Some thoughts about the Smart Media Tokens Whitepaper
I've read through the whitepaper quickly once, and found it fascinating. It seems to me as though an SMT is like a subset of a full Smart Contract, with many of the same benefits coupled with greater ease of use, but less flexibility.
A couple of sections jumped out as particularly interesting to me initially though:
When launching a new token, there is the option to automatically burn or power-up some of the participant's Steem. This might sound odd, but it might prove a very attractive option for ICOs from people who hold significant amounts of Steem they'd like to appreciate.
I expect that each upcoming community will create their own token, and I somehow suspect most of these will require a Steem vesting component, which could have a positive effect on the Steem price.
Advisory tokens could be used to indicate or acknowledge posts that have some attribute, without conferring financial reward. For example, spam could be flagged as such, but without the person flagging expending their 'financial' voting power to do so. Perhaps comment based referendums, quizzes etc. can also use these without subverting the intention of Steem votes (and the reward shares system). I imagine such arrangements could suit some communities.
I'll keep reading and trying to understand the implications as opportunities as time allows, but like most others, I think it's an exciting development and I'd be pleased to hear other thoughts!
Thanks for a thoughtful piece. One of your contributions is to point us in the direction of the work we need to do in order that future events be consistent with the apparent euphoria created by the SMT announcement.
I certainly share the happiness over this effective creation of an important new set of avenues for expanding the system-wide utility of Steem and its block chain. Beyond this feeling, however, it is apparent that there is a lot of work to be done, and it is best that we put our heads to it.
I stopped reading the white paper yesterday when I got to the section entitled “Owners Manual”, thinking that I could postpone getting into that part without much loss for the immediate discussions. Consequently, I apologize in advance for this half-baked commentary about the matter of votability and rewardability. I need to understand these processes much better than I do now; but here goes with my response.
If I was creating an SMT to support my service where I wanted to reward contributors, I would like to establish my own principles regarding voting and rewards. Here is my concern. The current system comes close to creating a rolling popularity contest, and I fear about the long-term consequences when it becomes important to develop and pursue high-quality material that may not be popular. As we look around us in almost all walks of life, do we see that the best is the most popular?
Please — this is not a blanket criticism of the status quo; because I think I understand well enough the Steemit business model to see why the prevailing system is needed here. But for new SMTs, I think their leaders should be left to construct a system that seems best given their objectives.
I totally agree with your assessment of these shortcomings of the Steem platform, and these will perhaps inevitably carry through to spin-off projects like this. That said, this SMT plan does have quite a lot of flexibility.
How do you imagine quality could be judged and rewarded if there were no technical limitations relating to the planned implementation of SMTs? I'm genuinely interested, as this is what third-party developers like myself need to know.
Hello andybets!
I am now ready to offer some suggestions relative to your important question, noted in our earlier exchange.
These observations reflect not only my long experience in at least two other types of writing communities than that of social media; but also some research that I've done on Steemit posts over the last two days. (I will tell you more about the research in a minute; but first I want to provide the nutshell of my suggestions.)
In a nutshell, to make major strides towards raising the quality of the information, we would need to recognize specific content classes and within each class standards tailored to the properties of that class would need to be specified. Each class would need to be provided with a pot of available reward coins that cannot be invaded by the other classes. Also, in some of these classes, we might need content referees of some kind.
I suspect that these ideas are fundamentally incompatible with the general principles and strategy of social media (where people prepare and submit whatever is on their minds) and so we may have to live with the status quo.
Much of what I have just said is strongly supported by the results of the research that I have just completed. Two hundred and sixty-three Steemit posts from the “Trending” list as of September 30 were classified into 53 classes over many hours of effort. These classes pay no attention to the tags, and focus more on what I perceive to be the functions or utility of a particular class of content.
Three of the 53 categories have a relatively large number of items. I also grouped two more categories to produce a large number of items where there is significant overlap in the said content functions.
Among these subsets of classes, with rising vote volume, rewards tend to fluctuate up and down within a widening band until the number of votes reaches around 200. Generally, as the vote volume sweeps above that level so does that of the rewards. Also, as we approach 200-votes mark, the upper bounds of the bands of rewards tend to become distinctly higher than the upper bounds of the bands where vote volumes of 50 or less are observed.
We also need to factor in the unknown force of the voting robots and/or algorithms that generate voting blocks under certain signals.
