An open-ended question to @ned and @dan

in #steemit7 years ago

Yesterday I noticed @ned downvoting @officialfuzzy posts to zero.

I tried to find out what was the cause.

I found out that @dan started downvoting @sweetsssj posts about 15 days ago.

@sweetsssj stopped posting, so did @officialfuzzy

So are these steemians pawns in some power struggle that we do not know about?

To both of you @dan and @ned , downvotes are not private they are public.

People are not pawns, they have feelings, and hopes.

You should not downvote people in that fashion using your power on the platform without giving the community a reason.

This is starting to look like guilt by association.

If that's not what it is, then give these people a decent answer.

Not only them, "We" want to know why are you playing " Judge, Jury and Executioner " ?

On a platform you guys claim to have made for libertarians.

Sort:  

Can be a winner on a nuclear war? Only high intelligent members are allowed to answer. Thank you!

It's all moot if you ask me. Graphene is already creaking with 1 years worth of UTF-8 blobs. You would know very well, @liondani just how likely it is that within 6 months the whole database will come to a grinding halt, for good.

I'm betting that the answer to the question of wtf ned and dan are doing, is probably not that complicated. They know I am right.

Thanks for that detailed information.

So the lags i see from time to time and some services not working on steemdb or other ones are related to what you said?

Yup. The architecture is not capable of dealing with this much data at the advertised speeds that @dan has been so specifically advertising about his 'fancy' graphene.

I hate to break it to @dan, but there is no way you can use C++ and Boost to make a fast database system. That would be C/Assembler and GLib or homegrown libraries.

Question:
I really think to make my old blog alive more and more, because here posts are lost if they are not viewed in 1-3 days.
Also my posts can't find them easily if i want to check them.
Can i gather information you posted here and quote them there in an article?

I would love to keep track of such good informations and that's the only good way i see. To other people can reach it also, and not be lost here.

Or better, if you can or have a full article with that, would love that more.
Waiting for your answer. Tks

C++ can be quite fast but of course Assembler and C are slightly faster. Enough to make a difference though? I'm not certain.

Code that runs fast is quite distinct from code that gets the best out of hardware. C++ is loathed by the most famous kernel coder because C++ tends to lead, especially inexperienced coders, to mistake abstractions for the physical. Abstractions are for convenience, not performance.

My main issue with C++ is it's excessively complex. My most recent study of CS was from a russian friend I met while living on the street in Amsterdam, and his obsession was functional proogramming. I am resolutely a functional programmer now, but I believe that some algorithms are better done procedurally, or using objects, but no matter what other paradigm you work with, in my opinion, if you disrespect the functional rule about messing with the data inside functions, from other functions, you make your code unmaintainable.

C++ tries to encourage programmers to make data private within objects, but it tends to lead to functions within the methods of an object, that are too broadly defined, and lead to 'dirty functions'. The object really should be broken into several distinct sub-objects but the programmer's model mingles them into one, and the bigger these 'objects' get, the more likely they are to become impossible to re-engineer once a model proves to be wrong, because 5 different methods interact with the same variables, creating entropy in the algorithm.

Entropy is death for distributed systems.

can you please explain this statement?

As a former witness operator, I have had intimate dealings with the software that runs the Steem blockchain. Since I first started working with it, back in November, and gradually getting worse until now, the rate at which the blockchain replay takes place (necessary to get an RPC server running, which is necessary to run Steem based applications), has slowed down at an alarming rate.

Note that facebook uses massive clusters of a specialised database that has the ability to break the database apart, and runs queries entirely in memory, in giant data centers. Steem's success necessarily will cause this database to grow beyond the capabilities of graphene, and even, eventually into the size of a database like Reddit or Facebook (at least, circa 2-3 years ago).

Because I was curious to understand why, it turns out that the database system, Graphene, a graph database, is very unsuited to storing the data of a forum like this. The memory utilisation becomes enormous and at a certain point, the process of creating search indexes out of the transaction log (blockchain) basically goes on for eternity.

It already goes very slow. 6 weeks ago I was trying to get an RPC up and running so I could do some development of Steem based applications. 2 weeks later, I still was unable to get one running. Yes, I stopped the process a few times through that, but I should not still be waiting for an RPC replay to finish 3 days after I start it. You can imagine how inconvenient that is with a computer basically doing nothing productive for this long, and no certainty it will ever finish doing anything. I certainly was not going to be able to do any kind of programming that required access to the database.

If something is not done soon, everything will go offline. Steemit.com, all the exchanges, and all the steem apps.

People think I am just being a chicken little about this, but just look at the situation. Poloniex trading in steem is down now for over a month. Changelly ditched steem some time ago. Only blocktrades, one of the founders, and bittrex are still functioning. The frequency of outages at steemd.com and steemdb.com is becoming alarming.

If those remaining two exchanges go offline at the same time, you can't sell your Steem.

I wish my upvote was worth more, because I am very interested in your response. Since I'm not that technical that meant something to me, but I'm still a bit unclear.

