No but more importantly the entire series (including the people-rank posts) isn't worth $12000 and most certainly does not add $12000 of value to the Steem ecosystem.
As I have said many times, founders posting platform updates (and let's be clear, Dan writing about his plans to redesign the Steem voting system is a platform update, whether he disguises it as political philosophy and claimed not to have been writing about Steem or not) getting high rewards is exploitative and impairs the ability of Steem to reward other users by depleting the reward pool.
At this point, most of the damage has already been done and this one post is just the icing on the cake. I am undecided whether or not I will be downvoting it closer to payout.
Oh, and those of you claiming that the post shouldn't be downvoted regardless of its value because it isn't plagiarism or spam clearly did not get much value from the post.
By downvote do you mean flag?
Yes. That's the only way to down-vote currently.
"downvote" a flag should be used for much more serious things on a platform advocating against censorship, although it is not censorship, it can quickly restrict users from seeing or wanting to engage with such content
That was my point. If they call it a downvote they shouldn't make it look like a little flag. We've all been on the Internet for a while now, a bit too late to retrain everyone on what a flag means.
While platform announcements / discussions should not be rewarded, there's value to their visibility. This series is certainly not worth $12,000, but it's important for the users of the platform to know what a co-founder is thinking about.
The simplest solution would be an "Announcement" tab where all voting is disabled. Another possible solution could be a way for low value posts to trend based on their importance rather than SBD generated. Reddit has the "controversial" algorithm which makes posts which have a strong mix between upvotes and downvotes. I suppose that makes sense - if something is so polarizing it's probably worth checking out. Similarly, perhaps an equal number of whales could come in and downvote these announcements, yet they would be visible on the trending page.
I agree and we have discussed precisely these issues for months. A feature to disable rewards on a post was added two months ago but is not being used.
There are many ways one can conceive of announcements and communications from the developers being made available to users without direct monetary rewards. Somehow virtually every other startup business and software project manages to do this and indeed I dare say that none would consider a founder drawing on a promotional fund to do so (for example entering these blog posts in a writing contest sponsored by the company for its users) to be appropriate.
Possibly. If you are an investor looking closely at the system, or if you happen to be interested in the theory and philosophy of voting systems, they you might find this series interesting and vaguely relevant. But merely as a 'user' of the system, you are probably a blogger putting up your recipes, photographs, makeup videos, art, restaurant reviews, opinions about the direction of the economy, etc. in the hopes that you get support from your followers and may or may not get rewards. In that case, you probably neither find a lot of value here nor are likely to even read or understand most of it. (Several people have explicitly commented on voting despite not reading it and others clearly, from the content of their remarks, have not read and understood it.)
There is a place for everything. High in trending with rewards draining the pool day after day is not it.
Interesting - so the feature to disable rewards already exists.
You are right - this series in particular will not interest most people on Steemit. Those who are involved closely would be following Dan anyway, the post need not trend at all.
However, broad announcements do need to be visible. Major new features, significant changes in reward algorithms, etc. Those are relevant to everyone using the platform.
@smooth That's definitely a good point and is even separate from the problem with people being able to self-upvote.
I think the question you are really asking is:
I think it is clear you do not think so and I would be in agreement - it could be seen as another form of kickback and be used as ammunition by the "Steemit is a scam" crowd of people.
Obviously if @dantheman wants to post articles as a blogger on here there is nothing stopping him (nor is there anything wrong with that) but it might also make sense if official announcements are made on a separate channel to disentangle the two.
That would also remove any conflict of interest and keep his views separate from those of Steemit as a company. It might not seem important now but it will be in the future when this is a much bigger company and has the eyes of the world and the media upon it.
I'm actually really glad we are having these discussions. We may not agree on everything but we all care about the future of Steemit and by working together we can ensure that it has the best possible chance to succeed.
I mostly agree and I have never downvoted his 'blogger' posts, though it isn't impossible in theory that those too could be abusively and excessively voted especially if he and his co-workers and friends are voting for them.
However, a lot of times the 'blogging' veers into areas that are inextricably tied up with his official duties as the Steem lead developer. If he is blogging about divorce that is one thing, but blogging about blockchains and voting systems is another very different thing. The latter, especially, should not put him in a position of personally enriching himself by using his position to compete for rewards with the very users the system is trying to attract.
Perhaps he should create a normal "blogger" account without all the steempower? It would allow him to have the same level of "voice" as other bloggers without the payout distortion.
@smooth That's why I think the self upvoting should be removed and the official announcements and personal accounts should be entirely separate for Dan.
Then there will be no confusion and no possibility of "self-enrichement" as you call it (which is a better term than kickbacks lol).
So both problems would be solved and it is a pretty easy solution.
@thecryptofiend it seems to me like all that would accomplish is allowing site admins like dan and others to upvote their personal posts with their "official" accounts and their official posts with their personal accounts.
@dantheman, for example, isn't even dans biggest account, voting power wise. And i suspect that nearly every big whale has a similarly large proxy account.
I agree with@thecryptofiend, down voting should be removed to avoid an unfair advantage to large players voting for themselves and inflating unnecessarily steem dollars. There is no information value in seeing someone's upvoting it's own posts, in my view.
Well said. Platform announcements, solicitation for community feedback regarding the platform really should be reward free. Personal blogs I won't weigh in on... but you make a great point.
Sorry @smooth if I sent you a message about a woman that needs help. Just couldn't help it.
I must disagree. @dantheman is abiding by the protocol of the blockchain. You seem to want to create arbitrary political rules that aren't enforced by the blockchain. You are free to turn Steem into a political clusterfuck if you want. I certainly won't complain :D
What about all other posts in the meta category: posts about new features in the GUI, new third party tools, explanations how bots work, presentations on Steem statistics etc? If you think the devs should not be allowed to earn anything from "posting platform updates", then, if we want to stay consistent, all other similar posts by other people should also be treated in a similar way.
I find @dan's posts quite useful. Most of them are not pure announcements - they give me a valuable insight about @dan's motivations, explain the whole context, and explain what problems he identified and why he had to reject alternative solutions. If they were pure announcements, then yes, they don't deserve much payout. But these are not just "platform updates".
So, you think a few short posts about how voting philosophy is informing evolving designs for the Steem platform are a good use of $12000 from the reward pool, as opposed to, say, rewarding 120 good-but-currently-unrewarded posts $100 each? You are entitled to that view, but I respectfully disagree.
We must admit that almost all financial rewards here in Steem are disconnected from the "real world" value. Yes, $12000 is well overpriced if we compare it to the outside world prices, but so are many other posts and comments, including mine.
I think it will be very difficult to draw a line between platform update announcements and educational blog posts describing somebody's thought process. For me, @dan's posts fall more or less half way between those two extremes.