RE: HF21: What Makes Steem Valuable?
I like how you took the time to lay it out as you understood it to be. So in that vain I agree with you 100% but I am no fan of the downvote for 1 simple reason. And I realize there are more than 1 reason to downvote. But for me I was in the twitter beta test and spent a lot of time up at Facebook campus. These companies have spent a decade training millions and millions of social media users how to share and consume content. And whether we like it or not, it has short form and mostly "shit" content that only people within their "social' group may or may not like. If we are to retain a social media element of steem we need to embrace that style of content and not downvote it . Instagram alone has thousands of influencers with millions of followers that would be far better off moving over to steem and subsequently moving their followers over to curate than by staying on instagram. If we model ourselves after a currently irrelevant long form content platform like Medium, we are dead in the water. I don't like seeing share2steem or actiffit content downvoted. Those types of dapps are our future whether or not steemians currently "get it" or not. In my opinion that is where our growth is and if we have influencers participating and earning here, then the investors will follow. I'm fine with the fork, just not the downvoting because big stake holders will just downvote for the hell of it.
I think you make some very important points. Steem is still in the “What am I?” stage and the dominance of Steemit.com in defining that self-perception can’t be overstated. Most people still use Steemit to access Steem content. Many people have very entrenched views on what is valuable here and what isn’t, and your point is important that it might be categorically based according to the medium (memes, short form tweet style, images, video, etc). I think the promise of SMTs was supposed to resolve this by letting each community creat their own token of value. Steem-engine is starting to make that promise a reality, but that doesn’t necessarily help the STEEM price.
As I mention in my post, this may be the single most important reason some larger brands and influencers stay away from Steem.
The challenge is, when monetary rewards are involved, people act differently. Instagram likes are free and dot mean anything. If they did, the behavior on Instagram would change.
I wouldn’t consider Medium irrelevant, just different. The dialogue we’re having now is because of this long format approach.
I really like how you lay out your points. You're very easy to understand and that is important because very few steemians can take a step back to explain their thoughts clearly enough without being tribal lol. I agree about monetary rewards. You can pretty much figure out how things will be when you throw in human nature. That being said I firmly believe our future is in more instagrammy type content and not in Medium style. Medium is irrelevant when you compare it to social media platforms. The problem with steem engine (which I love) is that the content gets shared to the steemit feed and that's where the downvotes come from. People really should just hold the downvotes unless it is blatant spam.
For example I see a guy who posts a link to his site where he sells gift cards. It's 100% link spam. He should be downvoted. But people should layoff downvoting share2steem posts.
Thank you for your kind words.
Do you think people should downvote content that is overvalued? By overvalued, I mean a mostly spam comment self-voted to the max. Should that be downvoted to leave more of the rewards pool for other, more useful content?
No. And the reason I think that is because in the big picture it doesn't do that much damage unless the person has a high stake. That stuff going with plankton doesn't bother me at all.
What I often thought is that if whales would take 1 of their 10 valuable daily votes each day and split it up into 100 1% percent votes and vote plankton and minnows with it, the whole ecosystem would be different. Even if they did ten 10% votes to save their precious time things would have been different and we wouldn't have come to this.
The "Rich" need to be smart enough to protect and grow their stake by giving a little away instead of being greedy. 1 lousy vote a day sent out to the universe would have, and could still make a huge difference here.
And in this case?
I've seen examples where people would count from 1 to hundreds, each as individual comments, and vote them up with sock-puppet accounts for many dollars per vote. If we allowed this, people would extract the entire rewards pool inflation for themselves with junk content.
These are hard problems to solve with no easy answers. I agree, people should think in terms of long-term value creation instead of short-term wealth extraction (see my post on that for more). Until then.... what do yo we do? What changes do we make to our system here to incentivize the behavior we hope for and prevent the behavior we don't like?
no I do agree with you on this point. Blatent reward pool rape is bad. But I get downvoted for my actifit posts all the time and I feel like that has no purpose.
So how do you allow for one and not the other?
