Following a systematic flag of my latest statistics posts, I have no choice but to stop posting the daily payouts report. According to the authority flagging them their content is not something the network should be rewarding in such a way and they are not in the best interest of the rewards pool.
I apologize to all steemers following and liking those daily posts.
I also want to thank everyone for their support of my statistics posts in the past weeks.
You should not stop because some are flagging you. There is no need to cap the reward. Users that rely on you to provide data will vote in any way they want. I've been flagged as well, but I am not going to cave in to some whales wishing to censor my posts. You have to continue doing the work that you want to do even if some will not support it. I would be curious to know why @ned downvoted it. Hmmmm.....
I think stellabelle is right here.
First, it is a sign of weakness, if @ned or @dantheman or whoever with power flags content just because it doesn't fit into their personal mind. this is nothing other then censorship. this is not what a decentralized blockchain should stand for, point.
If it continues to go this way, it will not have any future at all.
providing data and statistics has been a normal part of Steemit from day one. I could see why some of mine are flagged, but this? Providing data? I am very confused actually by this one.
I think that providing all data and statistics should be provided daily from steemit without need for users to upvote . We investing money and time to this platform and if there is enough steem for all kind of projects there should be some of it also for that.
maybe this also shows that the actual system has some weaknesses that are not yet correct balanced. but doing some manual interaction like flagging cannot be the right way to do it.
I feel like these series of downvotes from Ned deserved a comment at least as an explanation to MasterYoda. If we're going to suddenly start downvoting to try to force someone to change their behavior, it deserves at least an explanation.... Otherwise, how will we know exactly what someone is disapproving of and he we can personally improve? Just my 2 cents.
Agree with you. Whenever I flag anything, I always leave an explanation. I guess @ned does not subscribe to that philosophy.
The idea that in an autonomous, decentralized, and distributed network, there are a group of you who leave comments like the one above is troubling. While I get we are not all equal here, the fact that some act like gods, even if they are the creators does not exactly engender confidence in the future of this endeavor.
So, you feel an explanation makes this okay? Either this is a anarchical prototype for economies, or an oligarchy.
deleted
I said this action deserves an explanation, especially since it comes from the top. I did not say it is justified by an explanation.
Good, and I agree, it deserves an explanation, what it ought to get is an apology and immediate withdrawal of the downvote bot.
Agree with you and applaud you for not 'caving' even when others (including myself) have disagreed with you.
Glad to see an active whale exercising common sense. I am not sure why @ned flagged this poor guy's posts. I was under the impression flagging was reserved fire power to fight spam, not to censor legit posts in a centralized fashion. This goes against all the basic top attributes of decentralization, and it's worrisome to be honest that he seems to be out of alignment with the vision of the platform.
Using your limited and valuable vote power to flag because you believe the rewards are excessive is part of the design (white paper, etc.).
Earning less rewards is not really censorship though, it is just that people wanting to post and earn higher rewards need to find a way of presenting things that attracts wider support or at least indifference (including from people such as @ned).
The 'censorship' aspect that I personally find troublesome is the hiding of flagged content that can occur without any input from the reader about what they would like hidden. If someone wants to enable a filter that hides all posts that are flagged or all posts that have rewards of less than $100, all posts from people with rep below 50, etc. that is their prerogative, but I don't believe that the platform should take it upon itself to do this for all users.
In time I do think we will see multiple competing sites all working off the same blockchain so people will have the ability to choose a site with some preferred amount of filtering (or none). Understeem [Tor link] already exists with some filters removed.
I see it as censorship in that @masteryoda will no longer be posting stats because @ned did not like what hundreds of members of the community valued them at. I actually am ok with it if it were a non-founder whale doing the de-valuation (they earned that right as a private investor, it's nobody's business what they do generally speaking), but this user's posts are highly valued by many in the community, and have effectively been silenced by founder @ned because they are no longer a source of income making it feasible for them to take the time to produce these stats. A founder going against the grain on a particular user, wiping out hundreds of community votes seems a bit concerning to me.
The reports do reveal if the same people are rewarded and also if the payout amounts are decreasing. Maybe some whales don't want that information to be seen. But I'd point out that the reports also show when new names break through and start making the list.
Why woulnd't the same people be rewarded? What people are failing to see is that the only limit on cash rewards in this system is the price of steem, the actual coin. If it increases, each vote means more cash, a smaller chunk of investment in SP, but more spendable SBD.
If his payout is zero, he's going to stop. Plain and simple. I've been there - I thought I had a good thing going with my old game theory series, but then the whale votes mysteriously disappeared and now it's been months since I wrote one. We put work into this platform, and if the work isn't rewarded, we stop doing it.
Yes, phil. When i think about it, i imagine something like a scene out of an old-style prison chain gang. MY, sweat pouring off his brow, breaking rocks with a small pick axe to extract the stats. A mounted guard with a shotgun, barking at him every time he pauses or slows down in the completion of his arduous task.
I actually liked your game theory series (It was one of the first things i read on steemit and I and didnt even realize it was you until i read this comment) but that took work -- composition. And it added legitimate content that would interest people. These posts are posts on steemit, about steemit, of interest to no one besides insiders and they take money out of the available reward pool
I'm not sure whether these stat posts are done with an automated program or MY pulls them out manually, but one way or the other, these stats are easily ex tractable and formattable as a post in minutes with little work and no creativity required.
Especially considering the timing of their inception, these posts really seem like an excuse to throw money at a user who has a lot of friends with a lot of vests. IDK if thats the case, but thats what the appearance is.
IMO, posts like these being actively taken to task is a good thing.
The good thing about steemit is, you can be flagged, downvoted, or maybe in some cases being criticised in the comments section, say the 'Synereo AMP' episode few weeks ago. But end of the day, @stellabelle will still be able to post whatever she wants, so long as your reputation doesn't take a very strong hit, to the extent you will not be able to post anything here on Steemit. I remembered the time when reputation level was just introduced and some Steemians even received negative reputation. I'm not sure if this is still in place, but yea, that was quite a nightmare for guys who shares a different mindset from the 'general public'.
