I have some questions, though I might pretend they are rhetorical and do not require answers since everyone is looking at the STEEM price charts at the moment.

1. What is your greatest personal skill?
2. Do you think it is valuable for you in some way?
3. Would you think it valuable if most people could do it?

While you are considering those and preparing your well-thought-out answers and maybe even fashioning your own post in order to delve deep into your skill and surrounding psychology and economic position on supply, demand and scarcity...

Anyway...

I was thinking about this after reading some comments between @smooth and @pharesim concerning content rewards and other matters. What I was wondering about is the distribution of Steem throughout the platform and as they mentioned, the spread to the tail - something I agree with, and I am not in the tail regarding rewards. If you want to read an interesting look at what I consider improving reward distribution over the last year, here is one from Asher today.

So, while not in the tail myself, I do think that there should be spread to the tail, however, I do not think that it should be blindly so. What I mean by this is that in my opinion, the economics of scarcity when it comes to the value of for instance, a token, also applies to content.

Yes, quality is subjective and currently it is near impossible to know what is value adding to the Steem community, but content scarcity is still a thing. For example, there was something like 6000 top-level posts today, with "top-level" referring to them being main posts, not a grading scale. Most likely, many of those posts would be considered barrel-scrapers, in the same way that most social content is.

There is nothing wrong with low-quality posts, but no where online are those kinds of posts valuable unless the person posting them already has a significant following. What that means is, the post doesn't have value, the audience does. I have written about the network and access to it being the value component in social media before and here is one I have found from relatively recently.

But, on Steem and in a small community that offers the possibility for earning on contributions, it is natural that there are going to be barriers to getting that contribution. Can your roll your tongue? Should I get paid for doing what 65-80% of people can do with ease?

Essentially, anyone with legs can kick a football, it doesn't mean football fans want to see just "anyone with legs" play at Wembley. Top-level (quality) football players are very scarce in comparison to the billion-strong audience of football fans willing to pay to watch them, buy merchandise and stab people who barrack for opposing teams.

Now, when it comes to the quality of a football player, it s a little less subjective as there are physical and observable traits that fall into consideration. This is not the case with content on Steem and while there might be people who are fantastic at putting together a book report, it doesn't mean that they are going to engage the general public, or the voting public.

So, since anyone can post anything freely on Steem, no one is forced to actually vote upon it, let alone anyone with stake who is likely more discerning with where their value goes as it affects their held token value. This means that when @smooth votes on @burnpost, he is making a decision that for example, this post is not worth more than what he thinks the use case of burnpost is. And that is a fair call considering his probable personality (as I have observed but can't be certain), as he cannot know for sure if this post adds or subtracts value, but he does know that reducing inflation is likely to add value. No guarantees in this life though.

But, it is up to each individual to decide where their stake goes, and it is up to each individual to decide if they want to redirect stake away from content through downvotes too. While some people will redirect away from content that goes over a certain value, I think that what they should also be considering is where else that value is going to go.

While I cannot know for sure, I wold predict that there is a little bit of Pareto principle in play here in regards to Steem rewards. This is a chart from Asher's post that shows that while the top 10 take 8% of the rewards, the top 500 take 56%. This is the results from the week before the end of the month (I think)

I asked Asher to get me the number of accounts for 80% and for the end of January, there were 1245 accounts that took 80% of the Steem. In the last 24 hours there have been about 5400 posts. We can assume tat the higher earners are also consistently posting multiple times a week and that the posts per day is relatively static. This means that

1245/5400 = 23%

So, that is pretty damn close, isn't it? While the Pareto principle isn't in play for all account, if we look at it from the side of those that are active, it is close enough - in fact the distribution might be a touch better than the 80:20 rule, but I will let Asher play with that later and use the caveat that this is working under some assumptions.

The Pareto principle pops up all over the place and in many companies it will be observable that for example, 20% of the client list provides 80% of the revenue. While I cannot know for certain, would this also mean that 20% of the content in say, a library, gets 80% of the borrows, or 20% of the movies movies on Netflix get 80% of the audience?

The "Top 20%" likely appears all over the place and when it comes to rolling the tongue, it is actually those who can't do it who have the scarcer trait. And this raises the questions from the start of this piece again.

What is your skill, do you think it valuable and, how scarce is it?

If you think it is valuable that is fantastic and you should do it all you can, but if it isn't scarce and many can offer the same, it is unlikely to be seen as valuable by others.

Now, I don't know if this post is valuable enough for @smooth, but perhaps it gives others some ideas to think on about how content creation affects content rewards as it appears, there is a 20% rule in play. Remember though, quality is not the only metric that goes into the value of content on or off Steem, in the same way that if someone likes Brad Pitt, they are more likely to pay to see one of his movies than someone who doesn't like him. The movie quality itself might not be the top of the hierarchy when making that decision, nor might it factor heavily in whether they liked the movie or not after seeing it. That cuts both ways of course.

Are you a Top 20% contributor - could you be?

Well, if anyone could do it...

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]