Thoughts on the Steemit White Paper
I threw out some ideas about helping fix some contradictions in steems ecosystem. @timcliff replied that much of these ideas were in the works already, through the upcoming Hivemind / communities update. That's great.
I think there are two main contradictions in steemit right now. Both are related to a lack of effective competition in the platform.
First, the method of content curation / feed doesn't effectively promote quality. The flood of posts still diffuses any competition that 'tags' could promote.
Second, there's no effective competition. Minnows cannot compete with whales. Whales can easily get their posts on trending. This reflects wealth inequality in the ecosystem. The problem isn't necessarily that inequality, but that having enough wealth removes you from competition.
The tl/dr of this post:
Communities could fix a lot of the contradictions on steemit by promoting active competition of 'quality' content within each respective ecosystem. Communities could limit the mafia behavior of whales by forcing their content to compete.
Anyway. I read the whitepaper. I think there are specific ideological beliefs that excuse structural contradictions to the steemit platform. I'll elaborate on some this below.
It state’s:
“In the real world, algorithms must be designed in such a manner that they are resistant to intentional manipulation for profit”
Sure. But how is the current system not obviously intentionally manipulated for profit? How could any system not be manipulated for profit?
“Any widespread abuse of the scoring system could cause community members to lose faith in the perceived fairness of the economic system.”
Like abusing the rewards pool. And then people who attempt to fight that get flagged into the negatives.
“A proven system for evaluating and rewarding contributions is the free market”
I think this is a fatal mistake.
“The market system rewards those who provide value to others and punishes those who consume more value than they produce”
Steemit proves this isn’t true. The market system rewards those who can best game the system and accrue as much value as possible, because steemit allows for a user to imbue their posts with their own value (or value from an upvote bot or vote-ring). Once capital is consolidated (a user has enough SP/STEEM) they’re basically ‘in’.
By free market, what that really means is letting the conditions of current society into the ecosystem of steemit ‘as is’. This isn’t a place where equal actors on an equal playing field compete through meritocracy. Instead, steemit mirrors the real world in terms of wealth inequality. You can easily game the system by having the ability to invest in more STEEM. You come in, put your investments down, get your bots ready, spam your content, upvote away, and you’ve got your game.
content has different value based on what it is (journalism/philosophy vs memes). The freedom here is the freedom to enjoy the mundane.
Content is flooded. There needs to be a modified method of finding content. The freedom of this market is the freedom to lose your post under a mountain after an hour.
people don’t read anymore. The freedom here is the freedom to have no attention span.
actors with more money to invest into STEEM will start at a more advantageous position. Investment in STEEM is promoted and necessary for the success of the blockchain, I understand this. But it promotes structural inequality. The freedom here is the freedom to start ahead.
Free markets always lead to consolidation of capital. These become monopolies, robber barons, sharks, whatever you want to call them. Whether by use of vote-rings (political machines), Ponzi schemes (which are present on Steemit), massive investments into STEEM, those who remain at the top will fight tooth and nail to protect their massive income. Without either power of steemit users to combat this, or some kind of editorial state apparatus, these mafias are inevitable. Once someone reaches a certain critical mass, they no longer have to abide by the rules everyone else follows.
“Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.”
^^^^I think this needs to be expanded and explained more. As it stands, this sounds like a “let the fire burn itself out” solution.
Off topic by there’s a grammar error on page 17: “The Steem Power give** the user increased voting”.