I was talking with Blurt's #2 witness @Khrom today, and realized this important topic needs to be seen by the broader community, so here it is in the form of a post. In short, the insiders and management of this blockchain are encouraging the abuse they claim to fight, driving away real content and investment. This issue as central to what is wrong with Blurt, and must be dealt with for us to have any chance at surviving as a blockchain community.
Khrom and I agree how important it is to encourage those users who aren't merely here to milk the system for some rewards. I decided to use the opportunity to bring up some issues I have noticed.
Firstly, why are so many resources dedicated to a bot that provides universal basic income, which is the antithesis of proper curation? Blurtbooster votes on almost every new post on this blockchain, and can be gamed by people who trick it into giving the most money for the least effort. It doesn't seem to appreciate me very much, but I've watched as others earn quite a bit of money with it.
Thousands of people have now figured out how to soak up the majority of the Blurt Power on this chain, pumping out snapshots of flowers growing near their house, low-effort Actifit posts, and other complete nonsense - the exact stuff we already have too much of here. They sign up multiple accounts, and tell all their friends/family, and Blurt fills up more and more with literal garbage. And they are compensated handsomely for it. It's a form of reward-farming, and we are encouraging it. These users are not the type to provide real content, nor are they investors that bring funds to the platform and increase the price of the token. In fact, they are the opposite, milking the system and continuously reducing the price of the token.
Why do we systematically encourage this?
The Blurtbooster wallet shows most of the BP is delegated from @initblurt, @instablurt, @megadrive, and @socialgraph. Blurtbooster is currently liquidating 80,000 BLURT per week. This is the largest powerdown draining the blockchain, aside from @instablurt, @socialgraph, and @blurtyield. The latter of which appears to be little more than a fund for circle-jerker @rycharde to farm 100% upvotes on every single comment.
So we have a group of insiders who are "above the law" here, farming the reward pool - doing exactly what we blacklist and ban others for doing. This is corruption, cronyism, and massive hypocrisy. It encourages low-quality posts and comments, and mutual farming with the insider-owned bot @blurtbooster.
We are not only allowing, but ENCOURAGING the destruction of our token, and the loss of good creators like myself, who bring real content and investment to Blurt, and then get drained dry for it. We are systemically reinforcing those who drive the positive feedback loop I talked about here in reverse, decreasing the price of BLURT, damaging sentiment, and discouraging quality content.
On Hive, people who do this (circle-jerking and comment farming) are downvoted by individuals and groups dedicated to preventing this abuse. Here, we have no such mechanism, so the problem continues and festers unchecked. When a regular user abuses the system this way, the management/insiders quickly use their powers to put a stop to it. But what are we to do, when the abusers are the management/insiders?
This issue is at the core of what is wrong with Blurt, and why only insiders, management, and top witnesses are happy with the status quo, and why we can't grow. Outsiders see this happening, and refuse to invest their time or money here.
I'm speaking up at risk to myself, although I have long ago been put on mute by these insiders for challenging their authority (and in some cases I returned the favour). None of them will ever give my content a single upvote, so I have little to lose (other than further secret shadowbanning of my account and content). But all I can do is bring awareness to the problem - I can't fix it.
@Khrom is now one of the only people who potentially has an opportunity to do something about this. I would love to hear his thoughts, as well as the thoughts of any other user who wants to see this misconduct end, for the betterment of our community. I hope my friends here will join me in a united front against this problem.
With my vote, @Khrom has just now become Blurt's top witness. I'm pleased to see a non-insider take the top position, and hope this helps us tackle the corruption that is dragging us down.DRutter
Why is there a problem with every blockchain platform that we move to? lol and true about circle-jerking and comment farming. I hope you don't get creamed for this post.
It doesn't matter where you go with crypto. If you're not creating your own coins or running your own nodes then you're at the whim of the developers and whales. It's a sad fact.
I'm soakingUP what I've read in @drutter's post as well, I am reading AND rewarding the comments I think add to this discussion 😉(Since I value engagment as a sign of life for any social blockchain).
One thing I would like to say...
There is a difference in automatically UPvoting EVERY comment indiscriminately with no time taken to read them. That, I would say, falls under the "farming" term that you are making use of here.
I am actually championing a whole new form of engagment curation called Comment Ranking. What this entails is reading through comments on a selected post... and rewarding them with 100% UPvotes in the order that I subjectively think add value. This is a primary mission for the @comet.ranker project actually. ☄️
So yeah! Just wanted to jump in here and make the differentiation.
Authentic engagment is how we can bring Blurt to life while separating us from all the other social blockchains out there.
You can't fake what's real and that is what I believe Blurt's super power is.
@wil.metcalfe
Comet Ranker
rycharde or other milkers have little or no effect on the price of BLURT.
In the last few weeks I have bought more than 1M BLURT, it has had no effect on the price. rycharde and all the milkers together are not able to sell such amount. Only fake foundation can do it and they will do it because they have their BLURT for free and will sell at any price. Fake stake is the real problem
power up start date 2022/11/20
I asked about "fake stake" when I first came here with my crypto savings. (If I had held those savings until the recent bottom I would now have 25+ million BLURT.) I wanted to find out if Blurt had any mechanism where insiders could just inflate away our currency. couldn't get a complete answer from anyone, but was told we had free speech and decentralization (both of those have now been confirmed to be half truths). I can't do traditional banking, so my crypto earnings have to stay somewhere in crypto land. I was beaten to a bloody pulp by the Hive downvote cabal, and Steem was pretty much already dead, so I hesitantly put my family's crypto savings into Blurt. Fuuuuuuuck. Now, I understand that there is fake stake, and also a Blurt printing press that most of us will never benefit from.
