upon.

Many thanks again for sharing and for your support :)

Thanks for summing up, far more eloquently, my thoughts to. I have only been on here for 5/6 days, posting, so can hardly be qualified to comment. - But I will anyway ! lol
'We' you ( and me, and many others I would think), see this as a as 'cheating' strategy -other see as fair playing of the system.
The moral issue of 'cheating' and 'fair play', is something that can be worked out, in a free market place - which this is.
I'm sure there is a way to. - I just cant figure it yet!... but I have set my grey matter onto the conundrum.
What is obvious, is that, just like in society today - those at the top with ' the power', will not relinquish it.
Those are the same people without the same moral compass as ourselves - the ones who think it's fair play.
So, somehow it behooves the 'moral compass crew' to work within the system here, to promote other equally 'moral contributors'. (not content of posting), but the INTENT of the posting.

For example, I just wrote a game of thrones episode 'spoiler' - I thought it was pretty funny actually, but no one on steemit seemed to think so . Oh well.

While not deserving of up votes, if it really is that bad ( which isn't -goddamn it, it ). But lets suppose it really is that bad (which it isn't - did I mention that?).

But, if it is, by popular vote, so be it. - It means it's shit - but the INTENT of posting, was to make people laugh (and get some money for my efforts).
The power houses are not going to change the way things are - it suits them handsomely - but if there are enough 'of us' people headed in a different moral direction, with the will to pursue different ends, (and numbers to also)....well that's free markets in action , right?

The sickness of late 20th century/21st century thinking, is that gaming a system belies intelligence thought- which it does, of sorts - But it embodies all the short sighted awareness, and social responsibility of your average T-rex, who is in particularly bad mood.

If I am missing something blindingly obvious, please let me know - Like I say I'm still getting to grips with the whole thing.

(and check out my game of thrones post! if it's something you watch it - it is tongue in cheek, silly funny - honest) :)

"I thought it was pretty funny actually, but no one on steemit seemed to think so . Oh well."

It's probably just because you don't have the followers. Don't take it so hard. You may appreciate this post I wrote (apologies for self-promotion, but it's relevant):

Steemit, like Life, is a popularity contest

Your followers are your visibility. Posting quality content with few followers is like buying a billboard on a cornfield highway in Kansas with a population density of 8 people per square mile.

I can't check out your post, unfortunately, as I would spoiler myself out of this season.

Any system that can be gamed will be gamed ,and when good voluntarily restricts itself, evil games much better. In compound interest terms, like Steem, that means "evil" makes a ton more rewards.

We may be morally best-served by removing all community norms and rules, but I fear what that might turn Steemit into (Bitconnect?)

It's OK, I didn't take it hard - in slightest- (it was for dramatic effect)

Take a look - it's not remotely a spoiler - I promise. - that was just a headline grabber !

While I agree with all your points.

It's a cross I seem to have to bear, in life - to always try to find the exception to the rule. - Or failing that, change the rules...
Both a talent and a curse, throughout my working life.
(with the exception- rules of war gaming - that would be silly - it's 'only' a game)

cheers

Hahaha.
I like the advertising for the game of throne spoiler and the work of the gray matter. I need to work out my little gray cells too. I can hear them hum and bum in my head. Poor little things got fried after the electrical shock of the above mentioned information. LOL
Thank you all :)

yeah - a bit crafty, that one ! lmao

One of the reasons your post seemed not to be liked by people is because they never saw it.

Only those that saw it had an opportunity to judge it, and this a huge problem for new accounts, particularly lately, as the number of votes available to minnows was decreased by 400%.

One way to better ascertain whether your post was judged by those that saw it at all, is to compare views to upvotes. If you got 4 votes out of 4 views, you're batting 1000.

It's OK, I wasn't really that concerned, to be honest -
I was just using as an example. - I'm very new here, and realize it takes work and effort . (which was the point I was making about people being rewarded, for neither.)
I have some thoughts on that subject, but just letting them ferment at the moment ( and still trying to get a grip on the whole process of steemit)

We never get a grip, AFAIK lol

As for fermenting, that's the only way to get a potent brew! However, unless you reckon Everclear is what you want (great fuel, but makes for a short night out drinking) it might be better to release the Kraken when the motivation hits.

YMMV. It's all on you! lol

Thanks! I look forward to being schooled at your earliest convenience =)

patience is a much overlooked quality lol

@theleapingkoala thank you for sharing with us here because I think what you share is how many of us are feeling and you had the courage to share it! It is up to us to decide as a community how to best work together because the more we reward a great effort, the more we will all come out ahead. At the same time, investors expect to earn a return on investment. How do we balance out needing to reward authors, especially those working the most at the bottom with the lowest reward, with the need for investors to feel holding Steem Power is worth it? I will create a new post on this and include what you have shared here in the discussion!

@jerrybanfield Thank you very much for your prompt reply and for planning to share my opinion and even upvoting it instead of flagging it ;)
I love constructive discussion and I would love to read more interesting posts and discuss them.
I have been planning to make helping people my business but I am very new to all the social media platforms. Steemit is the first public platform I actually used to do blogging and interacting and I like it a lot.
As long as there are different people, there will always be abuse of systems/ideas no matter how good they are. That is inevitable. But it is up to us (people who want to make a positive difference) to do what we can.

I hope this doesnt sound like begging, but I invite you to visit and please check some of the posts (I haven't been writing much lately until I figure out how steemit work) but I have been trying to share any payout from my posts with other minnows. It would be great if you would upvote these posts from time to time to increase the pool of rewards I could share. Of course, if you feel like doing it.

Thanks again @jerrybanfield and @cryptoninja for upvoting my comment :)

Hi @theleapingkoala,

I also responded to you below, but you sound like a great candidate to join the Minnow Support Group and the PAL discord. Great group of over 5000 people who help with everything from post promotion to proofreading, and lots of chat and other programs.

They have a variety of services like the minnow-upvote bots that will help you bump up your posts a little bit, at least enough to get into the Hot category on more obscure topics. A lot of us delegate SP to the MSP bot to help with this process (I put all my new liquid rewards there, beyond what I need to maintain a vote slider).

I strongly recommend you check it out. Here's an outdated (can skip Streemian) checklist for joining.

http://minnowsupportproject.org/

Hi @lexiconical
I am honored that you think I am a great candidate to join the Minnow support group. Thank you very much for your trust and upvote.
I would love to join and make a good difference in Steemians' experience with steemit (especially minnows of course)

I will definitely look into it to join.
Many thanks again :D

We'd love to see you in the chat, which doesn't even require joining.

Hopefully this link works (You may need to download Discord):

https://discordapp.com/channels/319885228464406528/319885228464406528

Sure @theleapingkoala I upvoted a few of your recent posts. Would you submit your best new posts on the newest upvotable posts in the comments because that will help me feature them every two days and send more readers your way?

@jerrybanfield, Thank you very much for your support and the offer to submit my post in the upvotable.

Many Thanks indeed :D

I am sure you will agree @jerrybanfield, that effort alone does not imbue content with value. The content is valued by the subjective worth of the ideas and entertainment value, and hard work to produce and format it properly can greatly increase this value.

Upvoted, even if it may ease your frustration only partly. :)

Hahaha, Sorry for being grumpy :P

Thanks you very much @jaki01 and everyone else for your upvotes and comments.
Beside the fact that making money is awesome, being upvoted by you makes me feel happy because it means my voice has been heard by several important figures on steemit.