How about this. Let me ask you: What would you do, if you had the ability in order to overcome this obstacle?

just guessing I would say replace Graphene with something less resource demanding. But is that like asking a mountain to move?

It isn't that difficult, really. I mean, there is implementations of ethereum full nodes in like 10 different languages. There is just a need to reimplement.

The reimplementation, at minimum, needs to split the user registry, the token ledger and the forum/voting system, and the underlying witness/cluster membership management system need to run separate database instances, using a more suitable database.

Note that this will only allow Steem to maybe cope with up to about 1 million active users (currently around 15,000). To cope with a rapid influx of new users beyond this level, requires some massive database engineering feats the likes of which to date, Google and Facebook are the only organisations that have pulled this off.

As @andybets was telling me, he has most of the chain's posts and comments extracted into a flat file database, which is still better than it being embedded within a graph database.

There is the resources and knowledge in the community to make the necessary changes, and I expect these changes will be forthcoming over the next few months.

I am just hoping though, that someone will do something that I think should be done. Erase the premined SP, and release the vests to the rewards pool. The remainder of accounts are invested or earned stake. The profile of trending posts will entirely change, it certainly won't have Dan Larimer's opining at top trending because he can vote so much on himself that even half the other whales can't flag it down, if they work together...

Thank you for your honest opinion, it means a lot to us.

Very interesting.. this must be why @pfunk hates my botnet voting so much.. as he runs a witness node. Thanks for all the information guys!

Errrrr....Bittrex unavailable for 48 hours now...Automated Maintenance...

The period of time required for maintenance keeps getting longer and longer. This is the problem I have been talking about since November last year, that I am saying, is now becoming terminal. This is why poloniex has quit working with it, and now all you see is 'waiting on the steem team to fix the problem'. @ned just to remind you, fearless leader, that this network is losing exchangers because of the impossible to operate server software.

I have been here for more than a year, posting, commenting and curating, encouraging newbies, organised Steemit meetups....but finally decided to power down and call it a day. I only hope thete will be somrthing to trade in the next 13 weeks...I have put in a lot of work for that SP. Would like to get something out

The pressure has to be raised against Steemit. They are either going to fix it, or they are going to lose their userbase and position in the market cap ladder, very quickly. By userbase I also include developers and node operators, who are being shafted the hardest.

This is very valuable information @loki/@elfspice. I've been following you from way back and have always valued your honest opinions even though they don't praise Steem always( neither do mine ). We have to be critical and not just bury our heads into the sand. There are only few people with as long history with steem as you, and even fewer who really know the technology and can critique it. I know I can't do that.

So a big thank you for making this comment! I've also noticed the increased mainteance rate in Steemd and have wondered what the hell is the issue with exchanges and Steem. I'd love to hear more about your opinions and findings on this.

You might not at times feel welcome here, but nevertheless, you're an valuable member that has the best interest of whole rather than few in mind. Sadly that isn't rewarded here. That's at least mine perception of you, hopefully I'm not wrong!

It's pretty simple to understand really. Blockchains are designed first and foremost to be a tamper-proof, permanent record. Databases need different structure than a log to be quick to search. To confirm a transaction, there has to also be a search of the history, to ensure provenance and ownership is as claimed in a new transaction. It is not complex to implement a relatively fast search by having an index tied to the block log, but it's not an optimal search strategy.

Then, add a forum and votes to this structure and you can see pretty easily how horrendously resource consuming and processing consuming it becomes as it gets past a certain size.

Many forum applications actually use the underlying filesystem to store the files. Most filesystems have 1, 2 or 4kb filesystem blocks, which is a good size for blog posts. Usually 4kb these days. It makes a lot more sense to store posts as individual files, or, at least, using a sparse 'shared memory' type file, create 4k blocks that store one post each. Most posts will fit in one block. The actual underlying varies from 512bytes to 8kbyte blocks, so, depending on this, one can make it very efficient for retreival. A usual strategy would be to partition the storage area into several different size blocks. you could have 512 byte, 1kb 2kb and 4kb regions in your shared memory file. These then require an allocation table with the hashes and the addresses of each block/page, and retreiving them is very very fast.

But a Key/Value or Graph database format does not understand this. It should be coded so the graph only keeps merkle roots of posts, that each post is coded into a string of indexes referring to the initial and subsequent edits, with the hash, and then you do two index searches and you have the data. But I'm pretty sure that dumb people just see a text format like json and don't even consider hardware limitations.

More than likely, this is exactly what the problem is. If there was merkle trees for each post instead of the whole text in the records, it would stay fast until it gets enormous. But if all those posts are strung together willy nilly alongside other, fixed-sized data blocks, it's gonna have a pretty serious problem with indexing and exploding addressing requirements. The indexes are probably designed for graph data blocks which probably are 128/256/512byte page tables. This is gonna clog up the allocation table really fast putting 1-4kb blobs in there, you see what I mean?

I'm not native english speaker nor a professional in any way at computer science so I don't understand all the details and terms you're trying to explain and use. This is something I'll try to fix with further education and I can always come back to this answer to fully understand it at some point in time.

