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RE: Steemit Update: HF21 Testnet, SPS, EIP, Rewards API, SMTs!
The main reason this EIP was pitched was to mitigate bid bots.
Except it incentives bid-bots by making it financially necessary to make it to linear rewards.
How many top 20 witnesses are running a bid bot? If the EIP threatened their bottom line they would veto the hardfork, which is exactly why it obviously benefits them.
EiP is threatening the bottom-line for traditional bid-bots owners & co FYI.
1.) Rewards will be reduced in general.
2.) A higher percentage of rewards will be dependant on how good the post is behaving; or whether it's being downvoted (big risk due to the downvote-pool).
Everybody can think what they want about myself and Smartsteem.com, but at this point in time, my actions and decisions are completely in line for the good of Steem. Otherwise, why am I still holding hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Steem?
I want this blockchain to succeed and its currencies to become more valuable! If this reduces the rewards people generate who aren't staked in the system at first, maybe that's a good thing, don't you think? Otherwise, Steem is just a place where free-loaders can get some STEEM & SBD posting content without risk, while stakeholders are the ones taking the beating since they're locked in at the same time as other cryptocurrencies have a bull-run.
EiP will take steps in the direction of people wanting to be a hodlers of Steem and I'd say that's a very good thing for us.
That's what Steem originally was. That's what it is now. And bid bots make it possible for staked and non-staked users alike to increase their risk-free liquid rewards. We don't need bid bots and their owners to "protect" any investments/investors here. In fact, they are one of the largest contributors of negative value to the platform, thanks to the largest contributors: STINC and our past top-20 witnesses that approved the delegation, linear rewards curve, and 10-vote daily target protocols, which paved the way for the anti-social and cannibalistic economic behavior we see today.
None of these actually matter much, they just shift around the methods that milkers will use but with automation, vote selling, reward-sharing schemes, etc. this was always going to turn out badly.
The only rule set remotely likely the voted content rewarding model that we have (as opposed to other completely different models like paid boosting) that has a shadow of a chance to work has significantly higher curation and cheaper/free downvotes.
Well, that's my point. It turned out badly because those protocol changes made it much easier and much more lucrative for the "milkers."
Delegation made it possible for non-invested users to rent stake and run vote-selling bots practically risk- and accountability-free. It also allowed entities like STINC and users like Freedom/Pumpkin to gift or rent out their previously and mostly unused influence, further diluting all other stakeholder influence. I think you're aware of how that distorts and influences markets and development in a variety of ways.
(I say "risk-free" because promising liquid payments for renting SP is a stakeholder's dream. You can keep your stake powered up and still cash out the rewards earned from it...with no actual "contributing" effort to the blockchain/content required. It's essentially a circumvention of DPoS.)
Linear rewards made it possible to precisely calculate vote values and offer them for sale at a "fair market value." It also makes "guaranteed ROI" possible - which further allows for easy automation.
The 10-vote target made that delegated voting power and vote value 4x more valuable for "promoting" content. It allows bid bots to push the poor content to the top and mostly out-compete "organic" curation.
So I do think these protocols matter...a lot. Yes, we had other issues of buying/selling votes before, but not nearly at this current scale and with this much visibility. This bold move of "bringing it out of the shadows" has been a disaster. Not only is it horrible for perception, but it doesn't accurately depict the type or the amount of backroom trading that may have taken place previously - and that we were unaware of - which was likely relatively minimal.
Instead of cleaning things up via transparency, it made things actually appear exponentially filthier.
Instead of giving more influence to less-invested users, it apparently has made those users see the game as even more rigged.
Instead of attracting, retaining, and cultivating more active users, we simply have more former users going off and creating their own chains, using other chains instead, and/or spreading the word about how awful Steem has become. And we thought users didn't like Steem before the 2017 hard forks. Even the people still here can barely stand the place.
I get what you're saying, but if we really want to fix the economic protocols/incentives, we can't continue ignoring the protocol changes that completely broke the system and what little social atmosphere we had prior to those changes.
Also - this is a perfect example of why multiple large code changes shouldn't be made in one fork. And a great example of why we should be able to evaluate new behavior and revert back to previous protocols when things break or don't work as planned.
This could already be done and was already being done with vote bots where users signed up with their posting authority. Delegating your SP to a vote bot (in exchange for pay) and giving a vote bot the ability to vote with your own account (in exchange for pay) are essentially identical. It was already happening on a moderate scale prior to delegation and what changed things (including the scale) between then and now was not so much delegation, but the passage of three years of time with more and more people recognizing value of taking maximum advantage of the incentives offered, and then doing so. That was and is inevitable given broken incentives with or without delegation.
