You can check out STEEM Guild's recent post here if by some chance you missed it.
First of all, I'd like to begin with stating that this is not an attack on anybody. I added "no drama" to the headline for people looking for delicious drama. None of that here.
I've been supported by both Curie and STEEM Guild, and continue to be supported by the Guild, and I am grateful for this support. It's nice that my posts have been deemed worthy of the upvotes.
I don't know the people running these projects personally, nor do I have anything against them. I want this to be crystal clear before anyone reads further.
I've been thinking about this during the past few days, and keep coming to the conclusion that perhaps there are issues with these guilds. Even though the intentions are most likely from a good place, as a stakeholder, albeit minor, of this platform, I care about the long term health of Steemit.
So, I'd like to voice my concerns.
Recently, there was a big war on the general chatroom about the fact that Guild members receive compensation for their work through self voting with big whale accounts, which guarantees them a top spot on the trending page.
I'm not questioning the legitimacy of the reason given.
I am simply pointing out that this caused a big stir in the chat, and people seem to have an issue with this.
Why this is important?
It's important because Steemit, unfortunately, has had to battle with scam accusations right from the very beginning. People from the outside have refused to join because "it's a scam", and then people on the inside have either left or caused drama because "it's a scam".
What's important to note here is that how things are is not always even relevant, and how things are perceived is often how a community can either flourish or perish.
How the Guild self voting looks to the outsider can cause huge problems. To the outsider, the operation can show itself as an infinite cash cow for the Guild members who are guaranteed a big payout on their posts simply because they work for the Guild.
Legitimate or not, this sort of stuff is what's driven people away from the platform before, and most likely can do so in the future, as well.
The big war on the chatroom today is evidence of this. A member of the Guild noted that there are rules regarding the self voting, but since those rules are not visible to the average user, it's easy for him to see it in a negative light.
I understand what's pointed out in the post I linked: the guaranteed money is compensation for the curation work, but at the same time I can't help but think to myself that isn't that what curation rewards are for? Compensation for curation.
What I mean is that every user on Steemit reads and upvotes on posts all the time, that is the intended purpose of the platform. People can easily get upset over the fact that curating from a certain club of people is more valuable than the curating they do.
Again: it's the perception. Perception is everything.
I just don't want this to be an issue that drives people away from the platform. I want Steemit to succeed.
And this brings me to my second point. The guilds were founded because Steemit was considered unfair, and curation guilds were made to reward users who otherwise would not have been rewarded.
This included me back when I was a new user without a big following. And again I say I'm grateful. I don't want to come off as an ungrateful douche.
I am, however, a bit skeptical as to whether or not Steemit needs these guilds.
Steemit is a social network, and garnering a following on a social network always takes time and effort. When I joined, I totally expected to make next to nothing because I lacked a following. I understood that it takes networking - posting more, commenting on other people's posts, finding likeminded people, getting to know people, etc. - to gain a following and succeed more.
I currently do receive a certain amount of both autovotes as well as manual votes from people I've befriended. This is the result of some people just liking my posts, me making comments on others' posts that they've liked, and making friends on the chat.
There are people who aren't willing to go through the trouble of what it takes to make it on a social platform such as this. And I'm by no means a big user, I still make posts that don't even make one dollar - however I'm fine with that.
What's important to keep in mind here that the content I make that makes very little can be something like a review of an obscure videogame released in Japan in 1990 - on a console that most of the world doesn't even know about. Now, the post can be "good", and it's awesome if and when people feel this way, but if it's content that most people simply don't care about, is it deserving of X amount just because it was "good"? The view count can help here, and what I can clearly see from my low rewarding posts is that they simply don't have that many views. It's because it's niche stuff that most of the community doesn't care about.
And that's fine!
When I make posts like that, I do them because the subject matters happens to interest and entertain me at that given moment, the community is not obligated to pay me X amount. It just goes against the whole idea behind Steemit and stake based voting.
And don't get me wrong: if you like my stuff, I really appreciate the upvote.