I did however understand(or did I?) that it's not wise to store every post as plain text data and it rather should be coded into a string that could be searched,processed and stored efficiently.

Thank you for the detailed answer!

If you have been around for a while you may remember back in the day that there was a time you could only put 140 characters in an SMS. Then someone devised a method to string them together (it's a bit like a blockchain, funny enough). Basically, in the database, this is how graphene is probably storing the posts, as strings of 256 bytes, normally large enough for any graph data.

This is not a sustainable method of storing large blocks of data, not least of all because it's going to walk all over the block size boundaries.

You may have bumped into a problem of a similar nature with the FAT32 filesystem, and a large video file over 4Gb in size. The filesystem cannot do this because it hasn't got enough space to store the map of where all the pieces go.

It's starting to feel Steem was just hastily put together using tools available and without that much thinking for the long term (+5 years and beyond).

Doesn't really make me want to put money to EOS at all.

How familiar are you with Ethereum? I'd like to hear your view on it.

Hehe... Pickin the ol' noggin...

Ok, ethereum uses merkle trees extensively, what this means is a bit like the graph database issue - it's only intended to store small blocks of information, and then it has secondary stores to store other things. This is the essential underlying principle of Ethereum's data storage strategy.

In these larger blob stores there can be virtual machine binary code for executing smart contracts, or, any kind of data at all, basically.

The issue that I see happening in the long term with Ethereum has to do with the blockchain getting stupidly long and there is no pruning method for reducing this problem. I think part of how it will extend-and-pretend for a while is by shifting sidechains into that storage area that is managed by the smart contracts. But this is going to have issues eventually with the cost of processing all this data via a virtual machine, and the inherent limitations compared to native code. I'm sure programmers are already devising idiot schemes how to clog ethereum's transient data stores with so much crap and putting so much load on processing that the Gas currency becomes so expensive that nobody can use it anymore.

Well, I think that's already a looming problem, and I believe you will find somewhere even that Dan Larimer has even pointed this out. I'm pretty sure he's doing the hammer-and-nails thing with his zero transaction fees idea, but probably missing some important point that is gonna bite EOS in the ass... once he's run off to his next thing. Or the bahamas.

Sounds like l need to powerdown and invest in other currencies until @ned invests in better infrastucture.

I don't envy the position @ned is in, one bit. Caught between premined super @dan, and the rest of the preminers, and the ethical and legal position that this puts everyone in, and the fact that they still will bleat 'it's mymymymymymy steak'...

I know, I keep reminding myself this site is a social experiment...thank you @elfspice.

Interesting.

Tic tac toe, Wargames showed us there are no winners :-(

Cg

don't know if I'm "intelligent" enough to answer, let alone "highly", so I'll just "not answer" this...

Haha good one !! Me too !!😂🐈🐱🐈🐱

I see what you did there. Well-played ... or rather, well-not-played lol

ROFL - Only High Intelliweenie Answers. Hahahahahahaha

hahaha.. good one

Haha...made my day with your pic :D

I'm not sure why you're assuming that this is a @ned vs. @dan war, or that @sweetsssj stopped posting because of a couple flags. She was still making $500+ per post and I didn't see a bunch of Dan flags on her anyway. The largest one I saw was on a post that still received over $900.

Did you ask either of them why they were downvoting before speculating on it?

I was just checking out her blog and I have to say, even if she got downvotes, I would still not mind being in her shoes with the payouts she's getting!

I didn't know there was a lot of flagging going on. Here I was thinking it was okay ever since HF19 hit. can't really find out much about the reasons though, so I guess I'll stay neutral here :-)

Facts are for later, speculation first lol. I'm know I'm finding some of these posts about the subject entertaining.

If it were a minnow I would be amused. From a witness, it is not amusing at all.

Good point @ats-david I also posted about this same issue today in my blog post and hope that it get resolved. Thanks a lot for your great comment.

@sweetsssj was traveling to another wonderful and exotic, incredibly expensive vacation location. She is back now....

Haha....yes, even first class needs 'flight mode'

I tried to find out what was the cause.

I think this implies he did try and find out . . I guess a Ned downvote will always attract a lot of attention, I hope it isn't part of some kind of war though.

Cg

OMG youre rright, who KNOWS what happened maybe it was even a mistake?? and yeah they obviously didnt flagat full power because @sweetsssj posts and reputation would be lower, right??

Oh this is a huge relief, also, how can you even see the list of flaggers when the list ends anyway? You have to use steemdb or busy.org right? I mean theres no option to even see the list of upvotes it just says "and 440 more" like it does here up on this post when you click the people who upvoted

Of course @officialfuzzy's and @sweetsssj's posts are of good content and Quality. But I have seen so many other very very good posts which got only a payout of a few dollars. So I think downvoting is a possible way to adjust the payouts. If a follower of the named authors notices a post which has already apotential payout of several hundred dollars, is it clever to upvote it further??? Why dont these people search some good, but undervalued posts and make some new authors a little bit more happy?

Hmm this is not the case with @officialfuzzy post , all money from them go to the people ............... Chek the posts they are giveaways !

