For Better Steem, What Is the Main Problem and What We Should Do?

Steem is an innovative platform that combines economic incentives and social media. Ideally, it should reward contents that increase Steem's value by stakeholders' wise decision-making process, and therefore satisfy both of contents creators and investors. However, the reality appears to be not the case. Why?

The major problem of Steem is mixed incentives and invasion across the border. Investors, who mainly seek monetary benefit are easily lured by greater rewards earmarked for contents creators, as known as author/curation rewards. When we have superlinear reward curve, there were many voting bots that follow (or predominate) whales' vote, regardless of the quality of post, just to maximize their curation rewards. Fortunately, this phenomenon was greatly weaken after the linearity hardfork, but self-voting or circle-jerking for author reward are still the universal problem in Steem.

These for-profit-only behaviors consequently distort contents filtering process. Many good authors feel disappointed when they see certain authors repetitively earn much higher rewards due to favorable supports from whales and voting bots. There are rebuttals arguing that valuation is all subjective and this is true, but for some people Steem is too subjective towards certain authors. And they leave here.

Cutting the Gordian Knot, what we need is understanding each group's motivation and splitting them. When it comes to investors, it is obvious that they want more profit and they will do any reward-related behaviors the earning is higher than the cost, including opportunity cost. Then what if they need to give up some profits to vote? Specifically, investors can nullifying their voting power for a certain period, and as a compensation they can obtain rewards. If we decrease the proportion curation rewards and give a higher weight on this type of reward for giving up voting power, there can be another equilibrium where people who do not much care about monetary benefit curate and people who are sensitive to return to investment give up voting.

However, this proposal cannot resolve self-voting or circle-jerking abuse that attempts to exploit author rewards. Downvoting is one way to cope with but users become easily tired as abusers dramatically increase. To address the problem efficiently, Steem has to change the non-consensus reputation system into consensus-based one, meaning accounts with bad reputation cannot earn rewards. In other words, when people commit socially undesirable behaviors, they are not able to get benefit from the society. There can be some ways to implement, for instance, similar to witness voting system, or crowd sourcing verification system (example).

Steem has two facets, and the balancing between economic and social values is the key element to succeed. We should not make investors feel that they are donating money for poor writers, and not make contents creators feel that abusers with great money power are stealing rewards. Fortunately, our community is strong and I believe we can make much more progress than what we have done so far.