It's a problem right now, as some people control thousands of accounts:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1594979.msg16019000#msg16019000

1 person = 1 vote is doomed with such practices...

when I saw someone responded to this, I figured it would be you @lukestokes, even before I looked at the username. That's the whole reason there is a need to sign up through facebook or redditt (I believe that is still true). Steemit is looking for unique individual users who will engage and use the system, not total number of accounts.

I guess people could keep making email accounts and facebook accounts and sign up for the steem power and only vote on one users post and eventually power down and transfer to one account, but most trying to game the system are looking for a quick buck and not willing to get their money over years.

I know how to game systems pretty well. It's just how my mind works. It's gotten me in some trouble, but I can now use it to point out bugs or exploits to help a community instead of just myself.

I have read the white paper multiple times actually and  
>when I saw someone responded to this, I figured it would be you @lukestokes, even before I looked at the username.

This was actually meant to be a compliment (rereading made me realize that it may not have sounded like one).

You are correct that one hundred accounts at 3 steem power is not a very big account, but you could easily outsource and pay x amount of dollars for people to make fake facebook accounts and slowly build up a following of a lot of micro accounts voting for them. 

It may not make a lot of money (then again if the price were to boost up, the value on each account could add up to a nice payday for someone), but I believe is clearly not the way steemit was designed to be used.

Steemit has added a lot of features to prevent abuse, but you are absolutely right in your reply to mine that a bunch of small accounts most likely won't be able to do much unless they scale up their micro operations.

Content is really what should be making money and finding content. I think that less steem power could even be given (or none) and make peoples first post worth a little bit more in some way. Just an idea.

If the 3000 content providers have no stake in the platform, then why would removing all of them cause the entire system to collapse. The system is dependent on them. How is that not a stake?

I am not assuming this. This is another type of investment. Whales, like everyone else have a limited voting power per day. They have made these auto votes to reward creators of good content and I have seen people have whale bots removed. Also if you look at @smooth or @berniesanders (both of who have voted for me and I am not on their bot list if they have one) you could see that they spend time engaging with others. Some whales have a bot and then at the end of the day read over the content. It's simply a different type of investment.

While I would hope that my content gets read, I would be happy to have created content that is deemed good enough to be put on the bot list. Check @sirwinchester. He didn't start with any bots on him and he made a big splash. I'm happy making the content I wish to and getting rewarded. I don't cater to any one audience and if that makes it so I am not on an auto bot list so be it. 

I love the community more than the money here.

Flag bots for capcha. Their vote doesn't count unless capcha is correct.

If I may interject: why the discrimination, why do only "whales" get to use a slider?

Very interesting take. If the price is right and the people want to get paid more, maybe some sort of affiliate marketing or advertising system could be set in place. Money will not appear out of nowhere and people want to invest in something that has the potential to have many eyes on it. I hope that steemit is never publicly traded because that will kill the community and instead focus solely on the bottom line.

People also need to realize that since steemit is based on user content, those with a large stake want steemit to succeed. If the whales decide to vote on content that others feel is not worth the price they may move away where content is rewarded more for substance and that will make them lose a lot of money as investors.

So grow the collective expected account values using creative development and marketing?

The amount of users on Steem has nothing to do with the value of each user on Steem. There is something more going on.

https://steemit.com/steem/@dana-edwards/are-we-over-valued-or-under-valued-on-steemit-a-steemit-blogger-is-currently-valued-at-usd25-878

Why dont start to pay a max. payout for each post, lets say 300$ for example.... more people would benefit at the end, guess it will be way more fair for everyone.

I didn't know about this modification, I had seen mention, but not a clear explanation. It may well be that I am wrong about curation rewards and they can become a net value add. Possibly some kind of ranking that modulates how the whale can win them would eliminate abuse potential, making it really a proper competition to see who can see the best stuff early on. The goal of developing with this AI algorithms to pick this then would make more sense.

The amount of Steem is fixed, the value of Steem is not. If Steem grows to 70k users, the value of 1 Steem will be higher and even so will the total reward pot of Steem in USD be higher.

I don't really think it matters whether she's made big money or no money. If there are safety issues, then they need to be addressed. It often takes someone who has standing to truly draw attention to a problem. So good on her for speaking up.

