RIGHT TO VOTE: Equality, Perceptions, What is our goal?
I wrote a long reply to @dantheman on his recent post and it was suggested I post about it rather than comment.
My knee jerk response was that I can only post 4 things per 24 hours. I didn't have close to 4 things planned for today so I'm not sure what my point was. Knee Jerk
For this blog entry to make sense you need to read @dantheman's post
In reality, he has written three really good posts with the most recent being this one.
In the article Dan provides some well thought out reasons why being able to vote negative matters, and he how we negate each other, etc. It is quite deep and I couldn't do it justice here.
Such a thing is indeed possible in an environment where everyone's vote has equal weight. It is important to note he did not mention steem or steemit anywhere in his article. His was a philosophical essay on voting in general.
I am the one who chose to view it from a perspective of steem and steemit.
For something like this to work on steem as described in his essay everyone would need to have the same weight of their vote. Voting weight should also potentially be decoupled from potential earnings. We could have feeds sorted by popularity (number of votes) which essentially should be the trending, and then you would also have a feed sorted by greatest payout. They would not be the same because the payout is dictated by your steem power when you vote. I do believe it is very important this aspect remain. I will explain why.
A big incentive to purchasing steem power is that the more you have the more you can earn, and the more you can reward others. This encourages people to invest in steem power which as Dan has mentioned is simply some magic on an accounting sheet. It is NOT currency. It is representative of currency you have chosen to TIE up into supporting the steem blockchain. You can remove it, but only at a very slow rate. This means that someone cannot suddenly pull ALL of their investment out of STEEM and crash it's price. The fact they have built benefits to having steem power means people are encouraged to buy this form of the currency. It ties them into the system in the long term. It protects the value. It is actually a brilliant idea and this should not change.
What should change then?
That depends totally on our goals. I see two driving possibilities and they do have some potential overlap, yet we would still need to decide which we think is most important.
- GOAL 1: To grow steem/steemit as rapidly as possible so it supplants reddit, facebook, etc as the new uncensored, get paid to contribute social media platform (and other steem blockchain sites/apps to come).
- GOAL 2: Make the world a better place.
Those goals do overlap. The first goal will do some of goal two. The reason I separate them is depending on which you feel is the more important goal it does change how some of these issues should be viewed.
I wish to address the second goal first
If you read Dan's blog you will see that a lot of it when applied to the world is about changing the conditioned perceptions of the world. It is about educating, breaking down paradigms, a teaching a different perspective of things.
In the long term this would likely lead to a better world. It would require educating people and realizing there would be a lot of conflict, turmoil, and negative public relations that would have to be faced head on. Yet ultimately in the long run the world likely would be a better place.
This is the path we would be taking if we do not change some PR nightmare situations on steem/steemit at the moment and instead expect all newcomers to change their perceptions and accept how things are here. This is not a bad goal if the ultimate goal is making the world a better place.
Now I'd like to turn to the first goal
I was under the impression we want to grow fast, and become too big to be easily countered. The world would be a better place, but it would require realizing that there are perceptions out there and if you want mass adoption at its fastest you need to accept they are there and plan for them rather than expecting those people to LIVE WITH IT, READ THE WHITE PAPER, and just accept how things are.
Personally I am fine with votes determining visibility of posts. How many people like something is a valuable thing to know. Currently it is more visibility based upon payout. A person could have a high payout with 10 votes, while someone with 200 votes may have virtually none so their post is not visible.
Is the amount of money the person is potentially making the true value of the post?
or
Is the quantity of people that liked it the true measure?
If votes are equal as in the essay by Dan then I would assume it is the latter. I'd expect the trending page to often have posts that had more votes, but less payout as ranking higher.
That too could cause some PR nightmare and I guess it is not completely avoidable, but I do not suspect (speculation/presumption on my part) that this PR nightmare would be as bad as the one that currently exists.
The PR landmine in the room
Perception of anyone first coming to steemit
They look at their post and are excited their post is going to give them $1000. They come back later in the day and it is now $10, or perhaps even $0. The same people that voted for them before and resulted in the money are still voting for them. They didn't change their mind. Yet one or more people flagged (down voted) their post.
The immediate normal perception is that THEY STOLE FROM ME!! THEFT! STOP THIEF!
This is natural, and really should be apparent to anyone. It is largely because they do not understand the system and how it works. Yet we must realize this PERCEPTION exists and it will cause turmoil, anger, and a lot of negative PR. We can educate these people but the PR damage will have been done.
How it actually works
It is a lot more like going to a bank teller and saying I'd like to make a withdrawal of whatever is in my account. She starts stacking money behind her window, yet she has not told you that money is yours, another banker comes along and takes some stacks away, and then she pushes the money through the window that is actually yours.
The excitement in steemit is seeing those initial stacks and thinking they are yours. They potentially are, until other people behind the scenes nullify it.
I myself am not a fan of this and have been quite vocal on it. However, one of the points people have made is that the payouts come from a pool of steem power. Only so much of it is available. By saying "I don't think this person should get this money" it is being returned to the pool of steem power to be spread elsewhere.
