RE: Shooting Ourselves in the Foot by Leading with a Carrot
Great post, @krnel. I've been meaning to read the book Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohn who talks about a lot of this same stuff. From what I've seen, rewards are most damaging when it comes to creative work, which is where most of our work is shifting to as a species. Factory work (i.e. non-creative, repetitive work) can actually function with a rewards-based system, but we've since learned that even in those situations, we need to be creative to notice potential areas of improvement.
I think you make a lot of good cases for why the rewards perspective on Steemit causes problems (I went through a time where I hid the $ signs to figure that out). I also think tools and such will improve things around here, but ultimately we have to provide more value than the current social media platforms do. All their friends are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc... why would they come to Steemit where none or very few of their friends are? What's social about that?
It's a chicken/egg problem and the other platforms have a huge head start. I'm thinking the real shift will happen if and when those other platforms screw up big. We're already starting to see some of this in regards to censorship and the use of ads.
Indeed, it has a greater affect in intrinsic factors, like when we create from a desire to do so, or excel fro a desire/care as well. Yeah well the other social medias got popular how? How did facebook get people over myspace? Features? Something else? I don't know... just wondering. I know that if you build functionality to allow people to connect, that is certainly a driving force to keep them here in additional to the rewards possibility given for putting out work. Thanks for the feedback.
In many ways, I think Facebook was lucky at the right place at the right time. Myspace was close, but the execution wasn't quite there and I think they may have even been a bit early. Is the network effect so big now that it can't be overcome? Maybe... but as it was with Facebook, if your entire university is there (I joined early on), then that's where you want to be also. Myspace didn't have that same draw. It also didn't have the same clarity of interface and functionality (IMO). But in today's competitive environment, I don't know if tooling and UI/UX will be enough. Maybe some rewards (or at least the concept of sharing value internally instead of involving advertisers and investors) might be a big draw which then leads to more intrinsic motivations to build community here instead of elsewhere. That seems to have worked for me, though many of the friends I've brought here either haven't posted yet, lost interest in posting, or lost their passwords (that, unfortunately, has happened too many times).