By the way, that fake stake is what powers up Blurtbooster, the big problem I am talking about in this post. I don't believe that stake was purchased on the open market, nor do I believe it was generated by contributing content. That's why I call it "fake".
Thanks for buying and powering up, sorry that it hasn't had any effect on the price...
It's even worse, they have printed fake stake out of thin air and are using it to multiply their income and control the blockchain
Yes, the milkers are farming and circle-jerking to multiply their income with the fake stake. It's all related in the inner circle.
https://search.brave.com/images?q=all+seeing+eye
The truf is out der!
Lolol! The fake stake!
Bro, are you literally this Dumb?
Who and how were they supposed to buy it from?
And
How and from whom were they gonna earn it from?
#tellmeyoureanimbecilewithouttellimgme
The idiot who threatened to report blurt to the SEC can't stop buying the fraud he was going to 'file' lawsuits with.
Another exemplary "how to idiot". Now go gaga guuguuu all over loserlin to cope with the facts above.
fake stake, almost as good as the real thing, Marius can't get enough of it too!
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/jan/10/most-realistic-plant-based-steak-revealed
Logic isn't your greatest asset
Lololol! The irony of your clown self! Not that you could explain or justify your assertion, I'll make a simple offer you can't refuse, if you can show how your response makes any sense I'll never comment about or to you ever again! Lolololol!
I think we should give you....@drutter the keys the blurt booster account! and I'm dead serious. I've mentioned I'm not a fan of bots curating for reasons pointed out in your post.
I really don't think the word corruption is totally appropriate. That puts people on the defensive and implies people are purposely being nefarious, when often (not always) that is not the case.
Perfect example. I've been given the keys to the coconut curration account along with 2 other people, and often the account sits at 100% vote power, because simply, I barely have enough time to even keep up my own presence here with my own account. Same issue with the people I'm sharing it with.
Hence bots come in, people are short on time. Not a good solution. We can do better. ;)
As for me and my availability, this has not always been the case. About 6 months ago, I had plenty of time. But these days I'm taking on a lot of projects outside of blurt and in the real world here in Thailand, like playing around with all sorts of weed! hahaha
But again, if you have the time. I absolutely will push to have you personally be a solution to some of these problems. You've proven yourself to be smart, pro blurt, and trustworthy. 100% I would love to see you running a huge curation account on the platform.
Maybe we can get some momentum behind this idea, if you are up for it....
Thanks for your reply Dan!
Regarding "corruption", to those whom it does not truly apply, then it is not them I am talking about. To those whom it does apply, then they are rightly included. There's some corruption going on, that's pretty clear to me. Who/where/how it is exactly happening, I'm not entirely privy to. Perhaps this is a start at finding out.
Glad you are a fan of Khrom too! I like him, as well as Fervi, yourself, Tom, and a few other witnesses. There are good people here.
I don't know how/if the Blurtbooster thing would work out, but thank you for suggesting that, and we can look at the details if you think it's worthwhile.
Have a great day.
I honestly must say I am not a fan of bot voting, there can be better things done with the founding stake. And I believe early on there was even foundation funded manual curation.
This is even if we might disagree on the ethics of funding stake in the first place. In business it would be likened to sweat equity.
Thanks for your comment.
I agree that manual curation is far better than simply voting on essentially every post. That is actually VERY poor curation. Any criticism of it is often dismissed by saying "helping everyone can't be wrong", but that's not true, it's the opposite of good curation. Voting/supporting content simply because it is there diminishes the efforts of all the real curators on the platform, who are trying to spend the reward pool effectively and responsibly. Mass curation encourages spam and farming. It also sets a very poor example from the management/insiders. Why should we expect good curation if the platform's insiders aren't doing it? Surely we can do better. But like you hinted... manual curation takes time, skill, and effort.
Also I'm happy your are talking with @khrom....I'm a big fan of his. Smart guy, on a whole other level.....he alone opens the door and a way forward to a better Blurt!
We often seem to disagree about stuff, but with this post I agree 100%, and while I am certain both Steemit and Hive are CIA projects, I can easily believe what's going on here is just greed, incompetence and total lack of creativity. Megadrive is one of the accounts holdi g this platform back, and he appears to just be a total buffoon.
I do think Blurt could be so much more if dickheads like him were replaced. But all platforms seem to be full of fakes.
Yes, I think there are people holding this platform back in a major way, who believe they are entitled to a certain amount of profit, even if that has to come at the expense of all the content-creators and investors, driving down the price of the token and running off real content.
The whole fundamental structure of DPoS is one designed to encourage nepotism, and cronyism, with low competence corrupt individuals, carrying more weight than those with talent, business acumen/experience, and principles of free market.
(competence always wins on a level playing field - so those not competent create playing field that you never, ever, win on...)
DPoS is a grift system, essentially.
I've discussed the platforms (back in the days near the end of steemit, beginning of hive) with some very smart people.
People who could buy the platforms out, kinda successful.
They wouldn't touch them with a barge pole.
They ALL said - to a person - 'it's just a con job, it relies on a continued input of money from external sources to maintain the value'.
There's a good reason behind why I keep repeating 'the greater fools theory'.
There's a also a good reason why I'm detested on this platform by corrupt/dim morons....Lies, and liars - hate the truth.
Truth is treason in an empire of lies.
👀