Steemit gamma glasses

STEEM Power Struggle

The value of any currency depends on the confidence of the community that uses it as a means of exchange. Steem is a cryptocurrency platform that enables it's investors to encourage community confidence by financially rewarding valued content production. Because of these qualities Steem has potential to generate more confidence and value than cryptocurrencies that lack community building incentives.

All free communities include members with diverse and incompatible worldviews. Tolerance for different views will produce growth for the community. The Steem platform can grow in many different directions by embracing diverse communities. However, the platform suffers from community conflict because of polarized paradigms. An idealized view of the Steem platform values extraordinary content, proof of brain, and limitations on self voting while the current system values promoted posts, proof of stake, and self voting.

The arguments against the status quo are that promoted posts produce nothing more than paid advertisements enriching parties disinterested in community valued content and long term value of STEEM currency. Paid voting services' liquid earnings create selling pressure in the markets while potential users and investors may be deterred by lack of visible quality content on the platform. These factors can limit growth of the Steem community and reduce the value of it's currency.

While Steemit boasts of many accounts the number of users in a common language forum is small compared to other social media platforms. Complete account transparency and financial incentives can encourage positive interactions but limit constructive criticism. Voices are magnified by large wallets and those with divergent views may be timid to participate in complicated discussions when considering the risk of provoking downvotes. Flags can induce retaliation and don't provide an obvious benefit over self voting with the same power. The result is a large volume of promoted posts, self voting, and circle voting encouraging yes-man commenting & curating with relatively limited diversity of opinion, challenging ideas, or engagement in debates that other social media platforms thrive on.

Proposed technical changes to the current methods of self voting and promoted posts will have to answer some difficult questions. Limitations to self voting can be circumvented by friendly voting circles and black markets can replace banned voting services. Any argument to regulate the valuation of content will be subjective. Entrenched parties benefiting from the current model will use their power to resist change. Alternative token reward systems will need to prove financial incentive for investors. There are legitimate technical challenges to limiting the amount of spam reward pool abuse and without an alternative to current voting and curation rules incremental efforts to improve user experience can succeed by changing the focus from reducing negative behavior to encouraging positive growth through available mechanisms.

Upgrading Our Experience

Steemit is an awkward interface that lacks important information such as voting power and fails to connect authors with their audience through basic collation or filtering mechanisms beyond following an author. Trending topics are dominated by purchased votes and discovering new authors is often limited to coincidental circumstances. Community driven volunteer efforts to create alternative front ends such as Steempeak deserve plenty of credit for filling in some gaps but leave much to be desired.

How can we upgrade our experience? The community is the ultimate authority worth consulting and many users have provided some answers.

• Users want a filter to "mute" selected accounts' vote values from appearing on posts and comments. The filter would allow users to subtract bid bots and whale vote values from their trending view without affecting payouts.

• Users want to construct creative personalized feeds; for example a feed that includes 3 tags but excludes 2 particular authors, a different feed that includes selected authors only when they post under certain tags, and the ability to add "trending" posts from multiple tags with filtered vote values.

New user interface features don't require any technical change to the blockchain and can help match content with readers effectively encouraging new growth. As a social media user and interested party what are some upgrades we can make to improve your experience and interaction with the blockchain community?