So yes, I feel less frustrated now ;)

Thank you all very much again :D
(I know my upvote is worth little, it is just to show my appreciation :D)

I seriously need your help! Please I want you to coach me .

This is an extremely interesting and valuable contribution, thank you.

"First the @steemit Inc account shouldn't be allowed to use this function."

This could be prevented with a special exception in the code witnesses run after a fork, correct? At first I thought we might need to take "someone's word" for it, but I'm hoping not.

While there is a special reason to preclude @steemit from so doing, in addition to the fact the the stake @steemit holds was mostly mined, I feel fairly strongly that the mined stakes - which are most of the Steem in existence today - should also be considered in light of the fact of how Steemit didn't even exist when the mining was mostly done.

There are wheels within wheels. While those of us on the edge of the wheel are largely unable to even perceive the turnings of the inner wheels, they impact us to unfathomable degree.

You make good points. Unfortunately, those who do not review the Bitcoin Talk history thread here probably know not of what you speak:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1548369.0

Me too. Thanks.

me three btw :p

"...The outcome will always result in a net vote of 0."

This is only true when only two people are involved, who always act against one another, which is a demonstrably false proposition.

"...If man does not have a right to counter balance another man in the political system, then the game is rigged."

And this is exactly the present case, where VP is an expression of how much wealth you have. My meager holdings are incapable of impacting the actions of those with greater wealth, and I have NO SAY potential to me from my downvotes or flags in disagreements with those, like @dan, that mined immense stakes of SP before Steemit even existed, or, like @snowflake, just bought larger stakes than I can.

I don't consider my, or your opinion, more valuable because you, or I, have more money, and our votes shouldn't either.

I reckon that weighting of VP should be based on the value of our opinions, or be equal in weight. Reputation, were it not gamable through self-votes, would be an excellent weighting mechanism for VP, as it represents the confidence of the community in one's opinions.

I enjoy seeing how this game plays out :) I'm against down voting--isn't it better to comment one's own opinion and then upvote yourself? XD

Jerry,

"In other words, it doesn't even make sense for me to even try and do anything about this, other than simply sharing it and making sure this is shown in the light."

This is a problem I've written about before. The only reasonably easy solution I see is implementing a separate downvoting power. The opportunity cost of flagging is otherwise just impossible to overcome, and the few who do it will be greatly punishing themselves, from a game-theory perspective.

"Extremely clever, you would have to essentially intentionally go to war on this one."

Well-put. It would require stalker-like obsession and would garner no reward. In fact, it would open one up to significant retaliation.

I think a big part of the idea of Steemit was to align economic incentives with community contributions. This is the baseline I think we want to work from to determine what abuse is as a community.

Perhaps mindhunter is simply looking at this like a game of Risk, but he's more serious than most of us. We're all just picking whatever country sounds fun or screwing around with Europe (which nobody ever controls completely for the bonus) - mindhunter's down there, quietly locking up Australia.

"I'm not saying this is right or wrong. "

I, too, am not eager to pass judgment for the reasons you highlighted above. Also, mindhunter has been nice to me and resteemed some of my posts. He replies to almost every comment. I happened to follow him very early because I did what you did - looked at steemwhales for active posters and followed them all and started reading/commenting.

Now, the tamim situations looks like abuse to me, but I'm not going to waste my voting power on flagging it. As it is, I'm already losing out to these authors because I am conforming to social norms, often at great effort. In fact, I've been flagged before for voting up my own comment for visibility (on my own article) with a link to part two of an article when everyone in the comments was asking for it (tax article that had $550 pending rewards at time).

If I was employing the systems these authors were using, I'd be making a ton more. That means I, and most of the rest of you on this platform, are losing out big-time by following the social norms. We either need to change, abandon, or enforce these social norms.

I'm not sure what the best option is.

All judgment aside, you've just revealed the fact two biggest earners on the platform right now are not even close to the two hardest workers on that platform.

It looks to me like you and @papa-pepper should be the top two earners on Steemit.

Edit: Link to my (past payout) flagging post (that, ironically, was my only post to get flagged) here, if anyone wants it.

Jason that would be very nice to have a free downvoting flag to use because of the exact point you made.
As things are, we are fortunate that there are several whales who give so much in service that they are willing to downvote often hundreds of dollars instead of giving it to themselves. What I like about Steem is that it simply makes the world more transparent because we often are aware that the same inconsistencies exist in the world around us but it is easy to ignore with the cloaks of secrecy. Thank you for your kind feedback including me with @papa-pepper as those that work to contribute each day.

Happy to do it, Jerry. It's clear to anyone who takes a little time to look at you that you work very hard. You're too well known to make everyone happy all of the time, but I'm convinced of your honesty and intentions and will continue to defend you on those points when it comes up.

Unfortunately, since you are willing to be pretty honest about your thoughts, you end up taking some heat. Ironically, probably from people who have had those exact thoughts, but like to virtue-signal to the greater group that they have not.

For example, we all noticed that you could just self-vote yourself a bunch of money here each day, and most of us probably considered that as a "pro" for investing in Steem, if not as a main strategy at least as a "worst-case scenario". However, I still see people attack you for your early post on self-upvoting, despite you were just laying out the facts, as-is.

Kill the messenger, and all that.

Thank you Jason for your support today!

To earn that much you need to invest a lot of money. What's wrong with that if someone buy lot of STEEM to vote for himself? I'm leaving Steemit because people here do not understand that. Everyone thinks the price will rise only from themselves and without investors.

Which should be the reason for investing. To give you the money?

Well, you can invest in any coin as a bet on the price going up. Steem just happens to allow yourself to "mint" a bunch of new coins by upvoting yourself. If Steem becomes known as the coin you just buy to upvote yourself, then I think most of the reason for it existing will be gone, and we will all lose.

The community needs to take a hard line on this one way or the other, because half-measures only hurt the rule-abiding.

I am pretty sure that the financial manipulation factor has tainted Steem with the 'scamcoin' tag, from the research I have done. Particularly the early mined stakes in Steem, which remain today the largest stakes on the chain, since mining is no longer possible, and certain ploys were undertaken to ensure that those stakes were overwhelmingly large (including relaunching the chain when others mined competitive stakes).

99.9% of people will never be able to just buy enough stake to compete, and those that can are unlikely to be interested in doing so to promote uncensored social discourse, but rather focused on doing so to control the platform in a Sybil attack.

I believe you have seen and commented on my earlier posts on how to fix this problem (going from memory here, rather than taking the time to search for the actual data) and have found my proposal insuperable.

The code permits these rewards mining schemes @jerrybanfield has pointed out (and that I have discussed with @snowflake, and others regarding a flagging endeavor undertaken by @transisto, IIRC. In that conversation @snowflake admitted that @mindhunter was buying his upvotes, acting as a sort of one-man @randowhale, just for @mindhunter. Since the value of the upvotes does not come out of @snowflakes pocket, and selling them was more cryptic than self-votes, which draw flags, it's a profitable scheme for all concerned), and permitting this makes those early mined stakes possessed by those that control the witnesses presently worth $millions when a Sybil attack is undertaken.

