The initial model of Steem was about people having to buy Steem and powering it up, in order to influence the visibility of posts. This is obviously redundant with the introduction of delegations and bid-bots/vote-selling.
The reason why Steem isn't working out for authors isn't that they're not earning enough. Heck, even 25% (instead of 75%) would be a lot more than most people gain when writing on WordPress. It's sadly somewhat of entitlement, that people believe authors should earn the majority of the rewards, while stakeholders are most important in this system. There will always be people interested in earning money by writing, but will there be more @theycallmedan's, buying millions of Steem? That's rare.
Instead, the reason why authors are not flourishing on Steem(it), is simply because the eyeballs are missing. But even if more eyeballs were on Steem(it), the content discovery is awful, the comment section is buggy and slow once the amount of comments gets higher. Essentially, the Steemit.com website had been abandoned for more than a year. (people are now working on it, but we still don't have communities)
So, do I want to see 50/50? Of course - why not. If it doesn't work out, we'll change it back. But we've had the status quo for way too long.
But besides the curation-debate, the biggest problem we have right now is that there is not a common view of what Steem is and what it isn't. Usually, in centralized structures, the people in charge are taking take of that, but Steem is very decentralised in that area.
Rational actors within a system will vote/do things in their best interests given the chance. That applies to witnesses and non-witnesses. I am going to argue that the 50/50 and 25/75 has nothing to do with why people aren't here.
I have been saying for awhile, Steem's problem is that everyone is relying on Steemit INC to come out with SMTs and somehow that will bring in a ton of people to the platform. Ethereum has all the smart contracts and have been fixing bugs in smart contracts for 3 to 4 years. SMTs are going to be extremely immature when they come out.
Steem also doesn't have anyone marketing anything from what I can tell its 0. The bitcointalk.org post about Steem is mostly people calling it a scam. Bitcointalk.org is a highly trusted go to for many in the crypto community, already you aren't going to get mass adoption from crypto community due to that. I'm not suggesting we go astroturf in there, but its pretty one sided with 95% of comments saying its a scam...
Steems great failure is that its poised to be a great solution to censorship and nobody knows about it, and those who do learn about it think its a scam.
Instead we see MILLIONS flocking to Minds.com and Gab and Voat, when Steem easily could have pulled in some of that crowd. I am only here because I deep dive into a lot of crypto stuff. Most of the people I talk to about Steem want nothing to do with it. I try to convert people from reddit(because reddit censors) and they look it up and see stuff about it being a scam.
Perception is reality for the (dumb)masses.
Geez I wonder why...couldn't be people being flagged for differing opinions now could it. Seems I remember you dropping by shortly after I got here to flag the crap out of me for expressing my opposing views, unless there's abuse of the system or false, misleading, dangerous information being spread people shouldn't be flagged for disagreeing with others. If I remember correctly not only did you flag my comments you ran over to my blog and flagged everything there...and I think you then proceeded to write your own article where my name was added in a bad light among others you disagreed with. It's these kinds of tactics that scare people off, it's bad enough people make pennies for their efforts when they get here it's just appalling that others with more power can take the pennies away. The way you deal with stuff you don't like is not to upvote it not gather your friends and flag the crap out of it.
You were caught copying and pasting other people's content after receiving many upvotes from our group.
I contacted and got replies from the person you were taking content from, and got the whole story from them and informed them of what was going on. Its all on the blockchain on the posts we downvoted on. You were getting upvotes from us for awhile until we noticed it, wrongly getting Steem from our group upvote by plagiarizing. We removed our upvotes from your posts and downvoted you due to your plagiarism, and masking your posts as authentically written by yourself and trying to get upvotes from our group.
@freebornangel I see you upvoted this, its all on the blockchain everything that happened. I have nothing to hide and my reasoning and evidence is in the past comments we made and post we made on why Sunlit7 was banned.
EDIT: Here is the link to the proof. https://busy.org/@truthforce/content-thieves-banned-from-iw-curation#@truthforce/re-sunlit7-re-truthforce-re-practicalthought-re-truthforce-content-thieves-banned-from-iw-curation-20180610t001509842z
You said in your comment above " It's these kinds of tactics that scare people off" we don't need more plagiarists or people copying and pasting others content here.
Yes you contacted that person but they didn't know you where talking about me, that's why I sent you their emails to me granting me permission to publish her stuff. She suffers from a debilitating illness that keeps her from expanding onto Steemit that is why she grants me a right to promote her stuff for her. I sent that same verification plus some further conversations on the matter between her and I to steem cleaners and that's why it's noted as such on any of the post that I do publish of hers so people like you don't keep pushing a lie to justify what you did. Not that I want to speak ill in any way, shape or form of practical thought since him and I have moved beyond that and I get a good sense from him now that varying opinions are healthy for a platform and we have engaged in a positive manner in that respect since, you guys jumped on your friends bandwagon not by engaging in conversation but by attacking and striking out at me in a punitive manner. I can see from how you responded here you've only slightly improved since then pushing your false narrative to try and justify the attack, the only difference is you haven't flag me for my opinion and went over and flag anything open on my blog. Even your friend Canadian Coconut has come miles compared to you. I now engage on her platform all the time without my opinions being attacked as some sort of personal attacks on people but as merely a differing of opinion, I give many kudos to her and practical thought in their restraints now to tell the difference, we may not agree but it's okay to agree to disagree, just like it's okay to move forward and find something someday we may agree on. I see you are still miles off on that yet.
Plagiarism or making money from other's content is why you were flagged because you previously got a lot of upvotes from us before we found out. Upvotes were removed and some posts flagged(less than 5 I think and it was over with). Our operation, and Steemit as a whole doesn't exist to upvote people who copy and paste other's content(EVEN IF GIVEN PERMISSION). If we all we did was upvote content other people take from others, this site would be a dumpster fire of content thieves.
