First of all, people all over the internet post for free. Most people who post on most popular websites like facebook, youtube, twitter, instagram, reddit all do it for free. I'm not trying to justify my voting here.
I'm judged on my voting just like everyone else. My voting is scrutinize and that's a good thing. Because my votes are bigger they receive more scrutiny and again that's a good thing.
If I would be voting only on myself then I wouldn't be where I am. I heed Bernie's recommendation and I heed yours too. They aren't the first comment I receive on my voting. My voting pattern are fluctuating constantly.
Most of my voting doesn't go to people who vote for me.
I am distributing a lot more $ to other people than to myself or the people who support me and this is true of most whales if not all whales.
Here's a nice excerpt on the topic.
"Whales/dolphins are greedy and only support other whales/dolphins." - Whales and dolphins are people who are taking a huge risk leaving large amounts of value in Steemit. They are inherently more valuable to the platform (at least economically) because by holding STEEM power, they are showing they believe in the platform and are willing to sacrifice security for future potential. Also, this is a generalization. Some whales/dolphins behave rather selfishly, while others give away insane amounts of value to minnows. @d-pend [source]
I'm always looking to make smart moves. Nobody is trying to kill their own investment. As you said we are all trying to make Steem more valuable and it will be a lot more profitable for all of us than any post payout.
I posted for free on Facebook many times and some of these were huge post because what I say have value but now Steem introduce money in a way that could link humanity in a way never seen before.
Also people mutually supporting each other shouldn't necessarily be seen as voting rings but people mutually supporting each other because of mutual views. I wouldn't vote for anyone if I would disagree with them on a fundamental level.
So thank you for your comment. I'm seriously glad you left that comment. It didn't fall on deaf ear. My reply to Bernie might have sound a bit weird but that's in part because I shorten the original version and didn't took enough care to explain myself in more depth.
Since the whales stopped voting there is almost no one curating posts. We have thousands of people with no shot at be rewarded, by a dolphin or whale's voting bots, regardless of the quality of their content.
It is insane to think that all the delegated power that was given out by @ned is being used to upvote the voting-ring, removing even more rewards from minnows.
To add insult to injury most people in the voting-ring just post screenshots of other websites for their daily payout and things are getting so bad that last week one guy in the voting-ring copy and pasted an entire book to make a quick $250 payout.
Steem has the potential to make all of us extremely rich, but I can't see that happening if this continues.
@gonzo, that is an extremely broad brush you are painting with, you have no idea what many of the whales and dolphins you lump into one general category are doing to grow this platform and everybody's investment.
True there are abuses but rather not generalize.
If "milking it" was my strategy why have I, out of my own, cut down to posting a maximum of 3 times in a week? ...specifically to leave plenty of voting power for others.
That means of a potential 77, 100% votes per week I use a whopping 3, let me repeat that
THREEon my own content. That's perhaps 5% of my voting power per week... the rest is spread around on all kinds of projects and growth areas.If you are looking for abuse, look elsewhere please, and don't generalize. There are many others getting a far greater and more selfish return on their investment ether directly or indirectly from the reward pool.
And incidentally, it is their investment in SP and the rules allow them to use it as they wish.
Is it the best for the platform if they use it selfishly?
I'm not in a position to judge since this ecosystem and user-base is too complex for anybody to claim they have all the data.
Anybody who doesn't like the way things are is welcome to get SP and do things differently.
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks"
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@gavvet
I don't want you to feel like this is an attack and I have no interest in looking into your account for other abuses like you suggested.
My only concern is about the voting-ring that is claiming the majority of the rewards pools and the trending page for themselves, which should be your main concern too.
You're right, I did notice how, all at once, most of the voting-ring began limiting their weekly posts, but I think it just isn't enough to stop the exodus.
Why don't we try an experiment where the voting-ring limits their payouts by 50% and use the other 50% to curate quality posts to see if we can keep more people on Steemit and to see if this will increase the value of our holdings?
Steem will be continuing to trickle down from whales to people who have less Steem. Steem is linking us in an interesting never seen way and I look forward to its future.
All transactions on Steem are voluntary and there are already mechanisms in place to curb abuse and these will get better with time.
If feel like this is a bit hijacking Gavvet comment section so I think it might be preferable if we speak on the chat of discord about this. Nonetheless I'm open to any option you chose.
I'm not looking to make myself extremely rich while injustice is rampant in our society and some people create money out of nothing while we scrape for crumbs. I'm looking to make our society more fair and thus more decentralized first and from this people will get what they merit.
Hopefully we won't leave anyone starving to death because there's no need for this. There's no need for billionaires with 20 mansions all across the globe, there's no need for people with billions of dollars "fructifying" in some offshore bank and their will never be.
I look forward to help us look for more righteous goals no matter how difficult they might be to achieve. It's not easy. We've been thinking about money all our life.
I still stress about money even thought I made more this year than probably my last 5 year combine and this is irrational and while we Steem and try to make Steem a better place there are still people dying in horrible horrible situation and there are still people printing trillions of dollars out of nothing...
Steem won't solve everything in one day nor can it solve everything but it can surely help and all this is a process.
As I've said most whales are giving more to others than themselves or close friend and sure some whales give to themselves and friends and there's people doing it more than others...
