Thanks for supporting this idea and promoting it ๐ ๐ ๐ I think it is a real contender and I'm excited to see it debated more.
I see your main point here is that you are concerned that self voting, especially on comments, is likely to increase over time. This is certainly something that concerns me too. We will be looking at the data and seeing if there is any evidence for this yet, and will be watching as we go on.
Well, thanks for being part of the potential solution @personz. This is something we need to look at and deal with sooner, rather than later...
One of the more prominent and somewhat recent failures of a "social site that pays" was a little venue called Bubblews which took a dive about three years ago, due to this very same type of issue. That site's fate is besides the point here... it's the numbers that are relevant.
The project founders did a bit of a publicity tour and got pocked up by CNN, CNBC and others... and approximately 1.5 million new users were added-- in a matter of a couple of months-- to an existing base only slightly larger that Steemit is right now. 99% of those had ZERO interest in "creating content;" they were purely there to get "money for nothing," and they employed the exact same pattern of vote-begging, follow-begging, scripts, copy-paste and anything else you can think of.
Of course, the next step is that legitimate users start to leave in disgust... and the balance of "power/content" shifts... after which everything heads down the tubes.
But anyway, back to the "numbers." That was 1.5 million people. Right now we're just dealing with some thousands.
And yes, I know this because I was briefly a volunteer "community moderator" but it was too little, too late... we were SO outnumbered.
I vaguely remember you talking about that experience before.
That might be the topic of a really interesting article if it were done in a deep way, i.e. looking for any similarities of dynamics (and being honest about the differences). So the question is, why did it fail? We are all in a way here to make some money, i.e. get rewarded, and there's nothing wrong with that. But where does it go wrong? And might the same thing happen to Steemit?
@personz, I think I may actually have most of that article written and sitting in my drafts folder on HubPages... and it would have been written shortly after the site crashed and burned, so the info was fresh... I'll see if I can dig it up and create something that's moderately readable... maybe with an "incendiary" title to do with history repeating itself...
I await in anticipation ๐ Followed, looking forward to hopefully seeing it
great! I love how diplomatic you are. I am just mad right now that so much of this bs is going on......especially the massive amounts. It's gross.
Thank you ๐