I may not agree with most of the post Steemians post here, but as of now I do not see much posts that deserves to be down-voted. As for @masteryoda case, its very simple that there're people feeling you're overpaid for the posts. But you have your set of fans, like myself. In the real world, Taylor Swift's concert tickets are too damn expensive as well to many people, but the concerts are sold out anyway. A similar case here, I feel that @masteryoda should continue the daily postings, and not be affected just because someone says that, 'your daily reports is just too expensive to read!'.
I'm more of a person who enjoys reading and listening, compared to myself talking or sharing, so if there needs to be a cap on what authors can earn on this case, then this situation will only be a precedent to what can happen in future to other quality posts that whales feel that is 'overpaid'. If the cap happens, or if @masteryoda stops posting after this episode, I guess its a step backwards for Steemit.
I agree! Eventually, they would grow bored of using their voting power to stifle this. It's nonsense to allow steemit terrorists to demand this type of change.
@stellbella
Why don't ask @ned for the flagging ?
Sorry, I disagree:
I get what @ned was getting at: it doesn't fit the format.
isn't the community as a whole the best option to decide what is fair? I think the idea of 'capping' is a socialist/ communist way of thinking. That is the definition of wealth distribution. What individuals have the authority to decide what is fair for everybody? Starting capping is going to be a very slippery slope. In my humble opinion (I have confidence I am allowed to express opinion) capping is a a dangerous idea and incapable of deciding fair. Very sad to this type of censorship being considered here on what I thought was a free market. I am really bummed out. To you masteryoda, Steem ON!
I am sympathetic. A few days ago, I published a post about a business idea, which was flagged by a big guy with a motivation which I found more or less understandable. So I withdrew the post and the project. A few days later, a similar idea was published, got no flags, and took off... This downvoting thing is probably being abused.....
re-post your blog. Censoring is just making this place suck bad.
I agree!
Wait, i thought this was steemit? The free thought , anarcho-anything place for all to be heard? Keep going @masteryoda something tells me your information needs to be out there when the head honcho himself thinks it doesn't!
It's not free thought. You have been fooled, just like me. If i dare even mention the word, Synereo, or criticize any facet of STeemit, I am automatically flagged by certain whales. They are ruining this experiment. Critiques are necessary to move experiments forward. We have to continue asking questions and being free-thinking people. Otherwise, Steemit will wither away in a shadow of fearful people. NOT GOOD.
As I've stated many times before, the fagging system is the biggest negative on steemit right now. I have warned about the negative implications ( comments here )and they are in fact starting to show. I wholeheartedly disagree with the current flagging philosophy as put forth by Dan and others ( ( here ) ).
Yep, flagging sucks. My feeling is that it's the road to mediocrity. As for an alternative set of "checks and balances", I have no idea, but surely there are enough innovators here to come up with something.
If they would just engage in the battle of ideas, a comment when they don't like something should be sufficient. If they keep this shit up, the real talent will be leaving. Good luck to them with the Spam Lords that will flood this place to pillage.
masteryoda + smooth = ned downvote
you're right. it "was". Now its quite controlled these days.
Do you agree with Ned's flag or not? If not, why are you choosing to stop a service you believe is valuable to the network? Why are your actions dictated to you by someone with Steem Power? Your post here seems to signal to the network: "Sorry everyone, you may have enjoyed what I was doing, but I won't do it unless I get paid enough money. It wasn't about providing value to you, it was about me getting paid."
I do a weekly report on Exchange Account Transfers. Some versions of that report have made over $300. Some far less. The last one was less than $20. If people value it, I'll continue to do it. If people don't value it and ask me to stop, I'll consider my own views on whether or not it's a valuable service to the network. If I choose to continue and receive flags or lose followers, I'll have to reconsider my subjective position on what's valuable to the network.
It's still my decision. I recommend rereading this post by Dan: https://steemit.com/anarchy/@dantheman/nonviolent-censorship-is-how-nonviolent-societies-create-nonviolent-government
There is no violent censorship here, and people who are truly free thinkers not shackled by the belief in authority can do whatever they want. Ned and Dan don't control you. If you think your posts are valuable, and you are doing them as a service to others, why would you stop? Are you only interested in the payouts or in keeping some "authority" happy? Why not be interested in providing value to others?
I maybe possible to provide this kind of data every day (plus curation activities!) But I don't believe that a whale will give me over $5000 in a month. (Between 8/19 and 9/18 when @ned began downvoting, these posts obtained around $5500 from the whale with 24 votes) I think this $5500 should have gone to more creative writers and contents providers.
As I explained in another comment, this is misleading and dishonest. My vote on a post alone pays out about $42, and this number is backed by an actual test (I found a random post in New and voted on it, as a test, before removing the vote; in the process I burned about $20 of my voting power, but getting accurate real world data made it perhaps worthwhile). Thus 25 votes would be about $1050, not $5000. The rewards on @masteryoda's posts, including rewards of sometimes $50 or more when I didn't even vote on them are the result of my votes along with many others' votes.
@clayop, please stop lying and trolling about whales' influence. Yes, whales have a lot of influence but when people like you who should know better (and I would argue do know better) distort the facts and constantly approach these issues from a negative perspective it brings down the entire platform. I have not been downvoting your comments consistently even when they are formed on the basis of lies, half-truths, distortions, and negative trolling, but if these continue I will start doing so in the future.
There are ways to work positively to build Steem into a better community, but you, unlike @masteryoda, are choosing a different, decidedly more negative approach that is filled with criticism (even when couched as 'data') and is increasingly bitter. Please reconsider it.
If you intended to give him $50 per post, you could adjust your vote after a post reached to hundreds dollars, or you could skip some following posts to set the average to $50~100 (or whatever you want). But the your actual contribution in the payouts is around $5000 in a month. You had enough options to adjust the degree of the payouts, but you neglected. Now @ned tried to adjust it and you are against his action.
And what am I lying about? I can open my code (although its shamefully dirty) then everyone can run the same analysis. I think the negative perspective is not from these analysis but from some behaviors of some members. If there is no such behaviors, the analysis cannot tell any negative things.
IMHO, @masteryoda now can run his own web service with rewards he obtained so far, and provide the same stats.
I intended to give my vote. The rewards are up to other voters and the system and I don't control them, nor do I have any intention of continually monitoring the rewards of every post I vote on to fine tune a particular reward level. That is absurd.
