It’s an upvote bot that upvotes your posts based on how much you delegate to it. So it’s pretty much vote selling. You get an upvote, they get the curation rewards from that vote, plus the curation rewards from other posts they upvote with your delegation.
They exploited people’s greed on Steem to grow big, and now they’re dictating what witnesses do on Steem.
They tried to do the same on Blurt, but we made it abundantly clear that we do not condone their actions. Then they threatened all the people who ran witnesses on both chains that they would kick them out of top 20 on Steem if they kept running a witness on Blurt. A bunch of witnesses left Blurt because of this.
Yeah, removing the delegation feature is the solution.
I've linked before to the steemit post that announced it - and the reason for it - whales too lazy to vote.
Then you'll have users whine that delegations are useful!! Well... tokenise your project and fund it that way. More BLURT-money needs to circulate - fewer beggars and moaners.
Despite seeing delegations very useful. I'm for removing them to have a better trending page and no upvote selling.
I agree, but for another reason, that it will create more of a flow of funds. The delegation-as-extraction algo is a stagnating system that devolves into worthless posts earning coins with minimal effort or interest - a mining system.
The thing I learned about delegation in real life is not good at all. Since the pandemic started I started learning so much about what's going on. And I found delegating a lot of things to others a very big problem that shifted the world for the worse. We delegated our finance to them, we delegated our education to them, we even delegated our health to them. That's why I prefer people to control their own stake instead of delegating it to others. Delegations caused a lot of problems, not only in steem, but in all the world. As I saw somewhere, the dependencies are what we should control.
:-) that was my mantra (maybe @rycharde) - control the dependencies - your dependencies - then freedom comes as a consequence.
via negativa
at what point are people going to figure out how to focus on posts they actually want to read and stop worrying about everything else ?
who cares about "trending" ?
it's actually a great smokescreen
if CNN is trying to dig up dirt on "blockchainsocialweb3" and they look at blurt and see a bunch of korean and vietnamese shit-posts, they're sure to turn their attention somewhere else
which is good news for us
I've mentioned this so many time in Discord - should do here as well - why does someone look at shit, then complain it's shit!? Trending within a tag may be meaningful - look there - Trending(all tags) is just a money chart. Why is this shit getting voted? Figure it out. Does it really make any difference to you, as a user? I would never look at Trending(all tags) apart from sometimes to see if there is anything vaguely interesting I've missed. Does anybody look at trending on twattr or fakebook and complain?
Create your own Blurt - follow, reblurt, mute, vote.
Look at your feed - not trending!
100% THIS
delegation still beats the pants off of a patreon style subscription model
Yep I'll be one of those briefly whining :)
Was some weeks, maybe months, ago I posted the steemit post announcing delegations - and the reasons. So people thought that was good, whales would spread their power a bit - then what happened, the arrow went in the opposite direction, with the smaller accounts delegating to large accounts! lol.
Not in all cases. I was a part of a group there called familyprotection that was ran by a woman, canadian-cocanut. She received a large delegation by one of the original petitioners for delegations in my understanding, Jamesc. As well as FTG to a lesser extent, who was one of the original miners I believe.
The delegations she has received from him and others allowed for many great things. To bring awareness to the governments kidnap and child abuse systems, and perhaps more important to myself was the actual help to families who are the target of this abuse. During my time of involvement with this program, I watched several struggling families aided with groceries for their kids, help with utility bills and much more. Much of which was made possible because of good hearted delegators.
So it wasn't always flowing upward. Not all of us who receive delegations use them in selfish ways.
But, even if we did, that should be between the person who owned the stake and the person receiving it for whatever reason they were given it.
Right, so back to the future. The way to support projects is to create a project account, fund it and give the manager the posting key while the funder retains ownership.
Property and functions are different and separate.
The other way is to create tokens and sell them - with or without incentives.
Need more flow of money, else this can become stagnant and routine.... could easily become Steem.
That would be above my level of knowledge, lol. I feel no shame though as I believe that would be the common experience in relation to this. I still don't understand the logistics even, using the Blurtyield as an example. What I (think) I see is folks sending in Blurt and it is being used to purchase hive? Yet some of it seems to go into the Blurtyield account too?
Overall I don't understand how that is bringing in outside money as it seems to me it places more Blurt into trading circulation to accumulate a separate currency (Hive). While I don't wish harm on Hive as so many coming over seem to, I also don't wish to support their project and token which is part of why I liquidated all my HE tokens quickly to power up here.
I'm sure I revealed a lot of ignorance in my above questions, but i just don't see how accumulating Hive tokens from Blurt tokens brings in more money.
Based on that structure, the only difference I can see from that side of the equation is the person being delegated to is receiving the curation rewards. Would it then be fair to say it's that aspect of the equation you dislike?
For an example I'll use myself as Jacob has given me a large delegation. Do you find it repugnant that he gave me this ability to curate and receive the rewards from that?
As far as running a second account, I spend to much time on one account, lol. I honestly don't know how you keep up with it.