That isn't how the events of this transpired, as I had contact with them multiple times to ensure that is how things went down.
I really don't know why you want to keep trying to talk to me every now and then
You sir are a liar, I didn't even have five of her post pending at the time. It is explicitly explained that SBD was being forwarded to her, that money was coming out of my own pocket in payments to her because it wasn't worth or I didn't have any real worth worth powering down, that's why when you contacted her she was confused as to who you were talking about, I paid her under my legal name not under my screen name. I always paid her more than those pennies ever added up to. There is absolutely nothing wrong with someone granting permission to another person to publish their stuff, it is well within the framework of the law. You fail miserably at trying to justify what you did. It was punitive and went way outside the scope necessary to flag me on the post upon which we engaged on, that's the real issue here, if you or anyone at your site disagreed about whether or not you should upvote my post from her that was an entire different subject and shouldn't have been woven into the dispute from another site for retaliation.
This was like a year ago and you still want to argue about the past.
Its simple, you copy and pasted other's content, our group is AGAINST that even if you had their permission, we upvoted it mistakenly and eventually noticed it was someone else's. Then we gave you some downvotes to neutralize the upvotes we gave/previously. You were then added to an extremely short list of people who were submitting copy and pasted content to the #informationwar tag, then you were banned from us upvoting you from the IW group.
You can still use #informationwar tag if you want, no one is stopping you. You just won't get upvotes from the group account.
Instead of working on that view like @llfarms and I are...
Or taking out an ad, paying for some marketing, or stopping other stakehodlers from draining the value out of our investment... our brightest minds are trying to figure out how to pay themselves for cleaning up their own investment. It's hysterical.
From the perspective of someone who has never seen Steemit it would probably be: Steemit is an ugly blog with terrible trending page and nothing worth seeing there. It's complicated as hell and not even worth using for "average Joe" because the median post is worth 0.10 $ or even less.
Until that is fixed... There is nothing to fix :D
It would be better if Steemit separates to specialized platforms with the given topics.
But... It's impossible to disrupt those established...
So the only solution is to bring Steem to those who know how to use it / make some dollars (not too little, not too much)
I like our trending page, minus a few bad actors that the stakeholders will not flag, unless someone pays them to take care of their own investment. (LOL)
What we need to add is an "Interesting" or another tab that pulls from the most active and discussed posts and those that receive votes that aren't from the known bots.
All content site allow people to promote content and everyone knows it. It's not a problem. In fact professional level content creators know the model and are used to it.
The problem is simple. When you use the internet, on a daily basis, you go to:
The key question is - why ever entering Steemit? Unless you are one of the authors.
It would be 100 times more successful if it would be something specialized, but good.
It would be also useful from the marketing POV.
The message from Steemit, Advertisement sections is:
We have 140.000 users, from 156 countries, with completely different interest!!!
From any reasonable perspective, this is a nightmare.
What / How to sell anything to those people?
Funnelling will be terrible (to nothing). This is why they can't sell banners.
For regular users:
For marketing whatever:
For investors:
Very, very tricky situation...
These are actually interesting points.
However, go take a new look at trending. Most of trending is filled with people who bought steem or spent steem and locked it up for 13 weeks to promote something.
A new project, either internal or external. A few of our stakeholder are so out of touch with our own site and users that they are actually mad about that. :)
What happened to the active tab?
We used to have that.
yeah I wonder too
And if we change it content discovery will still be bad. I've said I am for it.
Which of our witnesses will code it? How about our stakeholders? You know the ones who are always screaming at Ned to do something?
I don't think our Authors are underpaid, in fact compared to pretty much any other market with this amount of eyes... everyone here is overpaid.
But my point is can we do it or not do it? Because it isn't going to help us at all with the rest of the world.
Authors are overpaid, and still think they deserve more (even if they have no readers) as they don’t understand the reward pool or economics and are only focused on their short term upvote. Stakeholders look to Steemit Inc. to do everything, and then bitch when they do.. while doing nothing themselves.
Steemit Inc. is trying to push the community to do more (as this is suppose to be decentralized and all), when their stake is being used to upvote shit posts 100x a day, rather than those actually trying to contribute to the ecosystem (which I believe will at least improve soon).
The problem is, everyone wants someone else to do something.. rather than do it themselves (minus a few projects). Then complains of power grabs and unfairness when the few actually try to do something.
We reward the behavior we want to see around here, and we get what we deserve based on that.
50/50 curation won’t fix the issues, but it won’t make them worse either... and hey maybe we could focus on something else after 🤷🏻♀️ Or the self votes and circle jerks will continue and the doers will either keep fighting the current and keep doing, or they will finally give in and move on.
When people start thinking of Steem as a whole, and how to improve it.. as then everyone benefits, rather than just fighting over themselves for their project or personal rewards.. then maybe we will get some actual shit done.
This is a better way to say what I was saying...
Do it, don't do it... the people pushing it aren't even going to code it. They would like SteemIt Inc to code it.
:) Let's keep our 2500 inside investors happy, most of them are over paid as well.
Authors are unhappy? Maybe, but those of us who are working on this on a daily basis can find each other. Those who just want to pull money out are not needed at this stage.
Yep, totally agreeing with your points. The amount of time some of our top stake holders have spent on this (and nothing else) without actually trying to do anything to implement it pretty much is an example of what is wrong here.
Get it done, or don’t.. it won’t change anything drastically and like you said, it sure as heck isn’t going to attract people who know nothing about it anyways. Or fix some of the bigger issues here.
I think saying it will help encourage “organic votes” is comical but hey, I think people should get a return for something other than making content. So I’ve always been for the idea.
I guess I’m just over it all at the moment 🙂 Do it, or don’t.. then let’s move on.