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RE: An Argument for Long-Term Rational Self-Interest Versus Short-Term Irrational Value Extraction
Good on you for donating to meanful projects like that
Unfortunate not all steemit users are long sighted and many are blinded by the short term gain from spamming. Really unfortunate...
It is unfortunate mainly because, from my perspective, they are just harming themselves. They could earn more if they acted differently.
Collectively, perhaps. But that requires some actual coordination mechanism, such as downvotes which aren't both so hideously expensive and socially discouraged. Individually no one stakeholder (even freedom at about 3%) is large enough to make a real difference, and failing to maximize individual short term gains largely means those gains to go others who continue to do so. (In some cases such as downvoting, it literally does shift those rewards to the others. Using something like @burnpost, while also self-sacrificing, at least has the potential to drain the swamp and not actively increase the profits to the others.)
Yeah I think the requirement of coordination and acting as a community is the biggest issue. Let's face it, the people who are just spamming the system is obviously only in for the short term individual gains, and so doesn't really care if steem goes to the moon or bust in the future as long as they can get their earnings now.
In regards to downvoting, I think for a lot of minnows (including myself) the major reason that is stopping us do it is retaliation. You never know what connection a person has, and if you accidentally step on someone with a solid backing you are toasted. I know someone who tried to stand up to spam and just got bashed by retaliated downvotes because it was an account with lots of SP.
I had a look @burnpost. I think that self-sacrificing aspect of it is hard to grasp especially for new comers. Also, it feels like burning is not as constructive as upvoting good posts though. Doesn't burning the reward pool decreases the payout of all posts, including high quality posts? But I do understand it is much harder to manually curate for good content especially it's so hard to find nowadays, and the @burnpost method is probably effective in that sense.