The tokenization of dry nappies

I am definitely in a Friday mood today, which means - tired, but I think it is mainly because every night this week our daughter has woken to go to the bathroom and pee instead of using her nappy. This is fantastic whilst simultaneously being annoying. She is very cute when she is so tired and so far, has only remembered doing this once out of four times.

She found out yesterday that if she wakes up with a dry nappy five times in a row, her grandparents have promised to take her to the shop to buy a present. I found out yesterday too. I don't like this kind of material reward for learning and definitely not if food is used. But, grandparents, and it is rare.

I wonder if these rewards in childhood affect us later and provide some sense of entitlement and expectation for return, even if what we have learned or done is in our best interest already. Should someone get rewarded for being healthy?

I think that the tokenization model of SMTs can play heavily on this in society and piggyback on all of the gamification of behavior as a token can reward people for their behaviors, like @actifit does. Whilst I am unsure if this is great for society as a whole, it is heading more and more down that path anyway and social media is a massive driver of it through the hormone spikes driven by likes, hearts, stars and the incessant notifications that continually draw our attention.

We all work on incentives and this means that essentially any behavior can be influenced by providing something desirable, it can be a candy, a toy, a token or a pat on the head. If someone wants more of that thing and the way to get it is to accomplish tasks, they will. After all, many of us are already doing this at the most value generating level by going to work and performing tasks to earn fiat tokens that we can cash in on goods and services we want - and tax.

The tokenization of the internet and life isn't new, it has always been the model. The difference with something like SMTs is that behaviors can have a direct and known value applied to them, as well as them being able to be tracked with precision. What if all of the behaviors of each employee were tracked precisely, would you get paid moer or less than the person sitting next to you? And, once the formulas are known and transparent, would you change your behaviors to influence your outcomes - which is the goal of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

On Steem there are various KPIs that people use personally and for the evaluation of the blockchain itself. Steem Power, reputation, comment count, words per post etc might be personal indicators, with transactions, user base, speed, RAM efficiency and security being indicators of the blockchain. Different weightings are going to be applied to each depending on what one is looking to accomplish, with few people having the same set of goals, points of focus or indicators of success.

But, once the habits of all users overlap, trends and patterns can be discovered that can indicate culture and social norms. These can be influenced at group levels by doing things like changing the incentives for example on curation percentage, as per the last hardfork. Adjustments are made, new behaviors normalize and, the culture changes.

Incentives are vital, and while economic ones are often the focus on Steem, I think this is an "early days" situation and in time, social drivers will become much more important, while the economic take a more infrastructure perspective, much like the economic activities of a company in comparison to the users who buy their product.

At the moment, we are still in nappies and don't always wake up to go to the bathroom.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]

Note: this might be a crappy analogy, but I had fun writing it :)

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To note and bring some more awareness: 10% of the rewards of this post will go to @sbdpotato as part of the @ocd beneficiaries experiment. The "ocd community" is found under the #hive-174578 tag and you can join through the Beta site, https://beta.steemit.com/trending/hive-174578

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