Delegation was never at the core of the problem, though it may have contributed in a small way.
But realistically if we want to improve things now (years late I think we will both agree), we need not relitagate the mistakes of the past, however we might personally rank their severity.
What will incentivize people to power up steem from these changes?
Higher curation rewards, which means you'll earn more money with your stake by voting than before.
Since SPS is being introduced as well, and the inflation is being shifted partly from the reward-pool (author & curation) to the SPS, it might look like the curation rewards haven't changed or have become less. But they are indeed bigger and the SPS is supposed to be a net positive for the Steem ecosystem, which hopefully includes an increased STEEM valuation over time.
The shift from author to curator is numerically much larger than the shift from author+curator to SPS. Curators will see an immediate and obvious net increase, not quite double but close to it.
What exactly will there be left to power up?
If you're referring to author-rewards; you will still earn much more than on any other platform. Besides that, you can also power up Steem which you've bought or earned in another way (Steem Monsters, etc.)
Hmm, no. STEEM is failing to onboard top content creators from add revenue sharing platforms, and the EIP will only make this worse. It is failing to onboard many good fiction authors and convince them to go STEEM first with their fiction at the expense of sales on Amazon KDP, Play Books and Apple iBooks.
This I feel is the bigest mistake Steemit keeps making, forgetting it is a content platform that needs to actually compete for top content creators with the likes of Google, Amazon and Apple.
I don't think we need more onboarding. We can't even keep those who are onboarded active. Activity is needed.
Figure out how to have active users rather than mere account holders.
Downvotes will be bought and sold on the open market for a big discount.
This is all just narative. Simulate it with some old data and see how the incentives pan out. The only real incentives the EIP creates favor the bid bot economy. It could be easily fixed I feel by making down votes hit curation harder than the author.
That sort of simulation is entirely worthless because it doesn't account for changing behavior, which is the entire point of it.
Downvotes absolutely should hit the author (as well as the other curators, but not to the extent of favoring the author). The fundamental goal of both upvotes and downvotes is to pay authors in accordance with a stake-weighted consensus of value contributed. Downvoters are contributing their opinion into that consensus process that the payout to the author is too high.
That method shows us exactly what behaviour will be first to be incentified to be changed, and you can start reasoning from that. People don't change behaviour because of eloquent narrative about incentives meant to change their behaviour, they change behaviour because of actual stimuli acting on their existing behaviour.
That same method could have warned us about the disaster that was HF20. I feel it quite worrying, especially after our HF20 that anyone still could consider real-data simulations "useless". They aren't just usefull, they are essential to preventing what is perfectly predictable.
At best it is of minimal value in these situations.
Take downvotes for example. A number I saw recently was 0.008% of votes being downvotes, essentially zero. Running a simulation over that data will tell you nothing about downvotes because (for practical purposes) no one uses them. Only after the cost structure attached to downvotes changes will, possibly, the usage of downvotes change, and nothing in the historical data will tell us how it will change or how much.
HF20 is a very different type of situation. Very little of HF20 was intended to or could reasonably be expected to change behavior via incentives on a widespread scale. What it did do is block certain actions (spamming mostly) which meant that it wouldn't even be possible to simulate in that way, because many of the previous recorded actions in the history would be blocked, resulting in a chain state from that point forward deviating from the historical state. Many subsequent actions in history would then become invalid, leading to further rejections and deviation.
One must use the right sorts of tools in any situation. Historical replay as you suggest is the right tool for some problems and the wrong one for others.
You've hit the nail on the head as to why the EIP may have been carefully reworked, or even didn't properly address this issue in the first place.
At the end of the day, until these practices are weeded out nothing will change! At this point will we never get a chance to find out what a reward system that de-centivizes vote selling even looks like, when so many of the top 100 witnesses make their bread and butter running vote selling services. As you say, they will just veto the hardfork if it threatens their interests.
Or maybe I'm wrong? Not sure I care at this point.
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Is there a list or way to find out which top 100 witnesses are running bid bots? I may want to rethink some of my votes..!
I don't think there is tbh meanbees... Not that I know of anyway. If you visit bot pages some are clear who run them, others less so.
