The last 2-3 days I have spent reading different blog posts about downvotes (Oh, no... Not again that topic...) and different views on the same thing. I will try to keep this post as short as possible, to not bored you to death...
Just to clarify something in the beginning... I'm not old Steemian like some of you, as I see that lots of people here want to show their loyalty behind the numbers... I have joined Steem this year, but that doesn't mean in any case that I care LESS than some older members about it...
And, in this short period of time, I have met some great people here, and learn a lot of things about this network, blockchain, communities, etc... And, I have noticed some patterns that are always repeating...
From the very beginning of my being here (but I heard that it was before also), I see always the same things (problems) that STEEM has, and not so many ideas how can solve them... For example, pool rewards problem, self voting, bots, SMTs, onboarding problem, simplicity of the accounts, mass adoption, STEEM price, etc...
We had a discussion about improvements and we had proposals BEFORE the last hard fork(s). To solve this issue, we changed STEEM and it has now EIP (which is an OK thing), 50-50% rewards split (which I was against before HF, but at the end, it's not so bad) and we have FREE downvotes (Yay.. NOT)...
So, did we solve some of the previously mentioned issues? Some of them, maybe... But the MAIN problems are still here, and I think that the main problem is ONBOARDING... And, it's not that we didn't solve that problem, we have even made it bigger... Onboarding will be joining new members inside OUR COMMUNITY, but we are currently destroying our community... Let me try to explain this...
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The latest trend on Steem is being the Guardian of the Reward Pool... So, if you want to be one of the guardians, you have to go through Steem and catch the bad guys and punish them by downvoting their posts... In certain situations, it is acceptable, if the post is obvious SPAM or it contains plagiarized content (as that was the point of implementing the DOWNVOTE option)...
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But, Steem is not an ordinary Social Network and some people just can't understand that... Steem is a complex network with many different dApps, games, projects inside the project and each of them should be treated separately as they are not the same! You shouldn't downvote someone's post if it has 1 photo and 3 words, as that IS the point of APPICS app... It is a photo app, for God's sake...
SBI project is another example of a "project" build on STEEM... It motivates members to share their wealth with other users... People are collecting SBI share, liquid STEEM gets powered up and upvotes spread between members... They are usually upvotes worth a few pennies, but hey, for someone those upvotes mean food to survive the day... Usually, they got those SBI units as a gift for doing something useful on the chain, for the chain, or for the community... And then, someone comes and took that loaf of bread from their hands...
Let's take a look at the other side of the story... From the side of the Guardian of the Reward Pool... "It is an abuse of the reward pool and we downvote that and keep the pool clean..."
Clean from who? And clean FOR who? I saw a lot of comments from small Steemians that just got on the Steem and get downvoted after just few days... What kind of example do we give to the new members? What image of our network will they show when they leave?
I just have a feeling that we have lost the FOCUS after the HF and too much time has been given to downvoting which creates a negative atmosphere AROUND and ON the Steem network. It looks that nothing else isn't a problem anymore and we just have to keep those precious STEEM coins for us.
Well, I have bad news for you... STEEM without the people isn't a Social network and it has no sense to be presented as it... The price of STEEM will drop even more if we have every day less and fewer people on the network...
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