Review of CoinDesk's "I Want the Truth: Could Blockchain Stop Online News Distortion?"
This may seem like a positive story overall, especially for Steemit, but think again. The author points out some of the public-image issues that Steemit faces with the previous and existing mechanisms and behaviors.
And yes, this relates to the "dreaded" topic so many people apparently can't handle understanding objectively: quality content.
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Fake News Crisis
The CoinDesk.com article is written by Bailey Reutzel. The author opens the post with the statement:
"The shitpost is mightier than the thinkpiece."
That is powerful, and quite true, in our attention saturated market economy vying for slices of our time, which translates into slices of our lives. The more we give to the attention economy, the more of our total lives is "spent" and "paid" towards finding and giving attention.
Reutzel continues that truth has gone by the wayside ("degradation" as she calls it), as we progressed from print media like newspapers to more digital information access. Indeed, as the internet became available, it wasn't like a network owned by a company for you to get your voice out by hosting your own show. You could simply create your own web site.
Whatever you believe can be said, and anyone else can believe it to be "true". This freedom comes with responsibility that few actually question.
Bailey makes a point to mention the mounting criticism on Facebook and Google to tackle this "epidemic" of fakenews, after mentioning how 20 fake news stories outperformed 20 real news stories. Apparently, some mysterious "criticism" exists that Google and Facebook need to ban fake news from their sites.
Facebook also recently announced a tool to warn users about content that has been flagged as not reliable.
But is that really a solution? I mentioned in that above post about the flagging, that this allows them to create more restrictions on alternative media information sources that the mainstream media does not cover.
Whereas newspapers where people worked to uncover facts used to be the model, now it appears that money drives the content creation to feed the attention economy. Ad revenue is the main source of income for Facebook and Google, as I have previously covered as well.
Show Me the Money
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The development of the attention economy to monetize human attention and interaction, has led to block chain technologies getting into this social media revenue generation idea, as Bailey points out. The author mentions that they are worried as a journalist about the state of their profession given the new digital age.
Bailey also rightly is concerned with this monetary motivation behind social media and content platforms. Just as the former television networks were people grew disillusioned with the type of content available and their restriction to access of information leading to the success of the social media networks at the beginning of the new millennium, people are now becoming disillusioned once more with the control of our personal data for their monetary gain.
We have more freedom than with the television networks, but there is still more freedom to be had over how we make money for the attention economy that we generate, rather than having a corporation exploit our desires for attention and make money off of us.
It Looks Good
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Bailey's next point is important, although a bit naïve in some respect. The author asks if the new block chain content platforms will have the same consideration for truth that current social media giants allegedly have. What? This is what I find a bit naïve on their part, to think that Facebook, Twitter or MySpace or any other platform actually had truth as a consideration for a business model.
The author does recognize that this is not an issue for the block chains either. The new platform Yours is advertised as "getting content creators paid on the Internet."
Reutzel has no issue with this, so long as a consideration for truth is embodied, which I happen to agree with, as you might know if you follow much of my original work. Reutzel wants to emphasize the importance on well-written, factually corrected content as a content creation platform. Otherwise, you're simply creating more fodder and low-quality nonsense that takes up people's time and attention.
Bailey asks a pivotal question:
"Why should I, or anyone else, pay them?"
This might not seem accurate when thinking of Steemit or other platforms, but if you're thinking of outside investors looking at a new business model and what it represents, this is incredibly important. And this is why I have been adamant about quality content creation since I have joined Steemit. At least from a perspective of an alternative to the mainstream media, Steemit does not represent a journalistic community of integrity and quality.
This is why certain content types, being rewarded for not actually promoting a quality content creation platform hurts both the visibility for new users, and the visibility for investors. As Bailey mentions, why would anyone pay for low quality content? Or content that is simple "picking" one choice from another and "rewarding" people as an incentive to keep making someone rich by getting others to play that game?
Continuing with the article, Bailey mentions the founder of Yours, Ryan X Charles, saying that they work under the principles of market economics which allows the users to pick the rules like Reddit moderators do. The idea is all in good and well, that users who create good content should get paid for their posts.
Steemit Under Fire!
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Bailey talks about the typical image people have of steam it, where someone can make $1500 writing a short post that probably took them only 15 minutes to make. Compared to journalists, who get paid a lot less to research topics, which take weeks months or years, the new attention economy block chain reward system does not value quality investigative reporting, but instead seems to favor and incentivize the quick unsophisticated content.