Step 1: @teamsteem, I appreciate your positive content and effort on Steemit. You stay composed and constructive when people bash based on their personal opinions.
Step 2: Some random thoughts/venting triggered by your comments above. Probably not valid for this main blog, but hopefully for this sub-string.
I think whales who want to help Steemit grow (you're certainly one of them), should be able to sign up to have a small school of minnows assigned they can get to know, support, mentor, and upvote appropriately to help build them up. Bringing the minnows up to a certain level should be nice experience, and then set them free (while having the relationships to last). This would help whales focus on growing positivity instead of prioritizing negative activities. Better yet, they'll have people looking up to them so they'd be more likely to remain professional and respectful. Maybe this exists already, but I'm new and don't know.
I hate seeing people sneak themselves 100% upvotes when it's to pad their own pockets, or to try to get themselves to the top of a chain to get more attention for upvotes on a hot debate. It's greedy and becomes a popularity contest. I upvote myself for $.01-$.04 sometimes (my puny max) to try to get noticed above someone who isn't upvoted at all, as a meager effort to say "hey, please find my post", not to pad my pockets with a penny of SP/SBD.
What's worse, I've seen upvoting of quality comments on a whale/dolphin's posts at the minimum upvote %, or none at all, and then them upvoting all of their own replies down the chain 100%. Over and over, every reply 100% to them and 1% to their "host". That's sick to me and something should be done to curb that manipulation.
People also seem to spend their 100% upvotes spread around their curation reach in slivers, when they can really make a significant impact by sharing them with a few people a day to motivate and inspire them. This circles back to how the whale/school concept could help to retain a lot of new users. It's not really costing any money, just voting power and some light curation rewards.
A lot of whales get the bigger picture that getting people to sign up is the easy part. Keeping them motivated to build on the platform and grow seems to be delegated most to bots you pay for to get a small % of profit for bought upvotes. A hands on approach while the active user base is still small, can do a world of good for raising minnows into dolphins to repeat the cycle down the line.
Also, I wish there was a way to reduce the spam of people sending out "news" videos of other people's hard work in the form of Youtube videos, and thinking that citing their source in a quick sentence is called "quality posting". People are getting paid to do it every day in bulk to get payouts and there's nothing stopping them from this lazy spam. It makes my blood boil. I won't name names, but these copycats are everywhere.
Hope this can help you at all since you have the muscle to do something! Let's not have Steem just trickle down. We can all do better than that to keep the community growing!
I also appreciate a lot of the general concern for minnows by others in this thread. Thank you.
Thank Matt. I read your recommendation and I'll take them into account for what I'm looking to build here on Steem. Seriously.
I hear that, 'people post for free on other sites argument' all the time, yes they do because those sites allow them to engage with their, "friends" in a way that they find meaningful and which they don't find meaningful on Steemit. I have a daughter who tried Steemit and was hit up by Curie for big bucks but, like most teenagers, she didn't find Steemit engaging, it simply does not have enough of the features that teens like. She wanted some money; so I bought her SBD from her and she still hasn't been back.
So, the point is that most people do not post on Steemit for fun, like they do on other sites, because it lacks the relevant features, they post because it's the site where they are told that they can earn money for posting and no amount of comparing Steemit to other "free" sites will change that!
Most of the major social networks weren't build in less than a year. In that sense Steem is no different. When I came on Steemit there wasn't a personal feed. There was almost 50% less features. Yet I stayed on and I didn't regret it.
A lot of people who didn't stayed have regret it.
I think Steem will become even more difficult to get and I feel the future of social network will be based on Steem or technologies based on the same principals. I don't see how it could be otherwise. And Steem has a very good head start and people should try to make the best out of it, just like with everything in life. Nothing is promised here.
But maybe if we could all go back to when youtube started we would all try our shot at being professional youtubers because the competition was a lot less back then and Steem might give this new opportunity. People shouldn't think it will get easier to be noticed on Steem it will most probably get more difficult and Steem is probably going to get more addictive, popular and well thought out.
Note: You and most (if not all) of the others listed are powering down and can sustain your power and influence while doing so because of this voting ring.
Most whales aren't powering down and most whales are giving more than they are giving themselves or their mutual support meaning the power is being distributed away.
It's happening slowly but it's happening and as I've said in one of my previous post this distribution is almost inevitable or inevitable because of the way Steem is designed.
The initial distribution has been stated to have been done this way by Steemit Inc so as to help them create the platform they wanted to create. Note Steemit hasn't necessarily gone out of their way to invite people on the platform yet and might even have slowed down the subscriptions in the process helping those who are already on the platform.
Distribution is happening. The concentration of Steem was supposed to be even more concentrated according to Steemit plans but the mining phase lead to a relaunched that lead to a wider initial distribution.
People assume Steem are getting more concentrated at the top yet it's not the case. The best paid authors on Steem aren't the biggest whales. And the most powerful voters aren't the best paid authors either.
Power is trickling down on Steem. And the way witnesses will keep getting their support is by getting the widest amount of support.
If you think I said something erroneous let me know. I'm trying to be honest as most as I possibly can and people can look at who I am and what I try to accomplish here on Steem.