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Topic: Steem pyramid scheme revealed - page 68. (Read 107064 times)

sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 27, 2016, 03:26:35 PM
It's up to the voter to determine if they are sufficiently convinced and if their upvote should be given.

KYC? Video verification? No need for all these.

I'll respond to this in the future. For now I will just say I am confident I can convince you that it is absolutely necessary (but not immediately on signup as that would make a horrific attrition rate). Ditto to on how you didn't see the flaws in your conceptualization of the copyright liability issue (not criticizing you as I really appreciated your interaction on that, just saying I think you are not seeing all the ramifications yet).
legendary
Activity: 1708
Merit: 1049
July 27, 2016, 03:02:51 PM
It's up to the voter to determine if they are sufficiently convinced and if their upvote should be given.

KYC? Video verification? No need for all these.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 27, 2016, 01:29:05 PM

Yup, there is no 3D integration on the lower side of the sheet of paper. Smooth I agree we'll need to move to video verification of users. If I launch a competitor, everyone will be video verified before they can avail of any significant rewards.

Although FinCEN seems to only require KYC when you are both an issuer and a redeemer (Steemit Inc. appears to only be an issuer and Steem provides exchange thus redemption), it would be safer to do KYC on all.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 27, 2016, 06:13:12 AM
The voting and reward algorithm in Steem seems to me to have a fundamental flaw.

If they made voting rewards linear, then all SP holders could simply vote for their own posts and recover their share of the dilution of the money supply. The game theory would be there is no financial incentive to vote for posts of others (although there might be an incentive for minnows who value the site functionality more than the tiny bit of rewards they control).

So instead they made rewards quadratic and even time incentivized so that you have to risk your vote on a post that you can't be sure will gain you the most rewards (since you don't know which post all the other users will vote on until later, which is why the votes are time incentivized to vote early). That also had the hype benefit of creating posts with exaggerated $50,000 rewards due these non-linear amplification algorithms.

But the quadratic and time incentivization game theory highly favors whales who can collude since the remove the risks the algorithms intended to create yet the colluding whales can take all the non-linear reward amplifications. I am not saying whales are colluding now, but for example if the media moguls can obtain significant stake and then accumulate 100% of the tokens over time by this game theory strategy thus controlling ranking of content on the site.

I believe the only solution to this is to let users control their own ranking algorithms (so whales can't predict rankings even if they collude on voting) and votes for computing rewards should always be linearly tallied. In other words, rankings need to be truly decentralized else the entire system is a clusterfuck back to centralized media control again. Meaning that if you only vote for yourself, you voting pattern make not align with like-mindedness with others thus you may have no influence on the ranking of your posts on the site, so you lose income from the votes of others. Meaning if you vote for yourself, you opt out of blogging.

Meaning I see no solution to the fact that it is impossible to incentivize whales to vote meaningfully and it is impossible to charge whales for the voting of minnows1! Dan's communism fails.

I'll be reading over @theoretical's blogs to see if I have made any errors or incorrect assumptions. I'll update you if I find any.

1 I do see one solution to this where whales are charged for voting but not allowed to vote but it can't work in the Dan's current design where STEEM are debased 50% yearly because obviously whales won't decide to hold STEEM.


I remember now that long ago (perhaps it was 2014) I already gone down this wild goose chase of voting from shared debasement and had realized it was fundamentally flawed and can't work.

Steemit is fucked. There is no way to fix this. Absolutely impossible. Fugetaboutit.

What they did was put the whales in control so they could over pay for blogs to generate the delusional to-da-moon groupthink.

I can't think of any way sure way to fix it. We might hope if we adopt my solution quoted above and make the forced voting small enough, that minnows will just vote their conscience (because it is a hassle otherwise perhaps), in that case maybe it works. But the whales will still opt out by voting themselves, so the minnows end up paying for all the blogging, which means it won't have sufficient funding. Power-law distribution rules.

If whales have a huge incentive to be restricted from voting (e.g. they don't have to hold for 2 years), then perhaps you can charge the debasement to them. But if the minnows are voting with the whales' share, then the minnows have more incentive to vote for themselves.

It just doesn't seem to work no matter how we design it.

Steemit's whales can justify throwing away money because they know otherwise they can't cash out. This is still a ponzi scheme and race to the exits before everyone realizes the voting system is totally dysfunctional. It will become more and more apparently over time.