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I'm behind Smartsteem.com, but I've always been very open about it (https://therealwolf.me/projects, https://smartsteem.com/about). Most people don't know this, but I actually thought quite a few times about stopping it altogether. However, the truth is that this wouldn't change anything. It would simply shift more weight to those bid-bot/promotion actors who are not caring at all about removing promotion/votes from abusers/plagiarists/spammers. In contrast, Smartsteem has already blacklisted quite a lot of people:
https://github.com/smartsteem/blacklist
And there are indeed good actors who are relying on promotion services to get seen!
Now, it's true that it could be done more and better. And I'm always trying to improve the process. However, if I'd blacklist everyone who even slightly promotes a bit too much, (not referring to real abusers) I'm not sure if Smartsteem would have any more customers. Which would have the same result as quitting all-together, since delegators & vote-sellers wouldn't earn as much in comparison to other actors who are allowing anything, so people would switch over.
But with the downvote pool, even those actors (who previously didn't care) would be somewhat forced to use a blacklisting system, which means Smartsteem could be even stricter!
Now, I obv. can't guarantee that it will work out exactly like this, but I do believe (& hope) so, which is why I'm in favour of the EiP. It will not make the life of the average bid-bot operators easier, in contrast, it will make it more difficult.
The promotion services do more harm to Steem than good at this point. The whole point of organic curation is for people to distinguish between good and bad content. If Smart Steem is just going to upvote as a service then we have no way to determine good or bad content. Anything can get visible.
We need to fix the economics so this isn't viable. As long as it is viable, someone will do it.
Just as true is the fact that with downvotes (flagging) now being free of cost to the flagger, many are downvoting just for the sake of feeding their ego (or, as it could also be said, because they are on a power trip). Just imagine, you are not capable of writing anything original, so you attack those who do and threaten to attack those who protest such action by you...and...voila, you are the big boy and oh so influential.
All I see is Steemit getting less and less posts - when I joined, after submitting my post, I would get shown a list of new posts and if I missed out on a post and went looking for it, it had disappeared because of so many new posts being made. Now I submit, check out a few of the posts and when, a couple of hours later, I post again, I see a few new posts in the list....but then I am back to those I saw hours ago - which means there is a massive drop in posters.
It will be interesting to see how things go once more than 50% of the original posters, still posting, give up on Steemit. I guess the curators can then curate each other and enjoy having themselves flagged?
Not my scene....and have already signed up elsewhere. Just trying to work out how to maintain contact with a few friends I value, who are still here.
For every man that earns a dollar without working there is a man that did work that didnt get paid his dollar.
Why not develop an app or script to reject all witnesses who endorse vote selling?
I'm not involved with any bid bot, but I don't think it really matters if others are. I'm more interested in the overall economics and how it functions at a system-wide level than in who happens to be doing what.
This person or that person running a bid bot literally doesn't matter. If the economics favor it, that creates a valuable niche. If one person doesn't fill that niche, someone else surely will.
The vote selling economy on steem is not a valuable niche... it's a bleed of value. That bleed happens both in the talent that leaves this platform due to the fact that quality isn't rewarded manually, and steem Blockchains reputation in the wider world. I've noticed this same attitude among a lot of devs and some of the witnesses... + dapp owners etc. It's blinkered to assume that steem Blockchain primary usecase and best UC is not content. Therefore quality content should be nurtured by those with stake to create a virtuous cycle (eg when people see professional level content get curie awards they strive to improve to try and get those awards).
Bidbots drive away decent content creators. Simple fact. Curie can only encourage them up to a point... beyond that point they leave. I know this because I've been a curie curator for over a year... I've seen it again and again. Those people who claim bidbots aren't the problem obviously haven't seen the multitude of posts I have where talented people anounce they're leaving because they've discovered that votes are bought on here. I've seen tones of them while searching for curie.
To put it super simple, the vote buying system on steem sacrifices legitimate long term growth of the price of steem for short term gains for a few people.
If publishing houses invested in this space (to source or promote authors) it would lead to huge $ value. If legitimate film interests invested in this space (to promote independent film festivals or up & coming directors etc) it would lead to huge $ value. If steem somehow leveraged streaming entertainment (similar to YouTube) it would lead to huge $ value. I only have one instance of proof that vote buying is why they run a mile and that is in the publishing industry... I talked about that in my other comment in this thread.
I'll tell you what will lead to the continued devaluing of all our investments. Allowing the best content creators to be continually devalued and driven away by the fact that people with a tone of SP just want to sit back and watch money come in with little to no work. That's what vote selling is all about.
