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RE: Steemit Update: HF21 Testnet, SPS, EIP, Rewards API, SMTs!
But why get rid of the bidbots when it's better for business to cater to plagiarists and folks willing to extract tokens with as little effort as possible so they can dump them as soon as they are received? Why would it make sense to encourage actual content producers to do well, attract millions of potential curators, and the billions of dollars they bring with them? It's counter productive to want to find ways to attract billions of dollars to this platform. A few dollars in the hands of a plagiarist and a few thousand in the hands of the few who promote them is WAY SMARTER for business than if we had millions of consumers and billions of dollars pouring in. Everyone knows that!
Positive perception... is what is destroyed through vote selling. I've said this over and over again in posts I've written as well as comments.
Any serious high quality content creator runs a mile when they see how the system works on steem. The levels of shit content on steem aren't just the result of con artists, plagiarism and spam artists... it's also the result of a huge amount of people of quality either leaving, or never joining in the first place when they see how the system is set up.
Believe me, I pitched an idea for a steem community marketing up-and-coming authors to a friend who works in publishing in early 2018. After many conversations the jist of what she said was; that the system was far too corrupt for them to get involved and risk reputation or their clients interest.
Big mainstream entertainment industry investment is what will bring huge value to steem. And this will not happen the way things are working now.
I have horror stories as well. I once nearly convinced a top chef in Canada to hire a blogger and do foodie articles to promote his business and menu. I had him until he saw the front page, and I had to explain why some of that trash was there. He wasn't comfortable putting his name and image next to anything like that and also said, "If I was caught buying positive reviews for my business, I would be ruined." Dude is a millionaire, drives a fast car. No doubt he would have purchased some STEEM. Articles that double as advertisments that could potentially earn enough to pay the blogger, plus have a free form of advertising, along with a platform that allows free publishing, those links can be then passed around social media. It's an easy sell until you see the disaster these folks have created with their paid votes. If someone comes and sees it's impossible to compete without paying a toll, they just take the traditional route, because it's easier and more effective. Current front page drives eyes away. Why would anyone invest in that? That approach is only for the amateurs who don't know the business, which is why the vote sellers market their service as something that leads to success. Pros already know how to be successful. They don't need the "miracle cure."
@nonameslefttouse that is stunning. People like that are presented the blockchain alone is tough enough, but having someone that may have actually considered implementing steem/steemit into their business and feels they can't is mind-boggling to me. You are right, that is where the real growth is going to come. There needs to be some level of saturation of regular users within businesses like this. Getting new users is hard enough, steemit's focus I believe should be more on retention and let the success stories in their own carry your marketing effort for you.
One hundred percent, every change should be focused on getting "regular people" onto steem. This whole chasing of investor dollars is silly. This myriad of problems we have would be an annoyance instead of an ecosystem if the userbase were truly in the millions and not just "millions of accounts". We need the voices of people who don't have the time or energy to waste trying to game the system. That's where the "your upvote directly rewards content creators" pitch matters. They don't care about getting 50% of their pennies back.
The cool thing is if you feel you have a better idea there is an opportunity to create your own sidechain with steem-engine...
I'm the user I think there should be more of. I haven't got any tech savvy, really. I think steem is a great idea as advertised, the implementation just makes it tough to be joe schmoe on here.
Yep same here. I think keeping people like yourself and me as well needs to be more of a priority if possible.
I hear you m8. Yeah, that sounds very familiar.
Absolutely spot on. There is a big issue on steem with some of the biggest SP holders having nothing to do with, and no interest in content creation, or understanding how this can be a virtuous cycle that brings increasing investment when incentives are there and are honest.
Lol, but I'm gonna retire from this comment thread I think.