He was flagged one day after often having several posts on trending at any given time. I respect the work he does also, but are his posts the most valuable posts on SteemIt... EVERY DAY? I think not.

Intresting opinion about , acording the trending page . There are several people posting and earn big but no one was flaged even they have 2 or 3 posts per day . The one who get flaged is the ONLY one who give this money back to the comunity and to the minnows . ...........

I like him and the others, so I wasn't comparing anyone to any one else. I was just pointing out a member's work can be valued and appreciated without trending every day. :)

The difference is im using payiuts to build things...not to cash out and buy stuff.

Are the payouts controlled by one user or do multiple people control the account?

Its not a voting account...but it gives tokens out to people who work for steemit, and any other "partnerships" ned might see fit.

All this would be ok to me if he had never used it to try to get me to sell out to him

Actualy i point many times about the unfearnes of trending page ........... at moment of post people get 200$ upvote and 3 views ? Is this any fair ? Based on what this people trend >? Coments , people intrested ................ or just MONEY !

Hey @whatsup :-)
Perhaps the solution is to fix the trending page algorithm without damaging someone. I can understand where you're coming from, but there are over 1000 people who benefit directly from fuzzy projects.

His posts are what allows the growth and development of these beneficial projects, as well as giving people easy access to all the recent information and opportunities.

Should the entire community allow the almighty god to strike them down whenever he chooses? I don't believe steemit was designed to support such actions.

Of course, if it was ANYONE else in the normal community I wouldn't have a problem with it lol. But coming from ned, that means steemit inc. is taking official actions against specific users for personal/political/opinionated reasons. Do you think that's ok?

Here is one of my many thoughts on the trending page. It is a link, but to an old post. So, Not looking for votes here. :) grins.
https://steemit.com/trending/@whatsup/seven-day-payouts-and-the-trending-page

You are right, time to give others a change to set on trending page. Those names are there for i guess almost a year :)

Personally. I'm glad. People who just post pics and stories from their vacations DON'T deserve to be making $1k a post or even $200.. All cuz what? It's some halfway decent looking woman and the men on steemit go crazy?

Or posts analyzing markets or giving opinions or doing giveaways or whatever type of crap that is.. all useless.

The reason I'm happy that posts like that get downvoted by those with massive power is because those posts are useless. They are lacking any value on this site. They simply get upvoted cuz masses of people, mostly men, like what they see. That's counter-intuitive and those people who post useless, invaluable information.. do NOT deserve to make that much money OR recognition on this platform. Simple as that. Great job Ned and Dan! Keep the useless posts from getting more than they deserve.

Who do you suggest should be the arbiter of subjective value?

"They are lacking any value "
" like what they see."

These can't be both true.

I giveaway more voting powerin my posts than i receive.

Yes, nothing is more satisfying than watching 2 oligarchs control content on a platform!

Go Dan & Ned!

Destroy everything you have built simply to save us from the content we can easily ignore on our own!

Yay!

Destroy everything you have built simply to save us from the content we can easily ignore on our own!

^that's it!

I think this is just a little bit unfair. Plenty of people feel that some big whales shouldn't be earning as they are. They were lucky (or smart) enough to get in early, or they were able to invest big, but their content isn't necessarily much better than that of a minnow, who earns $3.00 for a similar post. There might be a lot of disagreement on flagging and when it should be used. Some say it should be reserved for plagiarism, others say it should be used for curating, just as much as upvotes are used for that.

If you look at it like downvoting, so it's simply to curate good/bad content, then flagging gets a less bad rep. Plenty of people would like to downvote some content that they don't feel is very good (or simply over-rewarded by bots), but they are afraid of retaliation from a pissed off whale who can destroy their acount/reputation within minutes. I know I would be, so I use flagging for plagiarism and spamming only. I'd love for it to be called 'downvoting', placed right next to the upvote button, so people wouldn't be so scared to use it. It would feel like a fairer curating system, but that's not the Steemit we live in. In this case, we can only try to speak our mind and hope for some whales to fight our battles for us.

If we want fair, we need to change the way people look at flagging and we need to accept that it's used for curation aswell. If we want to be okay with big whales (not just Dan and Ned) ruling the platform, then we'll have to be okay with the whale war flags and hope we don't get on anyone's bad side. Flagging will simply keep its bad rep and everyone will be afraid of it.

I, personally, don't mind if > $1,000.00 payout posts with no more value than those that earn $3.00 get downvoted somewhat. I would love for that to become socially acceptable, but I know it won't.

In this case, fuzzy (in case you're reading), I don't mean your posts specifically. I really don't know enough about them to form any sort of opinion there.

This is not directed at you, but at a single point I'd like to address.

Who's content was it that helped build the platform up from nothing?

Was it the people who got here early when they were posting for months and earning nothing, yet continued supporting the platform OR was it the people who waited to see what would happen and then once they saw others actually got money they finally decided to support the platform and post?

For some that "good content" does not outweigh the continued support from those who got here early and stayed even when the price dropped to near nothing; while some others with "good content" only seem to show up when the price spikes, then tend to have extended vacations when the price is down.

