Human Nature is what’s wrong with Steemit
"For such is the nature of man, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance." - Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.
Steemit is a community and it reflects the good and bad of what society has to offer. We have poor and rich members; people with influence and others who are hardly read; a witness parliament; and at the top we have the “leaders” who own the platform @ned, @dan and the dev team.
Because we have such a diverse group of users all decisions to change the platform will affect every person differently. Take @ned´s last initiative for example; he proposed two changes to make the platform more “fair”, it quickly became a debate amongst big holders and “normal” users.
Nobody wants their interests affected by policy changes. We all know off-shore drilling is bad for the environment but oil companies are not going to stop doing it and they have the power to influence politicians so that the rules favors them.
In "real life" voters can protest and maybe pressure their local authorities to do something about the environment; the difference is that regular citizens all have 1 secret vote to cast on the elections, in steemit large holders have thousands of non-secret votes. It’s like having Exxon-Mobile casting 3 million votes for Hillary Clinton.
So yes, pleasing large SP holders is a big factor in user’s success. If you want to become a witness you need to have whales that support you, if you want to have high rewards you also need whale´s votes and if you cross a bad a whale... oh boy are you in for trouble!
If you add money rewards to this equation then it all becomes even messier. People fight over money, they argue with friends and relatives over it so of course steemians will fight over rewards in a social network with strangers.
Conclusion: There is nothing wrong with steemit, the platform technically works… human nature is wicked by nature and we can't expect this community to be any different.
Thanks for the post ideas and issue you bring up.
I would like to point out, our nature is both good and evil, so to polarize the argument that our human nature is the problem, is not exactly accurate.
The current condition of humanity is the issue, not our nature. If you want to use the nature as a scapegoat argument, it can be applied to every single thing wrong and then we get nowhere.
Our current condition, to favor money, be obsessed with money, is the conditioning in society and media to influence this, as well as the scarcity and needs for economic survivability. They way people think and view money, is a result of the condition of the way we live. Not the nature in humanity to blame.
I wrote a post to try to get people to focus less on the money, and instead understand how Steemit will success if we want it to success, if not it will fail. To focus on money is the issue people are conditioned into living by and are choosing to continue to live by.
Take care. Peace.
Thanks for your contribution @krnel, I read your post 2 weeks ago when it first came out and I think you have some valuable points.
I think we need to understand human behaviour in order to solve the problems of societies, if we know people are individualistic and greedy then there should be rules implemented to avoid that kind of behaviour.
Regards,
People need to raise themselves up in consciousness and learn to balance out purely self-centered individualism with healthy individual self-governance to be responsible and and consider others as well, self+other consideration and concern. Rules to get people to learn is good, but rules to make people not focus on money? How do you do that?
will could tell that the human nature is selfish and individualistic, but is a part of the society not all.
agreed!
I thought it was very fun to see smooth's responses, he made a few really good points that actually influenced what i now think of the proposed changes compared to my initial reaction.
The rest is sadly true...
Nothing much to add . Well said!
I didn't see it as a fight between large SP holders and 'normal users'.
That was a flat out debate with good points made on both sides. I didn't get the sense that @ned wanted to make it 'more fair', thats impossibly subjective... the goal was in the headline and that is increasing demand in SP and Steem due to the constant price decline and lack of volume to pick it up.
I also disagree with your assessment of 'human wickedness' by default, so 'why bother'? If you incentivize good behavior, as the rest of the platform does, good things come and overpower negatives.
As of right now, there is no incentive to remain powered up and THAT was the core of the debate that I read through. Particularly between @smooth and @ats-david.
Edit - is that image at the end solely there to be provocative? I don't understand the context and think you're going to alter the comments of your readers with that one image. As I was scrolling down, I saw the tophat and thought "ah fuck... the evil capitalist meme" ... then I scrolled a bit more and thought it was Donald Duck in a tophat... then I saw what it actually was and said "wtf was the point of that?"
Hi Blake,
1.- The last debate on ned´s post was just an example of somthing that occurs on steemit and on real life. Since the platform started there has been arguments over curation rewards, bots and changes that affect large holders. I think its fair to say that if ned`s proposed changes go trough large holders will be affected and small users will benefit from voting pools, every change has winners and losers.
2.- I am more of the Hobbes, Locke and Maquiavelo line of thought, humans are evil by nature. Is not something I want, I would love people to be good by nature, but sadly history backs up their affirmation: Human kind has been at war and killing each other since the begging of times.
3.- Agree on the photo thing, I will take it off and replace it with a more suitable one... I dont like posts without images but this one may be my first photo-less post.
EDIT: found a picture with a quote that may provoke anarchists but I think it goes well with the post.
As the platform gets older, the more immutable the site will get. As new updates are harder and harder to pass trough. The controvercy we have now is little to none compared to that what we're going to have in the future.
Adding money to the equation is precisely why Steemit will work. Also, don't think about it as fighting for the money. That implies a zero-sum game where there is a limited supply of money and taking some of the pie leaves less for everyone else. This Steeming pie is one we can all get our hands in, and when we do, it actually creates more for others.
“It’s true: greed has had a very bad press. I frankly don’t see anything wrong with greed. I think that the people who are always attacking greed would be more consistent with their position if they refused their next salary increase. I don’t see even the most Left-Wing scholar in this country scornfully burning his salary check. In other words, "greed" simply means that you are trying to relieve the nature given scarcity that man was born with. Greed will continue until the Garden of Eden arrives, when everything is superabundant, and we don’t have to worry about economics at all. We haven’t, of course, reached that point yet; we haven’t reached the point where everybody is burning his salary increases, or salary checks in general.” - Murray Rothbard
I am not attacking greed, on the contrary I am acknowledging it an instrinisic part of human nature!
Thanks for the clarification. It is an intrinsic part of human nature and one that will help Steemit grow. Watching how the dev team works to help spread rewards to the minnows is going to be interesting.
Vote in steemit
I also thought the point of Ned's changes was to slow the drop in the price of steem and sbd. If you look at a chart for either one, you'll see a race to the bottom. And if you look at steemdown, you'll see the whales who are powering down and selling. To be fair, I transferred out the SBD I made on some of my posts.
The consistent price drop and lack of large money coming in to support and turn around the price is the real issue. It's possible that a more equitable rewards system would not only attract new users, but keep them here. I don't know if it's too late.
I don't think any reasonable person would object to whales getting more of a return, because they were early adopters. But if there are people with a lot of SP appearing to create fake accounts and boosting them with upvotes and others jumping on the same people's posts because they know they can build a nice curation reward for themselves, I wouldn't be surprised to see the attrition rate in membership increase. If good writers aren't rewarded, they'll leave. Why stay? It's probably a moot point though. Looking at the charts, it's hard to see how steemit can continue to pay rewards to anyone.
This is from someone who really likes the idea of steemit and hopes it somehow does survive as a better steemit.