Whether it looks more like a productive joint stock company or a Ponzi scheme, because the rewards given to the workers/stakeholders could either be the pay for their work, or the dividends giving the false appearance of profitability. It all depends on how the stakeholders vote.
What an accurate and wise analysis! I followed your vote on farazahmad's post to here.
the stakeholders are split between these two sides
The problem is that many followed the tactic to get more dividends when they found out a whale with huge SP does, instead of fighting for the better one. I can actually see Steemit is going to a worse one of the two scenarios.
This is possibly due to human's weakness. For example, many places in this world are bribed and connections are valued hugely. Also flagging someone is difficult to do for some people. You can see this is happening on Steemit.
I agree with anthonyadavisii's comment, it's difficult to make dinstinction between the two. Will you vote your friends to encourage them, no matter what they write? or not?
There's a shortage of curators and there lacks competition in almost all the categories, travel, cryptos, steemstem, etc... Why is that? I guess because whales and in general most of the Steemians know they can benefit from fewer competitions here, so will they bother introducing their photographer, writer friends to join?
BTW: I love this post, if it was less than 7 days, I would 100% vote it.
On the bright side most of the real value that's being produced here can be salvaged even if the SP distribution gets wrecked. If Ponzi voters gain a controlling percentage of the voting power they'll destroy their investment, but that doesn't have to destroy the community, and it certainly won't destroy all the infrastructure and code that's been created for dtube, steepshot, busy, steemit, esteem, and all the other interfaces.
Forking the network and nuking known bad actors from the new network's distribution is always an option, though it is a messy one and consensus on who qualifies as a 'known bad actor' is difficult.
I agree it'is difficult to decide who qualifies as a 'known bad actor' is difficult. It's like a gray zone between legalism and liberty.
I'd much rather get the economics of the system updated so that being a bad actor becomes unprofitable and they sell their stake on their own.
Do you have some concrete suggestion on that? I support you write it on utopion 👊
Changing the way how curation rewards are calculated might be a good idea, to encourage whales curate in a large range and look for new content creators, not just inside the circle (then again, they are allowed to have some “favs”😉). Or does the current situation mean linear rewards system doesn’t work out?
I do have some concrete suggestions, but I'm afraid they may not be terribly popular at the moment. Several of them are complete or partial reversions of past changes.
I think the vesting schedule should be much longer so that stakeholders are tied more effectively to the long term consequences of their decisions. It was shortened to the current schedule to appeal to a wider group of "investors", many of whom I think are destroying long term value with their shortsighted and reckless behavior.
I also think we should return to non-linear rewards. Perhaps not the original R^2 curve, but at least an R^1.2 curve. The point is that there needs to be incentive for consensus, rather than simply a zero-sum competition for rewards as linear rewards give us.
Additionally, I think there should be curation rewards for downvotes as well as for upvotes, and curation penalties for upvoting content that the rest of the community downvotes into the negatives.
All of these changes should be considered together rather than individually, and are designed to encourage responsible voting focused on the long term value of the network.
R^1.2 curve would probably work. Actually been benefited from the current HF19, maybe I woumd stay on Steemit till now because of that linear rewards, but yep, that’s also what all these happened ever since.
Downvote curation is absolutely necessary, since except for a flagging war, we tend to treat our downvotes quite cautiously, even on the « disagreement with the reward » side.