If some things were made off limits for downvotes, people would extract value from those opportunities.
These are very difficult problems to solve. It's easy to complain about them when they impact us personally, but very very difficult to built actual solutions for them.
The way it is solved in my opinion is to not encourage downvotes. because we know factoring in human nature that it will be abused by the high stake holders here. It will only effect the low stake holders. Literally every economic model ive ever studied has eventually gotten to that. But I get what you are saying. Perhaps this isn't the right time to introduce that. It should be left out of this fork. In my opinion a bunch of bad actors will wipe out newbies and drive them from the platform instead of being smart and distributing upvotes based on effort. I will go with the flow and I'm a steemian for life but you may have noticed in my wallet I have not powered up the 1100 steem Ive accumulated. That will go to diversify. I'm 100% invested in steem and it's scary because I don't believe those with power are smart enough to protect and grow the platform.
Absolutely agree. Downvotes serve no real purpose, because the people upvoting are upvoting with the share of Steem Power that they purchased. Who gets to decide that what they like they should not like? Some people like to upvote sophisticated articles of deep study and others like to upvote funny cat pictures. To each their own I say.
Honestly, I believe the biggest problem on Steem are these idealists dreaming of this perfect content machine that produces only pure content. However, this doesn't work, and the evidence is not there to show that the world is going to use downvotes for good. People are already much worse behaved online than they are in person, but now we're giving some people the power to be a real pain in someone else's backside just because they can. We need to think about whether Steem will cultivate positivity or negativity.
I think it's a positive thing when someone downvotes a comment spammer who is extracting rewards and ensures those rewards instead go to people adding value. Scammers can extract a lot of value (this is just one example) and if the community doesn't work to prevent that, more scammers will come until it becomes a serious systemic risk that destroys the system.
The rewards pool is, in a way, a shared collaborative commons. If we don't protect it, it will be abused. Votes are how we come to consensus on how that works.
That said, I agree, people using downvotes to harm others may actually increase.
Ummmm have you heard of @steemflagrewards? Are you asserting not one SFR downvoter is doing so for the greater good??? (Perhaps you haven't heard of us and it's too bad. We don't abuse promotion like everyone and their mom so tend to be a more niche community.)
To quickly address your question:
I did not say there was no evidence that someone would use it for good. I said there is no evidence that the world would use it for good. Most people on the platform are hoping Steem will do well and are considered with the health of Steem. However, if Steem got to be as big as Facebook, people would stop worrying about the health of the network and begin focusing on using their downvoting power for whatever they deem worth downvoting. That opens it up to a lot of whimsical downvoting.
I recall seeing an article related to the words "steemflagrewards" that was talking about figuring out how to reduce the cost of flagging and also how to flag anonymously to avoid retaliation. That was enough for me to disagree with the group.
I mean no disrespect to you or anyone in your group, but I believe that your program is exactly the opposite of what will help Steem achieve success. The mentality behind flagging is very flawed when you think about the economics of Steem.
If you wish to know more about what I mean by that I welcome you to check out this lengthy comment I made:
https://steemit.com/hf21/@hobo.media/ptqmvo
Ultimately, and I realize that you likely strongly disagree, I don't consider use of the term "abuse" legitimate. When people purchase STEEM and turn it into Steem Power, they have paid for something and that means this "power" is not a priviledge or an opportunity but a property. Thus, standard property rights apply on Steem.
When you buy something, you are entitled to use it however you please, so long as it does not interfere with another person's rights. This is where downvotes become the true abuse. Someone with their purchased Steem Power is using their power to hurt someone else because they dislike something they did.
Upvotes are a non-aggressive action, and that voting power a person purchased and its share of the reward pool is their property because they purchased it. Downvotes violate the rights of individuals and the votes they purchased.
I believe that people should be able to upvote whatever they wish to upvote without harassment. They purchased their voting ability and that purchase helps keep the reward pool valuable.
Another gross violation against personal rights and personal property is the aggressive behavior and downvoting of bidbot customers. If two accounts make a private business arrangement with each other it is their own business.