We'll see about that civility once money starts coming in for the express purpose of buying influence. For example, there are stories that the Russian government operates social media propaganda labs, where agents' full-time jobs are to talk about how great Putin is on social media. This would be a perfect place for them! Putin could toss a million dollars (chump change, really) at a Steem-voting botnet and start pushing pro-statist, anti-western articles to the front page. I suspect it will be a very different landscape when that sort of thing starts happening.
The problem with buying influence is that we're now seeing the "Feed" feature. People will not be interested in propaganda and so it won't show up in their feeds. And as the friends/followers feature develops more people will just get info from the networks that interest them. So it becomes a waste of money to try and game the system. The money they pour in will just feed the value of Steem making it more attractive for more people.
You just said: "everybody will ignore the advertising and propaganda" but "they money they pour in will fund everybody."
Why would they pour money in if their message is totally ignored? It seems like there has to be an equilibrium; the advertisers/politicians need to have enough voice for it to be worth their money to spend it on us. It's an interesting conundrum, don't you think? We want (and, I would argue, really really need) their money, but the only way we get it is if we give them our eyeballs.
Yeah good point. I was just riffing and prob should of used a conditional tense. In another post I pondered whether there could be a way to control how much advertising you want, like a scale, and that could be tied to your earnings on the site in some way. the more advertising you allow the more money you can make. Just a thought.
Yeah, I think that's a pretty interesting idea - I've seen a couple proposals along those lines. I'll be curious to see how things look as they develop!
That is a fair point! I wonder if there's some mechanism in place to prevent such abuse - I bet there is or is being actively worked upon. Perhaps someone more familiar with the platform can comment? Somehow, I doubt I could go to that Buy Steem Power link and willy nilly power up worth $1 billion.
Honestly, I'd argue that in a sense there shouldn't be a mechanism to prevent it, because Steem can only be successful if money is flowing into the system. Where does the money come from? Politics and advertising. Some of that will be distasteful, but without it the financial future of Steem withers and dies.
Money can keep coming in from private sources powering up to gain influence in the community. I don't know how sustainable this will be as Steem scales up to the millions though.