Loyalty has it's rewards for some I guess and I think that's especially true for many whales/dolphins. I personally would rather support someone with mediocre content that sticks around and helps build the Community over someone with great content that post when the price is high, cashes out and leaves for 6 months until the next pump.

There's a lot more to Steemit than posting content. Behind the scenes, many of these people that aren't considered great content creators are some of the most ardent supporters and Community builders in the ecosystem.

Many don't see that part of them, because those people aren't Community builders and don't come behind scenes to help out, they just comment about content on Steemit and complain about how much in rewards someone did or didn't earn. So their perspective is skewed. :)

They see Alice, who's content is crap to them, and it's earning $300; but they have no idea Alice is in chat every single day helping out new users or fighting spam and then they complain about the rewards she's receiving.

I'm not saying that's always the case, but it is the case enough times to bring it up so that others are aware of why some with not so great content make big rewards. It's not always about the content, sometimes it's about the individual and the other things they do here and it works both ways. If someone's an ass, yet their content is great, they may get flagged to zero rewards. :)

I can completely understand what you wrote here and I agree that content isn't the only reason people deserve upvotes. Heck, I upvote people, simply because they're good conversational partners too.

You're right, some people do a lot of things behind the scenes and deserve rewards for that. I'm sure some actually get those and others don't. People don't always notice these contributions, but if they are really that invisible, shouldn't we drag those contributions out into the open more? We've got plenty of members who keep going up there in Trending. Why not have them shine the spotlight on some valuable, behind the scenes members?

What I don't completely agree on is the fact that the early birds should be constantly rewarded for being the first ones. Yes, they got in first and put their faith into a platform. However, from what I've seen, posts from the early days got crazy high payouts, compared to now. Isn't that their reward? They've managed to build up their earnings really fast here, while an average newbie struggles to even get $1.00 payouts now.

Yeah, some people are here, simply to cash in when the price is right. However, not all of our low earning minnows are new and not all of them quit when things get rought. There are plenty here that have pumped out posts every single day for over half a year and they are still struggling to get seen. They don't leave when things get tough. Yes, they vent sometimes, but can you really blame them? By now, they've been here half as long as the first members have. By next year, that difference is only a quarter. How long do the first members have to be carried on hands and feet for being the first? Who even qualifies as being the first? I'm sure if Steemit is still here, 10 years from now, all of us current members will all be considered the first.

So when is someone seen as a loyal member? I've been here about 8 months now and have never stopped posting more than a few days, due to vacation, where I refuse to go online. I help plenty of people out aswell, but I do it through comments, because I don't know how all of this 'behind the scenes' stuff works. Am I a loyal member? Or will I never be, because I hadn't heard of Steemit 6 months before I joined? Or because I'm not a programmer or other useful backstage person?

(P.S. Not meant to be personal, I'm just using myself as an example here.)

Bravo 👏🏻... Bravo 👏🏻

Up-Yunked

And I guess sports players shouldn't make millions either. Perhaps "the house" should just keep all the extra money and pay each player a steady $50,000/year regardless of how much attention and money they might otherwise attract to the "stadium"...

but I do agree with @freiheit50, that downvotes should be qualified, although in this case dan's @sweetsjjj downvote turned out to be merely a 1% downvote, versus ned's triple -100% downvotes on @officialfuzzy, which also presented no "direct objection" whatsoever, despite being orders of magnitude more impactful.

Nope. They shouldn't make anything near what they make. That money should be given to the people, those whose tax dollars generally are pirated from them to build these garbage ass stadiums.. Rarely are stadiums paid for with private funds. It's generally tax dollars.. So where's my cut for you using my money to build a stadium I didn't ask for that you're still gonna try and charge me $100 a seat to sit in?.. Are you really that much of a sheep @alexpmorris? or was that a bad joke that I just don't seem to get?...

Your name is totally appropriate, Comrade Marx.

Social Justice Warriors are on Facebook -----> That way.

PS - I agree public funds being used for stadiums is theft, but we both know that's not the metaphor people mean when they ask this question. It's about who generates the value.

totally agree that's it's an outrageous abuse to use state funds for stadiums. it's not outrageous to charge $100 a seat, if some "sucker" wants to pay that much for it. And if state funds are used, then most of that past operating expenses should go back to the people. But I GUARANTEE YOU, they won't fill $100 seats, let alone $100,000 box seats, with players earning $50K/year. If you want the "cheap seats", that's what college games are for. And ironically, I'm sure you're aware of all the crazy "college recruiting stories", because great student players equates to HUGE alumni donations...

But if you think that a sports star, or any "star" for that matter, would stick around accepting 50,000/year, when their attention and "value" would likely attract multi-million dollar offers elsewhere, that's a pretty "idealistic" worldview.

If that's how you feel, though, I highly recommend you start a career as a YouTuber. You may only make a few hundred bucks, but you can be comforted in knowing you just might be "donating" MILLIONS of dollars to the "greater good" (well, google's perspective of the "greater good", at least)...

