RE: How Mainstream Media Hacks Our Perception
It's crazy. But then again there's a large part of me that thinks the negativity-obsession is weirdly an endearing trait of human beings. If humans are by nature empathetic, then you might predict a myopia towards the terrible features of our species so that we can identify and alleviate it! So that's a way to look at it optimistically haha
I get concerned when that obsession, while well-intentioned, ends up working against its own goal. We stop looking at what progress we have already made and conflate any talk about the productive things with "denying there is any problem at all".
But that is exactly NOT what I'm saying! I'm saying that to further the amelioration of human suffering requires identifying the factors that have contributed to the progress made thusfar, and improving those factors, guiding the process in the direction those factors pointed.
Rant over. Lol
Maybe using Steem journalism can be something else than clickbait titles and exploiting our lizard brains since money doesn't come from ads rather than people.
I really hope so. Steem could at the very least temper the polarization effects from the ad-monetization schemes that the other (fiat) platforms use now.
I wonder if anyone has considered that opportunity seriously yet. It's a brilliant point. I'm sure communities could sprout around alternative models of journalism. And again the bar doesn't have to be set so high... could be as modest as doing deeper dives into whatever the subject matter is, or deeper than what's being done now which isn't saying much.
Instead of writing to provoke or produce clickbait the journalist could write to understand and present nuance. But now I'm just hearing myself saying "we should bring back those good old days when journalism was objective!" ( even though I wasn't around for those good old days and it's probably BS anyways haha)
But more than improving on the current model I could imagine new subject matter entirely being explored, and then let the Steemit market decide what sticks.
In the end Steem is backend system that enables shareholders to reward content via clicks from shared rewards pool. This in itself can be utilized in many ways but to give more power to growth of smaller communities around Steem, we are soon getting smart media tokens(SMT). These SMT's will then work as another layer on top of Steem, like inception these smart media tokens work just like Steem and Steem Power but the issuer has more control on how to issue these new tokens out. For example, let's say you would be to create a new website that encourages positive news only and objective journalism. You could then issue a new token revolving around this new website, where contributors get rewards in this token of yours. These new tokens could then be traded back to Steem, or later, to btc if it gains big user rates. This way, your new token would be hold by those who contribute a lot to your particular website and they have more say, where new tokens will go by upvoting.
At least that is my current knowledge of the SMT's. It will help smaller ecosystems grow within Steem. Every website could have their own, if they choose so.
That's really good to know. I've been wondering about how much flexibility there is for engineers to build alternative incentive structures with Steem, but circumventing the Steemit platform to make on-boarding new and less tech savvy users as easy as possible.
But that's even besides the point, these smart media tokens sound like something I should get more familiar with.