There may be nothing wrong with any of the current situation in the context of writing for social media.
If anybody is angered by these remarks, I beg you to hold your anger until you see the articles I will write in the coming weeks to exposit the results of the research cited above. In any event, I am not a fighting person, so anger is best delivered elsewhere.
P.S. The 263 articles include several languages -- I dropped no item because of its language. I know from my French how machine translation tends to produce unacceptable translations; but the reasonable conveyance of ideas now achieved by Google's Deep-Learning language robots is simply astonishing. This has to be one of the great feats in human history.
Thanks for your thoughts.
I guess the further questions this raises would include how such content referees could be chosen. Once there is a mechanism for this, Steem's proposed SMT model could perhaps be used to grant extra value to the votes of these referees, through the delegation mechanism.
Most social media is devoid of any meaningful content, and like you, I'd like the situation to be different, but the problem is that most people don't want to be excluded from the discourse, but don't seem to have much to say! Rewarding curation is an attempt to reconcile that dynamic I think.
I agree with the amazing capability of Google's translation engine to convey useful meaning, even if it's not the most elegant language!
Thank you for your encouraging response. What follows is better placed in a private email, so if there is a route I can use to tell you my private email address without broadcasting it, please tell me what it is. I give you the idea in the preceding sentence because I don't want to make a lot of people angry unnecessarily, and I expect that various people reading this note will think that a Newbie in the community is not supposed to making the sorts of remarks that follow!
The quality-of-content issue emerges as a matter of serious concern in comments that seem to be coming from community leaders in response to Ned’s last video at https://steemit.com/steem/@ned/explainer-value-flows-on-steem-with-smts-video . The message I get there is that high quality of content represents one of the key achievements of Steemit, and one up on which the future evolution of the service, as well as the emerging SMTs (it seems), should try to capitalize.
If this is so then something about the existing conversion of votes into payments raises questions for me.
(1) An article at https://steemit.com/steemit/@andrewmcmillen/my-story-about-steemit-for-backchannel-the-social-network-doling-out-millions-in-ephemeral-money is being awarded $715 (at this point), when it seems to have very little green content, and is mostly an excerpt from another article published in a Wired journal for which the author probably got paid. That $715 arises largely from 952 votes, I think.
(2) I saw something similar in the day or two that started with the SMT announcement. Various people were getting rewards in the area of $200 to $500 for content that was a combination of digests of sections of the SMT whitepaper, speculations about how and why Steem would now “go to the moon”, and praise for Ned.
(3) I also see various instances of payments of $150 to $300 for what are basically re-postings into Steemit.com of videos previously uploaded to Youtube by people with large Youtube audiences. Once again, there are generally 200+ votes for the reposting of the successful videos into Steemit.
Do I begrudge very high vote counts, or large numbers of community members praising a writer for doing a very good job of advertising Steemit to the greater world? Absolutely not. On the contrary, i love it. For one thing, I’ve locked away into Steem Power several hundred dollars that went straight from my pocket. And I have no plan t to do a power-down.
However, I am asking the following question: Am I looking at one of the classes of high-quality content according to the community definition of “high-quality content”?
The message I am getting from the collection of items 1, 2 and 3 above is the following. Spend a year on Steemit where you comment on stuff and don’t get whales angry with you, so as to bring your “reputation” up to 50+. Then focus on trying to make articles that will cause people to praise your advertising of the community to the outside world, and never mind whether there is any green content in your articles. Or do I have this all wrong?
I think that's a fairly good summary of the situation! Steem has a far from perfect economic incentives model, and it does reinforce slavish devotion and group-think as well as quality material. Expressing doubts about the direction the project is moving is particularly difficult, and many users give up on taking that route after a while which I think is negative for the platform. I think platform resilience comes from the ability to discuss and logically refute doubts as they are brought forth.
You've put your finger on a bottom-line thought, i think. If we need a Great Debate about 'where to steer the ship', the last thing you want to do is frighten away the people that wish to sing from other than the 'blessed' song book.
BTW — this morning I saw a post that illustrates how SMTs might be integrated into Steemit (as I recall) and it lays out the case for s distinct sub-communities with their own standards, review procedures, remuneration, etc., very nicely. The post was also well received! If you need to find it, I will go and search for it and give you the link.
