RE: HF21: What Makes Steem Valuable?
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.
big stake holders will just downvote for the hell of it.
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.
I highlighted in my post how the changes pretty much require downvoting to be effective according to the lead engineer's comments. If people can just extract as much of the rewards pool as they want without any way to counter that, things will get far worse very quickly. You do see that, right? I'm not saying downvotes won't be abused (they will). I am saying less wealth extraction at the expense of others creating valuable content can be avoided if people use proof of brain and both upvote and downvote. If it is left out of this fork, then there will not be a way to effectively counter what is already a problem.