I agree. A simple directory creation for upvote purchasing may also be the answer. Allot one spot over the top twenty (non-botted payments), say the 20th one, at that, and have a random pop up feature that has any paid for/bot voted on any given search or hash tag. Then you would have to define what a bot necessarily is. My definition- a group of voting delegation for the apparent overwhelming purpose of selling votes with little to no precondition of content quality or other affiliation to that group or other subgroup in benefiting blockchain growth through original creativity or original programming. I use an example.... @steemmonsters (or the re-branded name of @splinterlands may be more appropriate). They would be the golden goose as far is this is concerned. Creating alternate tokens, building an upvote pool that was created for the purpose of benefiting their players that have done some level of content creation that is original and commentary on their game with forums now that are also tokenized. Versus bidbot X, that upvotes the person with steem/sbd ready to spend, and yes does some level of quality control but cannot be expected to patrol thousands of posts a day if they are big enough as a vote service. If more whales saw the benefits in delegating portions of their steem to causes like this, and would even actively participate or even sell the assets generated due to delegating to this venture the economy would open up... beyond belief. The upvote that carried by SM also is limited, so even the most heavily promoted post is no more than like 7-$8 at the moment, so there is certainly no guarantee that that vote purchasing will guarantee that even that post is guaranteed to land in overall trending searches. If the paid for upvoting services were collected, and listed less prominently and openly displayed as "promoted posts," again, showing up every so often rather having all posts at the top, then maybe that could also show some level of integrity of voted posts. Also with the hike in curation I am also for the bigger fish curating more because they should, they are bringing the capital to the table. The people that are whales on here are not people that went to STINC HQ and said "give me your steem," then ran out the back door and rode away in getaway cars, somehow they earned it whether we agree or disagree in how they did earn it under rules for the blockchain at the time is beside the fact, it is theirs to do with it what they wish. Long story short, opening the economy up to more users and getting actual movement in steem and SP to people that are here and doing legit work and building communities is where you are going to win. People showing up need to have a reason to stay, simply getting them here is not enough. There is a lot of support and energy that goes into that. When respectable retention becomes possible over time then we will truly see changes. I think labeling any article that has any vote within the post under a clearly defined definition of bought votes and is listed as promoted will be a great start in my humble opinion to having some credibility, among also generating some diversity in thought among those that are at the top. It seems very "group-thinkish" in how resources can be spread, or the group-think is very heavily enforced because real answers for re-invigorating the steemit economy is not being allowed into the hardforks in my humble opinion, at least since I have been here.
All that complexity, for nothing. If I want to go on stage, I'm not going to buy the tickets for the seats in the theater. I don't even see why people put so much thought into buying votes, when all that does it force the performer to perform in front of an empty house = no money. There are business models that have been around for centuries, they work. All this buying votes nonsense and coin stacking and people wanting handouts and miracle cures goes against everything that actually works.
Exactly, those cheating authors using those cheating bid-bots cheated the steem economic model.
Everyone knows: When you cheat, you win, and everyone respects you for it.
That is true far more often than it should be.
Everyone knows:
In retail: It's best to embrace the shoplifters and kick out the consumers. That's how you make money.
In videogames: You don't patch the exploits. Allows consumers to complain and hope they stop playing the game. That's how you make money.
Everyone knows this.
I know you are being sarcastic but your original comment is really true. Look at Trevon James. Doesn’t matter how much he pushed the ponzi BitConnect (and even created a Steem Engine token to push BitConnect 2.0) even thou people lost millions and it is under a current lawsuit. As long as he can give votes or the chance of giving something of value people will forget and worship him.
All of those people deserve to get scammed, if getting scammed is what they're into. Much like how so many here deserve to lose out on billions. That's what they want. Plagiarist still has 10x more rewards next to his post than I do with my previous post. I have no right to be frustrated with that. There's no reason for me to leave. Those other folks who left, thousands of them, good quality people, who cares about them. We need more scammers and corner cutters because those are the people who can build a strong foundation. Just look at the place. Two years of this and still going strong!
this guy was caught stealing STEEM from users !!!
It has been determined that you are trash, therefore, you have received a negative vote.
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You r a piece if trash butch!
Look at poor little @coininstant being trolled like the bitch he is by an automated bot. Jump monkey, jump!! Good boy.
That's why we need a downvote pool.
We have downvotes. Was it my job the other day to downvote that plagiarist you promoted or was it your job to be responsible and not promote a plagiarist?
As soon as we got the report, the account was blacklisted, but we can't blacklist what we don't know. Which is why it's so important that bad actors are being blacklisted as soon as possible.
However, this only works with services like Smartsteem (& buildawhale for example), that are actually blacklisting bad actors. For the rest, downvotes are needed. Because the accounts that are buying votes on their shit content and are receiving downvotes thus losing money, will learn from it; and the bid-bots that are voting on it, will realize that they're losing money by upvoting shit.
Could I ask what you will do if all posts with vote-purchases start being down-voted after HF21? Will it be a case of accepting this as the new normal and moving on to a new dev project, or will you look to continue, perhaps by some change in the way the business operates?