I do sometimes remove or adjust my vote on a post if I find the overall reward to be excessive and I think I may have done that in one or two cases of @masteryoda's posts (not sure). But in general I did not and do not find the overall rewards he is receiving to be excessive given the positive reception these posts and masteryoda's presentation and presence have in the community and what that suggests about value.
Value is subjective as I'm sure you are aware and I don't necessarily find original novels, poems, etc. to be more valuable than @masteryoda's contributions (and I use that word broadly to encompass the positive presentation and vibe that he brings to Steem). In some cases such original-works posts may be very valuable, but not necessarily. If I tried to write an original novel and posted chapters, my ability to do so would suggest that you should downvote it based on value.
That is a measure of contribution (or elsewhere you call it influence, though in fact it is neither) that you made up and which allocates a composite result of a collaborative voting process over time in a particular, and as it happens, very peculiar manner. In effect, it assumes each voter returns to each post the same instant right before payout and makes an explicit decision whether or not to remove his or her vote independent of the observed or anticipated actions of other voters. That is not how the system normally operates, not how people use it, and it is not reasonable to ever expect this to approximate reality at all.
This is false I have stated several times in this thread that I support @ned taking the action he did based on his perception of the value. I had some disagreement with some of his reasons he shared with me privately but ultimately it is his vote and his choice.
Thank you @smooth for your support of my statistics posts, obviously many people like them and find them valuable as it clearly shows in this post’s comments and your support has a lot to do with them becoming so popular. I apologize for the time you had to spend on this post to explain your point of view, unfortunately some people insist on vilifying me, my posts and people who support them. To those no matter what we say it will not change anything.
You are definitely one of the wisest big stake holders who truly care about this project and its future. Thanks again!
@smooth, correct me if I'm wrong but I believe that your vote did worth around $75 or more before. The reason of current $42 worth is that, steem decreased in value and so the account value too. Take the example of Aug 25 2016 when Steem was at 0.0019 (open price) and BTC was at $577 (open price) which means 0.0019 x 577 = 1 USD per STEEM but today, it worth 40 US Cents. So, your vote was worth around $90 before.
Even on 8th september, steem was worth 0.75 USD which means your vote did worth around $75. And I don't know if you meant $42 worth for both of your accounts or single, because your witness account is also powerful.
BTW, I am neutral in this case and just thought to leave my reply as I felt it essential because @clayop is not completely lying, although I don't think $5000 could be correct figure, he said 24 votes which means, he imagined your vote $200 worthy which is nothing but a big mistake or error.
Oh and by the way, I waited for your more replies but I feel like you forgot to check again. Check them out and share your thoughts.
@steemist I can't reply directly to your comment because of nesting. You are of course correct that the value of a solo vote will vary depending on the price of STEEM, level of account voting power (when I did the test I was at about 99%, but in general many of my votes have been made with lower vote power), and other factors such as the level other voting activity that day. My test did include both accounts BTW.
Thanks for taking your time. So, you tested your both account and that's something I wasn't sure about before.
Yes, value of votes also depend on how many people upvoted before you, and if any whale voted before you and you vote after that whale, your vote value will increase automatically.
Clayop, you don't understand how this works. IF we raise the price of steem by building a free, useful network, where votes count, the number of steem dollars issued every day increases. It is not limited, only the number of steem coins produced every day. This is why when steem wen to 3 dollars, there was more than enough to go around. If it went to 500-600 as bitcoin has done, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
I think you are tapping on a wrong place. I meant the money could go to more productive contents creators who can increase Steem value more.
No, I'm not. If that's the message, then reward those doing that, instead of penalizing someone who's doing work that is obviously appreciated by the community, who are supposed to be directing the flow of rewards, unless, of course, like voting in presidential politics, that is all a big myth.
My point is that I can provide the same stats as masteryoda's. But I may not get a whales continous support since he probably thinks I am not a friend of him.
True, but I would give it a shot. Since you are not a whale, which masteryoda is, you probably also won't get busted for it!
@markrmorrisjr
I am a kind of whale... a smaller one (but much greater than masteryoda)
Flagging is only for spam, not for over riding how the community sees fit to vote rewards out. It's centralized censorship what @ned is doing, plain and simple.
@smooth is doing exactly the same thing on @dantheman since he thinks paying devs with rewards is not good.
And he also does against attacking people. Here
Sorry I may not have clarified my concern as much as I probably should have. I really have no big concerns with whales that are NOT founders voting however suits their fancy (they invested so whatever they want to do is their business in my opinion). My concern is having one of the primary founders of the network doing the equivalent of putting a community member out of business, EVEN though the community itself decided they wanted them to STAY in business by voting them up. That is the only red flag I see here.
I agree with your point. If you look at curation statistics, curation influence in sum of all devs is only 60% of one whale(smooth)'s influence. (Need to mention that they have five times more SP than him) So I think the current situation is not that serious.
@taoteh1221 IMO, some of here (e.g. jesta or roadscape) easily can provide this service on their website(example) without any additional rewards. It's not a hard job. One just can make a script that generates daily/weekly/monthly stats and posts them automatically. Paying thousands a month for this makes less sense. We can rather pay this money for real original contents creators (such as novel writers).
Interesting. Yeh, it's not that serious overall big picture ATM. I still completely trust @ned as well, I think he has good intention and is not malicious at all of course. It's just a shame somebody is shutting down a highly liked community service because of a mere click or two of a founder. I'm sure everything will work out just fine in the long run. :-)
A team of whales can do the same thing as well. IMHO each individual dev is also a member of this community. They put lots of efforts as like other whales put their money, and obtained the shares. Using their own shares is one's choice.
I understand your point of view. I just see it a bit differently I guess. I hold founders to a higher standard myself, because they are the primary caretakers and creators of the platform. There is a big difference in my mind between a private investor who may only be in it for the money and nothing else, and a founder / caretaker who created and maintains the system. I tend to expect seeing an extra level of caution from founders when interacting with the community.
Yessiree bob, your reports will be missed by many...
Perhaps there is another way that you could continue your service by capping the payout reward.
@dantheman, why should it be necessary or logical to "cap" the payout reward. Doesn't the platform take care of this through the built-in incentives? If users value the content they upvote. If they don't value it, they don't upvote it. I don't see the point in flagging content because someone doesn't think other people should value it. All we're doing here is directing the faucet, so to speak. Whether or not specific content is more deserving should not be the point of the flagging system IMHO. Flagging is for content that is abusive, stolen, obscene, spam, etc.