Because of this I reckon the rest of us, who have no mined Steem, are powerless to affect the outcome. HF20, intended to dramatically increase the number of accounts on Steemit, will cause an upsurge in both the price of Steem, and the value of the platform to those with nominal wealth to mount a successful attack.

I expect we will see very soon after HF20 is implemented whether Steemit is a pump and dump scheme or not.

$Mx are at stake in those holdings that potentiate a Sybil attack, and for this reason I am confident in how they will proceed.

Remember that controlling the witnesses potentiates ending the 13 week power down (even to limit that exception to certain accounts), and the simplest agreement between the stakes currently in control of the witnesses (and @alexvan's comment points out just how easy it can be to influence the witnesses with cash) can enable them to simply take their buckets of cash and leave the platform to Zuckerberg, or whoever wants it, and has the money to buy it.

Edit: according to the white paper, the weighting of VP by SP was intended to allow whales to curate with greater control of the discourse on the platform, not to provide some kind of dividend to whales for their investment.

However, folks immediately understood that these rewards pool mines were possible, and this has caused many including the top witnesses with whom I have conversed, to become dedicated to the rewards mining, rather than curation, inherent in the VP weighting scheme.

While the white paper pays lip service to discouraging financial manipulation, one only has to look at politics to see that words can often hide intentions exactly the opposite of the meaning of the words.

This seems to be the case with Steemit and VP.

Thank you for this excellent comment. You have clearly done your research. I was remiss not to be following you, which I have corrected.

Your blog is very good and deserves more attention. I will try to point my Steemit friends and their "racks on racks" to this comment and your blog.

I attempted to locate your proposed solution that you mentioned I found impossible to implement. I am open to changing my mind in light of new information. Could you link me to it, or summarize it?

Thanks!

Well, I just took the time to reread it here. You'll undoubtedly prefer to have a summary =p

I have followed you for a while, impressed with your reasoning, and apparent dedication to the platform. I have commented widely along these lines, and expect my recollection may be based on comments to which you replied, rather than my posts, or that I am completely losing my memory, and just plain wrong.

Anyway, to summarize (I'll try =p):

The various botnets, vote-buying schemes, circle jerks, and etc., are all potentiated by the fact that VP is weighted by SP held by the account. This is also why delegation is even a thing.

Were VP equal, or weighted by reputation (and reputation no longer gamable by self votes being able to increase it) as I prefer, then none of these scams would be profitable - except those involving sock-puppets and botnets. Furthermore, the downvote would no longer be usable by a whale to silence critics, but would need to be applied by at least several folks to have substantial effect.

While various folks have strenuously argued that equally weighting VP would end investment in Steem because it would end their ability to profit from their holdings, I point out that BTC has no such 'dividend' and no end of hodlers. Also (and I am assuming you know this already) the white paper advocates the VP weighting in order that investors be able to curate with more influence on the platform, not that curation rewards act as a sort of dividend.

Further the white paper strongly disavows such financial manipulations as @jerrybanfield has pointed out here, and @transisto brought to my attention earlier. By pointing out that failure to be known as a fair platform would cause Steemit to either lose extant accounts, or fail to grow, such unfairness is an existential threat to Steemit.

Given the powerful use case that social media platforms are, Steem, which derives it's value from the accounts on Steemit receiving rewards in Steem (and associated currencies) has a humongous potential for growth, and capital appreciation, even if it were to only reach 1% of the value of BTC. Frankly, given Steem's vastly improved transactional capacity, complete lack of transaction fees, and the Steemit platform, I expect Steem (can it solve the distribution inequities and scams) will overtake BTC.

However, that being said, I am aware presently of at least two forks of Steemit ongoing at present, one of which, Calibrae, I have tried to influence in exactly this way. @l0k1, the party undertaking that fork, has incorporated reputation as a modifying weight on VP, and made several other changes that I find preferable as well.

He's a smart guy, much smarter than I, and I hope that Calibrae succeeds, as I don't think Steemit is going to solve these problems. As another comment pointed out, the top two authors on Steemit aren't the top two authors because of the excellent writing, but because they are gaming the system, over a year after it went Beta.

There may be other, good, reasons to not make VP equal, or weight it by reputation, but I haven't read them, or at least not so I understood them to be nominal. While changing the weighting scheme does not solve botnets, or sock-puppets, it dramatically reduces the number of vectors for attack, and makes them more expensive. Regardless, we need to solve those problems anyway, so changing VP weighting does not make those problems worse.

@liberosist also proposed a VP decay curve which I strongly support, as having but 10 votes/day is, frankly, insulting. His proposal goes something like this: for the first ~100 votes, VP is essentially the same, but after that, it rapidly drops off to ZERO. Going to zero is important because bots can vote 1000s of times a day, and still deliver SOME rewards - which no mere human can. This would limit a given bot to the amount of votes that a human can actually cast, or closer to it. Some folks can probably cast more votes than the ~130 or so I was a day, until I read the white paper and discovered my VP would never recharge until I stopped voting.

So, taken together I reckon weighting VP by reputation, remodeling the VP decay curve, and working on other means of preventing botnets and sock-puppets, Steemit would become a far more profitable platform for investors, by strongly encouraging capital gains, and a far better social media platform dramatically less cluttered with pandering to whales, or F4F, or such spam.

I strongly believe that we are approaching a post market economy, and I have also posted how Steemit may be THE essential vector for that transformation. But, you din't ask for that to be inflicted on you here =p

Thanks for asking, and any substantive criticism you might offer would be greatly appreciated by me, as only by grinding away the parts out of place can the edge be made keen.

Thank you for an excellent and thorough comment. I think weighting VP by reputation could be very effective, but I would have to look at how easy it is to raise a sock-puppet's reputation via a high-rep whale account.

I think a lot about how to solve these problems, but I don't have a workable solution yet. Craig-grant the scammer just dropped into another thread I'm in, wrote two 8 word posts bragging about his new condo with no punctuation, and then voted himself $19 on each.

If this continues go on much longer, many of us will either leave of be forced to do the exact same tactics. Humans will not sit here and donate some of their stake everyday while shitheads like Craig-Grant literally live off of scamming people out of money every day while self-voting to community inaction. If we do, that means everyday this human garbage gets more power on this platform and we have less.

I find loki/elfspice extremely toxic, as do many others who attempt to converse with him directly via comments. I attempted to engage him and some of his cronies in earnest discussion, and when he demonstrated a complete inability to support his arguments with logic, he simply flew off the handle and labelled me a troll while seemingly-oblivious-to-the-irony began trolling my comments and blog. He is the only person to ever flag my post, and it was a post trying to make suggestions to help with flagging sock-puppets and botnets wherein I proposed the addition of a separate flagging power. He then attacked me for several days, rabidly sputtering in a way that was so disconnected from logical discourse that it honestly seemed like one of my mentally ill patients. He then made a big post talking about how his alcohol withdrawal from being a long-time alcoholic was making him irritable and he was flying off the handle at people (implying me without explicitly saying so), ranting at them wildly and had no patience. When I cited his own words to explain his attack on me in a comment I expressed sympathy and concern for his struggles in, he flipped out , deleted his posts like a crybaby, and then said he was quitting the platform like 3 times.

He is highly emotional, prone to bouts of anger, intermittently irrational and occasionally lucid. Basically, a textbook substance abuser. Almost every-time I see him in the comments somewhere outside his own blog or those of his sycophants, he is being toxic and horrible. He was instrumental in pushing the only flagging bot I know of, an idea I absolutely loathe.

