Selling delegation, becoming voting bots, in the middle of whale wars. Where did all the human curators go?
The decentralized blockchain revolution is meant to align the interests of the shareholders, the consumers, and the employees. If done right, the results could be something great. Will be something great. However, blockchain technology still has some issues to work out. Steem is no exception. It is maybe even more on the fore front of this revolution.
Steem is a complicated ecosystem. Adjusting the algorithms that run it to fix certain problems, may cause problems elsewhere. These possible unintended consequences makes finding the solution to the problems Steem has all that much more difficult. I always try to see both sides to arguments. I try to argue both sides to myself to better understand opposing points of view.
To me, the issue Steem is having is a shareholder problem. In standard business model the shareholders are those who own shares and only want those shares to be worth more. They want accumulation. They prefer the company pay the least they can for the goods they sell, and the least they can to employees. This gives them the greatest returns. They also want the product to be superior to its competition, maintaining or increasing in value.
The people who buy Steem and are looking for a return on investment will find a way to make profit if it available to them. This might be upvoting their own posts/comments. Or it might be delegating that Steem Power to a bid bot in return for Steem or SBD. This is the standard business model shareholder, making adjustments in order to adapt to this new blockchain enterprise.
It seems to me that the interests are out of alignment here on Steem. Lets assume this trajectory continues. The few high powered human curators left, switch to running voting bots or selling their delegation to maximize their return on interest like everyone else. Then even all the people with 1000 SP do the same thing, if everyone else is selling out it becomes hard to resist. Or they just start upvoting only themselves.. eventually all the good content and curators will spend their time elsewhere and just let the money they have here make them ROI. This will equate to content that steadily declines inlvalue. The price of the coin will drop and all the bid bot runners, and Steem power delegators will finally see. They will adjust behavior in order to bring value back to the coin. By that time many of the good content creators will be gone and it may be too late.
How much money do all the human curators give up to reward content that deserves it now? I know many of the human curators remaining, I know they won't let the good content creators go that easily. I want to give all of you a special thank you for remaining human curators, and being the good shareholders. It is in part all of you that keep me here. You give me hope.
Something needs to be done to give more incentive to actual curation. After the last hard fork, curating became much less appealing. Adversely something needs to be done to make running voting bots and delegating out Steem power for SBD less appealing. I am not saying I have the answers, I only know I would like solutions to be discussed and for something to be done. A user agreement or a blockchain constitution that can help us address bad actors in a civil decisive manner. A decentralized blockchain like this with such a robust ecosystem, could benefit from some form of guidelines or a constitution.
I would like to end evoking a Lysander Spooner quote that may come to apply to this great experiment.
Thank you for remaining vigilante human curators. Thank you to all the content creators still here, still trying. Thank you to those who take time to read articles and leave comments. It will be us who makes Steem what it is meant to be. Not the people running upvote bots, only upvoting themselves, or delegating Steem Power to bots for money.
I don't know all the answers. I am probably missing layers of the problems. I want to talk about it an know more though. I would like for the quote above to not come true here. Behavior needs to be altered, the code needs to be adjusted. No matter what the original intention is, here we sit. With a steadily declining true ecosystem, being oppressed buy a pay to play vote model that no good author wants to take part in.
I have seen enough posts about this, I just wanted to add my two cents, that usually can be found in comments surrounding these subjects. It comes to the basic philosophy that behavior that is bad for the whole should be punished, behavior that is good for the whole should be rewarded based on its merit.
Woot woot,
Steemit was never perfect. It started out as an experiment and it's a wonder that it lasted so long.
Ive contemplated so much on the issue and it seems my small mind just can't think my way out of the Steem power abuse by people that wants to outright "maximize profits". Just like shareholders.
However if there is hope, it will be in 3rd party apps and communities that springs up around the Steem Blockchain.
I believe future self voters / bid bot farmers won't be as much profitable when there is more activity on the blockchain. The sort of "earnings" we see now are not gonna last for long (assuming steem price does not go up). We are experiencing a huge time arbitrage and it won't last long. The reward pool is capped whereas the potential participation is uncapped.
Governance is tricky, how much can we control how people can vote or use their stake before we must stop calling ourselves "open permissionless decentralized platform"?
Interesting.
Would I be right in thinking the following?
At present the 100 highest SP accounts (or the one's that are active and/or have delegated SP to bots) of our approx. 65,000 total active accounts, collect a lot of the reward pool. The same top 100 accounts, when they are in a total participant pool of say 1,000,000 active accounts, will be collecting less of the reward pool than they are now
Actually, when you put it that way, it's in the interest of the most vested self-upvoters to make sure participation doesn't grow too much.
Yep.. But the value of steem lies in the utility that comes with greater participation/adoption, and so though it seems so in the short term, they are killing their portfolio in the long term.
It's actually in their best interest to earn less from the reward pool but have their holdings increase in value as adoption drive the price of Steem.
If only these people are willing to see it that way.
Thanks @drpuffnstuff , I enjoyed, and resonated with your article. As I am still dipping my toes in the shallow end, I enjoy gaining a deeper perspective from members like yourself.
Many community, or contributionism type movements, like Michael Tellinger's Ubuntu movement have discovered that large governmental changes need to start at a local government level.
I believe (from my limited experience thus far) that forming solid mini communities within the blockchain would also be a progressive solution. As these communities grow, individually, eventually, like minded groups could pool together.
As an aussie, I was fortunate enough to find such a group in @teamaustralia . This community is all about quality curration.
Those within the community, with solid SP, delegate to bots (and this is where the true potential of bots may be found) the bots then upvote minnow team members posts. All posts tagged with teamaustralia, and thus which come up in teamaustralia feed, are humanly monitored for quality.