The Oragami ones are cool. One should do what he/she is good at! MasterYoda is good at stats.
I vote on both. Well I used to. What will you be posting next masteryoda?
What do you mean used to? Did you not get the message, there are no new voting limits or weight changes. Vote away!
oragami posts worth hundreds, analytics break downs not acceptable?
who is working for Soros on the Steem team?
Agreed, sounds fishy that someone is downvoting Steem data, only reason could be that they are hiding the falling payouts.
it was @ned
no joke!
Flagging was originally downvoting, which as the whitepaper describes, was intended as a tool to bring down over-inflated rewards. Our vote weight is supposed to be able to both say "I think this should be rewarded more" and "I think this should be rewarded less".
I think it would be ideal to have some smarter voting options available. For example, "I think this deserves $X. My vote will count towards it up until the point of $X, but not further".
I think after they changed downvoting to flagging, they should have revised the whitepaper to say flagging was for spam only. Reducing payouts seems to be censoring BS to me. If a user doesn't get paid anymore, chances are they may stop posting.
they did not change downvoting to flagging. They changed a graphic in the UI. AFAIK, nothing at all changed on the steem blockchain.
The front end change has resulted in a semantic change for the community. Especially with the guidance added on SteemIt.com, about flagging being for abuse. This change in philosophy was never implemented consistently even among the founders though.
Stakeholders are entitled to believe, express and vote that a post is being given too large a share of the rewards pie. To disallow or discourage votes which say "this is rewarded too highly" is censorship in itself.
exactly.
I don't think @ned got the memo that flagging is only for spam, and not to be used to censor people.
You birthed this baby, but like babies world wide, at some point they stop recognizing absolute parental control.
If it was obscene, like bodies in wood chippers, I could see it, but this is not good.
When the people want to stop rewarding the work, they will.
Sounds like this user is essentially being successfully censored by a centralized authority on your platform? Not good.
Dan maybe you can talk to Ned, since it looks like he did the flagging in the most recent masteryoda posts? This is a case where the data and information presented is consistently upvoted by members. It's not content that should be flagged. In fact, why flag content without discussing it with the author first anyway? Please consider helping to resolve this. Thanks.
Yep, I agree, 100%, this is either a user generated platform or it's not and it was definitely presented that way, so I'm afraid I don't get what this is about.
Why does that need to happen, Dan? You talk a big game about liberty, but this right here, is an authoritarian response. You either believe in a free market, or you don't.
capping rewards (instituting a maximum payout for all Steemit posts) has occurred to me also, but I rejected the concept because it deviates us from the natural law of imbalance / the 80/20 principle. IMHO it is far better to continue to allow the best connected people to keep earning 'unfair' $5000 payouts, than it would be to payout 50$ to 100 people... hmm. AND i also have a problem with flagging used as down voting. But I guess that's just me.
How about we cap flagging instead?
Flag content and it costs you exactly what you took from the person you're flagging in terms of money and rep. Then require commentary on each and every flag and allow users to appeal that since it does not only monetary damage, but rep damage.
Your flag the other day on my post cost me an entire rep point even though I was busy talking to those who upvoted and explaining that several of the upvotes were coming from people i was contacting via email to discuss a business that would be using their infrastructure and because this was crypto world i had no other way to verify my ident.
It took me forever to get that rep point, and you took it away because you felt my post wasn't worth the money it generated despite it becoming an active discussion on the merits of voting and curation. Eventually the big voters filtered in and removed their upvotes so it would have gone to 0 anyways. But you did damage to my rep and god only knows how long it will be before I get that point back.
If you cap earnings then what will happen is sock puppet city, just like when you capped maximum number of blog postings. Limiting speech on a free speech centered platform is never going to fix it and money is the ultimate form of speech. You need to loosen the restraints not tighten them. The core of this problem is the fixed daily payout amount. Get rid of that and tie it to user activity instead.
The "fixed daily payout" amount is a myth anyway. Since the price of steem going up, could increase "cash" rewards, making every vote worth 50 cents, a dollar, or more, even for plankton, why sweat it? We need to be looking much more big picture.
I’m not aware such option of capping the reward exists. Also what would be an acceptable reward in your opinion? Thanks!
$50 is an acceptable reward
Says who? People should be able to vote how they want, Let's raise the price of steem, then the SBD payouts each day can go crazy! If you start limiting top payouts you'll stimey the incentive to grow the platform, everyone will end up with a $1 here and there and the whole place will be swimming in spam!
Is there any logic behind this number, or is it just your "gut feeling"? Or are you being sarcastic? I can't even tell...
I think it's a number that none of the users on steemit would feel "weird" about if they see it everyday, unlike seeing $300 everyday for the same post on the trending page, does not look fair
Who cares? Are we shooting for "fair" how are we going to judge that. Is my posts, after twenty years of writing in various capacities for a living on the same scale as some high school kid? Who gets to decide? Is this a decentralized, distributed network, or an autocratic oligarchy?
@craig-grant
What do you know?
I think $50 is too low. It's not the same post. It has new data each day and it's always interesting.
It was a rhetorical question, one that has no exact answer everyone agrees on.
I understand masteryoda. But what I personally don't understand is why some entities flagged content that people are interested in. We know there's interest because of the upvotes and comments. I can only assume the flags came from some people who had a lot of SP. It just smells fishy and is censorship by flagging.
I don't quite understand it neither, so that makes two of us.
That's ridiculous. In one thread it's the system decides what the work is worth, now a cap is proposed....
http://bit.ly/2cu76fn
Maybe @dantheman learned it from @smooth e.g.,
I have not been voting on these posts only on the basis of the statistics. I've been voting on them also on the basis of @masteryoda's presentation of a leaderboard as a generally-positive and engaging community-building concept, along with his interaction with followers to the same end, and finally in support of his ongoing work to produce other useful and interesting statistics such as the recent SBD report. That has been evidenced by the generally-supportive comments that I have consistently seen on his posts, on this post (other than yours and a very few others'), and by mentions of the posts elsewhere on the platform and in chat rooms and private conversations. All of this indicates to me that the posts add value to the Steem community and thus I am awarding my votes on that basis, in accordance with the standards suggested by the Steem designers and founders. (And to be fair, I assume that @ned is using his votes according to the same standards but with a different point of view.)