Perhaps the irony is that most of the complaints I've seen on STEEMIT are that the STEEMIT and crypto posts seem to "eat up all the rewards". I'm personally happy to make a few extra bucks, versus the NOTHING I received posting on facebook.

Id take fiber to the home as community broadband over a stadium anyday.

I don't know much about the situation, however if it is an issue of downvoting because they feel the posts are incorrectly valued, fine. I agree a comment explaining downvote would be nice.

As far as not seeing payout related to value that is fine for now. We are new. Right now, steemit is a numbers game. But guess when this site is huge, the cream will rise. I believe the most valued posts a year from now will be held to a higher standard than today. However, this takes time. I believe in steemit. my job is to create the best quality content that I can. Perceived value will come in it's time if I keep doing my job. No need to bother that vacation posts and pretty girls make bank. I like exotic lands and pretty girls.

I agree that some posts are incorrectly valued, however I think that is not to blame the author. After all, the community upvotes it (and ofcourse a billion bots I bet).

No need to bother that vacation posts and pretty girls make bank. I like exotic lands and pretty girls.

There's a reason the sex industry makes billions, haha. It is simply what people like. But the author is not to blame. I think they should either do something about the bots, or the upvote curve or something - but punishing the author sounds kinda unfair to me..


Honestly, if they start downvoting big authors like them, they should return the favor and give big upvotes to small authors.

Time to change those names on trending page more often.

Mostly you are right. But together with the downvote a comment should be placed to tell the author and the community the reason of the downvote.

@tngflx - I agree, to an extent. I still hoped to see stories about people's lives.. Just not about constant vacationing.. About maybe their careers, hopes, dreams, daily life, likes, dislikes, etc.. I hoped to get to know more about people on here. I wanted to see stories as well, but not always what vacation you took or are on.. More like, what's your family like? How do they live? What's it like where you live? Etc.. I hoped to find more philosophical and intellectual posts, ones that actually make you research topics and give input in return. Idk, I had a lot of hopes for steemit and it's mostly come thru.. Just , to me.. I believe that the guy who's struggling in a third world country and can only manage to get on steemit once a week, maybe two.. deserves a larger chunk of what's here than someone who's living it up in luxury already at a fancy ass resort on some hardly known island.. Those people just don't deserve it. At all. IMO.

@freiheit50 - I agree, in fact. I believe that along with the transparency of steemit as far as who you are and how much your wallet holds.. should indeed carry over into downvoting posts. I might be sitting here thinking they got downvoted cuz they're useless or not worth that much.. but for all I know.. there could've been a real-life altercation between these people.. lol. Never know. On a platform of clarity though, it'd be nice to have solid reasoning behind a downvote. :)

WOW, congrats @kainmarx on that $600+ payout you received last year... I hope I too can get that lucky some day, as I have yet to come even close to such a large payout on a single post!!!

I hope you at least followed your own advice and shared most of the proceeds of your hard work among those struggling in a third world country. They need it and deserve it more. You, me and others living it up in luxury already at a fancy ass resorts on some hardly known island shouldn't keep a darn bit of it!

Link: My latest unfortunate, unjust experience with the law..

Wow!

That is some serious touche =D

Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that the 10 or 20 accounts that were mining before there was a forum (I know, fuck me right?) have a lot of unearned voting power, and these guys are the kind of dicks who didn't seem to see the irony of being a nerd and a bully at the same time. Pretty rare creatures but they'll upvote titties and trading hax all day long.

According to the self-voting crowd, it's their right to do what they like with stake. The purpose of promoting and rewarding quality, absolutely not the first paragraph of the whitepaper, is irrelevant. Get with the program!

It's funny when it's coming from someone that mostly posting about the "useless" stuff .

LOL. God forbid I've posted maybe 1 vacation post out of the entirety of my time here. rolls eyes

I'd love for you to show me all the things you consider "useless" from my blog. At least mine has variety.. instead of a bunch of the same garbage.

** - Coming from a guy who literally just posts pictures of insects and reptiles?! And enters those stupid contests I mentioned?!... LMGDFAO!!

I'm just taking your statement " They are lacking any value on this site", Have you ever see your own post? what value does it give to this site?
You better deep looking at yourself first before judging someone like that.

My posts have actual intellectual value? LOL? I'm sorry, but provoking thought in others isn't useless to me. Posting about how nice your 4 course lunch at your 5 star hotel in your 6 star country on your 7 star jet ride is complete and utter trash. Maybe what you consider "valuable" and I do are different ideas.. Cuz I'm sorry, but yes, my posts (most of them) actually make people think about ideas or concepts..

the point is, ironically, that the community judges what it considers valuable. I am fascinated by all sorts of things, from mushrooms, to tech, to programming, to trading, to travel, to cute funny animals, to touching personal stories, to you name it.

But just because makeup tutorials may not generally be of interest to me personally, does not detract from the value it may have to others. Write about what is passionate to you, and what inspires you. If it's truthful, honest, and sincere, whatever the genre, over time you will likely attract a following that likes and appreciates your work.

