From a newbie for the newbies: meta-discussions of Steem's economy, power structure, hierarchy, functionality -- projections and predictions, concerns and objections, hope and opportunity
Like you, I care more for good content and spirited debates than the monetizing potential; I am looking for a decentralized, self-organizing, censorship-proof alternative to reddit, Facebook, Wordpress and MySpace, not the new Bitcoin or Ethereum.
But I am of course interested how a hierarchical society will likely develop under the meritorcratic rules set by the Steem engine. Much of it will only be revealed in the future, when the user market nears its saturation and more sophisticated attempts at rigging and manipulating have been made. But already, the whitepaper and the current wealth distribution reveal interesting math and data, allowing some predictive power, room for speculation and means of analysis. Quo vadis, Steemit?
Browsing Steemit, I bookmarked a few posts and articles I found enlightening; they are a sort of "summary" of what I learned in the past days.
economy and strategy
Uh, Steem, Steemit, Steem Power, Steem Dollars, whales, dolphins, rewards for good voting, money for blogging?
- @donkeypong: Come for the STEEM, Stay for the Steem Power. This is Getting Unfair for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Reddit, and Facebook.
A little background on why you want to "power up" - @roelandp: SteemStream.com - A Realtime Visualisation of All Activity on Steemit
What the title says: live feed monitoring of all major activities (upvotes, comments, money transfers, orders, new users, etc); upon which steemviz.com builds - @crypt0: Steemit: Whales, Dolphins, and Minnows- The Importance of Steem Power on Steemit
Minnows have very little ability to influence the direction that votes take, as their votes are not worth very much. As Dolphins vote, they begin to entice others to vote, capturing the attention of recent post's voter's attention a tad. Whales are the big kahunas. When they like something, YOU'LL know. Hell, you'll probably like their content too, if you don't want to miss out on earning a few bucks by not liking them early on. - @coinhoarder: STEEM PROPOSAL: Abolishing Liquidity Incentives And Reverting The Funds To Provide Actual Autonomous Liquidity
First Whale problems :) Closely related to: - @blakemiles84: Handful of Users Are Gaming the Liquidity Reward System And Earning 1200 STEEM per Hour
(extremely interesting discussions!)
and of course
- @boardwalk-steem: SteemIt Resource Repository - Collection of all the great posts on how to SteemIt!
- @hipster: Awesome Steem
Also a list of Steem(it) beginner/intro/howto/FAQ/tutorials - @pfunk: Your Steem account is worth money! How to secure it with a new owner key to keep it yours forever
This is important. Do it.
philosophy, politics, math and game theory
Once upon a time, there was a king who collected all metadata of his citizens. He was a wise and benevolent king who brought material and spiritual prosperity to the country. The data was used only to optimize administration, to the benefit of all.
But then his land was occupied, and the usurper got hold of the data, parsed it and used it to weed out all those who would be most likely - and most able - to oppose his new reign of terror.
Moral of this (true) story: it is not that the devs andor whales of today are on trial - more power to them for kicking off this project and forming such an awesome community! But what of the accounts that change ownership for millions in hard instant cash next month...? Does, in case of an emergency, the long "tail" have the power to oppose the corrupt elements of tomorrpw? Such concerns are not to be dismissed off-hand in a world where agenda-pushing and opinion-forming are such valuable "markets".
But let us assume the community is left alone with its beautiful anarchy: if upvoting potentially popular content is systemically incentivized, what will the "hot" pages look like in the long run? Read these 23 reasons why you should care now - #5 will blow your mind!
- @biophil: What does Game Theory say about Steem? (Part 1) (Part 2; Part 3)
Could the incentives actually backfire, causing steemit to turn into the usual catlolpic circlejerk boobfest? Prisoner's dilemma, beauty contest and why puppies are superior to kittens - @rok-sivante: The 7 Fatal Flaws That Could Kill Steemit (Or Massively Accelerate Its Growth IF Transformed)
Interesting and long thesis. How to treat NSFW content? - @demotruk: The urge the join the circle jerk is stronger than on Reddit.
