When STEMGeeks was created, it was very important to me to have the resources needed to keep the community on topic and discourage abuse. To accomplish this, I issued and powered up 1M STEM tokens to the account @nostem4u. This account trails @stemgeeks downvotes 1:1 and is used to counter abuse and off topic posts.
Official and unofficial curators have been doing a good job distributing rewards to on topic posts and avoiding rewarding spam and off-topic content. There are situations I still have to step in but I am able to handle it by muting the post directly without muting the author. This allows me to avoid flagging which creates a lot of confusion and frustration, but it also allows me to avoid posts that don't belong receiving rewards.
This is commonly posts talking about Bitcoin price and tagging with #technology because Bitcoin is technically a technology. This type of post does not belong in STEMGeeks as it has nothing to do with STEM. It is similar to the posts in Leo that are about shoes because they calculated the value of the shoe in Leo tokens. I like to call this shoehorning and I like to avoid this from happening. I am able to do this effectively with post level mutes. If an account is abusive, spammy, or always posts off topic, I can do a more extreme account level mute.
I also made a change recently reducing rewards for posts not on the https://stemgeeks.net front end. This reduces the rewards paid out to posts that are more frequently off topic or shoehorned into STEM.
A few days ago I started the 28 day powerdown of the @nostem4u account. As the account powers down, I will be burning the entire 1M STEM tokens as per my original promise of never using or selling the tokens on this account outside of anti-abuse.
There are currently only 3.724M circulating STEM tokens, 1M is on @nostem4u and around 700K are on the @stemmarket account. The tokens on the @stemmarket account have been burned down from 2.5M assigned from the initial supply.
I will be releasing a transparency report soon that will break down all the major transactions on STEMGeeks so everyone understands where everything is.