Yes, the jamec delegation was fantastic. I didn't realise he also delegated to CC. I know the Tribe Steem Up/Abundance Tribe was awesome - people thought that was circle jerking but I know for a fact there was a lot of vetting there, eg if you posted memes, like someone did, and it was brought to the tribes attention, you'd lose the upvotes. So many good content creators stayed around too because of that. And I've watched struggling Venuzuelans - people from all walks of life - have their lives transformed by some kind and well placed delegations.
I never interacted with him personally, but his benevolent nature has allowed for so much good to be done. I was humbled greatly watching the use the Family Protection group put it to. I was honored to be a part of that structure and be offered a way that despite my financial hardship was able to contribute in making real peoples lives better and be able to see it.
During my time with them, I was able to generate enough rewards to donate
158.404 Steem
141.862 SBD
I also won several raffles article61 was having for silver coins, and had two of them shipped to struggling families, and the third to one of the quietest yet supporting member behind the scenes of Family Protection.
The ability to set up this structure was aided immensely by the kind heart of jamesc, and while I don't know him I'll always think of his blessing in funding such an initiative that Canadian Coconut and Markwhittam were passionate about.
That entire structure sold me on the fundamentals of this economic system. In most walks one like myself is impotent to help another except with my back. I'll always be grateful to have been given the environment thanks to his kindness and their vision to help in a financial way.
Heartwarming stories like this was exactly why I stuck around!
Never thought of that solution - don't know why. IT's a good one. But then there has to be some other way to code it as some accounts do a helluva lot of good, or try to anyway. Take for instance @gardendiary, which I'm trying to get off the ground to encourage gardening content and thus support the Blurt chain in that way, doing what I can. No way can I fund it myself to the extent it gets large enough to truly encourage people to write content for surety of upvote (all manual of course). So delegations are welcomed and useful and used for good - with the aim of helping more blurt circulate (gained funds used for challenge winnings, upvotes etc)
It's alsmot like there needs to be communal funds and an application process to get them, suggesting how you would benefit the Blurt chain by recieiving a delegation, and say three witnesses woudld have to approve the project with a review by all witnesses say every three months. I know I know, it's kinda dictatorial, just throwing stuff out there.
The idea I mentioned below, creating a "project account", is one way, which was common pre-delegation on steemit. I myself worked as a curator for one such projects in my early days on steemit - made enough from it to not be a "struggling newbie" within maybe 3 months. Anybody can do the same if such a system existed here.
I can't recall pre delegation days! I think that's why I couldn't imagine life without it, but am intrigued by the idea.
I’ve heard someoen suggest just not being able to delegate to ppl with more stake than you which sounds like a fair idea.
Words sound "fair" until one codes the idea - then you see how to game it!
eg I can create 1000 small accounts that all vote as one trail - users can delegate to those ;-) tedious, but with a simple front-end is not hard to code.
There is also nobody with the authority to auto-undelegate apart from the actual delegator. So if the delegatee accounts becomes bigger than any one delegator, what would happen?
;-)
That is an important algorithmic point that I haven't seen before. The "chain" cannot act for users without their express permission - the chain itself does not "know" user keys in such a way as it can use them without the action coming from that account.
well, if witness votes can be "set to automatically expire after one year" then delegations can also be "set to expire automatically after 90 days"
Yeah I always say that sites are as good as the people on them in the most part it’s the users that need to grow lol to keep up with the platforms
Then whales can still delegate to smaller users
exactly
and pretty much anyone can help out a newb with low funds
Shit, thanks for the goss. Vote selling sucks. The only way I'd be happy with something like that is if it was for whitelisted authors that wrote consistantly excellent content. Say if Garden Diary took delegations and voted any gardening post by that author knowing they were quality. Ah, I dream of utopia.
I still believe just deleting the code for trending entirely would make a difference. I'd much prefer a good tag referencing system and content streamed by quality over votes (impossible to algorithimise - did I make that word up?) - then it wouldn't matter. Who reads trending apart from newbies? I think older crew know never to pay attention to it.
Why did 'trending' come across anyway - was it just a duplication of the original Steem code? It was always such an issue there.
If I ran the world...
Precisely. Blurt is a fork of Steem, so most of the code is exactly the same.
yep
that's what curation trails are for
Absolutely. But they are also used to get rewards from people who get mega votes by virtue of their mega votes, not necessarily because of good content. Hence the conundrum.
we can't police "quality" without forming the same type of vigilante gangs chasing everyone off of hive
people pay ridiculous money for all kinds of stupid things in the real world
and they're perfectly free to spend their money as they wish
I agree with that too! 🤪 I guess that's the truth right.. you kinda want some elegant solution but in the end it's always going to be unfair in some way. The vigilantes of Hive just boggle me as they totally have gone so far one way it goes against what they profess to stand for, and is often hypocritical too.. but I don't need to talk about that as we all know the story!
Still, if we didn't have a Trending page we could move on to talking about something other than the unfairness of the Trending page 😄🤦♀️
Just chewing the fat of possibilities...
100% THIS
noted, do not delegate
NEVER EVER WOULD.