There's been a lot of talk about how the EIP will affect vote-selling, particularly around high-trending posts, but I've seen relatively little from vote sellers themselves. I would be really interested to hear how vote-selling services expect HF21 to pan out.
I think this is what some people get wrong. Smartsteem is not what I'm building my future on. It's a solid business model, and it most def. needs some remodelling after/before HF21, but I'm far more interested in Steem succeeding. Which is why we need the downvote pool, as I'm not able to influence anything else directly in the bid-bot/promotion sector besides my own project.
It will need re-modelling and whitelists/blacklists will become more important than ever, but I'm not able to predict what exactly will happen. Maybe people will start to flag everyone who uses promotion services. Or maybe they'll realize that people using it in moderation on good content is actually acceptable and valuable. However, I'm quite sure that bad content will be far less profitable to make money with.
Thanks. Interesting!
I asked you, with the question being directed to the Smartsteem account, if the money the plagiarist spent had been refunded. You/SmartSteem did not respond. I'm asking again. Was the money refunded?
If the money was not refunded, that means your business made more money promoting plagiarism than I did (and many others) who produced content today.
Just because someone loses money due to downvotes, that does not mean there's no money to be made in upvoting shit.
Nobody deserves to make money through plagiarism directly, or indirectly and that includes you.
No. Everybody who uses Smartsteem's services is accepting the Terms of Service, which includes a section about abuse.
No. Smartsteem didn't make anything, it actually lost money/revenue. 100% of liquid rewards are being distributed among delegations and the curation rewards were lost due to the unvote.
Correct. But it depends of course how exactly the plagiarism was used - was it quoted as part of a blog post; or was it blatant plagiarism.
So it's set up in a way where investors would have to take the fall.
That's concerning because if someone were to promote a ponzi, your investors get thrown under the bus.
Plagiarism is plagiarism. Fair use is fair use. There are laws in place that define these things. That incident I'm talking about was plagiarism, you agreed. It's illegal to make money in that fashion.
Anyway, I won't take up any more of your time today.
You have yourself a good day and let's see where these future changes take us. Hopefully to a better place. There's something we can both agree on.
No. Delegators were already paid out. There are some cases, where refunds had to be made, but that was usually being done by Smartsteem taking the loss.
Yes. Have yourself a great day too!
MinnowBooster also utilises a blacklist.
The blacklist is fine and dandy but I'd prefer to see something a little more proactive rather than reactive. The plaigiarist will pout about losing money and getting caught, move some tokens around, and do it all over again. Blacklisting seems like a waste of resources and that time, energy and money spent could go to a more proactive approach. It's not hard to predict abuse, and we have proof of abuse over the span of years, and many have been calling for a stop to it, for years. The blacklist has been around almost the entire time this disaster of selling votes started. There's no good reason to hand over easy money to scumbags and leeches while forcing thousands of good people to sit back and watch it destroy the place, before they leave.
QFT.
Its nice that some of the bid bots and vote sellers have blacklists but it was never a good solution, just better than nothing maybe.
Why fix the roof when one can simply place a bucket on the floor...
The problem came in when bidbots became open sourced, when there were one or two fine, they were structured and had business models, now every anonymous dog and his auntie runs a bidbot, so things are a bit crazy. However I have been on Steem since June 2016 and one thing I know is that having the freedom to boost ones' own posts is way more dignifying than having to beg and lick the you know whats of the whales who held all of the voting power, I think that was subhuman, vote bots are just like every other promotional aspect in life, paying for ads and higher rank on traditional media, getting yourself visible.
Before vote bots a small group of people were getting all the rewards and benefit, with bots it is more widely distributed. It isn't ideal but I for one am happy I can just send some Steem and get some visibility on my post and not dm a few buddies to see if they will help me out in exchange for some witness votes or having to vote them back later.
MinnowBooster is now a less supported bot in terms of delegation, but it supports a whole team of people as can be seen on https://buildteam.io and has helped give rise to projects like @tokenbb and to take over the @ginabot project and keep it running.
Proactive is hard, Ai could be an answer, have it recognise what an abuse post looks like and deny it an upvote, but the issue is there are so many bidbots that if one service blocks them they can go to another. We do have a community whitelist on MinnowBooster that can help as a proactive measure to ensure the larger votes only go to whitelisted authors.
