thank you - it is a result of a week of heavy discussions on @steemspeak radio. Come and join us at http://steemspeak.com - we talk steem 24/7 all year :)

Thank you, and happy new year (soon)

Lets hope you feel better once your posts gets more rewards. And if you want to set up a bet, you can do that - and people will spend their money on it, and you can rake in some % as a bookie if you wish. :)

We want to avoid having to use flagging - by moving the gamblers to a safe gambling-section where they can gamble as much as they want without affecting the author-payouts for all those other people who use this platform for blogging-purposes.

Not naming anyone, not shaming anyone.

They deflected the issue instead.
https://steemit.com/voting-games/@fyrstikken/should-i-use-my-vote-as-payment-for-gambling-or-my-own-money#@thecryptodrive/re-fyrstikken-should-i-use-my-vote-as-payment-for-gambling-or-my-own-money-20161226t110212291z
They would prefer to blame others.

once the Gambling-section is established with the smart-contract to go along with it, there wont be a market for vote-games anymore. And those that try will be flagged for not posting it in the right section.

I did a little [rough math](https://steemit.com/steemit/@sirlunchthehost/betting-is-it-hurting-or-helping-the-steemit-community-special-edition-preview-no-0#@demotruk/re-thedrollyears-re-demotruk-re-dantheman-re-noisy-re-sirlunchthehost-betting-is-it-hurting-or-helping-the-steemit-community-special-edition-preview-no-0-20161227t170728651z) on another post, to determine just how much @steemsports is taking from the reward pool, and my conclusion was about 8%. Looking at it that way, worrying about this may be much ado about nothing.

good to hear @karenmckersie :) you too, steem on!

I am sure about it @spbesner, we are still in BETA, and we are the BETA-TESTERS :) - and we have to facilitate this platform for the next million people that will join us.

It will be GLORIOUS!

Thank you @shieha, I believe so.

I agree !💪😉👍

There is a lot of "education" material on steemit about vote-games and those things - a Prohobition is important in this case because it affects such a large portion of the daily reward-pool and only really benefit a few account-holders that are getting fatter and fatter every day.

We got to be smart about our reward-pool so there actually is rewards to give to authors of blogs.

I agree, education is key.  This has been a learning experience for us all.  We could not know the damage vote-buying posts could do until we experienced it.  The larger stake-holders used to take responsibility for this for us and we were very grateful when they explained how vote buying would manipulate the market and make the experience for other bloggers less worth their time.  But then this became a bear market and they had a "change of heart".  Unfortunately it is now up to the smaller stakeholders - you and I - and those of us who really want steem(it) to succeed, not just for the next 3 months, but to become the next generation social media platform and cryptocurrency.

I see a bright future for STEEM as a gaming currency.  That will not be possible as long as votes become the currency.

We need to create incentives for finding and rewarding new authors.  This penny for your vote game is not going to do that.  One way the developers could help new users would be to create an automated first post tag.  So that every user who writes their first post can easily be found on one page.

Other ways would be to increase curation rewards for accounts with less followers.  That idea is not fully thought through, just throwing it out there.

It seems to me that with the removing of long term incentives to keep the platform healthy for the entire community we are now going through a transitional period where some large stake holders are looking for short term gains.  The long term success is no longer in their interest.  Things will change as they power down and we have a fresh community of curators who want to be curators to be curators, not to make a lot of money.