I hope he gets the help he needs, because buried under an acerbic personality, there are some potentially good ideas and skills in there somewhere.

However, at the moment, I would not touch any project he is headlining with a 10 foot pole, and I humbly suggest you are far too good to do so either. If a person or company I was doing business with had hired to him a lead dev position, I would immediately sever that connection.

He's the absolute worst ambassador you could ever have for a social media platform.

Further, is own inability to stick to his own rules and ideas is self-evident. He started Calibrae claiming he would port all users stake over, but only those he "manually investigated and concluded were legit". He wanted to make himself the emperor of his own little kingdom, where he is the ultimate arbiter of who is worthy to enter (and obviously, nobody that doesn't agree with him will be tolerated).

Then, days later, he started going back on his claims to port SP over, even beyond his own arbitrary vetting process. I no longer bothered to follow after that, since he was literally changing the whole design hour to hour. He started to want to arbitrarily decide "who was a pre-miner" and who "didn't deserve the stake they bought". Plus, I knew he'd never approve my account anyway.

I predict loki/elfspice is far more likely to come here and rant at me in response to this, but if he can show a modicum of civility and apologize for being such a nasty, toxic person (terms used by other steemians in reply to his comments before I ever did), I would be willing to look at his project with a careful eye.

Which, admittedly, does have a cool hummingbird logo and a name I think is solid.

[ Were VP equal, or weighted by reputation (and reputation no longer gamable by self votes being able to increase it) as I prefer, then none of these scams would be profitable - except those involving sock-puppets and botnets. ]

As far as I understand it, this is absolutely the flaw in the system. The concept of Quality > Quantity posts is an appreciable design, but it fails in practice because it has been substituted by SP weight. There is absolutely no reason to believe that SP weight should have anything what so ever to do with Quality.

i don't get all this but i can tell its an important topic

Your reply is the kind that would be great to see get the big bucks. So much more quality than a"me too."
As someone trying to figure out who's worth following in the community, I appreciate your sharing of positive experiences. It'll be interesting to see how/if either's behavior changes now that a spotlight has been shown on what they are up to & what level of integrity they'll display.

Thank you for the kind words?

Whoaaaaaa, ME TOO!
upvotes please LOL 😂

Your learning... me too lol :).

that's so crazy! me too!

strange... why did none of us earn 100$????

Too Me, or not Too Me, that is the question!

I contributed my $0.23 lol

mee not too :p

5th times the charm

lol

Don't be jealous Jerry, just start doing the same thing... and you'll be #1 in no time at all mate! 🐳

Hello @luisneira, can you help me with answering my question.
Will I get flagged NSFW for this picture from one of my photo shoots if I use it in my intro post?
Adam&Eve shoot.jpg

borderline. id assume yes

thanks

I'd assume no, as there are no sexual organs on display.

@mindhunter I want you to upvote my comment :P
Oh I forgot.
Me too :D

Interestingly @mindhunter's 100% vote is worth a meagre $0.19, worse still he's been drained to 17.86% voting power.
Bottom line, the guy is a hit and run farmer trying to harvest and clear out of steemit as quickly as possible

Can he be stopped, or is the system still able to be game by him so easily?

What would the developers have to change in order to stop behavior like this?

I have been saying, and still believe that they should take away the ability to self-vote, but would that actually ever happen is a different story all together.

That is a totally pointless and harmful fix. However, I realize you propose it with good intentions. Let me elaborate.

Self-voting cannot be stopped. Not unless you remove delegation and monitor every account for IP addresses, banning multi-accounters and sock-puppeteers.

It's actually better to leave it in, because at least you can track it. If you've been following this thread, you may have noticed this has nothing to do with self-voting. Self-voting is a witch hunt newbies to the platform throw in on (often out of frustration with rewards or jealousy) without even considering the game-theory ramifications (that it cannot be stopped because of vote-trading, multi-accounts, sock puppets, delegation, etc and that it would greatly reduce the utility, and therefore price, of Steem).

Consider if there were two versions of Steem, one that allowed you to vote on yourself to promote posts, and one that didn't. We all know which one would be worth significantly more to the market.

The solution must be carrot based, not stick.

PS - This is not an attack on you, thank you for your comment.

What if everyone on Steemit just wrote, and up-voted their own content all day... could that system survive long-term?

Probably not. We aren't in ideological disagreement. But because of delegation, vote trading and sock-puppets, you can't stop it. You would just help the best of the abuse even better since they'd be savvy enough to do it in private slacks, etc.

You have to make it more rewarding to do the desired behavior, rather than attempt to punish or prevent everyone else from the undesired behavior.

The Steem whitepaper is very clear about this, noting you cannot prevent all abuse and the crabs-in-a-bucket analogy.

Because of sock-puppets, botnets, and delegation, even weighting VP differently wouldn't eliminate the ability to mine the rewards pool.

However, all those techniques are more difficult than the present scheme, and entail more expense.

The various botnet, and sock-puppet schemes are penetrable, as @sherlockholmes is demonstrating daily.

Eventually, the decision as to weighting may be not in the control of Steemit, even stinc, at all, but up to the SEC.

Or whoever buys out the mined stakes and takes over the witnesses.

Well, in my opinion, people should just blog on Steemit just to blog.

It's a great place to do so, plus you may make a penny here or there... it's still better than any other place to blog for free that's for sure!

Interesting data, thanks. I'm not sure it provides a conclusion, however.

Love the last line "hit and run farmer..."

Sure, but you have to produce good work as well. Jerry gets paid because he produces good work.

Me too! Not easy for me to follow... as.. I am new to Steemit. I just started using it. I need to learn a lot from you. I am following your account, can you please follow me as weel?

Cheers...

too true!!!

The irony is that I started upvoting mindhunter because of this video https://steemit.com/hf20/@jerrybanfield/we-double-our-steem-power-upvoting-ourselves-every-181-days from @jerrybanfield.

I didn't have time to post and upvote myself so I made a deal with @mindhunter. He was effectively buying votes from me like the dozens of other vote buying schemes on steemit.

I started upvoting mindhunter's posts and had to upvote his comments when @newsflash started to notice and flag.

There was no ill intention from voting at the last minute, it was purely to make the most out of my vote.

This has been discussed in lenght the last few days and people can read my posts to see my stance on it.

If a minnow was doing this there would have been no flag and no one would be bragging about it, so this means large stake holder are discriminated, they can not use their steem power freely which is stupid considering they are the ones feeding the whole thing.
Ultimately the question we need to ask ourselves is : Do we want to prevent investors from making money? and is there a good and a bad way to make it?

My response is that everyone supports the system by default just by owning a share in it and so they should be able to use it as they wish. You have to stay powered up in order to profit from the system thus profiteers contribute to increase the price of steem.

I have stopped upvoting @mindhunter a few days ago because @newsflash was flagging all his posts. I realize there may be other better ways of supporting the community, however I didn't have time to scout for content and voting for @mindhunter was the easy hassle free way of doing it.

@jerrybanfield I think you are an asset to the community, what you have done for steem so far is amazing which is why you are both on my author and witness voting list. You definetely deserve the top spot.

Ultimately the question we need to ask ourselves is : Do we want to prevent investors from making money? and is there a good and a bad way to make it?