Yeah sure, if they're allowed to. Stinc and a handful of the most stake wealthy on steem could use their SP (downvotes) to stop bidbots if they chose to. But half of those stake wealthy people I speak off are involved or run bidbots so we're kind of fucked. Also their hefty stake weighted witness votes could remove the witnesses who perpetuate vote selling from the top 100 and send a message, but they don't because half of those stake wealthy people I speak off are involved or run bidbots.
You say it doesn't matter @smooth, you're wrong. But this comment isn't really aimed at you per say, these are thoughts that have been gestating in my mind the past 24 hours watching the comments on this thread.
This is the last I'll say on the subject.
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I'm quite sure you misunderstood my intent here. I meant valuable in the sense that people can make money doing it. I didn't mean valuable in the sense of valuable to Steem overall.
You should better understand what the permissionless property of blockchains means. No one needs to be 'allowed' to do anything, they can just do it. The only way in which it can be stopped is by changing to system rules and incentives to make it a smaller or non-existent niche.
Fair enough dude. I don't say these things to get some drama tokens 😉
But these issues I highlight are very real and they need addressing fully now! Especially with Facebook trying to enter crypto and Eos coming with voice.
I want to see everyone's investment in steem bring huge returns! Not just a few people getting moderate returns, as steem is driven out of the space and loses that first mover advantage.
I've spent nearly 2 years putting a huge amount of time in never powered down. I'm not the only person to put such time and effort in, I'm sure you have.
I don't need to better understand it, I understand it very well!
I addressed this above when I said stinc and high stake people could stop vote buying by excersising their right to be allowed to downvote both the people who run these 'so called' services, and the people who use them! That would be them exercising power in a permissionless environment. It would exercise a measure of control, and considering stinc have had massive stake lying around for 2 years doing nothing it boggles my mind why they haven't at least attempted to stop something that is so obviously of detriment to both the platform and the price of the steem. Obvs that would start a whole new discussion about if we're now centralized... but I feel that the stake distribution on steem (and the ninja mining by more than just stinc) means that ship has sailed.
This is true to an extent, but what I said about responsible use of downvote to stop negative 'niches' from proliferating is valid.
The network effect is what can truly make steem a wold class platform. An ever expanding network of people sharing content, and the advertising that would bring and other investment streams is what can catapult steem to overtake Facebook. This isn't rocket science. It also follows that as steem's value proposition is to actually pay people for their content, we need to fulfill that value proposition to succeed.
I know that there are issues to do with balance between stake flowing out and stake being converted into SP, also the relative lack of trading of steem as a token.
But, as I stated in a comment above, if the issue of steem being a fundamentally unappealing place for content creators doesn't change soon, we will lose any first mover advantage to facebook coin or voice.
I don't disagree that the best way to change all of this is to make the system not reward vote selling/delegating behavior... and better reward manual curation or delegating to a guild that does the work for you, I'm just unsure this HF21 will achieve that, and if it doesn't... well the clock is ticking.
Steemit always intended their stake to be non-voting, in fact they implemented a feature into the blockchain code to enforce that. For various reasons the feature was never used, but the tradition of not voting with their stake remains. That tradition exists for a reason, at least historically. With the dominant stake they once had, if they did vote, no one else would have any meaningful say at all in anything. So for that reason, and because the stake was mined for the purpose of funding the company, compensating their founders, and giving away to new users, they have never voted (apart from a few specific exceptions, mostly emergencies).
Even despite that tradition, they do delegate a large amount of stake to steemcleaners and some other downvoting efforts. It simply numerically isn't enough. I haven't done an exact calculation but my intuition is that bidbots alone have more stake than Steemit (recall that Steemit has sold a lot and continues to sell a lot; the meme about Steemit having an absurdly dominant stake like 80% as they once did is complete wrong), and bidbots are not the only problem.
Trying to solve this the way you suggest would not work and has not worked. Working against the underlying incentives by trying to tell people what you think they should do with their stake despite incentives encouraging them to do something else is inefficient to the point of ineffective, even if you are ultimately right in a way. It is like trying to push a car uphill several miles to get to a repair shop but collapsing from physical exhaustion before you get there, when you could instead roll it downhill to another shop at the bottom of the hill.
I share some of your lack of certainty about whether HF21/EIP will produce the intended and desired results but I think they are worth a try. We should have tried making such improvements long ago, but since we have not, there is no time like the present.
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....