Is Actual Human Work from 'Proof-of-Brain' the Reason Steem Doesn't Get More Investor Attention Compared to Other Mining Cryptos?
When it comes to investing in something, people don't want to have to do work. Steem was originally promoted as a content rewarding platform. That means you have to do work with your brain. You, yourself, actually have to do work, not passively do nothing. Either post or curate to earn.
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To get more crypto coins, investors don't want to do work to get it. If they want to get more of other crypto, they just have to mine for it. Proof-of-Work isn't human work. The computer does the work. On Steem, to get more STEEM, you had to either create content, or curate content.
There was mining originally on Steem, but that was done away with. I think for the better, as the people doing the work to create the content (post and comments) on platform and those who evaluated it to reward it should (curation) be the ones "mining" it through the Proof-of-Brain metric where consciousness is doing the "mining", not a computer.
That was annoying for those who didn't want to do work to get more. To get around doing work to curate and be reward, there were bots introduced early on. This way investors could not do work and get curation rewards. But that wasn't enough for some. They wanted more return for investing in the token.
So, to solve the work problem for people who don't want to do work to get more STEEM, vote selling came about. Now, investors don't need to work to keep getting more tokens, they can just sell their votes and get rewarded doubly for the sold vote and for the curation rewards.
With no-work passive mining gone, now vote selling is the new way to just let bots do the work for you, supplanting the autovoting autobot passive curation for rewards. One third, 30% of SBD and curation has been going to vote selling bots. They are making a lot of money now, sitting back, not doing work while others do the work.
The Steem platform has a lots of people doing the work to create content and make the platform what it is, while few people get most of the reward. What do you think the ratio is? 99% of people doing the work, and 1% getting most of the rewards by doing nothing except selling their votes?
At least before, the high SP power players would manually or autovote for content and not sell their votes, meaning more people got rewarded without having to buy votes. That way of the platform is almost dead compared to how many sell their votes.
On other crypto blockchains, there is mining, and there is no way to sell votes to just make more money passively. On Steem, there is no mining, but selling votes is the new way any level of investor thinks they will be making Steem "great". I've been saying the opposite. If more investors come in just to sell their votes, it's not going to make Steem great at all.
Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.
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You see one can’t use investment to replace laziness. One’s investment doesn’t give one a damn reason to be lazy. Yeah truly steem was promoted and still being promoted as a content rewarding platform and in the true sense of it , that’s the way it is . Investments are not contents but so many had chose laziness over contents and letting their investment earn for them.
If one’s investment could bring so much of an income, then it means adding content to it will only make you grow. So steemit is actually a content rewarding platform that had created investment opportunities to enhance growth. But it is the opposite .
Yeah, things are a bit twisted from the original goal... :/
I think you hit the nail on the head. I disagree profoundly on the proliferation of bots on this platform. Most of the bots are utterly useless and I think it brings the platform down in reputation to just be a mass of bots.
That being said, I have found one bot that I think is worth keeping on the platform for myself personally @trufflepig they promote posts that others wouldn't normally see depending on the number of votes it receives and the payout it's currently got. I've found a few people on there that I now follow because of it so I do find that valuable.
For others that are trying to spread good crypto related ideas, there are reSteem bots that I think are valuable in the right circumstances @crypto.piotr has found some that he's gained followers from because they shared his posts. That I find valuable as well for the right people; not for me personally but I can understand their value. I find the reSteem bots far more important than the useless vote bots.
It's ultimately the way society is going, I think. People are lazy. There is too much to look at to get the rewards they want so they want a program to do it. I can proudly say that my meager rewards, followers and reputation are from my personal work without using a single vote or reSteem bot/service. I don't have a high value account but I think I appreciate reading the content more than just making money. Making money is the best incentive for me to be on here doing any type of blogging or reading that I would normally, but it won't drive me to utilize the bots I think it ruins the point of this platform for me.
I agree with your comment @cmplxty
Small correction: people living legaly in developed countries are getting lazy. This world is still full of hard working individuals but those are usually immigrants or regular people from many struggling countries.