I don't judge this behavior morally - maybe everybody has the right to post 10 minimalistic posts per day and then just upvote them (like @sandrino does) or also his comments.
The question is however what would happen to the Steemit community if everybody starts doing that, because it's the most simple and effective way to earn steem. Will we still see elaborated long articles and communication between the platform users? And in case not, what would that mean for the growth of the community and the Steem price? I fear the consequences would be everything but positive.

If everyone did that, you'd see a race to the bottom in quality. A trend like that wouldn't be so hot for Steemit's reputation. But it is a beta product and it's going to take time to work it out.

Since that kind of activity seems beyond my sphere of control, I'm just going to focus on the content.

I'm afraid I agree.

Also, I applaud you for focusing on the positive (ie. where you can make a difference, authoring).

I hate to make the "snowball effect" argument, but it does seem that Steemit would devolve into a cesspool of circle-jerking that was not much better than a MLM scheme if we were all to maximally exploit the system as "allowed" by the code.

Curation of content is not very incentivised and most people do not spend time on things with low short term gains. @mindhunter was not doing anything different than what many other people are doing. Mindhunter just did it on a larger more detectable scale. Whats kind of even more ironic is the fact that even @jerrybanfield is profiting from this because he is writing about it with a profitable post. :)

I think we need substantially higher curation rewards. We should make self-voting or vote-trading the LESS efficient way of maximizing Steem gain.

Even super-saiyan human curators like @ats-david may have trouble keeping up with curation rewards relative to straight-self voting, if the rewards I have seen from curation are any example.

I'd love to hear his thoughts on how we could make curation more rewarding.

Lmao right! At the end of the day everyone is here to make money :-)

Lol, yeah, your existence is probably contrary proof to the assertion you responded to.

While I am very grateful the rewards have been so great from using Steem, my main hope is to collaborate with all of us to help heal our world here and help empower each of us to have a good life together. The existing companies drain employees of life while draining the entire planet of creative energy into a funnel which then allows advertisers to maintain control over the majority of the planet. I hope with Steem we have a chance to break this cycle and empower every individual to earn enough money to pay for basic necessities by sharing here.

Yeah, no.

I am not here simply to gain money, but rather to use a platform where financial incentives strongly discourage trolls, and the blockchain precludes removal of posts entirely.

While there is nothing wrong with money itself, and I don't hate it, capitalism is dependent on value being delivered in order to gain capital, and so many tricks are used to simulate value that real capitalism just seems to not even be possible.

Every crypto has the potential to deliver capital gains to the investors, and each seems to have a different use case. Steemit is the use case that seems to me to deliver the greatest capital appreciation potential to investors.

While I don't see any problem with authors that produce content focused purely on wealth accumulation being considered valuable, and upvoted accordingly (I hope this indicates that I am not jelly, as I do not post such content, and am not focused on wealth accumulation), it is a fact that gaming the rewards pool drains it of rewards that would inure to authors and curators that deliver such valuable content.

That decreases the rewards available to promote the creation of such valuable content, and strongly incentivizes folks to simply game the system, as you found to be true.

I reckon were the system such that content creation and curation were strongly incentivized over gaming the system, you would have no compunction about using those means of improving your profitability.

Since that would increase the value of the platform, and thus increase the value of Steem, you would see significant capital gains as a reward for your investment in Steem, which I also do not denigrate. Indeed, I strongly support the capital gains mechanism, as it is a true capitalism - as long as it isn't the result of less fair businesses, such as the defense industry promoting war and the profiting from selling weapons to nations through capital gains.

At the end of the day, you seem to be focused on making money, and that's ok by me, as long as the means you use to do so don't harm others. I see certain games and financial manipulation as strong negative impactors on the potential of the platform to grow, and to deliver on it's potential to create uncensored content and overcome the controls on capital used to devalue humanity, and concentrate wealth to the point where 85 people have more than 3.5 billion.

There is a point beyond which wealth accumulation is untenable, and I reckon the world has passed it. YMMV. Perhaps you simply want to be the 86th. I am not stating that you do want that, but that, if you are only focused on wealth with such a goal, I consider that evil.

People are worth more than money, and money is merely a veil behind which real wealth is concealed.

Actually, I'm here because the blockchain means my posts / profile can't be erased from the internet by some totalitarian freak who hates free speech. The money is a nice side benefit though, don't get me wrong.

hahaha you are right!!!

@azfix you're right the combined power of all the systems we are not noticing is probably more than the top 10 authors combined from bot networks voting up comments $1 or $5 hundreds of times a day to authors posting on hot topics like this and then getting a lot of upvotes as has happened so far here on this post. None of us can totally separate our selfish motives from our unselfish ones :)

The problem is that short term selfishness often doesn't lead to long term success. If finally everybody came to the conclusion that it would be much more easy to upvote ones own comments or articles only, the quality of articles would decrease rapidly, new users would be completely frustrated (even more than already now) and the steem price would decrease as well. As long as only few accounts are doing that it may work very well for them - if all are doing it that's the END of Steemit.

It's a bit like the classic prisoner's dilemma.

"The prisoner's dilemma is a standard example of a game analyzed in game theory that shows why two completely "rational" individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

I agree with you there on the curation vs. posting decision. I love to write, so I tend to write more than curate. But we need curators.

I read some time ago that the best way to allocate time for steemit is to post 2 or 3 times a week and spend an hour or two per day just curating and commenting. I'm beginning to get the sense that is what needs to be done.

You are on track and have discovered the key to getting more exposure with good comments that show you have read the content. Manual curation is important no matter how big we all get on steemit. I am not opposed to bot voting but it needs to be with reliable consistent content creators and checked for quality now and then.

Good comments are critical to gaining followers.

Unfortunately, I don't think curation is rewarded nearly as much as it should be, game-theoretically.

Are you really asking this question ? "is there a good and a bad way to make money?"

@snowflake thank you very much for replying here along with upvoting the post and voting for me as a witness! I love that you started the upvotes after the most I made :)

You have made a powerful point that I agree with in that investors need good motivation to hold Steem Power and be active here. It will not matter what authors contribute if too many investors pull out and dump Steem because of an inability to earn a good return. I know as an investor with my life savings here I feel I have a right to get a return also. Curation currently does pay but not nearly as well as posts or upvoting ourselves.

The question is how do we both ensure authors and investors both have a way to share in the rewards that most of us are happy with? Currently it is not simple or easy for either. Authors struggle to get started while authors at the top are consistently rewarded. Investors not posting or wanting to spend hours reading articles each day to decide where to give the very powerful upvotes have few options to get a good return in both time and money while investors setting up systems to guarantee a return often are earning a lot from auto upvoting posts accepted by curation guilds to upvoting authors that consistently earn a lot from posts to accepting a portion of the upvote back as a thank you.

How do we make it easier for investors and authors to help each other in a way that readers enjoy the most?

I appreciate your reply here especially because writing this post with you as both a top witness upvoter and the upvoter featured in the comment felt like walking a tightrope. I am very relieved to read your reply and am grateful for your kind feedback here!

The question is how do we both ensure authors and investors both have a way to share in the rewards that most of us are happy with?

