RE: Steemit Update: HF21 Testnet, SPS, EIP, Rewards API, SMTs!
I do and do not agree with you.
I have spent most of my time at Steemit without buying any votes. I remember what a rush it would be to get a vote from curators who had read my story and liked it.
But then...they seemed to die out.
Writing the same quality posts as before, but getting just a few no_value -or small_value votes, without comments from readers anymore, it made me lose interest in posting.
Only then did I learn about SmartMarket. So we now talk about how they make us authors big money. Where? How?
If I send SmartMarket Steem10 for a post, I get back (usually, but not always) my Steem10 plus a ROI of between 5% to 10% (in other words, 0.50c to Steem1. ) One Steem has been roughly $0.30 to 0.40....which means, uhm...how many must I buy, at what cost to me, for me to earn enough to buy one cup of coffee per week?
And I am breaking the bank? !!!
I have not withdrawn even one SP for taking to buy a coffee or buy myself food. But because I treat the buying of votes as a part of doing business on Steemit, I am destroying Steemit?
At least, from me, if your tastes coincide with mine, you can read some stories, poems and some controversial political opinions to stir your blood.
What exactly is it you Flaggers and curators provide? I hardly ever see any of you, so I know you do not support those who write original material - unless it is about Crypto.
I sympathize, I really do. I also never get curie votes anymore... but I can tell you why they dry up after a while as I'm a curator. Below is the curation guidelines from the curie official discord, if a curator gets too many rejections from the reviewers they get kicked out, so you are incentivized as a curator to follow those guidelines. @curie focus on new authors with exceptional content because they don't have (delegated) enough SP to support great writers in perpetuity!
No I'm not attacking people for working within a broken system, I'm saying that if the system can be made to not reward that behavior and whales can be forced to actually curate, or delegate to curation guilds so that they can do the work for them, people like you and me, will have much better chance to be rewarded for high quality writing.
Right back at ya. I've been writing poetry and fiction on steem for just shy of 2 years, I'm not sure I've ever had a comment from on any of my content from you. There is a problem with not enough content consumers on steem, if we had the readership of medium.com it might be different, but as it is now every author on steem has to be sooooo active reading others and networking to even get a sniff at engagement and reasonable payouts. This is part of why you might not get much engagement, it is a networking game right now.
I do and do not agree with this lol. I've never flagged in my life, so far as what curators do.... well look at that list of stipulations above and you'll see that every one of your curie rewards when you were newer to the platform had someone behind it doing a full plagerism check, going through a check list of other criteria like working back through the links on steem homepage to make sure that you can be verified as who you say you are by checking if you have an intro post etc. Using google to check sections of the text to see if it's old material reposted from a website. There is a fck tone of work goes on behind the scenes and the curation guilds are pretty much the only entities ensuring that anyone has those great moments when something of high quality they've created (art, video, writing) gets a decent amount of valuable votes.
Everything I'm saying in the comments in this thread is geared toward trying to get across to any high-ups reading that the vote selling needs to stop, not to attack people like you who have legitimately started buying votes out of sheer frustration, but in the hopes that if it gets sorted the massive amounts of SP delegated to bidbots will end up being used to reward people manually based on the quality of what they are producing.
P.s. I also haven't taken anything out of the steem platform that I haven't put back later. A little out which I traded with and increased my BTC stores but I put more back in than I originally took out. I honestly understand why you're frustrated with the penny payouts on your posts.
Go look at my blog to see how many, and who I comment on and engage with. I do agree that the crypto, and steem posts, get a lot more notice which is stupid as no one outside of steem is interested in that stuff. It boggles my mind that people don't see how insular it all is and how damaging this is for attracting mainstream people to our platform.
I apologise - many times that I used the word 'you', it was because I was/am aware that many others who are attacking authors will be reading, so I was writing for a wider audience. My error was in not specifically saying so.
I checked to see why your name does not ring a bell. You are right, I have never, that I recall, read anything of yours.
First of all, I mostly read/write SF&F stories - but not in poetry. Poetry has more of an emotional and spiritual side to it.
I orginally came to steemit because I had spent nearly 18 years writing my novel (it is about 13 books, of over 700 pages each). I lost my money and that is how I ended up writing, so as to have somethingt o do. It started that way, but then I fell in love with my characters. Writing all day and night, developed me to the point where I was having lucid dreams about them - and those adventures I had shared with them, became part of their story.
