RE: Steem is a Free Market, Therefore Buying Votes is Voluntary and Not a Problem (or is it?)
I appreciate and understand the sentiment, but I don't think anything like this can be reasonably coordinated and achieved. For instance, I wouldn't want to participate in an experiment where I have to spend my SBD or Steem for a type of service I do not approve of.
Additionally, we also need a control, so we need to get people to stop using the vote buying for a period of time to see what the effect will be. But that will never happen as there will always be people who would use the time to buy cheaper upvotes.
But even in a perfect world where everybody in the platform would participate in an experiment, you most probably still wouldn't be able to show clear causal link as there are too many other variables. The price of Steem and SBD depend on a lot of additional factors, not just on the way people are behaving on the platform. Any change you see in the price of the token might actually be a direct result of implementing a platform wide experiment or the people's expectations of the outcome, not the actual thing being tested and you don't have any way to prove if it's one and not the other.
I'm not a fan of vote buying and I have no doubt that it one of the big contributors to people giving up on the platform. Seeing low quality content rewarded with very high earnings is indeed disheartening.
I don't like the experiment, but how else are we going to reach a consensus other than demonstrating positive or negative effects it has on the community, platform, or STEEM price? We use flags to punish those who use, or those who provide the service? I hate flags. Only those with high SP power can make that happen anyways.
In a proper scientific study, yes we would use a control group, but that can't realistically be done here, right? So we have to think about how to demonstrate it imperfectly with the methods we do have available. I look at it as let this continue where a small percent of usability has minor effects int he aggregate which aren't visible much, which takes 1-2 years to slowly drag on the suffering as we slowly fall, and the gradualistic effect has people unable to see what is happening or attribute a cause to the effects. vs. getting the pain and suffering over quickly and ripping the bandaid off, where the short temporal timeframe of engaging in casual behavior to produce effects will be more visible and apparent.
In a short time of engaging in specific behavior, there is a degree of likelihood that the behavior produces the effects being seen, rather than assume other forces unless those forces can be shown to be producing those effects. Even if it's the anticipation of outcome, at least that gives u an idea of the general consensus about how viable it is. If STEEM booms because of a consensnus on how great it is, ok at least we have a consensus, the same with a crash of STEEM on how bad people think it is, there is a general consensus that is manifested through aggregate behavior that has a visible effect.
I agree. I just want to get a consensus formed somehow. Any ideas? Arguing gets us nowhere, some people just care about the money and don't see long-term consequences or how applying a behavioral model across the platform demonstrates it's not a viable method of operation. That's why showing it with the free market and causality is what I thought of.
The reason I took the time to write the response is not because I want to argue, but because I like your idea that we should dig out evidence that this is a bad approach that is hurting the whole platform in the long run. Unfortunately, I don't think the experiment you are proposing is a real possibility right now or anytime soon.
The first place I'd look for this type of evidence would be the data that's already on the blockchain. There is a lot of data already about what's happening, who's active, what's the price of Steem and so on, maybe somebody could find a good way to probe into it and find some meaningful correlations. I would start there I think, but I'm not even sure that's viable either.
To show users inactivity after the vote buying started? and The price of steem taking into account the rise of BTC?
I didn't mean us arguing, I meant the general "it's fine" vs. "it's not fine" because the it's fine group doesn't care about the arguments, it gets us nowhere because they just want to do what they want to do hehehe.
I'm certainly not part of the "it's fine" group on this ;)