I think we should go back to a 50/50 model. Currently it is 75% authors 25% curators but used to be 50/50 which was better imo.
According to this rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) only 1% of users actively create content, so why should the 1% authors receive more than the 99% lurkers?
Someone was saying recently that there is too many authors compared to readers on steemit. I believe a 50/50 could rebalance this ratio a bit. It's important that we have engaged users that actually read content..

"so why should the 1% authors receive more than the 99% lurkers?"

Well, the obvious answer is 1 author provides more value than 99 lurkers. Or 999 lurkers. Or 9 million lurkers. Lurkers are useless.

Curators are not lurkers, they are hard workers who can't be differentiated from lurkers by 99.9% of us other than by stalking the steemd page and looking for votes.

I'm defining lurker as non-author who doesn't vote.

I fully agree that curation should be more rewarding, but perhaps something between 25% and 50% would help. Maybe a small portion of the pool each day could be set aside as a boost to curation payouts. Perhaps the formula itself needs changing.

This jerrybanfield post is the first time I'm seeing your comments. Great curation efforts!

I'll be following you now.

Thank you for your support!

I would tend to agree with that.

I am also agree with the 50/50 but then you also should re-think the VP curve ... The people should have the possibilitty to vote more often ... In general people vote less now and they tend to go to authors who always get good rewards... I know everybody is not here for the money but the majority part are...

With the equality update it does seem like an adjustment to increase curation would be helpful!

This seems to be a fuss about nothing. @mindhunter has put massive effort into building his account, but hasn't made that much money compared with some. I think he deserved some good rewards. I can't see that he is going to make $20k

I think you're misunderstanding the situation.

"I can't see that he is going to make $20k"

What you "can see" is irrelevant. This is past-tense. Already happened/happening.

"hasn't made that much money compared with some."

Demonstrably false. He's the highest earner on the platform last month.

You handled this very well and your response is quite valuable.

I don't actually have a problem with @mindhunter or especially you in this matter. I feel that not only is it the right and responsibility of anyone with investment to use it the way they want but also feel that we need to implement reliable ways for investors to easily profit here on Steemit.

The key to the price of $teem going up is new investors, and big ones are the ones who really make it jump up.
Yet big investors are only going to come here if they can reliably and quickly/easily profit on their investment. If it takes time its not worth it because most people with a lot of money are already very busy making money....

Great to see you a part of this discussion and contributing your intelligent and reasonable perspective.
This is an important topic. I can see how anyone who is not making good rewards would be upset by something like this but they wouldn't make ANYTHING at all if it were not for the big investors.....

SO rather than try and make the investors figure out how to game the system how about just provide easy and clear ways for them to profit on their investment simply and quickly.
I very much enjoyed reading this post and seeing your comment made it even better.

SteemON!

Your position completely ignores capital gains. Capital gains is the ONLY mechanism that gets folks to invest in BTC, for example.

Consider this: @jerrybanfield made a post not so long ago that showed that mathematically he would be able to double his stake in 180 days by only self-voting. That's about 150% gains per year.

However, if Steem is at $1, and then goes to $20, then that is a 2000% gain, and that can happen in less time than a year.

By allowing financial manipulation of the rewards pool to provide 'dividends' for investors - and the largest holdings of Steem, indeed most of the Steem in existence, are the result of insider information and mining before the Steemit platform even existed - then this is essentially the same as fractional reserve banking creating wealth out of thin air - but only for the banks that are permitted to do so.

Merely working hard, and saving up enough money to invest cannot result in gains competitive with those banksters, nor the early miners, so those parties will always gain more in such systems.

Steemit authors producing valuable content is a far more valuable creator of appreciation in the price of Steem, as the recent skyrocket of Steem price at the end of May showed, as that was the result not of major investors buying Steem, but of many new accounts being created on Steemit.

The bottom line is that financial mechanisms that appear to be swindles are suppressing the growth of Steemit, and repressing appreciation in the price of Steem, and that is a far more profitable mechanism to reward investors than self-votes. The widespread perception that Steemit is being gamed by folks like @mindhunter and @tamim is a huge problem for not only the author community, but for investors.

I don't know if your responding to me, but I don't disagree with what you said.

I was replying to you, as you seemed to be of the opinion that the accounts referenced were just doing what was financially rewarding, and that was ok.

I hoped to convince you otherwise.

A truth about investing is that the greater the potential reward, the riskier the investment. This is certainly true with cryptos like Steem. It is why Steem could reward investors that bought at $1 with a 400,000% return if it goes to the price BTC was recently at.

But, if Steemit continues to permit mining the rewards pool with the scams the two highest paid authors on Steemit are running, well, the price of Steem will never rise to that level. Only showing that the use case for Steem, the Steemit platform, can grow and continue to drive adoption of Steem by paying account holders in Steem, can those gains become reality.

No one should be more outraged and against such scams than those that have plunked down hard cash for Steem.

Yes, but any crypto currency you can invest in has the potential to go up at base value. I mean bitcoin doesn't even have a platform, product or anything its its value is thousands of times what was invested.

To me the attractive part of investing in steemit is that that investment can be USED but currently its not really that easy for an investor to get immediate returns. If there was then people wouldn't NEED to GAME the system like is happening.

We need to accept that fact that investors want to make money and build that in for them. Also I don't think there is any crypto that didn't have insiders getting the biggest stake on the early. Thats just the benefit of being on the inside. Sucks for others but good for them. Its just the way it is.

I couldn't agree more about BTC.

"To me the attractive part of investing in steemit is that that investment can be USED but currently its not really that easy for an investor to get immediate returns. If there was then people wouldn't NEED to GAME the system like is happening."

Investing in different vehicles provides various mechanisms potentiating returns. Some stocks offer dividends, some bonds offer tax benefits, etc... According to the white paper, Steemit was intended to offer investors a 'dividend' by potentiating their ability to curate content with greater impact, due to their larger holdings of SP. In order to provide a financial incentive to curate, the curation reward was included.

This is the mechanism stated in the white paper to have been envisioned to attract investors to this particular investment, Steem. It is a unique benefit from investing in this particular vehicle, and, indeed, offers short term financial rewards, although those rewards necessitate the work of curation in order to achieve them.

However, by taking advantage of bugs, or loopholes in the code, as we see that @mindhunter and @tamim have done, some investors are using their stakes in ways not intended by the developers of Steemit, and this has distorted the rewards all Steemers receive from the rewards pool. In the white paper, the distribution of rewards was intended to be that ~90% of rewards would inure to ~30% of accounts, but what has happened is that ~99% of rewards has gone to ~1% of accounts - orders of magnitude different than the developers claimed to have intended.

Innumerable mitigation attempts and work arounds have arisen as Steemers have confronted this situation and attempted to improve the distribution of rewards, from @randowhale and @minnowsupport, to @sherlockholmes and @jerrybanfield's investigations and reports. HF19 was intended, ostensibly, to improve the situation, as well.

Nonetheless, the distribution of rewards has not, to my knowledge, come very close to the original intent of the developers, and remains highly concentrated in the accounts of those with more SP. There is a great deal of vituperation and vilification on all sides of the argument, and none of that pejorative emotion is useful in solving the challenge, which continues to impact all the accounts on the platform, and the price of Steem.

Despite repeated calls to fix the code, that is being used to distort the rewards distribution clearly stated to be intended in the white paper, such exploits continue to be available to those comfortable with the ethical challenges of taking advantage of them. The fact that the two highest paid authors on Steemit are clearly using those exploits indicates the degree of the distortion of rewards, and the lack of effective action to fix the problem.

