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RE: Understanding Steem's Economic Flaw, Its Effects on the Network, and How to Fix It.

in #steem6 years ago

I agree, @kevinwong and @trafalgar should start pushing this initiative forward together and gather support, I personally am willing to support only those witnesses that support these changes. This madness has been going on for far too long.

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8 months ago I went on a tirade about how Steem needs to adapt to maximize utility. At the time I wrote the post I did not have a plan for how Steem could do it. I knew Steem was broken even back then.

Steem needs to focus on maximizing utility
This is the key take away, that the problem right now with Steem is that it isn't effectively maximizing utility. In other words the value in terms of how much happiness we get per unit of value we put into it is unfavorable for all participants at this time. In particular, those who buy Steem Power support the ecosystem and the utility they get from the system isn't high enough.

Many people will state that Steem is about making the world better. My response to these people is that the method of making the world better is through utility maximization. If every unit of value spent produces greater utility then everybody wins. The satisfied customers who buy Steem Power will have a reason to keep buying Steem Power. The producers of content who are genuinely talented at producing content will be encouraged by the rewards to keep producing content. Those who find out they aren't so good at doing that anymore will have ways to add value that we cannot yet imagine through SMTs. The point and fundamental concept behind it all is utility maximization, as that is the key to actually leveraging Steem to make the world better (as measured by utilitarianism).

Please note that I'm not an economist. I haven't studied economics. I know only the basics. But from what I do know about these basics the core of capitalism, of business, is the satisfaction of the customer. If the users of your product are not satisfied then you have to change your product.

So if the economics aren't working at all toward maximization of utility then the economics have to be changed. @trafalgar has presented a list of changes worth exploring. I think @kevinwong has also suggested a similar list of changes. I think we should consider these changes and what is there to lose by implementing them?

At this point we have a broken incentive structure. It's seemingly not working for anyone. Even if these new ideas make it slightly less broken it is still an improvement over completely broken.

"basics the core of capitalism, of business, is the satisfaction of the customer."

Yes, we have to ask ourselves who is the happy customer in our current ecosystem? Is it the content creators who are almost forced to buy votes to get noticed at all, curators who have to go through lot of promoted junk, just normal everyday users who want to find good content but are having trouble doing so or passive SP holders who just want to see their wealth increase with minimal effort possible.

I'd like to see ecosystem where I could actually spend time looking for great authors, reward and interact with them, without feeling that I'm losing out a big time on a rat race to increase our Steem Power or drain fiat out of the system.

Ned said frontends could do UI change, and that's actually something I've been doing with my own little project at https://steemliber.com (work in progress), where I hide all the promoted posts by default in trending feed.
Eventually even if we can't get this change through, I hope to see other frontends as well offer an option to not be blasted by promoted posts only on trending.

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