Voices similar concerns: does the pay-for-votes system actually amplify reddit's "Karma Whoring" phenomenon? - @pitbull808: Steemit Takes Advantage of Reddit’s Heavy Censorship
Goes into a different direction. Censorship-related "eternal septembers" (MySpace, Digg, reddit, Facebook) are the problem. "Whether steemit is the solution is not clear [...] but it is one of the more unique attempts to try and solve the decades long social media problem with the results of the experiment, whether failure or success, undoubtedly closely watched by many." - @business: The disappearing middle class of Steemit, and how to fix it.
What, free markets? No way! Cap those incomes! If someone has 2000000 STEEM power, and they double it every year, while you double your 200 how much do you think your STEEM will be worth in a decade from now? Caused lively debate and @bacchist's comment: Steem economics bear very little resemblance to capitalism. In capitalism, workers produce commodities for sale on the market. In Steem, authors produce posts which are not commodities. Objects with no exchange-value are not commodities, even if they satisfy human wants or needs (ie, even if they are bearers of use-value). Steem is a lot closer to a gift economy than a market based economy. - @daowisp: Building the Infrastructure of Decentralized Civilization. Part 1 - Communications
Not exclusively Steem-related, this article goes into how to build a parallel telecommunications network using affordable, powerful fixed-wireless radio equipment - @jpdimensions: Proof of Esteem - Cognifying Content, Mining Time, Attention, and Appreciation with “Heart-Like-Tweets”
When some of today's top social media influencers with large followings start joining Steemit, how will their reputation accelerate their influence? - @aaseb: Is Steemit a community where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?
...theorizes that, due to the high inflation rates, an account with a lot of steempower will grow faster than an account that doesn't have much (in terms of interest rate) unless the account with a lot of steempower doesn't vote or publish anything, resulting in the proportion of total shares getting bigger for the big accounts and smaller for the small accounts. - @sitaru: Let's do some math and see where the power is! How is the steem power distributed and how much values it?
Top 100 accounts hold 91.56% Steem Power of the Top 5000 accounts. Top 5000 list on Google docs. - @norbu: Steemit and the ideals of Non-Violence
- steemd.com/distribution
'nuff said.
functionality
Let it be noted that Steemit is still beta (as the header logo indicates), and the functionality we all have come to appreciate from other platforms -- PMs, favorites, following etc -- has already been announced. In other news, Steem is open source, write your own webinterface!
In that spirit, here's an aggregation of ideas so they are not forgotten:
- @aleksei-filonov: 3 must-do things for Steemit
1: User Profiles, 2: Private Messaging, 3: Bookmarks. - @acidyo: Some steemit improvement ideas I haven't seen here yet
Visibility of microtransactions, account stats, "stars"/tips (reddit gold?)
No doubt, profiles, PMs, favorites and even reply notifications are already in the works, they are the sine qua non of such a network. Personally, I found that a log like https://steemd.com/@username is missing, even if only to come back to older content more easily, or to retract votes if necessary.
I feel the markdown implementation does not yet work as intended. No ~~strikethrough~~, for example, no ^sup, and ###headers are no fun thanks to #hashtags.
Piston seems to indicate that Steem stand-alone browsers are a possibility to look forward to...?
tldr;
I'm very excited and looking forward to watching how this experiment - that is what it is, according to the whitepaper - will turn out: and what it will prove.
#steemit #economy #distribution #liquidity #philosophy #politics #math #gametheory #steempower #steemit-faq #anarchism #how-to #steemit-potential #forecast #usury #compundinterest #demurrage #gift #feedback #analysis #reddit #hope #love #peace #prosperity #abundance
I cant believe this post is only worth .56 cents
Wow! This is very insightful and the countless references to other posts are incredibly useful. This will give me a lot of interesting material to digest :) Thanks
Somebody just read my mind !
There is no need for a hierarchical society to develop here... There already is one. The distribution of wealth is top heavy, along with the attendant power. Certain users can reward posts and comments with hundreds of dollars with a click of the button, where a mass of users at the bottom know their vote isn't even worth a cent. It will become more and more noticeable as time goes on, when you see the markers of structural inequality arise time and again.