They may be hoping they can get enough users into the system to begin some ecosystem work on microtransactions. Maybe the big lie in the voting algorithm is just a stopgap measure to onboard users. But I really can't see this group of developers ever succeeding because they seem to be always about fooling people.

Solid businesses are built on solid ethics.

I think maybe I have a design idea on how to structure debasement of voting that solves the problem above that I thought was mathematically insoluble!

I don't want to say I am certain, so I will think about this more (especially when rested).

If I am correct, then this changes my opinion about voting being worthless and insolubly dysfunctional.

Edit: hypothetically another advantage of my design concept is that the voting algorithm would not be a globalized calculation, which is a very important criteria if we want to be able to shard the blockchain for scaling purposes, which is something Graphene can't do.

My idea emphasizes the SP as "karma" and mathematically so.

P.S. I worked 18 hours today! My health is cooperating.
legendary
Activity: 1260
Merit: 1000
July 27, 2016, 04:51:39 AM
If you knew about my post history, I was the one telling everyone months ago that Steem and Synereo would fail because the advertising revenue per user per year for the social networks averages less than $20

I'm not sure if the Larimers are actually this smart and/or devious or not, but it's entirely possible none of the economics for this thing have to make sense at all and the entire thing will be kept afloat by enormous amounts of money laundering.  Targeted voting, all kinds of tricks.  The Liberty Reserve even had a dollar pegged asset exactly like the Larimers seem to have created.

Also, looks like somebody stole your post haha:

https://steemit.com/photography/@watch-chronolog/how-to-search-for-royalty-free-images-on-google
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 27, 2016, 03:58:41 AM
So around this lady might develop a cosplaying sub-community which could upsell related games and paraphernalia:

https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@tayla.barter/hi-steemit-i-am-tayla-barter-kinpatsu-cosplayer-and-artist

But there need to be incentives and features to promote creation of sub-communities.



This lady wants to work creatively as a freelancer, and she seems to think Steemit maybe helping her to achieve that goal:

https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@diana.catherine/new-introduceyourself-post-and-info-about-me-i-still-think-the-founders-are-geniuses
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 27, 2016, 01:59:13 AM
Thanks for coming here to discuss+debate. The more we can learn, the better.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about in terms of monetizing content consumption. It's very clear Bitcoin investors, (which makes up 98% of the STEEM market), are paying content creators. How much the content creators are paid by these Bitcoin investors is determined by the curators. That's the entirety of the system in its current form. So I wrote the article asking, "What tangible value do Bitcoin investors get in return for STEEM."

In the context of professional content creation, where independent creators are a subset, the entirety of one's living is earned through selling produced content. For a filmmaker this is charging people to see their movie, for a author this is charging people to read their work, for a game developer it's people buying and playing their game. Steemit in no way in its current form gives Bitcoin investors any direct value. Sure, you may say professionals dabble in Steemit as you stated above, but it will in no way facilitate the development of professional content. If a Bitcoin investor can directly broker a deal with a producer for a cut of a production's revenue, vs buying STEEM power... From a strict investment point of view, buying STEEM power as a Bitcoin investor looking to make a legitimate ROI (one procured from actual productivity), is essentially a gracious donation to STEEM users.

You appear to be missing the point that the business model of Steem is to onboard many users, then sell them a microtransactions ecosystem that has yet to be fully developed. So far, they have the 3 second block period confirmations of the Graphene DPoS blockchain and the claimed high transaction rate headroom which currently Bitcoin's blockchain can't do (and Lightning Networks for Bitcoin has other technical hurdles to cross yet).

The content is there to engage the usership in order to build an ecosystem for gamification and selling things online, including for example selling content, e.g. selling music downloads.

Quote
But he fails to understand that the value of a social network is not its content, but its users ongoing use of the site due to their investment in the communities of the site.

Shut the fuck up for a second, and stop making assumptions.

You write with the similar profane cockiness as your accomplice MPeX (the self-proclaimed DAO cracker). It is somewhat of an entertaining joust. So is the sport of boxing. Do you do both?

