Sndbox Summer Camp Sociology Task 2: The main problem with Steemit is that Capital, NOT Content is king
View this post on Hive: Sndbox Summer Camp Sociology Task 2: The main problem with Steemit is that Capital, NOT Content is king
I've moved to Hive, along with most other people, following Justin Sun's takeover of Steem in the Spring of 2020. I believe hive is a lot more decentralised than Steem!
When you say...
Do you mean to use some form of KYC identity verification?
Not necessarily - I would just like some way of knowing who I am dealing with! No one actually knows WTF donkey is for example! For all we know it's a corporate stooge messing with the system for lols.
I think the bots are an obvious and massive way to distort Steemit easily.
But also the ability to set up hundreds/thousands of spam accounts with the sole/main purpose of upvoting one or a couple of other accounts, or a circle network of accounts, to funnel Steem Power eventually to one account or a small number of accounts in preparation for a massive cash-out.
The mechanisms for limiting this are complicated, and unfortunately there are several 'Donkeys' and people ARE noticing.
The actual power to do something about any of this is the crucial battleground opening up right now though. I wonder if Hardfork 20 will see anything introduced to limit Steem Power abuse? Perhaps a mechanism for rewarding the flagging of spam; or some kind of increasing diminishing returns for the network spammers.
The situation is potentially grave, but it isn't too late just yet.
It is depressing though, when some of the spammers just create new accounts all day with sequentially numbered names, just for the purposes of power abuse - and they aren't even concerned enough to disguise that the names are all exactly the same with just a different number of the end.
Even more depressing is how they manage to create dozens of these new accounts each day, while I and people like me had to wait several weeks for our accounts to be approved.
And even more depressing than that, is that these dozens of new accounts created per day are being created for FREE, and are automatically being granted Steem Power for FREE. It feels like some spammers have found a way to engineer a massive transfer of wealth and it is going on in plain sight while we all seem powerless to act.
Who has enough power to do something about it?
It is potentially very damaging - but also incredibly fascinating.
Maybe that whole bots business gives us a glance into the future where AI interferes wit human affairs. Only very specialised people can understand the wohle thing, and finally new technology takes over.