RE: HF 19- The Clu$terf*ckening and Unintended Consequences
I don't see that the present system precludes 'sock puppet' accounts, but rather enables such accounts to avoid the loss in upvote power, by using more accounts. The present reward system incentivizes such practice.
Users that simply blanket the blogosphere with upvotes are clearly not curating well, although if not just selfvoting would increase the breadth of reward distribution, and do certainly pose a thorny issue. Still, I doubt that is so common as to have much of a negative impact on the value of curation overall. Even if it does, is that negative impact even remotely potential of creating unfairness as the present system? Over 90% of rewards go, and will go according to @aggroed, to less than 10% of users solely due to inequity in wealth through mechanisms that devalue quality content, and encourage voting merely to profit.
Perhaps bots might be a problem in this way, but that is a different issue. It may be that using bots to perform curation detracts from that ability of people to discern quality, and should be discouraged institutionally, in addition to posing this hazard.
Those that spend hours and hours reading and commenting high quality content do add value to the platform, yet presently, and as conceived, that value is not rewarded to them, nor to that content they curate, because upvote power dissipates.
There are ways to abuse the reward pool presently, as we are discussing, and I suspect that a broader provision of rewards might result from any particular abuses you might have in mind. I don't ask what those might be, in order to keep them as inobvious as possible.
The idea is that you get more influence by buying more SP, not by voting as many times as you can. I realize that there is a trade off between rewarding power users who find 40 good posts per day and casual users who spend less time on the site. As much as possible we have to try and find the right balance.
meep
Well, there is a simple way to do this that acknowledges that 3 billion people earn less than $3/day.
Those people can't buy influence. This clearly establishes that creating a system that intends for people to buy influence to somehow create a fair distribution is impossible. I would go further and say buying influence is antithetical to fairness.
After all, it's exactly the problem in government and finance today.
The only way to create a fair system is to decouple wealth and speech. Making influence a commodity guarantees that not only wealth will be inequitably distributed, but also speech.
Most new users on Steemit do not understand that this is the case, because they are told that Steemit rewards posters for posting. This is what they come for, and it's a bait and switch. To be honest, tell them what you just told me, Steemit is a place where you can buy influence. See if new users still come.
Those that do will not be taken aback when they discover the truth.
The only fair way to live up to the rhetoric that has driven Steemit growth is to let the value of posts and comments be set by curators that have an influence, an ability to direct reward, weighted only by their reputation.
All the timing tricks, vote spreading schemes, etc. are just veils that may hide the raw fact that the value of speech is able to be co opted by wealth through those methods.
The real value in the platform is that creators create content, and people discuss that content. Creating rewards that incentivize this behavior will grow Steemit and cause the value of Steem to rise.
The influence buying paradigm is antithetical to not only free speech, and just government, but Steemit. No weighting scheme can make it just.
And that we, as I understand it, own the body of content collectively.
Powerful insight!