Of course, it was implied, but perhaps worded strangely - I apologize. The steem community is NOT class-less; the very distinction between "whales", "dolphins", "minnows" and "sea monkeys" makes that abundantly clear. The question I tried to ask: will the disparity become greater or smaller over time, as Steemit rises in popularity and population and replaces FB and reddit and saturates the user market (~7 Billion)? Will it be of any consequence at all even, once the vast majority of contributors and content creators have settled with the disappointing reality that the raindrops of an aristocrat's attention might never water their garden - simply because there are so few? Will they instead begin to carve out their micro-niches?
It has been usual for men to think and to say: this guy has a problem with income equality, he must be a socialist. Burn that witch! The truth is, I think that being wealthy is not a crime per se. In a perfect society, however, the rich serve the valuable purpose of redistributing the wealth (a billionaire needs a villa, a yacht, and must pay for upkeep); his investments, if wise, will be to the benefit of all in the long run. In other words, I'll prefer being plankton in a rich sea of abundance over being dolphin in a toxic lake. Give me a wise and benevolent king, and I will abandon all speech of democracy and elections and egality and gladly take my place in the bottom decile of a totalitarian society.
That is why I am not a fan of "caps" and other artifical means that complicate the law, the incentive to distribute wealth fairly (not evenly!) should be systemic.
Thus, my argument is not one of envy - I predict that the distribution of wealth will not change greatly, and even worsen the more users Steemit attracts, resulting in a proportionally longer "tail" and the Gini coefficient closing in on 1. Eventually, the "tail" will mostly interact with itself, as the "density" of ocean mammal's curation lessens.
In the long run, it might - that is why I am so interested in the math - even lead to a diverse, informative, enlightening, funny, and if need be, even sexy top/trending/recommended page. But only under the bold assumption that (just to name a name) FOX, MSNBC or Disney don't buy up a few dozen top 50 accounts.
Already, accounts are for sale and "policing" brigades being called for. Bots are running rampant.
Since the content remains immutably in the blockchain, no matter the downvotes, it is up to the developers to forge intelligent tools to sort, browse, curate and create content and weapons for everyone to defend himself against spam, propaganda, battles of the bots and censorship.
Then inequality won't be any problem anymore, the rank in the hierarchy not matter, and the market be truly "free".
This post really needs attention. You clearly put in a lot of work here, and you link to so many great posts. Alas that i have but one upvote to give!
I'll give you an opportunity to upvote more, Pt. II is in the works. Thank you for the incentive :p
Excellent. Unfortunately my upvote is only worth about 5 cents right now, but maybe I'll get another game theory article out around the same time and we can cross-pollinate.
Please, keep your game theory articles coming! My upvotes are even less powerful, but you are bringing much enlightenment into the matter.
Here is the promised update, including Part 4 of your series: https://steemit.com/steemit/@akareyon/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-steem-from-a-newbie-for-the-newbies-part-ii
Hello, do You mind if I translate your post into Russian and publish with reference to the source of course?
привет Константтин - I would feel honored!
Great post!
Feel fortunate to have stumbled across it! (#math helped), don't know why it hasn't been upvoted more, there is food for thought for all users in this post! Maybe @dan or @ned will help if they stumble on it
This is an example of what I meant in my comment. The feedback loops created by users at the top cause all the votes, recognition, and rewards to be concentrated. Having to cross your fingers that a handful of individuals notices your posts results in a dysfunctional ecosystem.
I feel honored that you think it is worthy a whale's attention - thank you for yours!
You raise another good point I forgot to mention: substeemits (analogous to subreddits) would, of course, be terribly impractical, but it would at least be nice to have a tag subscription list or something of that sort - ways to group my interest. The protocols (#agot? #gameofthrones? #asoiaf?) would probably evolve organically.
Thanks for the thorough rundown and up to date info - glad to have it inane post to bookmark. Much appreciated.
I shall keep it updated then!