the problem is due to the concentration of steem wealth in the hands of the few.
had steem done an ico this woudn't be happening.
they need to do an airdrop ASAP or someone is going to fork/clone this and do it right.
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Main problem is not whales but incentives, the way steem works now is people upvote only thread with many upvote and only popular people.
dan should change incentives so that people actually bother to read the content they like. I have also noticed that people participate less in the discussion in a thread that won't be trending, if people only post in expectation of money it creates very fake environment which will put off a lot of newcomers. Social media is about natural interaction not money hunting.
I'd love to see the upvote buttons removed from feeds. You should have to actually click into the article and scroll to the bottom in order to vote on it. It would also be cool to decide how much power to allocate to your vote so it's not all-or-nothing (as williambanks also mentioned). I also love snowflake's idea of a trial run to try hiding the earning amounts from view.
That's a good idea. It shows you're about more than just making money.
@snowflake The problem is upvotes are default 100% and there is no way to scale it using the current front end on steemit. You have to vote via piston to give a partial power upvote.
Simple solution. Cause the upvote button to pop a popup with 5 stars, give each post a star rating. Each star is 20% of your power instead of 100% upfront all the time.
A 0 star rating would be a vote with 0 power and would cause a drag on earnings.
This requires 0 changes with steem and like 5 lines of code in steemit.
It adds a half second delay to the upvote easiness, but would allow people to give something a lot more granular than just I agree or disagree. You get a lot more say in the message you are sending with your vote and you get a lot more votes in general.
Literally, almost no changes required.
Your suggestion could definetely help but I think the best and easiest way would be to hide $ amount, and votes. Only author can view them. People can guesstimate these with trending ranking, there is no need for other people to know the exact amount earned or who upvoted and how many users did. If they really want to know they can check user's balance and history the next day. Or an alternative would be to reveal posts details a few hours before payout. If I was running the site I would even hide author's usernames on the actual post ( not in the comments) Only content matters nothing else, all other factors negatively influence curators in my opinion, I see no benefits.
dan can even try it for a few days and see how it goes, I guarantee you it will create better curation and atmosphere
Most if not all of the whales know how to make lower power votes using the CLI and do so regularly. This might be a nice feature in the GUI for whales but it does little or nothing to add value for most users so I consider it a low priority, or even a negative if it adds complexity and reduces ease of use. Anyway, there is a prototype of it in github so it will probably be rolled out at some point.
I agree. the distribution and visibility of posts should be reconsidered.
You are not only completely incorrect about the incentives, but the incentives are the opposite of what you state. When voting for something that already has a lot of upvotes (SP), the reward is tiny (an example of this in my case was the makeup tutorial, I think my curation reward on that was 1/10 or less what I might get voting a post with little reward). When whales vote for something that already has a high payout we are doing it despite the incentive not to.
You are right, I made a mistake there. The point I wanted to make which you highlighted is that people upvote posts that are popular even if there is no incentives to do so.
I think this behaviour could self correct by hidding posts information including author.
I think the issue is most people don't understand how the voting works and/or are very bad at the arithmetic so keep voting on everything that they see with a high dollar value. That said if I find something I really like and it has a high value I still vote on it out of principal even though the payout will be miniscule.
https://steemit.com/steem/@arcaneinfo/urgent-breaking-news-the-time-is-now-to-buy
Lets hope not, I like this place.
I guess you aren't aware that the new accounts on Steemit are an exactly an airdrop. Thousands of STEEM are being given out every single day.
I agree, and it would be great if it impacted... anything. I completely believe in the site, but the fact really is that it is only viewed as worthwhile to write to the whales. I like a post that gets comments and try to work to that goal. But 100 upvotes and $3.50 is hard to understand when one vote is seen granting far far more. The rules regarding voting power and curation are not at all clearly laid out for the new users steemit seeks to attract to understand, or even view. I guess I just don't really understand calling that an airdrop to the community when it does nothing to reduce the gap in voting power that exists and creates this confusion. It's an experiment though, I get it. Just thoughts.
It does address the gap, but only when there are many, many more users. Currently there are maybe 20K users (we don't know the exact number). With a million users the voting power in the hands of the wider community will be 50x larger, and the voting power in the hands of the whales will be more or less what it is now, or perhaps less since most whales are slowly selling off.
This is a beta site not only in terms of the software still being early but also in terms of the user base being very small relative to what is really needed for social media to work well. It has only been a month since July 4 when the payouts started and usage started to grow even to its current, relatively small level. Give it time.
The same thing happens with ICOs you would have a different set of rich people buying most of the coins. There is no easy solution to age old problems.