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RE: The Heck is going on with Steem?

in #steem6 years ago

As many others have argued, the existence bot that will upvote pretty much anything means that content no longer matters. A post is simply an instrument to generate ROI (that's the only explanation I can find for accounts like @pinacle - though maybe it's a matter of taste).

This doesn't just matter for the idea that good content should be rewarded. The bots reduce the economy of steem to nothing but rent-seeking, as @krnel and I have discussed. Bots are selling attention and advertising space. But the steem economy can't just run on such rent-seeking behaviour. Here's two ways that could play out:

  1. If there are literally no content creators left, then there will be no ROI for those who have invested in SP and delegated it to bots. New investors who are serious about the attention economy find something else to do with their money. The steem economy implodes.
  2. There are content creators, but they are all producing posts like the dross on the front page. You can sell them the attention, but eventually someone will realise that no one is actually reading any of it. Organic upvotes from trending content dwindles. New money entering the economy from investors and YouTube converts dries up, inflation starts to kick in, panic selling ensues. The steem economy implodes.

Maybe those scenarios aren't quite right. But the work that indicates that rent-seeking and regulatory capture are really bad for economies is pretty well-established.

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