That might just been a stereotypical caricature that steam and has garnered being described by Bailey, but it isn't. Bailey goes on to target Steemit's executives, purporting that the big payouts are used as a marketing incentive to get more people onto the platform. He imagines that as more people sign up, the higher price the token goes which makes the executives richer, especially since he believes people go out and sell their tokens back to the executives that gave them the rewards for their content in the first place.
But it's not all bad for Steemit from Bailey. He mentions how Ned emphasizes a reward on "positivity and accuracy over garbage content like some of the things you see on Facebook".
Good news is short-lived for Steemit, as he brings back Charles from Yours to talk about how the whales need to be pleased in order to get ahead on steam it, which is true. Charles says they avoided creating a new crypto currency so that there would be less of a chance of power grabs and outside skepticism that this was a Ponzi scheme.
Journalism Revived
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Bailey's article closes with an emphasis on identity and identification. Anthony Duignan-Cabrera and Jeff Koyen are two other journalists who signed up for Yours and think that the block chain technology can play an important role as an identity verification layer for posting credible news from a credible source.
This, Bailey says, "could be the key to saving journalism."
As as previously mentioned with the emphasis on monetary gains in ad revenue through the attention economy, journalism is still playing under the rules of advertising to gain revenue by targeting the attention of the consumer. The blockchain can also assist in dealing with fraudulent ads and click farms. Fraudulent ads could be recognized and stored in a ledger as a blacklist which would make propagation of these ads less common. This would allow journalists to be freed from the influence and impact of advertising on their industry.
Publishing Potential
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The final point covered about the block chains potential, is that the trust and vetting process to promote the establishment of trusted relationships between content creators, advertisers and consumers. Payments can be issued through the block chain, through smart contracts in the trust us ledger where fraud can be mitigated and people have less of an opportunity to defraud and screw each other over. When a sale is made, micro-payments for each sale can be distributed amongst all parties instantly, rather than waiting for a certain time period to elapse.
Publishing will not be accepted in the block chain until such secure verification and trust methodologies can be implemented and used easily by all parties concerned. As such "decentralizing publishing is terrifying" for now, according to Duignan-Cabrera, one of the journalists mentioned earlier.
If we are going to allay the fears of the public and many sectors of industry surrounding the security around the block chain, there are tools that need to be developed so that we can demonstrate the power of the block chain and bring the future into existence, sooner than later.
This was a review and analysis of Bailey Reutzel's CoinDesk article title I Want the Truth: Could Blockchain Stop Online News Distortion?
Thank you for your time and attention! I appreciate the knowledge reaching more people. Take care. Peace.
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@krnel
2016-12-27, 7pm
Very topical content. I apologize if this goes off on a tangent a bit. The article triggered this thought process.
I'm more convinced that the attention economy is an important element of developing a way of interacting as a social network, but it's only the first step. The attention economy is the 'peacocking' or marketing of interest that attracts attention. What people really crave is the conversation (at least that is possibility I'm exploring). The issue we have today, is that the 'peacocking' is rewarded, but the next phase of the social network, the conversation is not being given wings. The post that draws the most interesting conversation is valuable content. I spend a significant amount of my online time reading the conversations that occur as disparate individuals are drawn together seeking to move their agenda into the public forum. We all have agendas of some kind.
TLDR = The conversations that occur under a content heading could be rewarded in the same way the content heading is rewarded. It then incentivises engagement. Engagement is the missing link in the steemit ecology.
Alternatively...I might be rambling.... :-P
In the first two months I was on Steemit July/August and before the slider for adjusting voting % existed you actually could make good rewards by dialog. I have another account @chaospoet that I was doing quite well with in that type of environment as that account I tended to have rhyming/poetic dialog with people about their posts. I likely will visit that again, but that was the primary way I made any income from that account. Since the slider was implemented that is no longer that viable of a method of engagement. I am sure I will still do it when I am inspired, but it will be with an understanding that I am likely to get nothing for my efforts but the same thing I'd get on any other platform.
I want to bring back discussion rewards and "make them great again". This can probably be achieved by having comments in a dedicated reward pool so they don't compete with posts.
Great. That will be fun to try out. Any experiments you wish to try while we are in beta I am excited to try out. Thanks for commenting and letting me know.