We're each doing our own thing, and that's great. But to be jealous of someone else who appears to be "doing better than you", without even an understanding or appreciation of what it took to get there, won't likely move you forward a single bit.

People may not know that @sweetsssj once was a humble curator for Chinese posts with Steem Guild, before she became one of Steemit’s brightest stars! That was when I first met her online and we began working together on curation. Even then, no one on Steemit worked harder on a blog than she did. Her tremendous success is a testament to her hard work and to the care with which she crafts each of her posts. She definitely deserves a regular spot on the trending page; there is no post on Steemit that I would rather new members see than one of hers.

Link: Reflections and Tips for International Steemit Members and Growth Communities

Intresting who make this comment ............. maybe all trolls around must look first themself ?How you contribute to steemit ?

I contribute unique information from my life or my thoughts. It doesn't have to be deemed valuable by anyone, idc.. That wasn't the point.. You seem to miss the concept.. Cuz while you may think my posts are worthless.. So do I to yours.. Where's your originality? All I see is resteemed crap and attention whoring about how you got "cyber stalked.." Why even be a troll and comment in the first place. No one was trolling here. We're expressing our opinions.. There's a major difference. I don't post things with an intention of getting under someone's skin or annoying them.

Acusing people about posting crap demand to look yourself first right ? Where is your originalty in posting ? A single photo or begging for support ? Or it is the fact no one cares about your vacation ?
https://steemit.com/life/@kainmarx/a-day-at-adventure-island-in-tampa

I agree. I thought this platform would provide something really productive. Better than fb. Instead it's just mostly for travel blogs with people posing how they have fun. Instead of some tips or tricks. Hmm...

Only if you fixate on the trending page. The real problem there is also with the curation emphasis on rewards. People try to dogpile things they THINK will be popular to maximize their curation rewards instead of just voting things they actually read, watched, listened to, etc. and liked.

This is a problem. Though I rarely look at the trending page. It has been rather cyclic and repetitive for the more than a year I have been on steemit.

I guess I expected too much from steemit :O It's just another facebook I would say. I even saw some people just posing a photo a day and earned like 6 dollar per post. LOL. While I wrote all the article so heartfully and no one cares :D

People care, we just are limited in out number of votes per day. We can't vote on everything and there is a problem with discoverability so it is easy to miss things. If you fixate on how much you make you'll always be unhappy here. I had many great posts make $0, and not because they were down votes to oblivion like my latest post yesterday. (I am turning that to a positive, it gave a lot of good information following the data trails of the mass bot down vote that hit me)

Yeah positivity is the key! You mentioned it well. It should be applied daily to our life not just in this crypto world. Yes I believe it will pay off one day. Right now I'm still trying to figure out what kind of post should I do. Wondering about crypto news or travel blogs. I guess I can do both and see how's it will be :D So let's work for our goal guys! Keep the positive people and positive things flowing in our life! I believe we will achieve anything we want if we push hard enough!

Don't spend a lot of time thinking about what you should write. When you are inspired, write. Many of them will not gain much traction. So what? You're writing what you are inspired to write and that can be pretty rewarding regardless of other people. If things go well some of them will be noticed, and that will only increase over time as long as you keep writing.

That's exactly what I'm going to do man! Writing blog actually forces me to do a lot of research. Plus I'm a perfectionist. I only try to produce good quality post. Thanks for the support man! Definitely following you :) Glad to see like minded people )

That would make a lot of sense if both downvoted the same post's. Now it seems more than a conflict between them.

before you downvote everybody should be forced to enter a commemnt why you downvote.

Edit: I have no idea who typed this. Must be a mistake from someone with my posting key!

Downvoting can play a significant role on Steemit, It's a great way for the community to regulate the content that they want. Its just common decency to give an explanation unless there is a blatant reason. I like this suggestion.

regulate the content that they want

Very bad reason to down vote. Do you walk into a store and see a type of food you dislike and pull it off the shelf or pull out a marker and start writing all over it?

Likely the answer is no. So why should you, or me get to dictate what OTHER people can like? We shouldn't. We should focus on what WE like, and let other people focus on what they like.

Down voting stuff simply because it is content you are not interested in or dislike is a VERY bad idea.

^This X1000. The same tool that punishes spammers and plagiarists is being used for difference of opinion. This has far reaching consequences, and that is apparent with the 7% retention rate for new accounts.

Yep I finally got hit pretty hard by it yesterday. A big bot net slammed my post that was doing fairly well to 0. All the negative votes came in at the same time from a large group of botted accounts. I am turning it to a positive. Lots of good data came from that. I am still mining it for data but, I will do an investigative report here soon.

Exactly..

Are we witnessing a Steemit feud? ;)

There seems to be this small army of people that got in summer of 2016 and bought in. Now they are in the shark/whale category and simply have to post to get paid.

By the way, I agree with your assessment that this useless stuff needs to go to the bottom of the pile.

This is mostly the case except for a few of us who dont abuse it...and instead build.

