Greetings, Steem! I am Akareyon.

akareyon (59)in #introduceyourself • 8 years ago

Call me Aka. Born into the first winter of '81, in a south Cimbrian province near Hamburg and Lübeck - grown up in Lower Saxony's shadow of the Iron Curtain with Lego, ABBA, Commodore 64 and meters of books in a family devoted to the teachings of the Watchtower Bible and Tract society.

All begins with a healthy dose of isolation from mainstream and pop culture, early reading skills and religious incentives to learn research and good speaking, lots of traveling like winter visits to family friends in the other Germany or summer holidays all over Europe - the fingers of the Peloponnese and the fjords and cairns in the north, the Elbe spring of Krkonoše and Welsh Mewslade Bay in an Opel Blitz or on a long walk crossing the fallen border deep at night to join spontaneous village parties on the other side, debates with biology teachers on the subject of evolution, discussions about mandelbrot fractals with math teachers, a certain estrangement from peers and their hobbies and preferences, turning the local library into a second home, hours of Maniac Mansion, Pirates!, Turrican and Giana Sisters (thus a head start in English classes) and recording their soundtracks on tape, coding, hacking and cracking, experiments with electronics and physics, art and philosophy. Terrible school French, leading to Easter holidays in Paris' banlieue and a boost thanks to M6's "Jeudis de l'angoisse", Franquin's Gaston Lagaffe and Dragon Ball years before it was cool at home.

The first internet happens at school: funds for a pilot project secured by a comitted teacher fill four classrooms with >20 terminals of the Pentium/PII era. There are homepages on Geocities, search engine results on Altavista and Fireball, there are webrings and guestbooks and message boards.

Blind Guardian, Nightwish and Angizia are the soundtrack to readings of Lord of the Rings and suddenly, RAWs Illuminatus! trilogy... Roland Emmerich declares Earth's Independence Day, Simba is the Lion King, Leo sinks the Titanic, finally Episode I brings Jar Jar Binks and midichlorians together and the Matrix has you: Sean Connery confirmed to play Gandalf.

It goes on with that fateful tuesday where, on a visit to grandma Hamburg, the uncle relays an announcement just heard on the radio about a huge terrorist attack in which two of the largest skyscrapers of the world completely crumbled when hit by airplanes. "The planes chopped into the base and they toppled?" - "No, they went in at the top, and they collapsed." - "The top fell off?" - "No, both towers collapsed all the way down." - "What, but how?" - "Because planes crashed into it, and the jet fuel melted the steel beams." - "Yeah, but..." The television pictures confirm: the towers disintegrate from top to bottom. They must have had bombs too. Surely, there will be a thorough investigation after this! And indeed, Zelikow's 9/11 Commission report finds that everything said in the first minutes on TV was factually correct, including Mark Walsh's ad hoc explanation for a never before seen physical phenomenon.

All scratching of the head helps not, however, and ties must be broken. Far away from religious indoctrination and artificial feelings of guilt and shame, the Wupper valley's sacred halls of academia offer the studies of economics and philosophy, a cashier job in a gas station, new friends and perspectives, a taste of rebellion, anarchy and interest in politics.

New neighbors moving in prove to be "musicians", errr, hiphoppers, rappers, whatever; a consensus is found on the worth of Tool and Eminem so long-haired black powermetal bandshirts wearing me sitting in their crib, joints make the rounds, listening to their shit. Regardless of taste, the quality of their stuff stands out even to the ear trained to screaming guitars, epic choirs and hard riffs. They call it mixing and mastering and just graduated from audio school and don't even have a website yet.

The investment - a presence to boast - pays out as experience in things music: managing gigs, composing, recording, mixing, and more or less accidentally bears fruits in the shape of SorgenFreu: the music project of someone who could never play anything on any instrument.

At the time, it was usual to have a MySpace page for such things, which, of course, leads to "friendships" - and friendships sometimes.

When MySpace imploded, everyone streamed to Facebooks hooray democracy. So naturally, over the course of the years, administrating, moderating, contributing, discussing, learning, researching on the web, a question develops: how to lay the groundwork for a community that grows and thrives naturally and organically, and most of all, in a sustainable (even if "ineffective"!) manner, while still having the opportunity to develop with the demands of time.

