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RE: Intellectual property just doesn't work anymore
Yes, it's increasingly like stemming a tide to keep a piece of software from being copied.
But Steem suffers from the freerider problem. Yes, you can let the crowd decide who gets paid how much via upvoting. But who will pay for the tokens to give them value? The answer would be advertisers and promoters of goods and services who will actually benefit from visibility bought on the platform. This is, incidentally, why I'm not so eager to have bidbots to be done away with. If we want STEEM to have monetary value, there will ultimately have to be a reason for buying it other than pure speculation.
Oh wow, @markkujantunen. This is a good perspective, and we could have a rather in-depth conversation about this one, as I am actually a pretty vocal opponent of bidbots-- although I understand perfectly why they exist and cannot be stopped, I believe we should be attempting as a community to shame them out of use and, eventually, existence.
You are absolutely right that the demand for STEEM must come from somewhere. I want to do a post on this topic soon so I am not going to go into a lot of depth here, but here is my theory in a nutshell: STEEM POWER is valuable in and of itself as a sort of status symbol. Just as there are those who are willing to give others attention in exchange for money, there are those willing to buy attention from others, and Steem allows this through the purchase and vesting of stake.
I think our theories are similar, but they are different in that I do not think the buyers must necessarily be advertisers, or that they have to be necessarily self-promoting. Instead, I believe people will be driven to buy and power up STEEM, and give upvotes organically, to earn the admiration of their peers.
I believe this is a change that we must bring about together, as a community. It's our platform... and there's never a better time than when prices are low like this. The people who are just using Steem for a quick money grab are running for the exits. Now is the time to build the Steem we always wanted while they're gone.
If they cannot be stopped what's the use of trying to attempt to shame the out of use? Why would we want futile shaming tactics to be a big thing on this platform?
That's a very important point I never thought of before: Steem Power as a status symbol. Obviously it is and valuable as such! Maybe even all the "Sirs" and "Dears" and the rest of the abject groveling have some value. I find it cringeworthy but there may be some among us whose egos all that feeds thus propping up the price of STEEM! lol
While this is surely the case for some, I don't think it's ultimately enough to keep the value very high. Another extremely important source of money are and will increasingly (I hope) be pay-to-play apps such as SteemMonsters that has a fiat-STEEM gateways built into it.
Yep.
I hold a very strong conviction that "code is law." If it can't be put into code, it's not a very effective law, at least not as far as the blockchain is concerned. This is what I mean by "cannot be stopped."
This is different from the subject of social norms, though. I do not agree that shaming tactics are futile. We are capable of working together to create social incentives to do good, not evil. We don't necessarily have to code this into logical consensus if we can reach a social one.
I will never disparage my fellow Steemian for holding a different point of view, so perhaps "shame" is the wrong word or concept. I definitely feel a calling to create social pressure to minimise bidbot use, though. I do not believe it is good for the platform, and I believe that prolonged abuse has the potential to divide the userbase among two or more contentious forks, which I think would be an unfortunate outcome.
I think that if my "organic attention economy" scenario were given a chance to flourish, you may be surprised by the amount of lonely people with a lot of money, seeking the acceptance and validation of their peers. Of course, it is possible that I'm being ridiculously optimistic about this... but hey, I think I will be writing that post sooner now rather than later :)
There's already quite a bit of shaming towards bidbot use. But it doesn't seem to be working. A great many Steemians are anonymous. I very rarely upvote anything upvoted by bidbots except if such a post is an important announcement of a new service or app adding a lot value to Steem.
In my opinion, the problem is overstated in the sense that I view blogging on Steemit or producing content using the main reward pool (the only one currently existing) as something belonging to the infancy of the platform. The vision that the creators of Steem had and what Steemit, Inc is currently working towards is for Steem to be a token factory and the backbone of thousands of separate projects each with their own reward pools. Some of those projects and their tokens may rocket to the moon if they become big mainstream hits. Steem Power will be used to pay for bandwidth and STEEM will be used as the main trading pair with the tokens. I wouldn't worry so much about what crap gets published in Trending now. The use of bidbots is mainly a reaction of the large SP holders to linear rewards cutting down on their return on investment. It all boils down to the profitability of owning Steem Power. Keeping the whales from dumping is in the best interests of all Steemians.
I wish Steemians had the patience to see beyond this temporary issue. STEEM inflation will gradually diminish and earning Steem will become increasingly difficult. I believe the focus will shift towards investing in SMT powered projects using the Steem blockchain.
Why are so few whales playing god instead of investing projects and earning passive income? There only seem to be very few whales that I'm aware of who love to throw their weight around with all and sundry watching in shock and awe.