She didn't say she was leaving.. she was pretty clear that she will be exploring the other system and writing about it here.

@l0k1 - there's a WHOLE lotta win in those two paragraphs.

>On the blockchain my personal bugbear is the curation reward system and flagging....the first encourages vote-gaming and the second encourages reputation-bombing 

Exactly these are big problems.

>Take these two things out, add a group management system for moderating membership, then create a distributed chat system that functions like a lower latency version of bitmessage.

I don't know if it would definitely work but it is worth a try.  

One other additional thing that I think might help (and I know it is controversial) is rank all posts according to the number of votes only and not the payouts - it may even help to hide the payouts as others have suggested.

Obviously the biggest problem with this would be using sybil accounts to upvote your own posts to get higher visibility.  If someone could figure out a solution to that fatal flaw it would be fantastic.

We already have content arranged in order of number of votes.  We only need to look at the Hot page.  This page often shows posts with spam votes so of course the trending page ends up being better.  But from what I can see at the moment it doesn't look like the posts that are getting the most votes are not getting enough payout.
http://i.imgur.com/gLS4ImI.png

The problem is attention scarcity and limited means to delegate the human attention resources (human computation) in an orderly fashion. It is in this area that Synereo will excel with their design while Steem can adopt delegated human computation but it's not currently designed for it.

So you can simply let whales delegate their voting power and the problem is solved. I outline it here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@dana-edwards/time-to-decentralized-curation

The reward system itself is fine, but there needs to be more human attention, from a greater variety of minds, to distribute the Steem Power via curation. Randomization can help provide for that variety of minds.

Maybe the function rewarding  sp is too steep. I believe the function is based on squaring, why not based on a smaller exponential. Bots  are not a problem unless not armies are making  worthlessness ostensibly of over. Dollar or two. I honestly don't think this happens . If it does just penalize by the percent of votes that go to the same author like the thirty minute rule. If 100% of votes are one author then voting power drops to 1%, if 50% then  50% and if 1%?or less go to same author you get 100percent voting power.

So content is not judged by votes but by the SP (steem power) holders.

@smooth In a sense, you're correct, only invested users should have meaningful weight on content curation; however, keep in mind that the stake now may not accurately reflect user investment. In the long run, the rewards system is intended to align SP distribution with reputation (people who provide real value in the system outweigh trolls), but that self-balancing effect might be too slow. Eventually the number and quality of whales will be quite large, and they'll have sufficient bandwidth to upvote all kinds of good content and downvote the crap, but right now we're still working on attaining that level of decentralization in the content curation.

It appears that the decentralized social media competition is now on, and if Steem is going to survive, it needs to keep up. Part of that might be figuring out how to grow valuable users' relative SP faster. One obvious way to do this is to decrease the degree of dilution mitigation SP holders enjoy, which will require SP holders to create comparatively more value to maintain their slice of the pie, and instead allow the high-value minnows to grow their relative stake faster. I'm *not* saying this is the solution -- I haven't put enough thought into it -- it's just an idea off the top of my head.

@stellabelle is pointing out real problems. Let's not let our excitement about Steem lull us into complacency; we need to fully understand these problems, and act to resolve them at their roots.

Designing a content publication platform with an economically-driven curation model is still an open problem. Will the current algorithms move the SP distribution in a better direction? I don't know what an ideal distribution would look like, but certainly some distributions are better than others, and we would do well to figure out what makes for a better or worse distribution, and ensure we're moving in the right direction. Even if the current algorithms are moving in the right direction, are they moving fast enough? If someone else can create a competing platform that moves in the right direction faster, they should rightly eclipse Steem, as that would be a superior solution.

I like Steem, though, so let's try and beat 'em to it.

+1

As a redditor for 5+ years, most votes are bots and the number is meaningless. This is the same on Steemit and I completely agree with this. Engagement is another story though -- there could be some economics built into posts that drive engagement (right now there's not).

It's not votes count only that needs to be hidden its everything, dollar amount and author included,

1000 minnows probably couldn't move that post....  but then again 1000 views on youtube doesn't pay the creator either.