I just question whether Steemit is really even being given a chance to function the way it should. The guilds are defended as necessary since without them authors would go unnoticed, which can be true, but Steemit wasn't really given the opportunity to even run for a full year to really see how things would go once the growing pains are over.
As soon as after a few months the market needed to be "regulated". And I think people may have jumped the gun a little bit. Perhaps Steemit should have been given a bit more time to sort itself out. The market should have been given more time.
And now, since the guilds are operational, we really don't even have the chance to see whether or not the market could function without them.
Unfortunately, the guilds drown out all votes, and during the short time that Curie was on a break, votes were worth a lot more than they are when the guilds are fully functional.
I think that these guilds may cater too much to people who are not willing to work hard on Steemit. They cater to the millenial attitude of "I should get everything right now".
And no, not by design, I don't think. I think that these are great initiatives, they show that support for others can form in a voluntary manner, that's really awesome, in my opinion. A voluntary "society" can create these sorts of systems that benefit others.
But I hope people understand my concerns.
We place a lot of weight, still, on the idea of a good post, and that good posts need to be rewarded, but the goodness of a post is something that is impossible to really measure, and too much "helping" may actually hurt the author.
One piece of evidence of this is the very formation of the STEEM Guild itself.
The Guild was formed because people who no longer were applicable to Curie were failing hard with their posts without the Curie votes. So, a second initiative was formed to help out those authors.
Could it be possible that Curie rewarded content that the rest of the community wasn't rewarding and wouldn't reward, thus sending out a wrong, for the lack of a better term, "price signal" with the support.
So, the authors continued to produce content that Curie upvoted, and failed since the content they produced ultimately lacked the interest received from the rest of the community.
I'm not saying this is the case, but I'm saying it's a possibility.
What to do, then? I know these operations will not be shut down, nor am I telling them to, but I raised my concerns. And maybe I, personally, would wish for at least a slight scale down. I'd like to see the rest of the community to be given more of a chance to decide what content ought to be rewarded.
Also, I think the self voting practices need more openness, and perhaps reconsideration.
Note that this isn't me at all saying what people should or shouldn't earn. I'm actually one of the posters that mainly cares about the success of his own posts, and I'm not questioning the work these people put into these guilds.
I am simply looking at it from the point of view of how can this potentially affect the community morale. The war waged today in the chat was furious. And as more and more people bring the voting practices into question, it's going to get worse. And then these people ragequit and tell their friends to not join Steemit.
And I do not want that. Nor should you.
I understand that it's absolutely awesome to be able to basically whale autovote your posts to the trending page, but the STEEM you make will be infinitely more valuable in the future if Steemit is a success.
Most people will probably think I'm an idiot for doing this, I'm shooting myself in the foot, but I'd like to opt out of STEEM Guild votes in the future.
If you like my content, please do upvote. Appreciated.
However, since I have these concerns, the way I am as a person simply means that I can not accept those votes anymore. I seem melodramatic, but this is a character trait/flaw I have. Nothing personal against the people who work for these guilds, but it would feel wrong for me to accept them. All manual votes are accepted, of course.
But I honestly also think that I shouldn't be a supported author anymore. I've made it near the top, and even to the top, of trending a couple of times now, and I receive autovotes and get engagement from prominent Steemit members.
I think I should either make it on my own, or not make it.
Thanks for the support, it's appreciated, I'm just willing to play the game by the same rules as a regular user. I don't feel entitled to preferential treatment from the STEEM Guild. The elusive "high quality" post is always completely subjective, so even though the guilds attempt to bring a form of "fairness" and objectivity onto a subjective platform, I feel this attempt will always ultimately fail because we all have our preferred authors. After all, I've been a support author for subjective reasons.
Ultimately, these guilds will function the way the community was criticized for prior to their creation: being subjective and not recognizing "objective value of certain content" - which, of course, doesn't exist in the first place.
Therefore, perhaps they are not necessary in the grand scheme of things.
What I hope to have achieved is making people think that maybe we should give the community more of a chance.
Thanks for reading.