But generally you're right.
And that's why I value your person so much buddy :)
Ah yes my apologies. I should have said it differently, people in western countries are lazy. It’s all about a ‘get rich quick scheme’ instead of contributing to the overall positive atmosphere of the platform.
Steem platform don't allow mining but it allows to earn regular income by becoming a witness. Witnesses are similar to miners, with the difference that they don't mine Steem. On the other hand steem has great chances for the investors to invest and earn as the investors can earn by simply hodling SP and earn interest on their hodling. They can also use their SP to sell votes, automatic upvote contents or providing SP on lease. These all things are similar to earn without doing much.
The real difficulty is for the people who are being used as guinea pigs. These guinea pigs work a lot and in return they get crumbs so that they may live anyhow. These guinea pigs' hard work is meant for the big whales and their bots. It is very easy for the owners of bots to earn without doing anything. They have set their bots and then their work ends. Bots earn much earlier (before casting vote) while the content creators has to wait for a whole week to get something. Bot owners are always in profit while it is possible for the bid senders that he might not be able to get his bid amount back after 25%curation reward which also goes to the bots. So, it is a win-win position for the bots while for the bid sender it remains a matter of luck.
Steem platform was designed to attract rich and powerful people who could rule this platform. I think the developers were successful in their quest. They have created a platform which is the most in-equal platform and system in the whole world. Even North Korea is better than in this position. I have tasted this platform and I am saying this after seeing all these things here.
Yes, it seems to be playing out that way :/
Why is it worse than North Korea? LOL... strong statement ;)
Months ago an user (I don't remember his username) scientifically figured out that if steemit would have been a country, it would have been the most inequal country in the world. In fact the inequality index was so much large for the steeemit that no real country can ever match it. There are only a few who have millions of Steem while others are living in 'utter poverty'. That's why I compared it with North Korea.
I have been here 113 days and for at least half that time I spent pretty much clueless. I expected a learning curve but not such a steep one! I was 'promised' reward for effort but figured out after 3 days that wasn't exactly true. I had no one following or voting for me. But that was okay, I enjoyed the people I was meeting.
Yesterday I read a post by @guiltyparties that said 5% of posts are original content, the rest are plagiarism.
Your post here has opened my eyes even more!
If people aren't posting or curating, and 95% of all posts are plagiarized, and people are buying votes rather than earning them, this doesn't bode well for the platform.
I believed Steemit has a lot of potential. I have invested fiat to raise my voting power, to be more of a participant. Now I have to wonder.
If that's the case... then no, it's pretty shit isn't it :/
Yeah, be careful investing hehe. We never know what will happen, if it goes back up or not. I'm surprised when it does go up apart form when bitcoin goes up... as I don't get why it does with all the problems... I think it's another investor who also has little grasp on everything, or knows about vote selling and wants to do that to get some ROI each day
This is my first experience with cryptocurrency. When I invest in a stock I set a limit on how much I will spend and I'm doing that here too. When I invest in a stock I'm trusting that the people who run the company know what they are doing. And basically that's true here. Except that the 'management' here set the rules and change the rules and the rest of us try to keep up. I read a comment where the person said they wrote off their investment from day one and I've found that keeping that attitude is very helpful!
There's also a lack of rules... anything goes pretty much :/
You have a point and I sometimes think of Steemit as a Wild West town where the 'bad guys' get away with whatever they come up with in the way of scamming the system and there are very few 'good guys' with any power to stop them. ('Guys' being a general term and not limited to men!) So yes, in that sense anything goes!
One of the promises Steemit makes is that content is uncensored. And although plagiarism is against the rules and #cheetah does its best, there is no real recourse except for downvoting. (As I understand it.)
The rules I was thinking of are along the lines of how payouts are calculated (i.e. dustvotes) and paid (no SBD as of late) which average users can't influence. For us it's take it or leave it.
I really appreciate the kind of analysis you do!
