Before revoked minnowbooster's delegation, the biggested beneficiary of selling vote business was minnowbooster team. Now the biggest beneficiary is a bunch of delegation beggers who are getting delegations from freedom and returning 50 SBD per day for 100k SP and freedom himself.
Freedom is an anon investor who most likely funded the main steem team during the initial presale. There was no steem ico because they were able to gather funds without any ico. But his recent actions is sinking the very thing he funded at start. His delegations are:
tayyabhussain, one of the delegates says this in his bio:
Send Min Bid 0.10 SBD & Max Bid 10.00 SBD. My Team Has 500K Steem Power In Different IDs, I Will Upvote Your Post From Any ID
The team he is talking about is most likely getting delegations from freedom as well. So, here we have steemit officials calling steem proof of brain where people are supposed to earn steem by posting quality content or popular content but in reality, many quality contributors are leaving the platform because of the way steemit is functioning.
I have seen at least a few high quality authors leave steemit after posting five or six posts. One of which is, https://steemit.com/@bynaomi. People are talking about user retention in steemit but if steem continues to allow unregulated vote selling, then only a few vote trading experts will be left in steemit who will mine steem using bot votes.
People like are leaving steemit because they are not getting even 5% of what their contributions are worth. On the other hand, 3-4% of the reward pool is going into the pocket of bot operators and vote sellers getting SP from
.
And they are either the same people or working as a team to maximize their earnings. They largely do not care about content quality and their votes are disrupting the steem reputation algorithm. Those who are buying votes are getting extra attention, extra rep points regardless of content quality.
Steem will lose legitmacy of being a social network if it continues to operate like this.
To fix this big big problem, I am working on an experimental idea of having a mechanism that will allow high quality content creators get rewards without buying votes. I have a lot in mind but for now, I have created the discord channel steemit moderation. Invite: https://discord.gg/6frydN9. I will write a brief explanation of how Steemit Moderation will work and how it will help retain high quality users later.
For now, know this, if you are a high quality content creator and receive only a few cents in your posts, you may post links to your post with excerpts of the first two paragraph in the "posts-to-review" channel. If I review the post and find it worthy, I will give 0.5-2$ vote on that post. I will try to review about 5-10 posts a day.
The chat already has two whales and two dolphins. If you are a whale or dolphin looking for good posts to upvote, consider joining the chat. The chat is largely empty and it will take some time for it to get on track. So, please have a bit of patience.