Your behavior has not evidenced this same sort of community-building approach, at all. If you could present yourrself and your data as @masteryoda has been doing then I would support it.
Also, you made a blatantly unsupported, possibly-inflammatory, and false allegation in another comment, that I was voting for these posts because @masteryoda is my friend. This is not only irrelevant but also false. Other than his presence here on Steem, I do not know @masteryoda. I have never interacted with him other than via his posts and the #witness channel (he hasn't been active there) and a couple of private chats where he asked for my advice and support on a couple of Steem-related development projects.
Please stop the trolling, negativity, and false accusations. They do not add value to Steem and your presence and actions are becoming a stain on the community.
Hello @smooth
Dropped a few important messages to you on steemit chat . Please check them out and reply. Thanks.
BTW guys, @ned already removed his downvote so stop spreading negativity and falsehood.
You have that backwards. I quite literally learned about downvoting being an appropriate action to take in the case of subjectively excessive rewards from @dantheman.
In this case I do not object to @ned taking the action he did if he feels that the rewards on the posts he is flagging are excessive. I do, however, believe that the reasons he gave to me in a private conversation for why he believed this were mistaken and incorrect. I'll let @ned comment on his reasons if he chooses to do so.
Just my curiosity. If I provide the exactly same statistics every day, will you vote for me? (not always but around 20 times per month)
I am trying to understand your wording because I could not understand the term "capping the payout reward" - does it mean to use another metric for measurement?
No, it means limiting the payout on the data posts because some idiot thought it was making too much money.
I feel that, for @masteryoda to get $300 over for a daily statistic posts, is definitely legit. We upvote his content, for appreciation. It may be very simple posts, or complex ones with details, there should not be a cap to how much @masteryoda should receive for the work he's done.
In real life, there're times when we buy something which we feel is over-valued, but we still buy it anyway, be it the reason that we need the product, or service, or its just appreciation or for charity causes.
I hope you continue your work, appreciate what you've done before. And even though I feel that you're over-paid for getting $300 a day for daily posts, I do not support the idea of having a cap to what you can get.
its basis of capitalism.. What's @dollarvigilante gotta say? Steemit makes him tons of money based on his ideology. Will he stand up for MasterYoda ?
This may not be the case where, Steemians who made great posts take a stand with, or against @masteryoda. @dollarvigilante does not need to say anything, neither is he obligated to do so for this case. But I believe most of us here, our primary concern is, why should there exist a cap to what @masteryoda can earn, when us, the community decides whether we upvote his posts or not.
There is no need to introduce the cap in this situation. As time goes, and as we grow into a bigger community, votes will get diversified, with more contents available. At the very moment, @masteryoda 's daily reports are generating decent income for himself. The daily posts might just be simple jobs that takes less than 15 minutes of his time, or perhaps there were effort and passion in what he does that makes his daily posts a thing to be 'upvoted' daily. When the community grows over here in Steemit, most new users might not find @masteryoda 's post to be helpful, and thus, may not benefit from the growing community. Perhaps in the future, the potential of Steemit maximises to the extent, every posts will be so good, authors getting $300 a day will be peanuts.
@neowenyian27
No one ask the whales to UPVOTES
@solarguy
Do you think dv would read this?
@dan haven't even reply to me.
Is a pointless attempt.
he left a comment so he will get notices when a new reply is left. they care.
Dan , Ned , I know your checking in on this particular post. I know you're clever guys and capable of overcoming this hardship. We all believe that. It not easy, I know this was not part of your dream but i also know you were prepared for it. How you will deal with it will be your legacy. I still applaud you for you genius in developing this revolutionary platform. All steemers do.
We are just frustrated today.
^^
And I thought Jedi's don't bleed... What a weak individual you are,,, much disappointing @masteryoda ,,, this post deserves a flag, to show you which of you're post would really get flagged
i feel like masteryoda has been censored. it's true.. freedom can only be taken away.
it's not censored, just rewards being taken away, but the posts can continue for less rewards
taking away rewards in a rewards based game/platform is like sanctions on a country for doing something you don't like.
"taking away rewards" is the culture the big steem power holders currently have, it started when others would downvote ned or dan and say it's to preserve the reward pool
that's bollocks. Ned and Dan have near Veto power, they are so strong. Hard to accept that
Taking rewards away censors, because they stop posting when they make no money.
It is censorship by flagging. If they had issues, why not discuss it with masteryoda in chat? And why should the reward for informative statistical data be artificially capped? We don't cap the posts of people who post chapters from their fiction books and get $500 per post. Why should we cap this data? It makes no sense.
makes perfect sense when the chapters from fiction books also enable a cap of $50 if users start complaining
But the users aren't complaining about that or about masteryoda's posts. They upvote the posts. That's the issue.
Since there is no cap on how many SBDs can be issued in a day (the number of steem dollars,being tied to the price of steem) why put caps on anything? If they want to more evenly distribute voting power, in reality, not by some artificially low vote number limit, then let them do that and the rest will right itself. But, the truth is, if there is a problem it's calling this a decentralized and distributed system, when it is obviously not.
It's a coercive use of force within a supposedly decentralized and distributed system and should be unacceptable.
my original comment on the wrong post, ha :)
What???
That doesn't seem right.
its whack!!
And why the hell someone decides for the author and his readers what to publish? For me personally, these posts useful and interesting! Have some favourite authors,and it is important to monitor their progress! Write on,@masteryoda !
I find those statistics really useful and interesting myself. That's why I thought they were worth sharing, I guess now I will have them all for myself :)
Keep posting them! He'll grow tired of then uproar and change tactics. Look at what happened when they proposed the voting changes. Public opinion swayed them. I for one would love to see you keep going!
Me too. Keep posting the reports if you have time and are not discouraged by this heavy handedness.
Wtf! I liked them
Oh no, they put The master out of Business.
So sad.
Who decide that? The Tribunal? or The Upvoters?
And why don't Cap all posts above $500?
Maybe should down flagged all posts. Dan did it , ned did it many more did it.
This have becomes Politics. What a shame.
my question who is on whose pay roll now. sudden witeness changes, crap making money, gold worthless. Steemit is suddenly upside down. I am under the impression steemit has competition now. lets see how well they do once they make a million dollars.