The white paper states that the perception of financial manipulation of the rewards mechanism presented a threat to Steemit, and this has been demonstrated time and time again, as users abandon Steemit due to that very reason. I also consider it to be a major factor preventing the price of Steem from appreciating.

This is costing investors huge amounts of money, in unrealized capital gains, as well as permeating Steemit with pandering to whales as users seek to attain rewards from the only remaining source of them, whales. It takes ~10000 $.01 votes to equal one whale $100 vote.

For these reasons, either Steemit will succeed by transcending this challenge and distributing rewards more fairly, as the developers claim to have intended, or it will not. No one has more at stake in the outcome than investors, except perhaps those insiders that mined the majority of Steem in existence, and who profit most from these exploits, as demonstrated by this chart:

authorrewardchart.png

Steemit code is open source, and forks of Steemit are being undertaken now. I know of at least two presently being developed. One way to ascertain if those accounts on Steemit able to resolve these problems intend to do so, or plan to milk the rewards pool maximally, and then move on to another investment vehicle, is to observe whether they are powering down and extracting their funds, as it takes 13 weeks to do so presently.

It is also possible that some of those folks might also cryptically sell their SP (by selling their accounts) to an actor that sought to control the platform, and this requires only SP to do, as witnesses control the code, and witness votes are weighted by SP. If the powerdown period changes substantially, or if code potentiating certain accounts to powerdown more quickly, or if the composition of the witnesses changes suddenly, then we can be certain that such a Sybil attack has already been successful at taking over the platform.

All it takes to take over Steemit is money. It is the least Sybil attack resistant blockchain platform I am aware of. A nifty feature of that potential Sybil attack vector built into the weighting of VP by SP is that those with the SP presently will have to be bought out for the attack to be undertaken, making them millionaires, and paying them in a currency that is not Steem, making them immune to any fluctuations in the price that result.

For all these reasons, I do not expect Steemit to fix these problems, as, for those with substantial holdings of SP, either from mining, or investment, these problems are features, and income opportunities.

Minnows are being voted down every day for misuse of the vote buying programs. These posts should also be flagged for disagreement on rewards.

@whatsup The 'disagreement on rewards' thing comes from the false idea of scarcity. People wouldn't care what others were earning if there was unlimited money to go around. The good news is that there is unlimited money, since the price of steem can increase indefinetely. Unfortunately the majority of users fail to grasp this concept.

You are so wrong, The price of Steem can go up infinitely high but not if more people do what you're doing. Not only are you sucking the LIMITED supply of new Steem from the pool reward, you are making the value of Steem go down because you do not promote good content.

I think there is a worse problem here which is censorship through flag abuse, because I believe in free speech. Why did you flag Roger Ver?

I noticed that transisto and his accounts promote core, other than that he seems like a nice guy

He can support core without abusing flags and engaging in censorship driving good people who love their mothers away from this platform. I'm kind of a free speech kind of man.....

Hi! Please let me know which article or comment. I believe everyone has right to free speech

Lol, I still don't get what you did, flag, vote and withdrawn, but I can't see what on steemd. Can you please say what was the order? Thank you in advance for the effort

I personally really don't care what you or mindhunter do with your stake.
Don't kid yourself that you are creating infinite resources here.
I bet the price of your votes would go down a bit if they were flagged.
If someone does care, they should just flag it and move on, we don't need all this "press"

Don't kid yourself that you are creating infinite resources here.

How do you expect steem to pay the millions more users in the future?

I bet the price of your votes would go down a bit if they were flagged.

Didn't get any of that, maybe too obvious?

If someone does care, they should just flag it and move on.

There are deeper implications that comes with the flag. I wrote a post about it recently https://steemit.com/moderation/@snowflake/the-last-missing-piece-of-the-steem-puzzle

I have to at least partially disagree that the idea of scarcity is false.

It's a fact of human life. There is only so much Steem. The more that is inflated to weak hands and sold, the less it's all worth.

The present amount of Steem is not unlimited, and rewards are based on extant supplies, not future theoretical supplies. There is a limited pool of rewards at the time of any payout, and those payouts are proportional to the weight of the votes applicable to them.

Thus, when @mindhunter and I are both being payedout at the same time, the amount of rewards I receive are less the more rewards he is payed. I am not jelly, and do not write in order to receive rewards, but many, many do, and since @mindhunter's rewards aren't based on curation, but on buying votes, this practice directly diminishes the rewards payed to others.

It isn't a false idea of scarcity that is fooling people. It is false to contend that, because Steem can continually be inflated, our current rewards aren't impacted by scams and schemes that draw from the rewards pool.

It is frustating to see minnows comes up with a 4hours of post and not hitting a 1/100 worth of that self voting post of a whales. To have work hard is the only choice of minnows and to work smart if the smarter choice of whales.

Yep, but unfortunately, it's still Reward = Quality * Reach.

It's not Reward = Quality.

Steemit, like Life, is a popularity contest

got linked to this post...most important one ive seen yet.

convinced me to set you as proxy and resteem. gave a big vote too jerrybanfield. good work.

@nikez452 thank you very much for resteeming this and trusting me with your witness votes by setting me as your proxy! What advice do you have for me going forward here on Steem?

i think you are already doing it. you were very careful to write this post without making anyone too mad and its a tough topic. you work a lot and made it to #3 so far.

as long as you keep showing you want whats best for steemit your popularity can only increase. it is difficult to find any problems with your recent posts and actions.

keep it up.

@nikez452 thank you very much for your reply here because I am probably my harshest critic and it helps to see how the contributions I make look from your point of view!

Interesting and very informative post. Thanks for sharing your findings.

Jerry, I daresay you've stumbled upon a can of worms that was only recently just opened. I noticed about a week ago that Mindhunter started getting flagged by a group of curators. transisto at least, and I think Bernie too. Scroll back in Mindhunter's feed and he posted about it, and you can check the comments of those posts for further info.

I will comment more thoroughly (time-permitting) once I have a chance to finish the other half of your article.

Thank you for this detective work, and your attitude when approaching it from the start to try to learn is top-notch.

Have a great day!

I wonder if this is something CommentWealth could help fight? The gears are starting to turn...

Jason I noticed the same which is why the comments are being made now instead of the posts because posts are easier to flag than the comments. At the same time, if the posts are being flagged, does the author have some responsibility to consider why the flags are coming and adjust contributions accordingly?

I think it depends on how much the author in question cares about the social norms of Steemit. They are the main "thing" at odds with maximizing one's investment.

The fact remains that the game-theoretically best way to make money on Steem (for minimal effort, non-authors) remains upvoting your own hidden comments with high stake. Unless something changes in the code, or all abuse spontaneously stops, this is a situation we're going to have to live with. Given the anarchist leanings around here, it may be that these authors are simply (selfishly) making the correct game theory decisions for operating on the platform, as it currently stands.

Interestingly, I noticed some of the accounts in question upvoted your post, like Snowflake.

So, if the formula for authors is Reward = Quality * Reach, and investors want to maximize their profits by placing their votes in ways that increases the value of their investment, but don't have or want to spend the time searching for quality content, then in a nutshell the way to find a win - win solution is to marry the needs of these two groups.

