Such a good post. Resteemed and full upvote ;)
I picked some poignant parts to highlight among it all, that sums up the situation quite well:
Today trending is Botland. Look at the top voters on these posts. All bid-bots. What are bid-bots? The natural evolution of greedy investors, ruthless efficiency, and adopting mining techniques from other blockchains. Essentially what has been created are ruthless monsters that take the money of profit minded individuals and only vote for their content.
Rather than vote for content that is the most sincere, the most authentic, and the best quality; votes are given to individuals with the greatest desire for attention and profit. Botland is a shining city of the rich and the rest of the population is left with the scraps in underground ghettos that are hard to find and hard to filter the gems from the trash.
What is left is a mechanism to elevate content regardless of the content itself. Anti-social media now has a way to rise to the top and the social part of the platform is choked off and starved and growth of the platform stagnates. In Botland, bots serve as central authorities of content and must be bribed in order to be granted access to the gated utopia.
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But in Botland, the central authorities are no longer CEOs concerned about the appearance of a platform. The central authority is a bot that doesn't care about you. They simply grant access to the people willing to pay the most. Social media doesn't matter anymore, running a bidbot operation is simply a better social mining algorithm than treating the platform as a social media platform. Steem is an anti-social media blockchain where some individuals still care enough to produce good stuff, but such people are an endangered species where extinction isn't completely out of the question.
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Dan seems like an optimistic person and one who is set on achieving his vision. He knows what happens when such platforms go rotten and greed overtakes the system.
The more corrupt a group is the faster it will die.
If there is any good left on the Steemit blockchain, they should care about the well-being of the platform and will try to avoid such a collapse from happening. But with the rampant greed in the cryptocurrency space, death seems like a pretty plausible option
I have long been a proponent of having human consciousness evaluate actual content, not automated upvotes or buying blind upvotes... I saw it as a flaw in the behavior of the community, a flaw in the goal to create success for Steem. Concentration of power and money ruling the platform is something I have addressed in the past as well.
The death-spiral seems to be growing. Infatuation on false perceptions has fizzled and the reality is laid bare for many to see.
The sad thing about it all is that the devs seem to be ok with current situation. Steemit just highly rewards bid bots and low quality - high quantity content right now. I just wrote about how the social aspect it totally going away and how real upvotes become harder to get because the system rewards extremely selfish behavior including some solutions. [Link]. I'm affraid steemit needs to be near death before something fundamentally changes, my hopes are more on @dan with the steemit competitor he's planning to make.
An essential misunderstanding that has contributed to the present problem is that quality of content is presumed to be the driver of a quality social media platform, when it is actually the quality of social relations that is the determinant factor. Monetary rewards has proved enormously beneficial to social relation quality, and has produced a platform with suprisingly few trolls and superb engagement by tapping into the power of a gift economy and creating a means of gifting without decreasing the holdings of the giver.
However, the ROI of stakeholders is the actual metric that rules Steemit, and Steem, presently. The social media aspect of the platform is merely justification and cover for the Steem mining function that keeps the whales feeding Stinc and the top witnesses. Stake-weighting is the essential mechanism that ensures this.
Were the social media to be the focus of the platform, investors (as whales prefer to be called, obfuscating the ninjamine that generated most of their stakes) would be dependent on capital gains for their rewards. Since but few of them have any experience actually investing, this is a scary thought.
@dan may have learned from Steemit how to avoid this problem. If Stake is allowed to weight VP on his new creation, he will but create another cryptomining application, rather than a social media platform. I'm not overly confident a social media platform is his actual purpose.
Like everyone else, he is responsible for his personal situation in life, and I expect to see that reflected in his work. I would love to be pleasantly surprised. I'm not going to bother to invest my emotional well being in hope things will be otherwise though.
Thanks for the long reply valued-customer !
You actually make a very valid point and it made me change my mind on how I see things. Steemit indeed succeeds in creating a social platform without all the negativity that often comes with the other social media platforms. It's really hard to get a good grip on how to properly see things on this new kind of platform, but something I really enjoy thinking about.
But at the same time, the death spiral can act as a cleansing of the greed off the platform. For smaller users, everything would be just fine. For investors, they are the ones at the most of actually losing something. Assuming that people still want to the use the blockchain when the price is only a few cents, the community should survive. But the first mover advantage of the network will all but disappear.