Steem’s soap opera
I recently realized that Steem is a very fun to watch soap opera. It’s only natural that on social platforms people socialize right? Well and when people socialize, they from time to time disagree with each other. When one disagrees with an employer he can go fuck and fuck himself. When one disagrees with the way the democratic system is going he can cast near to useless vote and basically do the very same thing. When though disagreement happens on Steem, shit gets interesting. Don’t get me wrong. This article will not be only about making fun of it all. I will (as always) try to create a constructive feedback/criticism. I can’t tell now what the outcome of the text will be really…
Dan vs Ned
I pledge that I will try NOT TO aggrandize. I might say fun things, I might say stupid bullshit from time to time, but I will try my best not to aggrandize, since it recently became very valid reason for flagging and my aim is to get filthy rich here, not downvoted to hell of course.
Guys I have no idea what has happened behind the curtain. No one actually does. All the information that reaches us are only bits and piece of the truth. This is though what I made out from it all. None of them has been able to say “Ok guys I fucked up by doing this”, while both of them had done some questionable moves. I do not take sides lightly…
Dan
Dan
- Hasn’t done any “visible” mistake
- Ned claims that he has plenty of “evil” stuff he has done in his records and Ned currently plans to reveal them upon his death (please do not be way too curious:)…)
- He’s left Steem because he’s believed there were some unfixable problems
- Currently uses his stake to support comments on his posts and posts about EOS promotion
- Never fears to criticize algorithm of any given platform his creations compete with
- He is now full time committed to EOS which is for sure a technological powerhouse.
Ned
- Currently controls over 51% of Steem thanks to Dan and is ACTIVELY USING IT
- He delegated a lot to @dtube, @dmania, @dlive, traveling sweetie… (probably even to other platforms and users…can anyone update?)
- He is using the rest to vote and flag on will (well known for self-voting his own comment to 2k bucks and flagging post that has declined payout)
- Claims that Dan is not as righteous as he pretends to be, but provides very vague arguments in support of his claims
So basically Dan is more or less minding his own business, working on EOS trash-talking different algorithms (in a scientific way…he provides a strong arguments for his statements, it’s just my knowledge is a bit too vague to make an educated opinion about that.
On the other hand Ned is obviously trying to help the Steem in numerous ways. He has contributed a lot of power to streaming and YouTube-like platforms. @dlive for their services though demand your posting key (which is a valuable commodity for those that don’t realize it). That leads to situations that can be deemed as centralization or plain abuse. Traveling sweetie is then selling votes that are strong due to the delegated power. At least @dmania supports creation of memes - I have plenty of them at my disposal and I will not be afraid to use them. At the same time he upvotes himself to a value that most of the users will never be able to reach on the platform and is flagging votes that declined rewards, or @berniesanders who is right now one of the only whales that fucking cares about the reward pool (will get there soon). I do believe that he means to do good for Steem, I truly do! I don’t think that he has thought out the impacts of his actions well…But I may be very well wrong. Got an opinion Steemians? Share it!
Whales VS the rest
And now onto the other matter of the Steem’s soap opera. I have been a member for about a year, and this has been an evergreen ever since then (probably even prior my entrance really). “Whales have too much power”, “We don’t receive anything for our hard work” etc. Everyone here knows it well I guess. Now let me tell you what I think about it.
This is fuckin biology, life, game theory…call it how you will. It is impossible to create system where the distribution would be so “fair” to give everyone significant portion (would it even be fair? I don’t think so). Every non-socialistic/communist system will have wealthy and poor members. That simply is life. We should look at the greater good here. It is because of those evil whales that poor users can profit from the system. The system wouldn’t have any value whatsoever, if there were not millions of dollars flowing in. And guess who can afford to make such a huge contribution to the system. Well of course the whales. And for that they definitely deserve to have bigger power than all of us that only bring content to the table. Content is nice, important etc., but without the money flowing in, it would be content worth of few cents. The mere existence of whales is not evil. Actions of some of them are…
Whales VS Whales
There are sort of good and sort of bad whales. Let me elaborate. There are whales heavily concentrated on short-term business plan and then there are those that are heavily concentrated on long-term business plan. Short-term means multiplication of tokens as much as possible and long-term means sacrifice the ability to multiply the tokens more in an effort to increase overall value of the platform (therefore the value of the tokens).
The problem is that concentrating heavily on multiplication of tokens usually goes hand in hand with “bad” moves for Steem. That is why we see the same users on the trending page and that is why we see so much reward-pool-raping. It simply is profitable. It does make the new tokens go in your way.
The good whales then concentrate mainly on rewarding poor users (looking at you @sdnbox :P). That is super important of course, but we also need to adress those that are gaming the system. The flagging whales are then mainly punishing non-whale users. It is a good strategy because minnows and dolphins are not capable of returning fire, but it is not what the platform needs.
The Steem is broken and awesome at the same time. Users like our greatest crypto analysts can wreak havoc on the platform. They can plainly steal thousands of dollars DAILY while no one, but the whales can do anything about that. Well the wealthiest whales are fighting their own battle (minding their own business or upvoting their comment to 2k bucks, while none of them is “pure evil” type of whale) while most of other whales are busy seeking the best multiplication-of-tokens-method. That leaves @berinesanders and @transisto (maybe even some others, but they definitely don’t really try to make their moves visible) to battle horrendous amount of whales that are damaging Steem by their actions or mere inactions. At the same time SMT is coming, so many physical and virtual projects are being created thanks to Steem Blockchain (and @sndbox...check us out!). So many good articles are being created every day and Steem has become one of my main information sources out there because of that.
We need the Whales to address abusage of other whales. We NEED the whale-wars, because no one else can stop the abuse of whales anyway. Linear rewards are great and pain in the ass at the same time. They do allow easy reward pool rape and that can ONLY BE STOPPED BY FLAGS. The strength of flags count though. Please whales, address the abuse and let us – the poor ones – choose our battles and fight spam and shitposts.
Conclusion
Steem in its current form (linear rewards) is IN DESPERATE NEED OF FLAGS. We don’t need Ned and Dan to fight their own war. We don’t need whales concentrating only on puny accounts that are trying to earn few dollars here and there by spamming or copy-pasta posts. We need to choose the battles wisely. Ordinary users need to battle abuse of ordinary users and whales need to address the abuse of whales. We should not blindly believe that everything is love and roses here. The platform can very well collapse (meaning its market value) when the Altcoin bubble falls off. We shouldn’t think that Steem has reached a perfect form or anything like that. We shouldn’t rest on ones laurel’s since Steem is close to its ATH. The job is FAAR from complete. If we want Steem to work and prosper, we should at least think about what I have just said. If you have done just that and disagree with me please do share your arguments? Don’t fear to argument in comments. Will definitely not flag you for that:D.
