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RE: What's Important to Steemit’s Longevity? - Inspiried by @anyx ‘Tragedy of The Commons’
strongly disagree. I think a "one man one vote" system wouldnt work because of sybils and other security issues but generally, and also because it wouldnt reward investors. Howrver:
What makes content good? Well, joy is in the ears that hear, so they say. Content's appeal and utility to the community as a whole is what makes it good. SO when one says content will be better with whales picking it than with everyone having a voice what one is basically saying is I know better what everyone else wants to see than they do. Stated like this, of course, it seems absurd. But there can really be no other logical conclusion from the starting point that whales can pick better content than the group as a whole.
Read my comment again. I said nothing about making the content better (Do not appreciate the fictitious quotes either. Someone may read that and think I actually wrote those quoted statements, when I did not.)
Replying here due to nesting
OK, i see what youre saying... that with the swarm voting it would be tougher for an unknown to break into the top of the trending page. I don't necessarily agree with that either, but i do see the distinction.
To me personally, the whole issue is wrapped in quality. I don't think most people's issue with the trending page is that its so hard to break into it. Its that very bad content frequently ends up on the trending page. While very good content ends up lost 84 pages from the top.
I think TDV is a bad example for a bunch of reasons, but lets use him anyway. My guess is that TDV probably also has the most earnings of any author since they started offering a feed and made the "follow" button do something. Id further guess that if you went down the list of "most followers" you would find an ordered list of the highest earners since the follow button was enabled with some well known whales like berniesanders, you dan and ned who don't post much interspersed.
Of course, youll say that of course theyre the highest earners. They get all that money because they have so many followers. And ill say "No, they get all those followers because whales pin them to the top of the trending page 24/7" Its kind of a chicken and egg debate.
incidentally, i texted an old girlfriend who is a magazine editor with the use of quotation marks above, and asked her what she thought
"The punctuation is correct, but no editor in her right mind would let you use that. You're putting words in someone else's mouth"
so i guess my bad.
ive changed the quotes to italics, though i maintain that a quotation mark is the correct punctuation in such a circumstance.
Sorry, but you absolutely did. I'm not sure if your point is that "worse" isnt the opposite of "better" but yeah when you say (direct quote before you punctuation flame me again) "In fact, 60000 might make it worse" yes, that is exactly the same as saying the whales only having a say makes it better (or at least might make it better).
That is to say, that the statement A is worse than B is precisely the same as the statement B is better than A .
pretending otherwise just sounds like doubletalk.
@sigmajin by "worse" I was referring not to the content itself but to the objection (from comment above, and the earlier portion of my comment) of there being the same people constantly on the Trending page. Perhaps a better a better phrasing would be "might make matters worse" instead of "might make it worse", since "it" is somewhat ambiguous.
I absolutely do believe that whales are far more likely to promote a largely variety of content from unknown sources than a swarm of users. That is not a statement of value or taste. Indeed, perhaps the popular somewhat-uniform content is exactly what people want. For example, I just saw that @dollarvigilante has the most followers on the platform at 2000. That's not whales, and probably not a sybil attack either, since the followers leaderboard is not widely-followed (yet).
In the future when the structure of the system is different with better mechanisms for discovery and many independent channels for promotion, that might no longer be true.
@sigmajin
That's probably the crux of our disagreement. I think he's a great example because he one of the people who are always on treading, and if you look at the others they are much they same. Remove all the whale votes entirely and they would still be there. By contrast, the quirky stuff that I find and push to page 5 of trending and sometimes makes it from there to page 1 on its own would not be there.
Anyway, I'm going to bow out of this discussion in part as a boycott of fighting with the atrocious nesting limit. Nice chat.