A social network is not valuable at all. If so Reddit would be profitable already (after  a decade or something), and it wouldn't have taken Facebook a quarter of a billion dollars and a decade to become profitable. Social networks are indicative of bubbles. Just because Facebook was able to avoid having their bubble completely popped doesn't make them a success story.

There is no value to be mined from Steemit from the "users' ongoing use of the site", because they aren't producing anything of value. Using Steemit will not yield flying cars, or cold fusion.

If you knew about my post history, I was the one telling everyone months ago that Steem and Synereo would fail because the advertising revenue per user per year for the social networks averages less than $20. So of course they aren't very profitable businesses ($20 is such a small morsel of a user's annual value production).

Everyone is still trying to find other demand cases for crypto-currencies other than Bitcoin's use as a quasi-legal wire transfer and bank avoidance tool.

It is thought that perhaps the free market can open up new currency uses in the microtransactions sphere. Yes we all know about why microtransactions haven't been adopted thus far. We have linked to the research articles on that.

One thought is that more people can be come content creators, not just dumb consumers of content (which makes them dumb over time).

In fact research has shown consuming large amounts of social media usually reduces critical thinking and overall intellect, so trying to attribute ANY value to a social network seems retarded. How about people actually go outside and socialize, instead of sitting behind a computer screen pretending to socialize?

Dude are you a 60 year old dinosaur? The world is changing and you better adapt.

We are on the cusp of changing social networking into a productive activity. And meeting outside physically is as inhibiting to exploration as gold is to wire transfers. You seem to be oblivious to the power of the efficiency of the speed-of-light.

Quote
He fails to understand that indie content can be a lot more interesting and precisely targeted to smaller audiences (coteries) than Hollywood content.

Dude. You are so uninformed in regards to the entertainment marketing machine. Most indie artist who do it out of love, say Diggable Planets, still have to eat, they just care less about the monetization of their content. They are the ones where "enough" is an reachable goal. For these people the most efficient machine for distributing their work is the best machine.

Also the one that gives them the most useful networking with fans.

Steemit is not one of them.

Lets say the value in Steemit is the eyeballs attached. Well how do you get eyeballs to see your content? Steem Power. So you go and buy a bunch of Steem and conver it to Steem Power just to upvote your content visibility. It makes the front page of course, but you find that there is a 1% click through rate, that is only 1% of people convert to your personal website from Steemit. On top of that only 10% of that 1% actually purchases something. Until there is a sane market for Steem, (which I doubt there ever will be), the PPC bids for Youtube, Google, etc. ads are far more efficient, and produce far more revenue per dollar invested. Even then the targeted nature of internet advertising has to be done with a great deal of finesse or you end up losing money on your advertising campaign due to low conversion rates.

You don't yet understand that the voting system is an onboarding gimmick. It was designed to psychologically fool people into joining.

The end goal is to create an efficient means for content distribution, networking, and sales. I also have my doubts that they can achieve it. But at least I recognize the conceptual potential.

If brand advertising becomes the bread and butter of Steemit, then the indie creator automatically gets pushed out of the trending stack. In this case large corporations are the STEEM power whales and use Steem as essentially a giant billboard.

Agreed.


Either way, STEEM has a lot of problems to figure out before its valuable. And honestly due to lack of acknowledgement of them or outright denial, I don't see it becoming valuable ever.

Agreed.

Your idealistic assumptions are myopic. I'm only making realistic evaluations, with valid concerns. Not one person has convinced me I wouldn't be a bagholder if I were to buy STEEM, and it seems other BTC investors are realizing this as the price dropped 0.0059 to 0.0041 since the release of my article.

I wasn't making assumptions. I am bearish on Steem economically. I was correcting you on what might be possible conceptually. I presume you aren't aware that I am contemplating whether I might create a Steem competitor. And I would structure many aspects of it differently.
legendary
Activity: 1750
Merit: 1036
Facts are more efficient than fud
July 27, 2016, 01:38:42 AM
^UGH, I already pointed out that content buyers can now bid and negotiate with a global set of content providers (lowering everyone's costs)--this allows more competition and easier access for new and emerging artists.

If you see a move towards zero marginal costs, it's going to happen--it's the way capitalism works.
newbie
Activity: 24
Merit: 0
July 27, 2016, 01:31:34 AM

That article is very myopic:

Quote
Over the past two years, Qntra authors have gotten paid for their work directly by MPEx investors as advertised. At a later time, if someone wants to buy the whole of Qntra, shareholders will get paid for their shares.

