Steemit's achilles heel - rampant inequality
Steemit has a pretty awesome reward system. It is really working wonders in promoting good content while discarding junk. However, right now, it's a completely open market. In economic/governance terms, it's a perfectly free market - absolute capitalism, extreme right wing. While it does guarantee that junk content and trolls never feature, it also means that a lot of great content gets overlooked and many steemers completely marginalised.
Looking at Steemd's distribution chart, the top 0.7% accounts control a startling 90%. Meanwhile, the bottom 80% have a less than 0.3% stake. This is runaway inequality, with an astounding GINI coefficient of 0.98. By comparison, the most inequal countries - Lesotho, Botswana are in the 0.63 range. The most developed countries in the world aim for 0.30.
Now, I know, of course, that's a flawed comparison, and by its very nature Steemit will always be inequal. I don't have any issues with that, really. What is an issue is that it's too wide open. Like any good system, it needs governance and moderation.
Long term, I can completely see how the top 0.01% accounts will hold massive influence over what trends and what does not. We will have situations where 1 upvote from a top 0.1% steemer will outweigh the opinion of 1000 others. That does not seem fair.
Particularly to new users who have just discovered Steemit. They may have excellent content and/or superior curating skills, but they will be sidelined to the point of frustration. Overall, this means the Steemit community is going to miss out on real talent.
So, Steemit needs to form a system of moderation that will step in and promote good content. Kind of like a government. People who will be neutral, and reward and power up great new content and curators when they deserve it. Basically, subsidies. On the other hand, we may see some steemers have ridiculous Steem Power, and many may get that through gaming the system rather than actually creating/curating good content. These steemers' power should be redistributed to more deserving steemers. Basically, taxation.
It's early days, and I'm sure the good folks at Steem will work this out. But now is the right time to get the conversation going.
People with a large stake have an incentive to vote for what, in their opinion, adds value to the system.
If you think that you could do a better job, open up a competitor. Or accumulate steem power within this platform and vote for what you will.
But taxation? Are you completely insane?
Government? This paradigm promotes free and voluntary association.
Nobody can force you to participate, and no one can stop you from creating a paradigm more to your own liking and trying to force people to use it.
HOW REFESHING! HAAAAA.... Thanks for the response and post, namaste :)
I am completely for free association and largely agree with you. You misunderstand my analogies - I didn't literally mean government - it was just a way to explain myself.
All I'm saying is there needs to be limits to avoid abuse. I know of certain users here who have accumulated a million steem power through junk posts. It's completely unfair that their opinion weighs so heavily against yours which is actually a well considered response. Over the long term, this will discourage and frustrate millions of steemers.
Of course, there are good creators and curators getting influential too - I have no problem with that at all.
Right now it's even hard to get a thread started. Seems there are people that just like to flag for no reason or based solely on prejudices not on content . Really discourages new people when one person who bought a lot of steem power can just bury your thread in a single vote.
That's certainly true. And as we know with capitalist systems, this will just grow more and more inequal over time, exponentially too. If uncontained, it could be that the top 100 steemers control all the content, while millions of the rest barely get any influence at all.
It will discourage people with real talent over the long run.
I'm confident the developers will figure out a better system though.
Yes companies will be able to just power up and control messages not only on specific subs like the do on reddit but across the entire site. Don't want information you don't like getting out just set up a few accounts with bought steem power, setup bots, and flag any messages immediately based on key words or phrases you choose.
As for the better system the devs better come up with it soon. You only get one chance to make a good first impression and so far I have not been impressed at all. If it wasn't for some encouragement from a few other people I would have been gone already.
That's pretty much what I mean - the potential for abuse. In which case, I'll go back to Reddit. There'll be more junk content there, but much more of the good stuff will be visible as it's a true democracy with every redditor having an equal vote.
But I really want to see Steem succeed as it is overall a better system than Reddit. They just need to control abuse of high steem power.
Good ideas in there^
I'm glad to find the ridiculous degree of voting power skewing is getting more & more attention - it's one of the top factors that will decide the success or lack thereof of this platform.
Discussed further here
I have certainly felt more and more steemers point this out. But it's usually in comments. So I thought I would look at the data and analyse it from an economics point of view. I would certainly encourage more new posts about this topic! That's the way we get heard.