You can always tell by the actions what ones position is here. I do think though that ultimately the responsibility for this lies in the math that allows it. They are trying to keep the investors happy until either SMT is rolled out, or an app (perhaps like SteemPress) brings mass adoption driving the demand up like we saw with the Ethereum model. We are simply the guinea pigs meant to showcase what is possible until someone else with more vision comes along and makes the millionaires into billionaires.
You're absolutely right, @Practicalthought .
My plan has been to write content and publish it, hoping to slowly gather followers who are real people, such that I can someday make a living. I'm not greedy, but it's not a secret that you need $50k+ per year to be able to live even the most meager life. It's not greedy to want to be able to make enough money to live, so I most certainly hope that my efforts pay off someday.
But there just needs to be that demand you speak of first, right?
Someone else to come along and make a killer app that attracts people?
Yeah, if you think about it it was all the projects using ERC tokens that made it so valuable. I really thing the Steempress could do huge things if the word gets out. I am thinking too based on the plans for HF20 as far as ease of signup that it will help future projects. That has been a real killer for them when people are waiting so long to use the available interface and give up.
Really annoyed at the people still thinking to be helping by selling their votes, you are not helping! you are destroying the economy and turning steem into any other pos coin. The rewards you claim for doing nothing are no longer there to reward posts.
But what can be done? Is there any way to find out if there is a human doing the voting? Because then we could just fork steem and implement it.
The only other idea would be negative delegation to shut the bot down.
Solution that involve "just forking steem" are not viable if you intend to have lots of users. It takes many full node servers to cycle between to handle the load of many users, which takes lots of money ;)
The way to determine if a vote is done is to see if anyone sent sbd to vote a post by checking the memo or transactions and snd sent to validate it as a vote buying, and then match that with votes received by that account.
That works now, but payments would not need to be in sbd. They might switch to monero and communicate which post is used with p2p encryption.
I think there may be a fundamental problem that in a free market people will always be able to buy votes someway.
I think the fall in price of STEEM and SBD is putting some pressure on the use of bots combined with the general tumble-weed of lack of activity here in recent weeks. This is no bad thing for the longer term as it flushes out the deadwood.
I can see a brighter future where decent content producers come on board once SMTs etc come online and prices drive back up again - but that'll probably flush out the rest of us middling content producers...lol!!!
Flushes out the deadwood, eh? I like that.
I'm just a poet and philosopher trying to get by, but it's tough. I see all these cheap ways of making money, but meh. It's a lot of work to do no work, you know? I'd rather just keep writing stuff for real people to enjoy, even if it's less profitable.
You'll be rewarded long term. Keep keeping on.
I love to see how responsive you are @stevelivingston
Interesting point of view ... :)
Yours, Piotr
As @practicalthought i think we are the guinea pigs for this platform and the steemit we see now wont be the steemit we see in a few years from now. The entire concept of steemit is still lost on many who join it and will take time to wrap their heads around it, there is also a need for lots of improvements both in logic and UI and i'm sure the community that sticks around will have great influence in the direction the platform takes. Thats what gets me excited to keep contributing on steemit
Things will improve in some ways, but other things may get worse. There weren't bidbots to sell votes before, but there are now :/ and they will be here forever...
Great Post! I definitely agree... Essentially, if the value of steem is in quality content, isn't this circle jerk of vote buying and selling actually detrimental to the value of the platform, and in turn the crypto?
I think so... but others just think about the ROI they can get. Quality content is a joke to many popular people here, they don't care, they just want more quantity of users, not quality. Well we have 3-4x more users now than over 1 year ago. And more powerdowns that power ups. So what does that show? That vote selling drew ppl to exploit the system then cashout when they could? Or that it actually works for the betterment of the platofrm? Or another thing?
Actions and results speak louder than words or intent!
Honestly, a good dip in the value of steem may separate the wheat from the chaff... unlikely though.
Even the most fatty whales do not have so many SPs to create such powerful bid-bots.
All the bid-bots' power comes from delegation. Just take a look who is the main delegate to the most popular boosters, and you will understand who is interested in this state of things, as it is now. There can not be "too much money" for STINK