Forking my thoughts

In my opinion, the best way to act is toward what we are wanting to accomplish, which means behaving in a way that is directed to where we want to be. If we don't believe that we have a chance to get there, then there is no point in acting toward it at all. In regard to Steem, this has meant that I have limited my involvement and time investment in some areas as while they influence me, I can't have that much influence over them or at least, my time could be better spent in other supportive areas.

I was thinking a little more about the behaviors of people if the application delegations are lost,. since most will focus their contributive attention on where they feel they can be rewarded. And as a few people have rightly surmised, more focus would be put on the applications that have private stake backing them (like @threespeak) and the tribes that have a far greater range of token whales upon them, as well as the communities that encourage a focusing of niche content.

A lot of the supported applications see content due to their ability to reward, rather than their use case itself, and I wonder how many would maintain their user base if that reward was removed. If for example, they offer a convenience or value that can't be found elsewhere, like @steempress does by providing the capabilities to post from Wordpress directly, perhaps they will survive well enough without being able to provide a reward. However, for the applications that do not have a useful differentiation from others in the market place, they could see a very fast user drop-off.

This aside, what does happen is that the voters that are still in the marketplace essentially will see their stake grow in value in the ecosystem, as people will more than earlier look to where the value lays. In a hpothetical scenario where the Steemit Inc Stake didn't exist for example, it would mean that not only would everyone's vote be worth 20% more due to the reduction of supply, the staked users on the platform have significantly more voice with whatever stake they hold, as there is less competing stake in the ecosystem, especially that of the applications which have been receiving delegation.

But what this does is highlight the importance and value (assuming we survive this) of powering up over the years. One of the largest private investors over the last two years has been @theycallmedan, someone who has openly valued the importance of ownership, so I will use him as an example, as he has a great deal of value to lose if things turn sour. In an ecosystem minus the Steemit Inc stake, his voice on the platform becomes significantly more powerful and his stake significantly more valuable, within the ecosystem.

I keep saying "within the ecosystem" because there are several levels of value we have to consider, with price on exchanges being one of them only. Being able to have a voice on Reddit due to Karma points for example, is considered valuable by Reddit users, even though they do not have a dollar price attached to them as they are not a currency in the same way as Steem, for as far as I know, they are non-transferable resources.

So, everyone who over the last 4 years has built their stake and invested in risk losing the value of that stake in price, but as long as the ecosystem and community survives (potentially through a fork or sister chain), their stake can have more value than it previously did. The less voting stake there is out there, the more effective the active voting stake is. This means that more people (those with any stake) will have more of a say over what gets rewarded and what doesn't, as there will be fewer large staked distributors (the applications) than earlier. This is a good thing, isn't it?

Perhaps the result of this would mean that instead of targeting applications for reward, contributors would actually have to spend more time developing the kind of content that gets rewarded by the community itself. This means that the quality of content could go up on average. However, large staked players are still going to be targeted heavily as many will believe that it is easier to get one large upvote than many small. Again, this makes the stake that is active more valuable in having a voice in what is rewarded.

And this brings in the communities.

Communities are similar to content buckets, however they are also owned and admin-ed. This means that they are centralized in the same way a Reddit community is, or any other community is. This doesn't necessarily stop anyone from trying to post in them, but it does mean that the community and moderators can mute and if on a token, remove rewards from contributors. Communities are private.

This seems to be something that some people do not understand on Steem. While anyone can post to Steem, it doesn't mean that it is all public, even if visible. For example, if a competition or league is run by an individual, it is up to the individual how they operate it and how they reward participants - it is privately owned and they are under no obligation to follow the demands of participants. However, no one is forced to participate, which means that if they don't support the majority of their participants in some way, people will not opt-in to the game. A competition on Steem is centralized.

While Steem the blockchain should be decentralized, the content upon it is very much centralized, which is why you can't post as me on my account. My account is mine - a single point of control. My keys, my account. You might not like what I write, you might want to wish I wouldn't write it, but other than voicing your opinion in a comment or downvote, there is very little you can do to change what has been written. Censorship resistance.

The value proposition of Steem communities isn't that it sorts information to make it easier to find, as that is an end user convenience and for market segmentation. The value is in the ownership and ability to moderate the community owned. It offers external censorship resistance and therefore gives internal independence. Layer in SMTs and there is the potential for various kinds of tokenized economies to form, whether they have external value or intrinsic only.

As painful as all of this has been and will continue to be, there is the chance that the Steem community will be able to discuss and make changes that not only empower more users by decentralizing aspects further, but also add protections for that decentralization process, as obviously, the single point of "Ned" was always a risk.

Steem has an enormous amount of potential to become a hub and multiple nodes of the new internet economies, the ones powered by users of all kinds. While imperfect, we as a community have the power to distill what we have learned to create multiple pathways forward to find solutions and benefit a lot from the process. Adversity tends to come with the side-effect of improvement.

Every decision we make is a fork, and each step down the path leads to the next decision to consider. Hopefully, we will strengthen the further we walk.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]