Also please see my related discussion here https://steemit.com/smt/@lestatisticien/synopsis-of-steemit-community-members-views-on-issues-to-address-in-roll-out-of-smts#@alexmavor/re-lestatisticien-synopsis-of-steemit-community-members-views-on-issues-to-address-in-roll-out-of-smts-20171010t195321010z
I actually sympathize a lot with those who may have little green content to supply but feel the need to display their participation, small though it may be. Thus, the trick is to design the site navigation to accommodate both kinds of people, that is those and the people like you and I who want to get into the ‘meat’ of a particular topic.
Right now, I find it distressing to experience the speed with which high-quality (for me) specialized content scrolls off into ether shortly after it has been uploaded and then you have to stand on your head to find it.
Cheers!
Interesting. I'll have a thorough look at your article when I've some more time, but it looks good, and I'd certainly welcome more transparency and communication about SMTs from Steem Inc. If you can find the post you mentioned, I'd be interested in that too.
Thanks andybets, and here is the article.
https://steemit.com/smt/@cryptoctopus/how-smts-fits-into-the-next-front-end-of-steemit-com-insider-scoop
On a loosely related topic, I was sent to a post entitled “The Curation Conundrum” ( https://steemit.com/curation/@thecryptofiend/the-curation-conundrum ) that includes many long and helpful comments. Among them was a remark (not challenged elsewhere on the page) that up-voting was designed to affect the flow of “dollars” but not the visibility of up-voted pieces (unlike up-voting at Reddit).
Well … ! Now that the control of “dollar flow” has various issues that people are writing about, and your carefully and expensively (in terms of time investment) prepared green content will seem to disappear into ether within 20 or so minutes of your uploading it to Steemit, I do think we have a big problem — at least of we want to have Steamit capirtalize on its access to high-quality content in various fields.
One writer in another post reported that he had stopped submitting articles, and was now just having fun submitting nice photographs one at a time! I am not saying he is typical of writers who have a lot of useful green content to offer; but he is suggesting that in the current environment the time investment required to make and deliver a well-though-out piece of green content is such that delivering the output at Steemit might bring the writer to doing some ‘deep thinking’.
Most interestedly, none of that is a problem if you take seriously the notion that Steemit is, deep down, just another social-media service where people just get together to ‘socialize’! But now there is a challenge, which perhaps may have helped Ned to press along with the SMT project, and it is this — if that is all the service you are going to offer and you are not selling tons of advert’s like Facebook does how long are your going to survive?
Thanks for the link.. perhaps we can discuss further via email. You can use andyb @ datadevil.co.uk to initiate that if you like?
This is a big question you have raised! Please let me reflect on it over the next day or so and come back with my suggestions or further questions. In the mean time, I invite you to glance at my work, as evidence that I am coming from a field where people bump into your question recurrently: http://www.springer.com/us/book/9789400740433 ; http://leroystudiesportal.com/ ; http://marketstatsanalytics.com/valuingcryptos.html . Also, I am going to find out how to up-vote your post (a first for me) and do so later on. I have a nice reservoir of Steem Power, which I intend to conserve for truly 'green' and helpful (to me) content like yours.
For me, it seems like Smart Contracts are subset of Smart Media.. since content can be anything, it's just a matter of objective or subjective parsing..
I see what you mean, that's also true.
A more flexible smart contract platform could allow for many more complex contractual arrangements as can be defined by programming code. Ethereum the allows the Solidity programming language to define smart contracts, and EOS plans to allow C++/WASM (program code) to do the same for their platform for example.
That said, you're right that because these SMTs come with Steem as standard, they also provide huge additional value that doesn't need to be built around the smart contract, like it would for the other smart contract platforms.
The Steem SMTs seem to provide a kind of template system for defining social media incentive infrastructure. It's analogous to what Wordpress provides instead of using more advanced web development tools. You sacrifice the ability to tailor your system to exactly what you want, for the convenience of setting it up with a fraction of the effort.
I've gone through that line of thought again. Since there isn't any infinite programmability, I guess I'm not quite on the money in saying SMTs have anything to do with smart contracts.. still wrapping my head around this lol.
Me too, these are some pretty complicated ideas!
Hi AndyBets!
I guess I'd have expected him to go for the low-hanging fruit first. Approaching the New York Times would be unrealistic at this stage. Purely in terms of effect on the Steem price though, I can see how embracing porn may be lucrative.
You make an interesting point, Andy!
I mentioned NYT only because at the date of the SMT announcement, the NYT application was 'all the rage'.
Cheers.