Is that a fair statement?

That sounds very reasonable to me. It could be tough to do.

Traders would hopefully stick to liquid Steem, and therefore never vote. Their stake is simply ignored for rewards-pool calculations.

Investors (people with Steem Power, not liquid Steem) in Steem hopefully have some belief in the fundamentals of the platform.

I think the idea of powering down was partially to help separate "traders" from real investors in the platform. Most real investors in the platform would be either content creators or big users of social media.

The problem I think we've seen is that the amount of gains that can be made voting for yourself, or vote-trading, are large enough to tempt traders (or anyone willing to hold 13 weeks) into maximizing this value. Once other people start doing it, the rest of us are forced to do so or fall further and further behind.

I think people will always act in their own best interests on average, so we need a way to encourage everyone's best interests to align with the group.

Perhaps we can figure out a way to rework curation to be based more on rewards given, than rewards given after you give rewards. Somehow, curation has to be more valuable.

It seems more curation benefits could encourage more readership too, at least a scan.

I keep seeing Steemit needs to do this or that, but no one is able to implement this or that except those at the very top, who don't seem to be interested enough to do this or that. So in light of the issues and lack of response to the issues, how can users marry the two? Could the arrangement @snowflake had with @mindhunter have been seen in a positive light if it somehow benefitted the platform? Not saying how, just asking for clarity to possibly come up with how.

Steemit is overall pretty anarchistic, so they don't like "fixing" stuff with rules. That includes the community as well as the company, from what I can tell.

I think if the situation could be seen as a positive for Steem's overall value long-term, it could be seen as beneficial or at least neutral. Hypothetically speaking.

Interesting, when I think of a fix I was assuming more in functionality than rules. I guess rules are used in code to create functionality though.

I'm not entirely clear on which is the second group. Authors? Curators?

Investors actually. In this case @snowflake is the investor, who did't have time to spend looking for good content to vote on, but wanted to vote and increase his investment. (from my understanding of his comment above)

Many investors are also authors/curators, but some don't want to or can't participate much personally, I guess.

I think authors and curators are aligned in the way they can achieve rewards, but they are not necessarily aligned with investors. As @lexiconical mentioned traders would be included with investors, which I hadn't thought of, but investors who are casual users were more what I was thinking.

So, since the "needs" of these two groups seem to be different, I was questioning how to create a more symbiotic way. Don't know if that really cleared anything up.

Ah, you had mentioned investors, and I understood them to be one group. I did not understand that creators/curators was the other group.

Thanks for clarifying!

Edit: well, now that I understand, I should make an effort to answer =p sorta obligated lol

The white paper intends that investors, those with substantial holdings of SP, are expected to curate, and thus the curation reward is intended to be motivation for that purpose. @andybets recently posted, just as @lexiconical above has, that curation rewards need to be larger.

I argued against it, but perhaps I am better understanding now why that might help.

Clearly, to date, curation rewards have proved insufficient for those with substantial SP to preclude their self-votes, and other rewards mining schema.

Perhaps @andybets and @lexiconical are right. I still reckon that weighting VP by SP is the root cause of the issue, as it delivers more 'freedom of speech' to those with more money, just like the Citizens United vs. FEC decision did - and CU was reckoned the end of free speech in America by some.

I feel that those people interested in dialogue on the platform can be rewarded without encouraging gaming the system by those more interested in money better by equal vote weight, or better yet, by weighting VP with reputation.

This removes most of the incentives to use SP to mine the rewards pool for profits, which in turn degrades the quality of the content and discourse on Steemit. Some have argued that this would remove the incentive to hold SP (just Steem but locked up for 13 weeks), and I am not sure they are wrong.

However, a strong social media platform that rewards it's users in Steem is a GREAT incentive to buy and HODL Steem, as the potential capital gains from such a platform being successful are practially incalculable.

Were Steem to reach $4k, equal to BTC, then at the recent price point of $1 for Steem as an entry point, investors would see 400,000% capital gains (Re-Edit: I suck at math). That is far more than can ever be attained by self-votes or scams, and frankly, Steem is a better crypto, with orders of magnitude better transactions/second, no transaction fees, and no mining and wasting of electricity, amongst other benefits over BTC.

IBM, GM, and other blue chips will never grow and offer investors gains like that. Risk is inherent in investment, even in blue chips. It did not stop the various cryptos from gaining currency (super pun intended).

Thanks for the reply, I didn't understand that investors were supposed to be curators. I think I'm allergic to white paper reading, besides, who reads the directions before they have to? lol

Curious, do you have an opinion as to whether this would be viewed differently if @mindhunter were consistently putting out quality, meaty content?

Were the comments that had been upvoted substantial, no one would ever have found out he was buying the votes.

That would have precluded anyone viewing the issue at all, so yes, very much different.

@mindhunter has produced good content, and I was a follower of his - until @transisto caused this whole kerfluffle to fall into the light. @jerrybanfield has substantially contributed more information, and his personal comparison is quite illuminating.

The white paper has been known to cause those trying to read it to begin yearning for death about half way through (srsly, according to @everittdmickey), although I didn't find it hard to understand. I did just skip the math (it took me three tries and two confirmations to calculate the capital gains percentage I included above in my head. I am not the strongest mathematician you will encounter in your life), but, for the most part it is pretty easy to understand, and very informative.

I have no doubt you will profit thereby.

Everybody has the right to decide how to earn money on Steemit the way that is most convenient and possible for him/herself and nobody should judge or flag that; but again, you don't live in an ideal world.

If this is indeed the established cultural norm, most users would just post spam and self-upvote it.

If that's what we want, we should establish that as a community, so that those of us following the social norms are no longer game-theoretically disadvantaged.

I expect that you neglect to consider that the rewards pool is a common resource. When you upvote yourself, you draw down the rewards pool that all others depend on for their own rewards. Therefore they have a vested interest in your actions, because your actions impact their own rewards.

The rewards you just upvoted yourself will decrease the reward I may get from someone who upvotes my comment, for example.

This is why I stand on principle, and never upvote myself.

My intention is to benefit others with what I contribute. I am not very concerned with my own financial rewards (but I am weird) as I have simple needs, and meet them through work.

I hope you are able to understand that everyone that is impacted by your voting actions, and thus has not only a right, but an obligation, to judge it, and flag it if they feel it's abusive and they need to do something about it.

As you can see from the flag I DIDN'T cast, I do not feel it my obligation to be your judge. Also, my measly $.02 vote means you are safe from me. Just don't be a big meany and flag ME =p

Well it's not free money... they first invested heavily into STEEM to get their voting power!

Some of them mined it when you could

What is being done with it now is probably more important than how they got it initially.

Either everyone is going to do this, or nobody can do this. I don't have a solution.

Yeah pretty much how I see it. Steemit is so polarizing to me lately. Everyday I come across a new valuable post or cool person. Yet daily I also find big issues.

In a way, that makes it a fair microcosm of life.

This does seem to be the human condition - we waffle from extreme to extreme.

waffles.jpg

Yeah, not so much. Most of the Steem that exists was mined before Steemit even had been created.

@berniesanders got his stake that way, and so did @dan, @ned, and some few other early insiders that controlled the mining, even relaunching the chain when someone else had mined a substantial stake that they couldn't counter.

The playing field isn't level. You can't even mine today.

New to Steemit?