Hey Guys, this is actually a comment response to @rok-sivante 's post part one and part two of, "How To Earn $100,000 Per Month On Steemit As A High-Profile Crypto Technical Analyst (a.k.a. Bullshit Artist, a.k.a. Reward Pool Rapist)..."
Do read, it is worth it.
Read your link at the end of part one @rok-sivante. (The one about TA and how he thought it was useless) Interesting thought process. I am kind of in the middle on it. Trends are important, but should be used for in a way to understand how people feel at that time. For example, I believe in levels of resistance. I believe these are level at which humans feel that don't want to sell below. It is there level of confidence in the value of the commodity. This is for selling and the price going down and stopping at a certain level.
For the price going up and not being able to break a resistance, that is just people hitting there perfect price sell points. Most obvious is when bitcoin hit 10k for the first time, and almost dipped, but the fomo was so crazy it took it straight through it and into like 12k or 14k. There was still a lot of people selling. Just more buying. xD This would explain why we never truly hit 20k. (on a few exchanges we did) But 20k would be another huge hurdle cause it is a great place for people to sell.
All these key points are just levels of confidence or feelings of great sell points. But they require technical analysis and trending to find.
But I have digressed, let me respond to a few specific points you make.
It may be true, some people find value in his offerings. And if he's been receiving large amounts of rewards, it's because people have voted for his posts. And if it is the case that he may have been "gaming the system," up voting his own content via separate accounts - as it has been hinted at - well, such conduct might not be totally honorable. Though, it'd be a failure of the system more than any individual fault, for which fingers may be pointed at. If it wasn't HIM to exploit the weaknesses of our rewards algorithm, someone else probably would - until an effective solution is come to.
Yup, and if anything, this showed everyone that a flag war won't work when it comes to anonymity. Who cares how dirty a handle gets when you can create a new one. Flag wars all day.
Welcome to the downsides of decentralization.
While many in the crypto space have praised decentralization as the end-all-be-all ideal of future governance, these are fine examples of why it isn't all perfect.
Yup, @dan wrote a wonderful piece on governance and how that is lacking when it comes to STEEM basically.
This makes me think of West World. If somebody is rich enough, they can pay a ton of money, come into town and fuck shit up. Not fear for getting hurt so they can do WHATEVER they want and not care at all about the consequences.
There are some key differences, we could "kill" someone who comes in on STEEM by down voting them, but they could just make a new account. They have a huge amount of options when it comes to hiding the abuse, and the ultimate freedom in the end to just make a new account and start all over when they are found out.
Think of ways to fight it:
Limit weekly rewards
Problem: Multiple accounts.
Cancel Rewards by top 20 witness vote
Problem: Multiple accounts
Limit posts
Problems: Horrible idea, and broken by multiple accounts
Flag Forever
Problems: Casualties and Time Spent/More people willing to let it go then flag.
Promising averaging type reward with specific weights:
Problem: Honestly most promising idea, but could still be ruined by multiple accounts. A lot of multiple accounts, probably like 10 with large amounts. Imagine ten 100k plus accounts would have been probably enough to fix the weighting of it. Not hard for anybody who is truly looking to RRR.
And if we don't like it, we could fuck off, choosing to play different games in a different arena.
(Lord knows I might end up eventually doing that, tired of the various kinds of B.S. that have run unchecked here and may continue to without any effective mechanisms in place to reinforce increasing professional standards of conduct.)
This..... This in the end. Mainstream doesn't want unfiltered and uncut. They want to block people that they don't want to see their profile. They want to be able to get justice for those that do wrong. They want to feel a sense of fairness.
STEEM, in it's current form, is not appealing to every day users, or big investors that are paying attention to the abuse happening. Some people like to throw around that investors would want that. But a smart investor, would realize that any system that is allowed to be gamed like that, will soon have a distasteful and hateful populace when they all realize the system is ultimately rigged against them.
These things all lessen the worth of STEEM as a true social media platform that can reward people for actual GOOD content.
It is only a matter of time before an alternative is made with better governance, and STEEM is nothing but a memory.
Unless things change.
-BiasNarrative