RE: Consensus exists only in equalitarian groups, where everybody has the same rights to express their will by influence and be influenced by all the others
I'm a noob so I could be wrong, correct me.
Trending page (most $$$): done by whales = plutocracy
Hot page (most popular/upvoted): done by bots = botnet
I think these two games are not fun for the 99%. I can live without the money game, after all I don't put my money in Steem, so I'm kinda ok I cannot move a single cent of the reward pool.
But I like to play the popularity game, and I like it with real humans, not with bots. You can actually play this game on Facebook and Reddit, I would like to have it on Steemit also...
Well, one could argue that everyone has the equal right to buy shares of steem in order to direct their invested vote wherever they want. The just, in this case, is that the shareholder gets a larger say than the non-shareholder - because the shareholder is invested.
Yes, but having more money to invest doesn't make you (generic you) better at voting or curating, or better at doing the best for the community.
Steem isn't decentralized in voting power, someone likes it, but if I need to invest thousands of dollars to move 1 cent, you're making this reward-game fun just for rich people. Or early miners. Not for the 99%.
On the other hand, if Steem price goes to 0, I could buy 1 million Steem and become a whale in a desert.
Plus, in the context of the internet, and the argument that "When people don't have equal rights" .... we have to factor in that "people" can be bots. 1000 votes could be a single bot voting with 1000 facades.
I still don't get why Steem allows bots. I don't know if it's technically doable, but I would like no bots at all on Steemit. Maybe some bot is useful for automated comments, but not for voting or posting. We can't talk about quality, popularity or community, when this post (example) has 50 views and 270 votes. Bots maybe be good money for tech guys, not for the masses.
Right now it's not technically doable.
But you are forced to think in terms of what is best to do. There is financial pain in one's mistakes which creates a feedback mechanism to improve what you do.
CAPTCHAs can be used to prevent bots but they are extremely annoying for humans.
When I registered on Steemit I was asked for my telephone number, for sms verification (just one time, not annoying).
So I suppose there are other ways to create accounts, without verification. I think that should be fixed.
However, I would prefer to suffer some captcha than having lot of bots messing up the site like now.
This is true but I don't think this mechanism is working: Steem is cutting-edge blockchain technology, but price goes down and down (I could be wrong, I'm not trader nor crypto expert).
The big stakeholder of a magazine doesn't directly choose what is going in first page and what is not, it's not his job, even if he could do it with a phone call. That job is done by people paid to guess what is best to sell: its stakeholder interest, but stakeholder is not able to do it. In our case, this job could be done by people in a democratic way, not by whales (stakeholders) or bots (?!#!?).
I will try to write down some problems of this mechanism but it's really just guessing:
Top earnings posts are often nerd/crypto stuff, upvoted by nerd/crypto whales; this is a vicious circle because people who wanna earn money will post stuff based on whales tastes (actually doable because there are few whales), and interests as a Steem stakeholders.
In a popular network (with big human user base) a post about Bitcoin price or fee would never make this much views/likes/money.
Earning several thousand of dollars with a make-up tutorial (zero originality) in a Steem t-shirt is another example, it makes me think unfair.
From outside this money-game looks like a small circle.