Going UP or DOWN?

Look at how gorgeous this elevator is which services the hotel at which I am staying - a work of art. The entire hotel is filled with my kind of design, hard and clean lines, concrete, industrial. It is an old textile factory built in the 1900s and has been converted. There is supposedly a very nice rooftop pool, but I don't think I will have a chance to enjoy it, in this weather.

For a long time on the platform there has been the call of:

"Do what you want with your stake"

And some people think that this has changed with the shift to having free downvotes as it seems to take away the chance of selfvoting behavior. But, this is actually not the case and as I have explained before, stake has the ability to direct the pool toward content, but it comes with no guarantee that it will stay there as downvotes have always had the ability to redirect the flow back the pool.

It was just that in the past there was a cost to downvoting as it spent voting power, and now at least 2.5 votes are free. The other cost was that those who did swim against the stream and choose to spend their upvoting power on downvoting, made themselves targets for retaliation. We have seen this come up recently, but because those who are doing all of the flagging haven't spent their upvoting ability, countering the targeted retaliation is much easier at a community level, something that wasn't possible before.

So, the do what you want with your stake still applies, it is just that there are more people willing and able to use the redirection mechanism that comes installed with the powering up process:

Curate up, Curate down.

Besides the utopia where all content created adds value to the platform, what we would hope for is that curation activities that push Steem to or pull it away from content concentrates forces on increasing the reward on value adding activities and decreasing the reward on value extracting or harmful activities.

What is great is that both sides of the force will increase the reward that the community believes adds value to the ecosystem by firstly upping the good and downing the bad as they see fit to do with the stake they hold. Due to the dPOS system and the way Steem works, when abusive behavior goes unchecked, the accounts can grow and as they do, they get harder and harder to counter as they have more power and reach. We saw this with Haejin who went unchecked for the last two years.

Once upon a time I left a comment on his post pre-rancho:

At that point, I think he was earning about 10 dollars a post and if I remember correctly was under 10,000 SP. I wonder what would have happened if the EIP had been in effect at that point?

The problem with these circles is that even while they stay narrow and even if they keep their Steem powered up, they are going to get larger and larger and eventually be a threat to the stability of the platform, a sword of Damacles hanging over the blockchain.

I keep an eye on various things and noticed another circle that requires attention. A few days ago @ocdb started using their downvotes on this circle, as did @adm - and this happened:

28 days

14 days

7 days

3 days

However, the problem is that the accounts that the votes are now going to are more of the same and appear all to be from the same writer as the form is "uncannily" similar. I do not Speak Korean - but perhaps someone who does wants to go through that list of accounts and see if they are legit as they seem spun from other content.

If you want to have a look here is the link and you can click on he names to open the profiles:
http://www.steemreports.com/outgoing-votes-info/?account=sigizzang&days=1

Now, I have no problem with people using their stake to support the accounts they like and their family, but there should be some kind of line where some percentage goes back into the community - the actual community. The reason is that long-term, the community needs to have a wide number of users with significant levels of stake in order to ensure decentralization at a great enough degree. This is why I don't mind Steemit Inc selling their stake as it will hopefully be spread to more people.

When I see this kind of behavior, it isn't the voting value that frustrates me, it is the blatant disregard for the rest of the community as there is such high values on content that apparently, no one even looks at even though it appears somewhere not too far from trending. The other thing is that this same value could be used on content that does add value to the ecosystem and they would still get 50% of their stake returned to them through curation. They could join a healthy curation trail, do no work and still get a high return.

Again, I think everyone should do what they choose with their stake but that also includes using it to increase the value of the community be decreasing the abuse. In time, new platform norms would be found and not only would there be a better distribution, the value of Steem will increase as the platform becomes a place where content creators and investors can live in harmony by enabling each other to be their best by supporting value.

This process of change, while not necessarily comfortable, is a necessary process to adjust behavior into an average that encourages better. Having said that, it has been a pretty damn good two weeks of community action and the longer it continues in this vein, the more rewarding the platform becomes for those who create and add value.

So, are you going UP or DOWN?

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]