Over time, these individual communites will carry the torch of quality, regardless of what others are doing. So if we who share the same dream, form similar communities, eventually, these combined communities will have substantial weight within the blockchain.
Just a newbies perspective :)
Peace.
when i joined steem i had the notion that my content will be upvoted and i worked hard to make sure i write great content but alas i was wrong, most content that trend or are on the hot tab are all sponsored or voted by bots, what happened to the original idea as speculated on the white paper? steem is begining to look like a bot centred platform than human centered, humans working for bots and this is not good
That is the nature of social media. When you upload something to the older social media without any form of marketing, without engaging the audience, it is unlikely that people will notice your work too.
You need to take into account that information and media is getting increasingly saturated nowadays and will only be more so in the future. Everyone of us is adding our noise to the crowd.
It is not enough now to just stop by and plonk your stuff and leave it be. You need to build your audience, join a community, build your brand.
"feed me" mentality will not work in an environment where attention is scarce. It's why we call it the Attention Economy.
P.S. Bot abuse asides, this platform is still undoubtedly the best for content creators, even if you made 1 cent on here. It's 1 cent that you'll never make in any other place by the virtue of your content alone.
Prior to delegation being enabled, I remember thinking it was going to be good at first, so that guilds could reward content creators for quality.. boy was that short sighted as the guild issues developed at the end of 2016 early 2017.... I then remember being told and also thinking that delegating power would be a problem, where people can funnel power into one account of vice versa with many accounts holding the power and obfuscating a single users ability to allocate rewards.
When I read your title, a song came to mind, called "Where did all the cowboys go" or something like that. So take the tune and replace the words with "human curators".
I agree, human curators are rare, but they still exist and they are nice to have on the platform for those of us who wish to grow organically. It's sometimes tempting to go towards bots, but I've not been tempted enough to do it yet and I have strong feelings that we need to hold strong and not give into temptation of the bots. I'm not saying never, but as a regular occurance, I don't do it. Actually, I go to human curators and will give the few SBD for many upvotes from humans from the Steemit Resteem group, which is fun interaction of humans. No bots there, really. Hopefully we humans can rule over the bots :p
My upvote is not worth much but I prefer to manually cast my votes. The way some people want to automate this place it seems they just want to go on holiday for 5 or 10 years and hope when they return they get to retire.
The human element is slowly draining away from society. It will be a very cold day if all I ever have left to talk to are the bots.
You would think their main priority would be empowering those that would increase their Steem value in the long run. Instead they wish to sell to highest bidder almost no matter what that is. It’s be like buying stock and being happy it plummet 90% but boy you get to have that 1% ROI from dividend so that somehow makes up for it.
I don’t think I’ll ever hold enough SP to care much about curation rewards unless it comes down to my only source. Far too many people are already chasing after and trying beat out auto casted votes for their “curation rewards.” I don’t consider that curation at all that’s just chasing after profits.
Incisive commentary as always! And, as I'm quickly discovering, I'm in furious agreement with you.
There's a lot in this post, but I'd like to pick up one idea and smack it with a hammer: That Steemit, and the Steem blockchain in general is some sort of ruler-less system, and that no one has ultimate control over it.
Paul Atreides/Muad'Dib was right. And here, we have lots of people who can potentially destroy Steemit, and/or render the blockchain so worthless that it may as well have been destroyed.
Sure, enough minnows could create serious havoc. But really, it's the real heavyweight stakeholders - those whales, who have the power to undo everything that we see here today. The could do this by selling off their Steem at bargain prices and crippling our economy, or they can do this by sitting on their hands when actions that incrementally damage the long-term future of the blockchain are occurring.
My points? The holders of these accounts can change what is happening if they so desire. But also while it's true that the blockchain has decentralised many interactions, power on the Steem blockchain (and power over the Steem blockchain) is in fact highly centralised.
I'm glad you put in that you may be missing some layers. I'm not sure if you are but at least you are open to that. I have given up on creating content for awhile because I am frustrated but I do enjoy sharing news through zappl. While I follow your logic completely I don't understand why the value of the coin will drop if we stay on the current trajectory. Can you explain? I'm heavily invested and I'm very active so I'm concerned about the future as much as anyone. My thought is if whales learn to devote a portion to minnows that we will onboard more users and the "whale" content wont matter as long as the incentive for content creation trickles down. I too could be wrong so who knows lol.
My take on this is that are (at least) a few things that could cause numbers of users to stagnate or even drop.
Numbers of plankton/minnows etc. matter. Established authors/youtubers etc. need an audience, and won't come across (and stay) without them. If numbers stay too flat for too long or go backwards, I'd begin to wonder about the future of the platform, and I wouldn't be the only one.
I think you are right @samueldouglas but I would add that steepshot is making a dent. It's exactly like instagram and people can bring their entire network over and share as they currently do but earn rewards. I think it has a strong appeal and blogging will become less of a "thing" on steem blockchain. I'm not sure that social media requires 100% good content but we will see.
I wish more people were aware of what your just touched upon.
Hey thanks TeamSteem, you are one of the ones that truly gets it. As a large minnow in this community, all I can do is to talk about the issues and hope it gets other people talking, and thinking about it as well. In all honesty you are one of the reasons I am here, and still here.
Seeing strongly libertarian leaning people who generally want a better world in our witness pool, gives me motivation. I appreciate everything you do for this community man. Krnel made a post about this topic the day before i made this one, and I mentioned you and the few other last great human curators we have on Steem.. and how it gives me the hope to see the light at the end of the tunnel.