It would be interesting for sure. There would be differing degrees of quality in engagement. With a comment reward, we might see people commenting just for the reward sake ie posting meme gifs (which can be funny sometimes), glib replies like "awesome". A system of downvoting comments too? Controversial. :-D Professional trolling? Man, that might be a nightmare..LOL!
Interesting times.
I only support flagging (not downvoting) things as Spam, Plagiarism, or Abuse. So unless someone is intentionally trolling someone, being an abusive, posting spam/plagiarism then I personally do not like the downvote. I personally believe how many people liked something is truly the only metric that matters. If you go into a bookstore, magazine store, clothing store, food store, ANY STORE you are not walking around with a little marker checking the things you don't like so everyone knows about it. That'd just be ego and trying to arrogantly imply that people should care you don't like something. No that isn't how stores of any kind work, and if they did I bet we'd see some physical altercations break out over it. Instead we go in and buy the things we like, we ask for information about the things we are interested in, etc. Really all that matters is how many people liked something. Short of combating spam, plagiarism, abuse I see no purpose for a downvote. There are those that believe it should be used to redistribute value elsewhere in the pool if THEY subjectively decide it is not worth an amount. I view involuntary redistribution as theft so I do not support it in that form either.
We had rewards for comments before. The issues you referred to actually were non-issue. You could however, be a person that spent most of your time commenting and engaging with others and still make some income/reward from the site. I do think there was more dialog during this time. This opened the door for people who might not be great at making posts, but still had good minds and could have good conversationalists.
The flagging system we have seemed to have dealt with trolls pretty well. I only ever encountered ONE and the MUTE works pretty good for them too.
Top posting after we hit the bottom of the thread.
I've used the mute button quite liberally. :-)
I am willing to give anyone a chance to actually say something different. I muted someone that was intentionally trolling me (and others). They were following me from post to post and trolling comments.
Their comments were hidden by the reputation system, but still there indicated as hidden. MUTE got rid of even that much.
I've only encountered that once since July.
EDIT: And they made $0 off of doing it.
An interesting(in my opinion) additional note. I can post on reddit and attract trolls rapidly. :) I think it is a pretty promising testament that I have encountered only one on steemit.
Another thing about the term TROLL. People often call a person a troll just because they do not agree and may be frustrated and neither person has managed to find that common ground to explain themselves to the other. This is not a troll. This is life and seeking understanding. Finding understanding is often NOT easy. It takes effort.
A troll is someone who is intentionally going out of their way to upset you, get you riled up, and be difficult.
It can be dangerous to assume someone is a troll simply due to disagreeing with them. So while finding common ground can be uncomfortable, I have had encounters like that where if we pushed through it both of us learned some things. Those same people also might have had amazing conversations with me on other topics. I'd hate to MUTE them over a struggle for understanding and by doing so miss out on the other AMAZING conversations we might have. Since I cannot predict when this might happen it typically takes quite a bit for me to consider actually muting someone.
Thank you for the feedback.
That is an interesting observation I've heard before, and see as well. Your next sentence is accurate as well, on the most valuable in terms of social interaction, is indeed the one with the most real interchange of information, not simply "Greenbay!" or "Both Steemians are hot!" comments... lol.
That's okay. I read a YouTube comment today in which someone called someone a 'contrarian'. As I contemplated that word and it's meaning, a picture of myself began to form in my mind.
/shakes it off
Scary...
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What worries me about this fake news is the following. It can't have just started now, newspapers have been around for a long time, before that we have records handwritten on paper, and before that papyrus and stone, could some of these also be fake, and some of what we believe is real history is actually fake news? That could be possible, for example in wars the victor writes the history, losers have no say in this.
As for alternate news sources I've read a lot of them and most of them are also full of crap, they are written in a way that attracts the readers they are targeting, yes, even lying.
The coindesk author is blinded by the "fake news" that newspapers ever actually "fact checked". This is compounded by the fact that without there internet there was no real way to measure the accuracy of the news papers.
I suspect that the level of propaganda in the MSM has always been this bad. The internet has finally exposed it which tells me there is less "fake news" today than there use to be.
Rather than measuring the total "fake news", perhaps we need to be measuring the quantity of "real news". Prior to the internet "real news" was very hard to come by. Now you can find it easily if you can apply a little critical thinking.
I enjoyed that one too.