Goes to show any business must bow to the overlords. Who/What ever they are.
Well, if you find out where the competition is, let me know, I'm down for a test run!
What this synero i've been hearing about taking some of steemits pie?
I don't have the patients to start over again and relearn how to blog. But i have asked that is and i can't figure it out but that's the impression i get.
It's a bad day for Steemit. I thought the community as a whole would decide what content is being rewarded. Now @masteryoda's content is censored by 1 or 2 big whales. A centralized authority so to speak.
How can Steem ever be decentralized if a few big whales have so much influence?
So..... the fact that hundreds of users read and vote for your post doesn't matter because a few users decided it wasn't beneficial.....
Decentralized is awesome!
Whaaaaat. Lame. Thanks for posting thus far.
Sorry I am lost. Personally I don't understand the reasoning right now. Where should we now get the stats from - open an additional website and send the traffic there?
nobody does.
You'll have to do the digging for yourself, I think we just need to set up a post to get subscribers for the data, each of us send Yoda a $1SBD a day and work around it.
I think it's important that the data be shared with all in the community.
I totally agree, I'm not talking about not sharing. The data is available, by the way on Steemitstats.com, but you have to dig it out.
.
I agree, bullionstackers, but what else can we do but just let them win?
Doesn't make sense to me. On Stermit people are supposed to be free to post any original content they see fit and other people are free to vote how they choose. If I spend 3 hours of solid work on a post and somebody posts a picture of a cat or song lyrics and earns 100X what I made, should I feel angry. No. I just need to find a singing cat and I'm gold. Lighten up people, and post what you want!
Interesting... I can understand the flagger's point but I also thought the information was valuable to the community... I am certainly bummed that I will now have to spend extra time looking up all this data myself. It was very useful to have presented the way you did on a daily basis... I'm sad to see it go.
I joined this site because of an author, but I have to say the more I learn about it the more I want to run for my life. What a bunch of crooks. Why would the founders flag this content? This place is worse than the mafia.
I asked Masteryoda to create a stats website several weeks ago, which would be more useable and accessible to users. He obliged at the time.
I saw these posts as something that can easily be run from the SteemSQL and put on a website with dashboards, and that the daily rewards for these stats posts were too high.
If no one else sees it this way, that would be interesting to me.
Thank you for replying here @ned.
The first thing I want to point out is the technical challenge of pulling these stats: payouts are part of what is called virtual ops in the blockchain these are not present in blocks, but rather in the accounts state part of the blockchain, this data is not available via the SteemSQL database implementation, and even if it was, parsing all accounts to generate a single daily report would put SteemSQL in DoS or get the client connection banned because it would trigger some DDoS protection mechanism, we are talking about millions of records that have to be parsed each time. I read some people here think it’s an easy task, I invite anyone who said that to give it a try. With about 95k accounts in the database, taking as little as 0.1 second per account could result in hours of treatment to get a single report. I use a custom program I wrote which is more than 3k lines of code, and I also use a modified steemd client that allows larger queries to the blockchain database, so even using a public API cluster will not work. I also use a top-shelf workstation to process the data, regular machines will just crash. I don’t want to go into more technical details as it’s not our main point here.
When you asked me to set up a website, you did not make it clear that it would mean I should stop posting the stats here. The above technical challenges would make it very hard and expensive to run a live website with this kind of stats, which leaves us with the choice of posting the same reports in a WordPress blog or something similar outside of Steemit? Which does not make any sense to me, because Steemit is a blogging platform in the first place, let alone the fact that it would be driving traffic out of Steemit to an external blog. So the feeling I get is that I’m being kicked out of Steemit because my posts are successful?
The next point you mentioned is that my posts’ reward was too high, this is certainly a very subjective point, which could result in some very long byzantine discussions. But my main point about it is that I have followers and people who really like my posts and upvote them as you can see in the numerous comments of this post, and my posts are not in any way abusive or obscene or anything similar that would deserve a flag especially one that nullifies votes of literally hundreds of people and one that is coming from one of the founders of this platform.
It seems many people here do not agree with the systematic flagging of my posts.
I’m an early member of this community, and I have the utmost respect for all its members including the normal users, the founders, the big stake holders, the investors and the staff. I have been contributing to it in ways I deem to be useful to community and I also have some ongoing projects for it. I certainly wish it big success as it would mean the success of everyone here! But the last thing anyone here wants is to see it turn into an Orwellian platform.
You can make it more efficient by parsing only last 24h active accounts, which is about 5k, instead of parsing every 95k accounts
I invite you to do that, because it will take longer as you will need to determine the active accounts first (by parsing the same 95k accounts and not blocks, as blocks do not have virtual ops information). It would be interesting to see how you will solve this problem. It will also allow you to get a better idea about the difficulty of this operation.
Identify the accounts by monitoring blocks then after midnight (utc) you can begin to parse them. I will try!
Not all posts get paid within exactly 24 hours some live more due to late big votes, also the second payout occurs after 30 days. Your method is not accurate and will probably miss some payouts but I invite you to try!
@masteryoda
Ah right. Instead you can make a 30+a day active account list which has about 20000 accounts. I am working on in.
@ned, nobody has the right in a truly decentralized application to censor / force an individual down a certain path. I think you may want to consider saving flagging power for spam fighting only, and think about how the users / investors that are into true decentralization (of which you surely have very many) are viewing what is a) going on right now here, and b) that it can easily happen again. You are nullifying the will of the other voters, and as one of the founders of the platform. I'm honestly not trying to be a jerk here, just pointing out why everybody is freaked out about this.
"nobody has the right in a truly decentralized application to censor / force an individual down a certain path"
Hardly anyone else has flagged these posts ever. They are not a secret, they are pretty widely followed.
Apparently it is indeed the case that no one else (or, certainly, not many voters) besides you had a major problem with the posts nor the rewards.
Putting the stats on a web site not only means removing the reward stream from person who is creating and producing these reports (not only this one particular report, but several different types including regularly-produced new ones) but is also means getting rid of the interactive comment stream, presence in feeds, etc.
It is quite peculiar to want to send people away to a separate web site, when the whole idea is to build a community here. I'd rather see more initiatives to give people more reasons to stay here and continue interacting. That also includes more types of content for people to choose from.
