You see me now

One of the things that comes up with the potential curation changes to 50/50 is that the bidbots are just going to earn the same, if not more. I tend to disagree though if there are free downvotes and a slight curve in combination, as the margin of "profit" for users is already quite slim.

Even at @ocdb where there is a queue system that means a bid will always receive a 150% vote meaning that there is pretty much a guaranteed 10% earning for the purchaser (unless big market swings), once there are flags in place this is not hard to take away. What this means is that bidders on the bots for their content will have to be either confident they aren't going to incur flags or, not care about taking losses. I will go out on a limb and say that most people buy votes for earning, not visibility which means, losses will change the market.

At the moment, there are plenty of highly voted posts in trending that people "might" have a go at trimming but without positive incentive to do so and a cost incurred to do so, most won't. However, there are plenty of vote abusers that don't make it to trending that none see, and those who do have no incentive at all to trim them down to a loss. That would change with an entire Steem community of free flags.

Essentially it means that manual curators are incentivized by the 50/50 to reward and also incentivized to combat abuse with discounted flagging. This means that the standout content that people upvote will be seen and evaluated and the content that is paid vote will also be seen and evaluated except, there is incentive to return reward on bullshit back into the pool as there is more for both the better content and the curators to split.

A lot of people stay quite narrow in their Steem experience and don't actually see how much crap content is on this platform and, how much of it is getting rewarded a darn sight more than much, much better content because it is either part of some circle abuse or having paid votes on it. Take a walk around and pay attention. Currently, this mostly goes untreated though because there just isn't enough SP or will to care about it.

That would change under a different economic model because there would be a balance brought into the ecosystem that makes upvotes and downvotes equal. Currently this is not the case as while Steem Power is ones ability to allocate a staked percentage of the reward pool, there is a positive gain for upvoting, and a negative for downvoting. This means that the allocation in the positive and negative are not aligned through incentive.

I do think that 50/50 would bring back some curators and once a lot of the vote buyers stop buying because they keep getting flagged to a loss, the demand on bidbots dries up. This means that the delegated Steem power that sits in them starts to move away from the maximization of stake point as curating and flagging become more profitable than vote selling. I do think there will still be a market for vote selling, however I think it will be more for advertising purposes, not earning of SP.

I think that most will agree that the current system is not ideal and needs to change in some way because relying on humans in such a diversified set as we to act "well" is just not going to cut it without incentives that direct behavior. Humans are maximizers and until the maximization model is one that creates a healthy ecosystem, things aren't going to improve much.

While I am unsure how this will play out, I do believe that the ecosystem is complex enough that we can't really know exactly what it will do without trying it. I also believe that Steem is robust enough that even if a sum negative, it is possible to learn and grow from it.

I see most of the strength of Steem and decentralization of community and choice as part of an organic antifragile approach that allows for many iterations and trials to be run with very little risk to the entire project. The core tenet of decentralization is that it is very hard to kill due to the distributed nature of the network and on Steem, the multiple use cases.

Steem keeps ticking over 3 seconds a block regardless of what actually goes on, what content there is or how many people are using the blockchain or not. It is we the community that care about what happens here, what possibilities there are, the risk, the future, the price, the quality, onboarding and all the other stuff that goes with it. We can see how much we all care through the conversations that are being had and the emotions that arise.

I find this the most fascinating part of Steem and a big reason why I spend so much time on Steem content. It is us that makes this place special and while some believe that a community should all sit around a fire singing Kumbaya together, I see a community as a group of people who come together to solve the problems that lead us toward improvement as a group and greater species. This is not easy and with each solution will come more problems to solve.

The problems should be different problems though. That is progress. Getting some visibility on the situation sometimes requires being part of the events themselves and that means that to see the future, we have to create it first.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]