...

In essence Steemit users are getting paid by Bitcoin investors via exchanges, similar to Qntra. However these Bitcoin investors interested in STEEM are few and as such there is less than a total of 1,000 BTC worth of bids for STEEM across all exchanges.

If someone holds a large stash of bitcoins, what would compel him to ever buy STEEM? (outside of speculating of course) In the case of Qntra, even before revenue is realized, the company may sell for more than investors paid per share. A STEEM investor never has ownership over any of the content published on Steemit. For them buying STEEM is essentially a gracious donation to content creators.

What he means is that the content is public on the blockchain and is not owned by anyone. Anyone can use that data from the blockchain.

But he fails to understand that the value of a social network is not its content, but its users ongoing use of the site due to their investment in the communities of the site.

Quote
The only hope for Steemit is incentivizing professional content creators to contribute. Professional filmmakers, television producers, comic authors, etc., would be the only content rational Bitcoin investors would be willing to purchase. Even in this case due to the mode of monetization, awarding content payouts will always be optional.

A professional television producer creates a pilot with a $10,000 budget. After a great deal of market testing, the producer realizes the show has great potential with his target audiences. One option for distribution is he can release it for free on a service like YouTube and embed it in a Steemit blog post. Here he is at the whim of generosity of STEEM users. It’s risky distributing in this channel as STEEM users are clearly irrational and won’t pay a realistic price for consuming the media. Another option is the producer to sell it to Netflix as an exclusive for $1mn up front and a possible royalty deal after a certain number of episodes aired. The latter option for the producer will likely prevent him from posting the content on Steemit.

It seems it would be very difficult for Steemit to incentivize professional content creators directly.

He fails to understand that indie content can be a lot more interesting and precisely targeted to smaller audiences (coteries) than Hollywood content.

And indie artists do give away free promos on their work in order to upsell other work or paraphernalia.

Indie artists often jam with their fans so they are in tune with what to create. Also they iterate in smaller morsels, and get feedback along the way.

Putting some content on the blockchain, doesn't mean creators have to put all their content on the blockchain.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about in terms of monetizing content consumption. It's very clear Bitcoin investors, (which makes up 98% of the STEEM market), are paying content creators. How much the content creators are paid by these Bitcoin investors is determined by the curators. That's the entirety of the system in its current form. So I wrote the article asking, "What tangible value do Bitcoin investors get in return for STEEM."

In the context of professional content creation, where independent creators are a subset, the entirety of one's living is earned through selling produced content. For a filmmaker this is charging people to see their movie, for a author this is charging people to read their work, for a game developer it's people buying and playing their game. Steemit in no way in its current form gives Bitcoin investors any direct value. Sure, you may say professionals dabble in Steemit as you stated above, but it will in no way facilitate the development of professional content. If a Bitcoin investor can directly broker a deal with a producer for a cut of a production's revenue, vs buying STEEM power... From a strict investment point of view, buying STEEM power as a Bitcoin investor looking to make a legitimate ROI (one procured from actual productivity), is essentially a gracious donation to STEEM users.


>But he fails to understand that the value of a social network is not its content, but its users ongoing use of the site due to their investment in the communities of the site.

Shut the fuck up for a second, and stop making assumptions. A social network is not valuable at all. If so Reddit would be profitable already (after  a decade or something), and it wouldn't have taken Facebook a quarter of a billion dollars and a decade to become profitable. Social networks are indicative of bubbles. Just because Facebook was able to avoid having their bubble completely popped doesn't make them a success story. In fact research has shown consuming large amounts of social media usually reduces critical thinking and overall intellect, so trying to attribute ANY value to a social network seems retarded. How about people actually go outside and socialize, instead of sitting behind a computer screen pretending to socialize?

There is no value to be mined from Steemit from the "users' ongoing use of the site", because they aren't producing anything of value. Using Steemit will not yield flying cars, or cold fusion.

>He fails to understand that indie content can be a lot more interesting and precisely targeted to smaller audiences (coteries) than Hollywood content.