Clearly, some classical approaches are going terribly wrong, and there are more opinions on the root causes than experts on the matter. There is always someone who pays for the server and wields all the power - to flush years of a community's collaborative work down the toilet in the worst case, or, as in most cases, to censor and "weed out" those with inconvenient views, creating filter bubbles and echo chambers.

A /r/conspiracy post alerted to the new alternative to reddit and Facebook: "Steem". The usual modus operandi would have been to wait and see for a few months or even years whether that new thing will indeed be as good as everyone claims (all is well in the shade!); and finally "adopt" just in time to witness the platform's "eternal september". This time, however, the white paper sounds so interesting that it seems worth a try.

Thus:

@stellabelle asked for longer introductions on slack the other day, so here you are.

Thoughts on Steem[it]

Holding a few "unconventional", maybe even some "radical" views on some topics, using the blockchain technology to build a decentralized community on seems to be precisely the brilliant idea this time and age thirst for. I am not really interested in cryptocurrency trading, or monetizing what I write on the web, it's 18 years too late for that; I will gladly leave these aspects of Steem to those who know their way around Bitcoin and Ethereum.

What I find more interesting is how this community will develop, how the math will check out, and if and how the systemic incentives are balanced to encourage (or discourage) pandering to the majority and shaping new filter bubbles (=turn the steemit stream into a mirror of /r/all) -- or whether this time, informed dissent and inconvenient truths will have a chance to be heard.

My thinking is this: had Galileo Galilei tried to make his case on Facebook or reddit, chances would have been slim that anyone except the usual crackpot tinfoil nutjobs take his ideas and views seriously, and the world would have remained flat for another century or two -- simply because no real controversy would have been possible, no civil debate in which arguments pro and con could be weighed against each other objectively.

Speaking the truth should be reward in and out of itself, so this is not a complaint about human nature; an old Indian proverb says "if you speak the truth, be sure to have a quick horse." No, this is an expression of hope that systemic, active suppression of alternative, but relevant views will be impossible or at least uneconomical on the stage set by Steem.

I will be looking forward to mathematical analyses of the algorithms presented in the white paper, especially those that will be written once Steem has really taken over the role of Facebook and first attempts at "rigging the game" have been made.

While I share the vision presented by @dan et al ("Steem is committed to enabling free speech and building
a free society." (p. 43)), I am not sure whether the math checks out; reality makes optimism look like ignorance sometimes. For example, the compound interest of most of world's central bank fiat currency economies clearly is a pyramid scheme systemically distributing wealth from those who have little to those who have more than they need; and the view that the "elite" will damp such effects through their own internal competition is not as proven as presented:

applying censorship is a good way for elected witnesses to lose their job and therefore, it is unlikely to be a real problem on the Steem network (p. 22)

However, inflation is taken into account and a periodic "reset" will take the function that currency reforms and economic wars have in the "desert of the real world", so it sounds a little as if Steem is actually a demurrage system! I'll gladly welcome any enlightenment on the details of expected wealth distribution... even if by means of ocean mammals.

Some of the intro posts that help understanding Steem[it]

Stuff I'm looking forward to seeing

updates in the functionality of the web interface
discussions on the Steem[it] economy
alternatives to current systems of government and economy
ways to world peace (I know I recanted from optimism a few paragraphs earlier -- I mean a realistic peace!)
flat earthers, expanding earth theorists, concave earth proofs, vaccination skeptics, GMO protesters, geoengineering activists, 9/11 truthers, Tesla and Schauberger theories, Silvio Gesell and Paul Lafargue essays, illuminati and lizard people, Niburu and Kundalini blogs, morphogenetic fields and electric universe scholars -- and how Steem treats them
machine embroidery tutorials (knerds, where are you)
circuit bending, 8-bit music, chiptunes and retrogaming: Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Nintendo Gameboy
glitch art and Rube Goldberg machines
the fanbases and their in-depth analyses of Star Wars, Star Trek, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Lord of the Rings and every other piece of science fiction andor fantasy
HowTo: stay sane in a mad world
debates on what happens when you build a tower, pick up the top 1/4, and drop it on the rest