Isn't it possible to form some sort of curation guild for news content that fact checks articles and recommends authors with a record of integrity? Like Curie for news. Also, it seems strange to me that no one is talking about the responsibility of the individual to question the validity of information. Interesting and complex topic. Thanks for sharing!
I put that responsibility on the people the first time I wrote about Facebook and fake news last month I think. It's not a companies job, it's ours to raise awareness of reality and learn more.
Your curation idea is great!
Thank you for the feedback.
Exactly! You're welcome. I'll check out your other post.
This Steemit.com contributor, while attempting a critical analysis of a well-written article on CoinDesk.com which was delegitimizing the content of Steemit.com, demonstrated with its horrible writing, the original author’s point.
Nothing does more to discredit content, than poorly structured sentences piled high with improper grammar and spelling errors. To establish this platform as a legitimate alternative to mainstream media, contributors on Steemit.com must commit to improving the quality of their writing.
I see a gold mine of potential in this platform, but not until contributors step up their game and self-reflect on their ability to compete in the real world by learning how to compose grown-up sentences. If not willing to put in the time and effort required to post quality content, don’t whine when journalists point out the obvious, that Steemit.com is going to fail under the immense weight of the poorly written crap that is published here.
Additionally, commenters and curators should take their job seriously and refrain from robotic upvoting when an article is barely readable due to overwhelming sloppiness. If commenters don’t point out the weaknesses of the content, they are failing Steemit.com as much as the contributor’s juvenile writing does. When critics offer insight, as in the CoinDesk.com piece, learn from it, and improve, and then prove them wrong by your improving.
I agreed on that point, and others, yet you claim I say otherwise, hilarious! This is telling, that you couldn't read and understand something said, due to your fixation on grammar.
All of your criticism of grammar and spelling doesn't seem to enable you to read clearly, so it's not worth much to focus on such issues if you can't even comprehend what is written anyways. Are a few little grammar mistakes preventing you from comprehending what is said?
If you actually read, I agree with the author on that point. Thanks for trying to make a point yet fail miserably.
Yes, point out the weakness. Grammar and spelling, OK. But your other statements are just meant to disparage, and that's it. How?
I'm calling you as a bullshitter. Be specific. Where do such errors prevent an accurate representing of the information or of the issue? OMG... he forgot a 't' on 'the'... eeek! It's a garbage post! Horrible! Juvenile! LMAO. What a fallacious mindset you have. The content, what it says? Who cares, the grammar Nazi says.
You are just shitting over everything with a general wide-brush in an attempt to invalidate the review, simply based on grammar or spelling, which apprently prevents you from accurately assessing what was said? Yet other people, can understand, despite such errors. So while you present yourself as having some aura of authority over what is "valid" material in terms of grammar or spelling, you still couldn't comprehend someone agreeing with someone else? Good job on your intellectual abilities.
I didn't shit all over your piece by focusing on one thing and using that one thing to attempt to dismiss your whole piece. I honestly assessed it and evaluated it, which is something you apparently can't do here.
And by the way, this is not a newspaper. There are no editors. If you want to establish some of that, go ahead. I put information out, and do pay attention to grammar and spelling, but it's not my 100% focus. I also use text-to-speech sometimes. Sorry for all my "horrible worthless" trash "juvenile" posts as a result... what a baseless claim to make on the part of an alleged "intellectual" who is a journalist. You don't even care about the information content itself (you couldn't even understand when I agreed with the author) it's all about the grammar. What a joke!
So to recap, I clearly stated I agreed with the author (you) on the point you claim I don't, indicating your focus on grammar is preventing you from reading properly, making your reasoning fallacious when presenting your case. The words you used to describe the post reflect your bias and blindness to accurately assess information when you encounter grammatical errors. Something for you to work on.
You are 100% correct. I could not comprehend your message because of how it was written; and it’s not just about grammar and spelling. You challenged me to point out the parts that I have an issue with, but I think if you read what you wrote out loud, you will catch most of it yourself. My suggestion is to have someone read your articles before you publish them to find anything that doesn’t make sense or can be worded differently to be more concise. I was too direct in my criticism because I was genuinely interested in this subject and was disappointed that I couldn’t figure out what you were saying. Sorry I offended you.
Great post upvote and follow you.
Gran post te voto y te sigo.
Follow me please.
Don't spam/advertise your links on other people's content. You are not even reading the post or engaging in the topic. You have been flagged.