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RE: HF21: What Makes Steem Valuable?
Steem curation can be displayed as a reflection of the most valuable content according to the shareholders.
The Steem community provides the following services to its members:
- A source of curated news and commentary
This has value for the community, aspiring authors and curators.
I'm not convinced that people influence people's eyeballs by buying Steem, or at least the model by which they can do so has not been clearly explained in the white paper or otherwise. They can influence who gets paid, but that isn't the same thing at all.
There are clear incentives for the community to have a window on what are the best-paid posts and the more Steem someone has, the greater their influence on the platform/pay.
The third principle is that the community produces products to serve its members.
Maybe. For those who are personally involved with dedicated curation of reward payouts, very likely yes. For major investors, maybe (depending on their own views on how important it is what particular payouts are made, some will care and some won't).
For many users, they may be happier looking at whatever Steemit thinks are the best posts to 'feature' or content that meshes with their own personal interests regardless of payout (possibly by app-level targeted curating, or just the user's own decisions of what to look at), or they may not even have a choice if their preferred UI (for whatever reasons) takes a different approach to showing content or doesn't even show 'content' at all (as with some of the games now reasonably popular on the blockchain).
I don't know how much demand there is for influencing the eyeballs of power curators, who are the only ones who can actually be counted on to have their eyeballs directed as a result of on-chain curation. There might be a bit more demand to influence the eyeballs of major investors (since that is a relatively valuable demographic to advertisers), but it still depends whether the investors care about payouts for their eyeballs to be focused on that content.
Saying 'curation' generally isn't specific enough, because Steemit does their own curation when they decide what posts to feature and what advertisements to place on the pages and where to place them. This curation exists alongside the curation of payouts and the former is more directly in line of users' eyeballs.
For users of UIs and apps that have their own policies on what content to feature, or none at all, those looking to reach those eyeballs will simply buy advertising from the app or UI operator, as with Facebook or non-blockchain games. Having a blockchain behind the UI doesn't change anything here.
The best way to capture people's attention is to let them express what they value. This is done through curation. Displaying the results of curation refines the process and create virtuous cycles.
People's attention has value. Capturing people's attention has value. We can account for irrational behavior but it can't be predicted.
See my other reply. I really believe that the biggest problem is simply that we have elevated this whole content and curation mechanism into something that it supposed to be a big deal on its own, when in reality it isn't.
It isn't that it has no value on its own but it really needs to be just a small piece that starts the ball rolling on building a larger community with its own vibrant economy that does much more (which makes the costs of paying content an acceptable means to an end). When it becomes too much of the focus and only a small part of the story for where Steem is going then, the fundamentally unfavorable economics of it all become dominant and value just bleeds away.
The attention economy was never a good story here. Attention has value but it has financial value that can be monetized only to the extent it can be tolled off, as sites like Facebook do. That's not a good fit for a blockchain economy which is built around permissionless access.