Stake through the heart

Sometimes wonder what has value on Steem, what is worthy of attention and what deserves reward and what doesn't. Quality is obviously a subjective matter (though it isn't really, interest is), but what kind of thing leads this site into a successful future. It would be good to know wouldn't it, because that way we could just do more of that and less of whatever doesn't lead there. This is kind of a free market because people can use their stake as they see fit but this doesn't mean they are going to use it effectively.

I don't know what effectively either, is voting on my overly long texts effective curation? Does what I produce hold any value for anyone, engage anyone, help the platform grow, retain people or inspire them to act or behave in the best interest of the community? I can't say really can I since, it is impossible to tell what effects any one account is truly having other than what they put in or take out from the reward pool and where they place it.

I am pretty sure that my content is relatively high quality in comparison to a lot else but, this doesn't mean it is achieving any particular goals that will improve the well-being and health of the platform or its users, it just means that he content is okay. Is okay content enough to get value here, I have been doing it a while now and yes, I have earned quite a lot more than others... well, I have powered up quite a lot more than others. Earning is a different story of course as I am not a high earner, I am just very consistent in my approach.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if instead of powering up, I extracted most of my earnings and if this would have effected my results here at all. Most likely, I would still be averaging about the same if the voting behaviors of others is any indication. Most don't seem to care if someone extracts it all except when it comes to someone ability to vote on them. The other thing that would change is my real life would be financially in much healthier shape which would take a lot of stress off.

Is this what would have been best for the platform? Instead of powering up, extracting? I can't really say about this either. My intuition is that what the platform needs is a large middle class that has the ability to support a larger and much wider range of users here but, if I am one of those trying for this but the support to keep growing isn't there, perhaps I am mistaken? Wouldn't those who have a lot of value here and are invested think similarly if it was true? Wouldn't they be trying to help build people like me as quickly as possible to take the pressure of a narrow band of users and in so doing, increase the demand on Steem in a multitude of ways? I must be wrong.

I wonder what would happen though if people with 'free' stake just said screw it and found a couple of members who were intent on being community nodes and voted them to the moon until they were at a decent enough level and then slowly remove the support.

There are something like 150 whale accounts and let's say they each average a vote of 100 dollars. What would happen if each day they gave 2 votes to a community node intent on powering up. every week that is about 1200 Steem which means that an account could go from 0 to 20k in about 6 months. that would put 150 community accounts at mid range dolphin level. Does it make a difference? At current prices, it would mean that they would be able to together distribute around about 3500 in vote value every day. That is quite a lot isn't it considering they could potentially support 350 accounts with 10 dollars each a day/ 70 dollars a week. 6 months later that is 350 more accounts with 1000+ SP which can in turn together provide 350 dollars from the pool each day.

Would this make a difference? I don't really know but it seems that these kinds of things need to happen at a large scale in order to be able to keep growing via onboarding. I wonder though, if a whale were to choose some accounts to support heavily, what would qualify as a worthy account. I'd like to think mine is one but I am not so sure it is because if it was, wouldn't the support be there consistently already?

I think of course that a lot of value needs to go to the app developers (if producing something worthy) but, I do think that the content that is going to populate the various apps and interfaces needs to be at least somewhat decent. Who is incentivizing good content these days? There are some of course but these lay in narrow bands of interest. Without that middle class, it is unlikely that those bands will widen very much or at least, not very quickly.

I take the view that no matter the reward I get, content still ha to be okay enough that I myself wouldn't mind reading it. I would be pretty lame if I posted things I wouldn't even want to vote on. But, that does not necessarily mean it has any value to the platform whatsoever. Maybe it is even harmful. Hard to say really isn't it?

I think it would be interesting to model what the platform would like like with an engaged middle class and what kinds of effects they could have on content, distribution and the account growth of other users. It would be interesting to see if the type of content support shifts and the Steem content reduces in favor of more human and interest based content. I think that with a large enough middle class, the platform would then be able to evolve and be less about Steem and more about the topics that interest humans in their real lives.

I think that the longer it takes to build that middle core, the longer this platform will remain a toddler struggling to run. I could be massively wrong in this, but for the most part, wrong or not, not much is going to change very quickly. The beauty of decentralization is also coupled with the freedom to not act.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]