@kainmarx i agree and it's unfair. Actually i write some other blogs too and recently nominated somewhere but i felt like the other curators doesnt really liked me because it seemed like that. i know i have to up my game next time to have my future travel blogs more valuable. However, i have some other writings that i hope to be seen by them to determine their wrong about who i am.

All I can say is to not give up! You may feel like you're not getting the attention you want or deserve and at times it may seem like everyone else is earning a lot more than u think you're going to.. but just keep at it! At first, I was a little turned off by the fact that everyone around me was making $1k a post and I was making pennies to dollars.. Then I hit my first $600+ post and I felt gratification. I still feel that, even all this time later. I've just been busy with life, but now I'm back and I've got a lot better content to start posting soon and only the future will tell how they do. Keep it up though and don't give up!

Well I think it is time that we see other people on trending and not always the same people with their 500-1000$ rewards. They make good posts but I dont think they are worth that much.
Also if you dont get on trending your post will be lost after a few hours.
Those two things together can be discuraging for a lot of new users and the inequality in the steem distribution will just increase.

Maybe that is their thought process not sure if downvoting is the right way though.

I give away more every post than i receive. How many posts can say that?

It was nothing personal against you but more of a general statement.
If you do that I think its great and I thank you for that.
It still does not solve the issue that we see the same people with big payouts on trending every day. Which makes it harder for new users to be seen.
But especially if you give away that much downvoting is not the right way to solve that (if it was even meant for that, who knows we can only speculate until there is a statement).

Some thoughts I had on the issue were possibly to limit the payout a single post can get to a certain amount, which could be realised as a asymptotic or logarithmic correlation between votes and potential payout.
And limit the posts a single author can have in the trending section at a given time.
I know there are probably also issues with my solutions but maybe something can be worked out.

Edit: After reading some other comments and posts there might be other issues which caused the downvoting. I have no idea what the reason for that would be thus I can not really form an opinion on it. I hope it gets resolved fast but my ideas probably wont help in this case at all.

I'm sorry fuzzy but i've heard this 1000 times before.. "I donate all my rewards." Hey how about just don't take them.. then they will naturally go to people who deserve them for their content.. no need for you to be a middleman.

I'm not sure what's going on with this @joseph, hard to tell whether it's part of some greater intent or merely a reactionary "Wait... this isn't how Steemit was meant to work!" afterthought."

Sometimes, I can't help but have this feeling that Steemit was created out of a truly wonderful "vision," but done so without any kind of cohesive long term planning. Sure, there's a "roadmap" and a "White Paper" but where's all the goal setting and benchmarking. My point being that corrective measures to address (perceived?) issues don't amount to much unless there's a comprehensive standard against which they are being applied... like an eternal series of "course corrections" on a journey that doesn't really have a destination.

What IS Steemit? Where does it want to go? What's the target for the end of 2018? And 2020? And 2025? And "well, I'll have cshed out and be gone by then so it doesn't matter" is not an adequate answer.

I don't mean to be too much of a harsh critic here... being newer to Steemit and all, but not "new* to social content venues.

ARE we building a social content venue here... or is this just a "temporary cash dispenser" for the fortunate few till the next greatest thing comes along?

I really don't know exactly what's going on, or maybe there's just a full moon out (or strong new moon or something), and instead of howling at the moon everyone's just become "flag-happy".

Seemed to really start a bit over a week ago with the crazy mushroom guy flagging down hundreds of our posts. maybe he ate the first 🍄 "zombie mushroom" 🍄 and now it's spread and gone viral...

But at least I can add this... whatever it is, I don't think sweetsssj necessarily stopped posted just because of Dan's ONE PERCENT downvote, currently worth about 6 bucks...

(from steemdb) -1% 6 days ago @dan voted on travel-with-me-81-round-up-of-the-beach-tower-and-royal-towers-at-atlantis-which-hotel-is-better by sweetsssj

yes, the two posts flagged are still valued at $1000 ! lol I'm sure she is crying her way to the exchange.

obviously she can afford to take a break.

Now that I see what the actual posts are I'm a bit confused why @joseph is so worked up about this....
although the excitement makes for highly valued content.

The voters have spoken!

All trolls , crazy and menatl issued people seems to be on full mode activity !

Why did he downvote her?

If that's true and without a definite explanation, I am on behalf of users of steemit join the grieving, and hope this in the near future can be explained to the public with the relevant reason....🤘🤘🤘🤘

Power and responsibility go hand in hand. The whole community but especially those at the top need to recognize this.

@joseph good post and great question to @ned and @dan . I noticed it too especially with @officialfuzzy 2 last posts ..both @sweetsssj and @officialfuzzy are doing awesome job here and people cherish and respect them. It will be good if we can know what the heck is going on after whch this issue should stop. Our aim is to work together : All for One - One for all and hopefully take over social media segment. Therefore, my only wish is Plurality, empathy, love and understanding. @Craig-grant and his wife was brutally attacked and downvoted too, hopefully that issue is coooling down now. I hope that this one will be resolved so my lovely steemians @sweetsssj and @officialfuzzy will continue their good work with open mind , dedication and hardwork.