STEEM – a great innovation on the wrong footing! (Part 1)

Combine social media with incentives for content creation and you have a great creation. Idea sure to hit a home run

Combine social media with incentives for content creation and you have a great creation. Idea sure to hit a home run… ad a teaspoon of shit to bucket of honey and you are sure to make whole bucket go bad…

The minor problem with STEEM design is relatively easy to spot for any objective, outside observer. It will sure raise its ugly head sooner or later and it is already doing so in somewhat random places.
This post of dan’s shows some of the symptoms, but is far, way far from pointing the right causes :
https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/thoughts-on-autovoting

Here is what he says: [i]“Autovoting is the process of upvoting content based solely on the author or other voters. Statistically good posters will continue to produce good content and the best way to get a cut of it is to vote for them "sight unseen". If it turns out the content is rubbish, then you can remove your vote or downvote them later.
This process can create a self fulfilling prophesy. Everyone piles on the upvote bandwagon because there is a high probability that everyone else will pile on. This type of behavior can undermine the curation system while simultaneously discouraging outsiders.”[/i]

While this somewhat correctly points the symptoms, this analyses comes short of finding the true deep causes.
The above behavior is a reasonable and so expected one, in a system designed and executed like the current STEEM.
When the voting power is concentrated in arbitrary number of whale voters, concentrated based on other merit but “just cause we are generally great”, the best thing for anyone is to find fast, easy way to mimic and match the (expected) voting by those in power.
The merit of a great voter/content finder is probably the quality of the content he has found in the past… but in steem it is predominantly based on how much voting powered one has granted himself!