I am very much against redistribution ideas so that goes very much against my own beliefs. It feels very much like the tax man taking taxes from my check before I get it, though I can still see on my check stub how much I should have gotten, and then redistributing it.
Imagine if we all coordinated to not vote for ourselves for decided periods of time and then carefully review or recruit in comments on all posts not following the protocol for a certain objective.
That'd likely be an interesting experiment. IT could be done by people that signed up to do it, but they'd have to intentionally opt in.
The users who choose to partake would initially not gain as much smd, but they would stand to potentially gain exposure and return thanks of the uninformed self voters that benefit from the groups actions. With the formation of groups based on various forms of opinion or beliefs they could form equal and opposing factions that switch off between directed self voting and vote alturism of the opposing viewpoint in order to further their understanding. This might be practical for funding useful vote based debates and research from multiple perspectives on the infinite mysteries of life.
I am too much of an individualist to favor grouping up. I'm not a fan of parties. I do like experiments though, so if there was a sign up sheet and enough people signed up to be the ones not doing that, and a control was setup of people who were up voting their posts it'd be interesting from a scientific perspective to see what the difference between the two groups was after like a month of doing this.
Hopefully you find this relevant. When I heard about Steemit what attracted me was that it as like reddit with monetized upvotes. I'm late to the game and only began using reddit a few months ago. I fell in love with it because within less than five minutes I can dive into a deep discussion on any imaginable topic with a massive number of people. Yesterday I wrote a comment on reddit that got 100 upvotes, and this felt good. But it would have felt better if I'd written it on Steemit and gotten $100.
I'm not at all against the idea that @dwinblood has avote worth more than mine. However I think the disparity between the votes of new users and whales is far too extreme mine doesn't pay a penny yet. on the other hand I'm not against a marrotocrassy, users who put more work or money into the system should get more valuable votes.
The other thing about the system that concerns me is top posts will be upvoted to a value of let us say $4000, and the entire value of all the replies will be $1.5, most of the replies having zero upvotes. I think replying to posts should be encouraged as deep discussion is always a positive.
Honestly, my blogs don't do too well generally. Even when I put a lot of work into them. I make most of my income here from replying to people and commenting on their posts. If it is relevant and makes people think sometimes you get up votes. The curation rewards are almost meaningless until you have quite a bit of steem power. I am not too worried about the disparity of payments as I expect a lot of changes as they mess with things, and I also know as you and I get more steem power and our votes begin to be worth more it will spread around even more. It is actually a beautiful system.
I like reddit too, but there are parts of it I truly hate.
For example: There was a period if you went to r/politics and did not post a piece supporting democrats the moderators and everyone would down vote you. This was years ago before this current cycle. So I learned not to go there.
There are many channels where it is all people that talk about the same thing. They leave no room for learning because we learn the most from civil discussion with those we disagree with. Say one word they disagree with and they down vote you into oblivion without even reading it.
I am actually starting to be anti-down vote and I was that way on reddit too. I never down vote people there for disagreeing with me. I never down vote people because I disagree with them. I down vote them if they were trolling or abusive. That's about it. I also usually spent some time trying to be civil to decide if I was being trolled or not. This meant I tended to feed the trolls for a little bit before I was certain they were trolling.
Reddit has some good ideas, it does. Yet it has some bad ideas too, so we can perhaps learn from them. There are reddit channels that have removed the down vote, not many of them but I encountered them a few times.
Here is my simplified addition to my other response and will show you where my thoughts are starting to lean.
If I like something, I am interested in talking with people that are also interested in that thing. I am not really interested in the fact that we may be the only 2 people in the world that like it. I don't really care how many people do not like a thing. That is irrelevant to me. If I like a particular book, I don't really care that 100 people hated that book. Same goes with games, movies, photos, art, etc. How many people dislike it is irrelevant to me. I also don't give a shit about democracy. I am an individual and I don't believe 1 person has the right to tell you what to do, 10 people don't, 100 people don't, etc. Until I harm another person in some way I should be free to have my interests and do my thing. No number of people that disagree with me is going to make me change my mind on that. I view 10 people forcing another person to act a certain way, or not be allowed to talk about something as no better than 1 person forcing a person. It is wrong.
That is how I am starting to view down voting. Why does it matter that X amount of people do not like something that I like? All I think that should matter is that there are Y amount of people that do like it.
I'd generally agree with you. I occasionally,but rarely, use the downvote on reddit for people who disagree with me. But normally I use it if I think they are being mean or sophests. When I talk about Reddit to Steemit users, I'm doing it to highlight the srengths I want steemit to steal from reddit, for example, replies on reddit get more upvotes than replies on steemit, this encourages the high level of general discussion on reddit.
I think that is a learning curve thing. Some people won't make much blogging. Yet they'll eventually find out that they can do okay replying to people.
EDIT: And the nesting limit thing discourages some long conversations.