I think the rewards have been excessive and it's gone on long enough. While I applaud his move away from serial plagiarism, I think this is clearly milking the system and his loyal whale voters are doing the platform a disservice at this point.
My half a cent...
I'll keep saying it, we need separation of flagging and downvoting. Until then, people will keep demonizing downvoters, even if they're doing their jobs in redistributing wealth in a fair manner.
Most comments here are ridiculous. What @masteryoda did was smart and he provides a useful service, no doubt, but those who think that he deserves a daily reward of $300+ per day for the rest of his life for setting up an automatic stat bot are delusional.
Wake up guys, the daily rewards are limited.
Ned doesn't need to provide an explanation for the downvote more than those who upvoted it so much in the first place.
At least that would be true if downvoting weren't linked to rep as it is now. Until that changes, expect a lot of similar situations/pissed off users.
Give up, you shouldn't, @masteryoda. Good for us, your stats are. Upvote more, we can, for your hard work.
Maybe others would be more pleased if you added some commentary about what you're seeing? I don't know. It was good as it was, but maybe others would like to see something more. I have no clue how much work it is, but will certainly miss the posts.
Well, in fact the only reason for your posts generating 200+$ rewards are upvotes from @smooth
You can see here that without his upvote your post would be generating only about 20$ reward https://steemit.com/stats/@masteryoda/daily-payouts-leaderboards-september-20
However @smooth do never hesitated to flag a post upvoted by @ned or @dantheman with explanation given not to suck out the reward pool
It would be very romantic to expect that SteemIt inc employees would accept @smooth to be the only one to decide who's sucking out the reward pool and who isn't, they are just acting symmetrically.
I'm sure that in case @smooth stops upvoting your posts ore maybe just adjusts slider at 10%, @ned would stop flagging it.
This is inaccurate. My vote alone on a post currently currently generates a reward of $42.48 (I just tested it). Anything earned beyond that comes from other votes in addition to mine.
You are selectively choosing one of the lowest-rewarded posts that did not have my vote. Another that didn't have my vote was three days earlier, https://steemit.com/stats/@masteryoda/daily-payouts-leaderboards-september-17 and that one earned almost $75.
I find these posts to be valuable information and also a positive contribution to the community (the many comments here in support of @masteryoda and his posts supports that my perception on the latter was correct). That's why I voted for them and would continue to do so. I do respect that others may disagree. It is unfortunate, not only for @masteryoda but also for the rest of us, that the person disagreeing happens to have the largest individual account and therefore the strongest vote.
Sorry, it wasn't my intention to be selective, I just was a bit superficial.
It's very good that you pointed out that 75$ post, because as we can see the main contributor for this post was @steemit200, obviously it's one of SteemIt inc accounts.
So it looks like SteemIt inc egree that posts of @masteryoda are positive contribution, just suggests that this contribution should be measured by 75$ rather then by 200$.
From my minnow point of view it's only good when whales annihilate each other votes, because all that only encrease my own vote weight.
However I also take in consideration, that at this early stage of development the whole reward pool is rather just money subsidized by Steemit inc
@clayop is correct that is not a Steemit Inc. account (I think those were steemit1-50, but I could be wrong; the specific numbers are in the original bitcointalk thread).
However, in this case you are also characterizing the rewards incorrectly. steemit200's account is much smaller than mine and as such would not by itself generate anything close to $75 in rewards. My guess is more like $4. Although @steemit200 is the largest single vote, there are many other votes on that post that are close in size, including @au1nethyb1, @rosco99 (both witnesses), @recusive, @satoshifund and others. It is not correct to attribute the resulting reward, nor any specific portion thereof, to any one particular voter, in either this case or others.
@steemit200 is not Steemit Inc.'s account IIRC
Steemit200 is a bot account that occassionally frontruns a lot of the whales (along with badassmother wang and the recursive's sometimes). AFAICT, its not related to accounts like steemit1, steemit2, and steemit3, that are steemit inc's accounts.
If it voted for this poster, it most likely did so trying to frontrun smooth, but got bolloxed when smooth didn't show up to the party.
Sorry. I'm thinking more and more that someone should make an unauthorized, totally fair-launch steem clone as an experiment. To see what sort of community emerges when whales aren't running the show. Maybe we do it pure PoW so we don't have to bother with the politics of witnesses. It could be a total disaster, but then that's really the point - to find out.
wtf is this? downvote bullying shit
I hope I don't sound like a dick for saying this but to me it looks like you're getting between $200-$500 dollars consistently for the same post. I don't think anybody was trying to censor you. I didn't like to see the whales voting this way either (flagging based on rewards too high) but those whales who've been (in my opinion) overvaluing your work are the same whales who flag the content of the developers for the same reason; content which (in my opinion) needs to be trending in order to reach enough members of the community. We connect better when we're all on the same page.
I would hope you would take it on the chin and either keep doing these posts accepting that a more accurate value is $10 (in my opinion) or add value to the content to make it worth what it's been getting. Try not to take a flag personally. I'm surprised to see the whales upvote together on a post like this when they do often flag things claiming they "don't add value"... This declaration of ending your series is far less valuable than the daily statistics you were doing.
Remember when @berniesanders flagged @dollarvigillante? He said he did it because he knew he could do better than that and Jeff Berwick took it in good humour and wrote a satirical post on it (probably because of those who protested) which was taken way too seriously I might add. But my point is take it as a gentle nudge to improve on your work. Thus far, it has clearly been appreciated perhaps ned just thinks it's time to do better for that kind of reward.
The beauty of the system is that the system decides the value. If people don't think it's worth it, let them stop voting for it, singling out these posts is nonsense.
The flag is as much a part of that system as the upvote is. I used to be annoyed by this use of the flag too but after when you consider that there is a budget to the rewards, and that this flag comes at an opportunity cost to the flagger who could have used the vote to gain a curation reward and the rewards just get redistributed to everyone else who was maybe only making a couple of cents for their work. Rather than repeat myself I'm going to copy and paste something from this post I wrote a month ago.
or
I call bullshit on this whole idea that steemit rewards are limited. The number of steem coins each day is set, but the price of steem drives the number of steem dollars, which is what most of this is about. So, instead of being jealous, or judging whether the community has done the right thing with their votes, let's focus instead on spreading the idea of steem and get the price up. That's first, second, the same thing could be accomplished by moving the vote in a positive direction instead of shutting someone down whose work was seen as valuable by nearly all of the hundreds of comments on this post.
