The other day, Bloomberg Technology posted an article about Steemit and how it is changing the Internet. They used the term "financial internet" to describe how posters are paid to provide their content. They included some quotes from which further emphasized the point.
Overall, it was a great promotional piece.
As uplifting as that piece was, I was saddened to see the same publication write a follow up to it. I will saw the new piece was candid in it review of the situation which makes it even worse.
Since the article on the 27th of February, we took a closer look at Steemit. What a first looks like a revolutionary idea is nothing more than a remake of some of the same issues on Facebook and other social media sites. Steemit is engaged in a "flag war" over the way rewards are paid.
Greed seems to be the central issue with one "troll" taking too much. In a decentralized forums such as this, the community polices itself. The problem is being dealt with in a warlike manner with sides being drawn.
We saw a number of posts using the war analogy stating the "troll" has to be killed, slaughtered, and maimed. Some even went so far as to post pictures of the heads of some people on farm animals.
In lieu of these facts, we can only conclude this site is a trollers paradise. Like many aspects of Facebook, it is filled with hate and anger. So in this regard, it is good competition for Facebook.
Well, at least we caught their attention. How do we all feel about it?
Of course, this article did not appear but it could. What happens when a site like Medium publishes something like that? Is this the image we want to portray?
Personally, I do not think that it is very appealing to people on the outside.
Is it safe to say that we do not want to be known as the blockchain that is always at war?
Do not worry, this isnt an attack article, as much as a solution to the dilemma. A lot of this is to help people understand what marketers know and see. Image is everything.
I take the freedom aspect of decentralization and the blockchain to be of great value. We all are living under systems that enslave. For the first time, we are seeing a way out of this, at least to a degree.
So the first question I have for people is are you for freedom or for slavery?
If you are for freedom, then a basic fact is that anyone on this site can be as greedy as that person wants to be. We see varying degrees of it all the time on here. There are people who will not upvote an article yet vote a four word comment for $7. Heck, we saw one individual upvote a comment to the tune of $2K.
At the same time, the community has the freedom to find exception with the greed of certain individuals and take action. Like those individuals who exercise their freedom to engage in greedy behavior, I agree that it is totally in the community's right to counteract that.
So the question is how do we go about that?
People feel that a flagging war is the answer. The problem with this approach is war is perpetual. We know the banksters are constantly touting it. Greed is their motivation. They dress it up nicely with patriotism, nationalism, and protection from terrorism. Yet, they care nothing about that. At the end of the day, it is greed...they profit it.
Some have put forth the option of limiting the number of posts to 4 a day. This could be a solution that solves the problem but at what cost? If one believes in freedom, how can one say yes to this option?
Do we want to be known as the blockchain of limitation? "Come and use the STEEM blockchain, but not too much".
We have an application called Zappl which wants to be a replacement for Twitter. How many Tweets do you think people send a day? Well it doesnt matter because one is only sending 4 Zaps.
Thank you for reporting that school shooting live via Zappl but you reached your 4 Zap limit so come back in 24 hours. But we are really interested to know how this turns out.
Steepshot is another application that is designed to take from the Instagram crowd. Again, are we going to limit one to 4 pics a day?
Naturally, if gets worse is one wants to Zap and use Steepshot in addition to Steemit or D.Tube.
"Come to STEEM and use our wonderful applications...but only a little bit."
Not quite the image we want to portray in my opinion.
So how do we solve this?
The answer is not war. What people are doing on here is akin to crapping on your living room floor and rubbing it in the carpet. Who does that? Angry crowds...
Have you ever noticed when people violently protest, they do not go to a rich neighborhood and and start torching stuff but, rather, do it in their own neighborhood? We all watch that knowing it makes no sense, yet arent we doing the same thing? If the war was taken to Facebook or YouTube, I might understand it.
The answer is really very simple. Part of the problem appears to be that too much posting is taking place on an daily basis that pay out some high rewards. Hence, the community feels that it need to cut that down.
So how do you combat a few posts taking too much out of the reward pool.
The answer is MORE POSTING.
According to 's post this morning, we have roughly between 70K-80K posts a day.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@penguinpablo/daily-steem-stats-report-friday-march-2-2018
What would happen if the posting suddenly jumped from that number to 250K-300K per day? What would happen if some of those people with 100K SP, instead of downvoting 10X a day, posted 10 times a day and upvoted themselves? What if everyone tripled or quadrupled the number of posts each day?
The answer is you would have something similar to a DDOS attack. We would see overwhelm.
Here is a solution that takes care of the problem without attacking anyone. The reward pool would be diluted to the point one or two individuals could not counteract it. Remember, one can upvote oneself 20 times a day, but not at 100% unless willing to exceed the 20% daily replenishment limit. Anything after 10 means personal dilution.
The other aspect to this is everyone needs to upvote their daily 20% that they get. Whether it is comments or articles, both count as part of the author pool
This approach ensures that an article like I described at the start of this post is never written. We want to make STEEM an attractive place for people to come. Activity is something that does that. Since we have a situation where many deem the reward pool being unfairly tapped, I feel this is a proactive solution. More posts will only garner more attention for this blockchain and give the search engines more to index.
If 10 posts are taking too much with 70K daily posts, then let us triple or quadruple the number of daily posts to make those 10 less of an impact.
That way outside eyes only see the increase in activity necessitating another uplifting article on a site like Bloomberg Technology without realizing their was a situation to begin with.
Form a marketing perspective, it is not a good idea for a start up entity to get a negative reputation. Why not approach this from a positive aspect and make sure everyone wants to be here?
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