Three points to a healthy Steem

There are several ongoing discussions about a lot of different things such as the steem proposal system (SPS), curation percentage, discount downvotes, convergent curves, SMTs and communities. As I see it, we need them all.

Some people would like to wait for SMTs and communties to be rolled out before any change to the economics of the platform but I tend to see it a little differently. Kind of like the Steem logo.

1. Communities are the people
2. SMTs are the applications and rewards
3. The economics the distribution

For Steem to function well, there needs to be a healthy push and pull tension between these three points where there is incentive for the people through application rewards, and the rewards are distributed based on healthy behaviors. This is far from easy but the more people on the platform, the harder it is to change various aspects.

Some might want to onboard people and then tinker with the curve but all that means is more people are affected and, more of them feel they are losing something. Some think that there is already healthy Dapps businesses here that should be protected but that doesn't incentivize new businesses heavily enough, nor authors. Changing the economics also doesn't necessarily destroy the business model.

Dapps should be labelled aDapps

To survive, all applications at this stage of the industry are going to have to learn to adapt their model to changing conditions because there is a massive amount of change to come, both with the amount of people coming into the platform and the amount of competition in the space competing for their attention. They better get used to constant tuning because it is the only way they are going to make it into the long-term future.

People power people

This is the same with the people and communities because while it is great to be an early adopter in a new industry with enormous potential to earn and develop, it also comes with the burden of uncertainty and constant change and if one isn't able to handle that, it might not be the space for them yet. People tend to forget where this blockchain and industry is and where it is going to be in the future. If your crypto dreams come true, massive changes in the way things work is guaranteed. Learn all you can as there is a lot of possibility for individuals and communities.

Curve

Personally, I would like to try the convergent curve model because even if it doesn't help that much, I think it would help in some way and it would mix up the current maximization behaviors by incentivizing activity in a slightly different way and should incentivize powering up into one account eventually. While everything is gameable in some way, the incentive to maximize for the betterment of the platform is the goal. This offers some guidance.

Free downvotes

While some people hated flags, the opportunity to downvote is a necessary part of the ecosystem to provide balance. If it had no ties to finances, people likely wouldn't hesitate much but because it does, they think that it is a negative for the platform. It isn't. It is healthy for the most part (other than the stupid flag wars etc) as it allows the ecosystem to regulate and handle bad actors. The problem is that there hasn't been balance, the incentive to vote is higher because of the rewards while there is disincentive to downvote because of the forgoing of rewards.

What people haven't recognized yet is that with more people flagging, it changes the behavior of many of the actors on the platform as there is more chance that over rewarded content gets knocked down, this means all of those people buying from bidbots on crap too. It makes removing their reward easier and because it goes back into the pool for distribution, incentivized. This means that either people clean up their content when bidding or risk taking a loss and after a few losses, they will either stop buying or adapt. This also means that the bot owners might be more sensitive to what they vote on too which means, manual curation at some level or a "use at your own risk" rule which would make them pretty poor business models for customers.

Curation percentage

Then there is the curation percentage that is supposed to encourage more manual curation. Alone this might not do much and it seems like a big cost to contributors however, in combination with free flags that puts more in the pool and less "poor" content getting botted to the sky with no one willing to knock it down, there will likely be more incentive for real discovery and more in the pool for normal authors.

I am pretty sure that in combination, all of these things will create a pretty decent model because good and important posts can still purchase bots to appear on trending with little risk and attract more votes but, people are unlikely to stand for every post boosted like that chbartist dude does. This means some regulation will come in to play through the bots or self-regulation after some flags. This means that frontrunning shit content bcomes less probable and earns less because the shitposters won't be boosting their crap to be frontrun. Less front running means that maximizers will have to adjust their voting behaviors.

Moving forward

All of these things together open up a lot more uncertainty in the system because there are more actions that can lead to different maximization models. Uncertainty is a good thing because it not only makes people think, it is much harder to code for and when there are a free flags on the cards, more risk involved with what people might consider poor behavior.

At this stage of the Steem game is when we should be making sure the economics functions well and scales no matter how many people are on the platform, because once they come in it gets much harder. If we can create a decent tension between the people, the applications and the economy, the entire ecosystem improves and starts to become increasingly circular.

Self-regulation

While some people discount the tinkering with the algorithms as pointless, if we have learned anything from the real world is that it is the economy that people suffer from and when it is poor, act upon. Balance is required no matter how one looks at it and the current model is not going to cut it no matter how many people are in the system and most likely, the more in the worse the communities and the people will suffer as there will be an increasing low end with no way to distribute to them and no incentive to combat the ongoing poor behaviors of a few very large accounts.

When it comes to regulation, Steem needs to be self-regulating and that means everyone in the community has to participate in some way including the dealing with abuse of various kinds with downvotes. Currently, there is a massive historical taboo with downvoting but with free flags, in time they will be common place enough and people will "mostly" be mature enough to use them well enough.

A healthy trifecta

Finding the balance between these three point is paramount to having a successful ecosystem and the responsibility lays upon all of us. This is the thing with a decentralized community with staked governance, it has to continually change and adapt to whatever environmental factors affect it and Steem is with a larger industry ecosystem that is outside of its locus of control. What gives Steem the best opportunity of success is the same for any organism - health.

While you may or may not agree with my position put forward here, this is part of the discussion that is looking for that position of health where we can increasingly provide a place that grows so that we can increasingly include. This can't rely on people "doing the right thing" alone, it is going to take incentivesof many kinds.

Some of those incentives will be through the communities and people who welcome and support, some through the applications that provide compelling experience, and some through the economics that empowers people to participate and offer the world their best.

Be part of the conversation at least.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]