Nobody has the right to decide what the overall value of a post is worth here, that would be centralized BS which does not belong in the decentralized world. @ned needs to re-think what "decentralized" really represents to the majority of blockchain users / investors, before he shoots his latest project in the foot.
This is the first time I've seen @ned vote this way. On the other hand I've seen flags come from @smooth, @berniesanders & @steemed all claiming to be redistributing the rewards more evenly by flagging the post because it wasn't worth what it was valued at. I had your frame of mind before but after realising that a flag is at a cost to the curator who could have used that vote to seek curation rewards, it's just a natural part of the system. You feel like your vote isn't counted but the fact is, your vote is just much smaller so the opinion of those with a bigger vote than yours wins. That is still decentralised because they paid for that power and everyone can just as easily pay for or earn the power to manipulate what makes the front page.
Refer to my other response above.
A founder having the HUGE voting power @ned has should not be flagging because they think all the other voters over-valued a post. That's a dictatorship, not a decentralized system where every user's vote counts. I agree if it was a whale not associated with the founders it is a natural occurrence. When a founding team member does this though, it's a dictatorship, plain and simple.
So lets say dan and ned and any of their employees stop voting. You think it would be decentralised then? The budget stays the same so in fact if they stopped voting the power would just move down to the next in line. Which would mean blocktrades (according to steemwhales) would become the new dictator. Because his vote would now be the most powerful. (That is, if this were a dictatorship as you call it)
My concern isn't with anything other than a whale founding member's account not voting "with" the majority of the community on average (per-user voted upon...in this case @masteryoda). The HUNDREDS of upvotes @masteryoda received from the community were continually wiped out per-post by ONE founding member whale. That is centralization because they founded the system. I actually am fine with a non-founder whale doing whatever they want, but it makes me concerned when a founding member wipes out hundreds of community member's votes with one click more than once on the same community member.
Your post will be missed.
I want to thank you for the time you put into your daily posts.
Steem on,
Mike
Thank you for supporting my statistics posts!
wow. so unexpected and sad for me.
did you have any new idea for your posts?
and 8 don't know why somebody can flag you.
because you take open source blockchain data.
Thank you @smailer you were one of the first supporters of my statistics posts, glad you could find success with your latte art posts, they are awesome!
That down vote crap is getting annoying.
Who's social networking site?
Our social networking site!
for the record i drank like a whole bottle of red wine while i commented last night.
In vino veritas
Thanks @masteryoda
Masteryoda, I like your stats. It may be the end of me, but... Here is my post about this post! Don't be a Moby Dick. https://steemit.com/steemit/@whatsup/don-t-be-a-moby-dick-stop-whale-flagging
A suggestion for @masteryoda: how about keeping the stat posts but adding additional commentary/analytics so that your posts are not so similar between each as they will have extra original content in each.
I really liked your daily posts... what stupid censorship this seems. If you want to act "in best interest of the reward pool" then how about we downflag whale's shadow accounts. just look at top100 SP holders. Almost 30 shadow accounts.
I enjoyed your posts. All the best to you!
Thank you!
Dont give in to the bullies. Keep up the good work please :)
Look how much activity this has drawn. People voicing their opinions, blood boiling, conversation. This is what steemit is all about! Right?!
@masteryoda, I like your daily updates. As they are insightful, they draw me to look at the platform about the same time everyday. Thank you. Vote them up, not because I make any money (my account is far too low for that), but rather it is a source of desired information. It makes me interact more with Steemit, so you get my vote. Keep it up if you choose, otherwise I wish you the best in other endeavors (on this site or others).
Why not continue it anyway? How much do you need to make to do it?
I cannot post and expose myself to flagging as it hurts my reputation and the people who vote for me.
Well, then, let's set up a subscription to put it somewhere else
What I like is blogging on Steemit, I’m not interested in setting up an external site to post them, does not make much sense imho.
This is very sad.
I totally agree. I think it's unfair what's happening here. It is not at all how the whitepaper describes this platform.
Not sure how I feel about this, actually.
I suppose one way to look at it would be that your posts are kind of like a stock ticker. The question that comes up in this environment then becomes, "Should the ticker itself be able to earn money?"
that's the wisest point . should the monitor be monitor be monitored. Wells Fargo comes to mind in this case.
Someone gets paid to maintain the damn ticker, no one does it for free!
If you want to look at it that way, it's a service. Masteryoda extracts and presents the data in a logical manner. It saves the rest of us from having to individually figure out how to do the same thing. Beyond which, it should be up to individuals on whether they find it valuable and upvote it.
All valid points in these replies. I'm still on the fence because there are understandable points on both sides.
Is it one individual who is flagging these posts? If so, perhaps some discussion might be in order between the author and the flagger to come to an agreement?
In fact, if the public is truly in control, perhaps a polling option for steemit might not be a bad idea. This way each individual - whale or minnow - has an equally charged poll-vote in situations like this, so we can all decide with a majority vote.
It looks like it was Ned. One other person flagged but I could only scroll so far through the voters. I agree that it would have been preferable for ned to talk to masteryoda first. There should really be a process for flagging protocol. An unweighted poll would be a good idea as long as it was one human one vote lol :)
What do the witnesses think?
dont ask they are servants.. Doesnt matter what they think. They can be voted out in a heart beat after buying $100k worth of hardware to build a computer that makes block chains .
This is bad news for freedom.
The most respected on steemit for supporting freedom will sit and allow this to unfold because they need whale votes. wont they?
F'n sell outs.
Quite obviously the voting is hundreds to one or two that you should keep posting.
Either we take our freedoms or we won't have any.
Yoda no more stats post? Like I don't. Sad am I.
That's too bad. I wouldn't let them win, test their resolve, keep putting it up, I'll kick in $1 SBD daily to see your stats!
@markemorrisjr
You are rich.
We can't even make 10 cent here, afford to read the stats
I'm not asking anyone to do anything they can't so I'd gladly pay for you to get them if that were possible. I understand and wish you much success here!
No need @markrmorrisjr
A blog will be out today
Keep a look out for it
good luck @masteryoda
Who is flagging these post and why?