I had no way to publish and there is a limited market for my kind of writing, so I was excited when I learnt about the blockchain and saw it as a way of keeping my books available even after I die.
Two years of publishing every day and I am only close to the end of posting of Book 2.
I also, for a long time, devoted time every day for helping new posters. This was where I saw the bad effects of flagging. For instance, Bernie flagged a Nigerian who wrote an article to help Africans feed themselves by using a tiny piece of land. He knocked the guy to zero Rep and try as I did to help, I was obviously too weak. Bernie said he flagged because he felt like it and I in turn was threatened, as does the trash guy, who also threatens he will attack anyone siding with the person he trashed. I checked and he has a delagation given to him of SP25,000. Coincidence? But he actually trashed someone who spoke out against Bernie....
The number of nasty people on Steemit is far greater than most know, I do not know why I fight back but nobody, to this date, has flagged me to death, but it does not make me more tolerant of them. It just makes me feel I am wasting my time here.
Since I no longer believe I will earn anything to top up my state pension, I do not really care about the upvotes. For instance, today I posted a very short story. I got about 40 upvotes. Only one of them means anything to me, as that person read and made a comment. The rest just have stuck me on an upvote bot...with even some of them never appearing on steemit anymore.
I would prefer to be on a platfrom where they are open about it being a cut throat battle of wits, than this pretence of caring about new or poor posters, when most use them as soft targets to vent their evil moods on them, knowing they cannot fight back.
As from the date of rewards changing to 50 / 50 I will ensure nobody can reward me at all, so no bogus curator can earn anything, while I still get my story posted and preserved for a while.
Thanks for answering me and I wish you the best on Steemit.
No worries. I hear everything you're saying and we actually have similar interests/backgrounds. I'm a published (and by that I mean outside steem lol) poet and studied creative writing at university. I also write Sci-Fi and fantasy, but I don't put much fiction up on steem anymore as the audience is not here for it. As you said, it is more important for a writer that people are actually reading what you're writing and even when the bots aren't of the 'bid' variety on here, often a lot of the votes are auto votes. Having said that I'm grateful for the auto votes that fall on my account. I mainly write travel articles or opinion pieces on here as I'm catering to the audience to the best of my ability. I still can't bring myself to join the slew of people who post nothing but articles about steem. It just seems insane to me. I write one article per month about a steem orientated subject max lol. I still put - what I think is - some very decent poetry up sometimes, but most of it gets saved for submitting to online journals that pay or literary anthologies that gain exposure and build a writers CV.
I've seen this too and it is truly depressing. I've seen someone I knows account destroyed for saying the wrong thing.
Anyway, sry if I got defensive in my response before. I completely understand you were talking more generally rather than specifically at me ;-)
Take care Arthur. I'll visit your blog sometime soon and check out that good Sci-Fi you're writing :)
Good Sci-Fi? Maybe not, but a world I love and would live in if I could :)))
So you're essentially guaranteed a 5-10% ROI on every post you make? Do you not see this as a problem? Is this not virtually risk-free for you?
I understand that curators (and users in general) have mostly disappeared - and that's a problem with incentives, interface usability, marketing (the lack thereof), and the general downward direction of STEEM prices over the past year and a half. But what you're telling me is that any user can sign up, create a post, and then buy their way to 5-10% profits on an exploitation of platform incentives and rewards.
This is precisely why the system is failing us.
I'm not sure that posting content and buying votes for it is "doing business." And I don't think it's you or people like you that are "destroying Steemit." It's the package of protocols that were pushed and implemented in 2017 that are the problem - and the people who created and approved them. The protocols must be changed in order to correct the mistakes and restore balance to the system. That's not an attack on any individual or group of users. It's just the reality that we're in. I think too many people are trying to assign blame to regular users when their behavior today was just a natural and predicted consequence of adopting bad protocols.
For my first year here I was earning more than 0.50c perpost...and I did not risk my own SP (yes, a few times I did lose when buying, so ROI is not guaranteed). My writing has not changed to any great extent, but if I do not buy any votes, I rarely make even 10 to 15cents. I am not willing to spend hours on preparing a post for 10c and since the whales are buying votes, then so will I - until it is stopped...and then I will block ALL payments to me, so that nobody else benefits.
That is my decision, so what happens, I have nothing to worry about - except that it means I will not be able to help a few really needy posters from poor countries. I accept it as a cost of the way steemit has gone....