I've been producing content here since September 2016; never kissed ass for a vote, never used a bid bot, never made any kind of deal with anyone, for anything. I earned everything in my goddamn wallet. Glance at my blog, look at the engagement, compare that to the majority. It might look kinda silly on the surface but trust me, I know what I'm doing.
Why not just flag my material if you're the individual who feels the need to push it down into oblivion with paid votes? Same damn thing. I've taken a huge hit since bidbots.
If I had my artwork behind the windows of my shop, and someone came along to plaster posters and ads of their work on the outside of my windows so people couldn't see in, I'd be pissed. You think that behavior here is dignifying? Force me to pay someone else so they earn more from my work than I do?!
I got a fence, it needs painting. You're the painter. In order to earn money you must first give me $100, then paint my fence, then I'll give you $101. That makes sense to you, okay, but I somehow magically made $100 because you painted my fence.
Yeah, okay, I get it. Someone never had talent. Couldn't do a damn thing right to get noticed so they had to find little tricks here and there to get paid. Meanwhile, because of that selfish behavior, the true talent around here had to leave because typically, in the entertainment industry, those with talent can earn simply by being talented. Once they left, so did the potential billions the entertainment industry is known to generate, annually. All that loss just so a few people with no skills in this industry could get noticed. All that loss just to cater to the lowest quality performers and place them above the highest quality performers.
If you're running a network on television, you place the best programs expected to receive the highest ratings in the prime time slots, and you sell the late night slots. Here, because of bidbots, the late night paid programming nobody watches sits in the prime time slots while the best content is placed in the worst slots, forcing the best content to receive low ratings. We can't all be expected to purchase votes and shoot for those slots high on the trending page because the moment everyone does it is the same moment $200 worth of rewards becomes the new $0 and everyone is right back where they started.
Dude, don't get me started on this. It's great you've been able to fund projects and all that but anyone with tokens would be able to fund one hell of a lot more projects once they stop sabotaging the potential of the entertainment industry. I'm using the term entertainment loosely. Anything that grabs someones attention, regardless of what it is, is worth billions, and that is being thrown in the trash here so a few individuals can run tiny little businesses.
^this 100% this
Yeah but this no unvote bullshit is a huge part of the problem. Oh, but apparently curation rewards trumps doing the right thing and NOT promoting shitbirds posting diarrhea. Ffs
Oh, and !dramatoken
P.S. noticed I got notified on Steem.chat but haven't logged into that shit for weeks. I'll check it now and try to coordinate some flags on it.
Posted using Partiko Android
Also, you can always report any plagiarism to steemcleaners and they can downvote it if you don't want to waste your voting power/risk retaliation.
You don't think we know that already?
The problem is it's not enough on a heavily bid post.
If you were not self-voting this and the next xomments, you would be in the negative...which would show what others really think of you. So why is it honest of you, but not honest of those of us who pay you to sell us votes?
Are you taking this position so as to protect your investment? I'm not saying you shoulld not...just wondering...
@themarkymark is #1 when it comes to faking things and number of bid-bots the one is running
grabs some popcorn
popsicle ?
It has been determined that you are trash, therefore, you have received a negative vote.
PLEASE NOTE: If you engage with the trash above you also risk receiving a negative vote on your comment.
It has been determined that you are trash, therefore, you have received a negative vote.
PLEASE NOTE: If you engage with the trash above you also risk receiving a negative vote on your comment.
Yes, literally! Everyone knows that! Duh! It's all so simple!!!
Hey, it's fun to joke around and all that but I just noticed you delegate to Tipu bidbot and Tipu's vote hasn't been removed from the instance of plagiarism I recently found boosted up to the trending(joke) page. Here's a link with more information and a link leading to the instance of plagiarism can be found tucked neatly inside that post.
I would like to see that vote removed and the money the plagiarist spent on the vote should go to me because I'm awesome.
Thank you and have a wonderful evening.
I don't delegate to tipU anymore. Those are residuals from prior delegations, I think via some issuance and dividends of tipU coins.
Alright but if you know somebody who knows somebody, maybe they can get someone else to do something about it.
@cardboard is the man you after
That sounds like code talk. Is this agent cardboard easy to work with or should I wear a vest?
Agent Cardboard. Lol!
He/she seeks like a reasonable guy/gal but I would always recommend the best!
I tried to message @cardboard, the owner of TipU, but no response thus far.