Dude. You are so uninformed in regards to the entertainment marketing machine. Most indie artist who do it out of love, say Diggable Planets, still have to eat, they just care less about the monetization of their content. They are the ones where "enough" is an reachable goal. For these people the most efficient machine for distributing their work is the best machine. Steemit is not one of them.

Lets say the value in Steemit is the eyeballs attached. Well how do you get eyeballs to see your content? Steem Power. So you go and buy a bunch of Steem and conver it to Steem Power just to upvote your content visibility. It makes the front page of course, but you find that there is a 1% click through rate, that is only 1% of people convert to your personal website from Steemit. On top of that only 10% of that 1% actually purchases something. Until there is a sane market for Steem, (which I doubt there ever will be), the PPC bids for Youtube, Google, etc. ads are far more efficient, and produce far more revenue per dollar invested. Even then the targeted nature of internet advertising has to be done with a great deal of finesse or you end up losing money on your advertising campaign due to low conversion rates.

If brand advertising becomes the bread and butter of Steemit, then the indie creator automatically gets pushed out of the trending stack. In this case large corporations are the STEEM power whales and use Steem as essentially a giant billboard.

Either way, STEEM has a lot of problems to figure out before its valuable. And honestly due to lack of acknowledgement of them or outright denial, I don't see it becoming valuable ever.

Your idealistic assumptions are myopic. I'm only making realistic evaluations, with valid concerns. Not one person has convinced me I wouldn't be a bagholder if I were to buy STEEM, and it seems other BTC investors are realizing this as the price dropped 0.0059 to 0.0041 since the release of my article.
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 27, 2016, 01:28:44 AM

While she seems not quite your typical mom (IT professional, some exposure to Bitcoin), making her warm lead from the start, this seems key:

Quote
Then, I read an article this morning about steemit on finance.yahoo.com

She's finding out about steemit not directly from a personal connection to a blocknerd but from general buzz in the popular media (and then converting to a user). This may be an isolated incident, we don't know, but it is very interesting.

Can anyone suggest some learning resources for her as she has requested?

https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@shcameron/hello-steemers-i-am-a-mother-daughter-investor-cook-friend-and-i-have-found-the-most-interesting-hacks#@shcameron/re-anonymint-re-shcameron-re-anonymint-re-shcameron-hello-steemers-i-am-a-mother-daughter-investor-cook-friend-and-i-have-found-the-most-interesting-hacks-20160727t055157230z

Please consider posting a reply to her there.
legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
July 27, 2016, 12:30:34 AM

While she seems not quite your typical mom (IT professional, some exposure to Bitcoin), making her warm lead from the start, this seems key:

Quote
Then, I read an article this morning about steemit on finance.yahoo.com

She's finding out about steemit not directly from a personal connection to a blocknerd but from general buzz in the popular media (and then converting to a user). This may be an isolated incident, we don't know, but it is very interesting.
legendary
Activity: 1162
Merit: 1042
White Male Libertarian Bro
July 27, 2016, 12:01:40 AM
I decided to launch a censorship resistance test of Steemit.  I know the Larimers don't seem to like Trump, so their reaction to this will be real interesting:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@r0achtheunsavory/5xdjbo-will-steem-become-a-valid-decentralized-social-media-network-or-just-a-tool-to-push-political-correctness-and-marxist-propaganda

They know Trump's going to send back all the communists, perverts, and trash.

sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 265
July 26, 2016, 11:53:01 PM
I decided to launch a censorship resistance test of Steemit.  I know the Larimers don't seem to like Trump, so their reaction to this will be real interesting:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@r0achtheunsavory/5xdjbo-will-steem-become-a-valid-decentralized-social-media-network-or-just-a-tool-to-push-political-correctness-and-marxist-propaganda

Your writing was quite good, to the point concision, as well as your conceptualization. I upvoted it enthusiastically.

Edit: readers I am not condoning the KKK. I am merely endorsing the open-mindedness test, the abstract conceptualization, and elucidation.
legendary
Activity: 1260
Merit: 1000
July 26, 2016, 09:47:58 PM
I decided to launch a censorship resistance test of Steemit.  I know the Larimers don't seem to like Trump, so their reaction to this will be real interesting:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@r0achtheunsavory/5xdjbo-will-steem-become-a-valid-decentralized-social-media-network-or-just-a-tool-to-push-political-correctness-and-marxist-propaganda
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