RE: Regulating Curation on SteemIt
why change your post instead of replying to my comment?
Anyways, I never claimed that first investors should be stripped of their influence. I also dont think free money is sustainable, ever. And that is part of the problem with steem. Steem is too much free money. Think if we had advertisement. Then we would just pay the person putting the add and maybe people that resteem to increase visibility. No more artificial rewards out of thin air but a logical business model with a natural flow of rewards.
But this is not steem. We have a game theoretical model of upvoting and are discussing how to best make free money appear. And that is a very tough question. I think that most people arguing for or against 50% do not have the statistical or game theoretical background to do so. These systems are very complex and there is no simple logic because there is no real market flow. So why risk breaking something that is not broken?
For example voting at a fundamental level is ignorant of the content. Curation is the game of voting first what others will vote later. If you know self-voters, vote on them first. No matter the content. Curation is a voting amplification, not a method to find good content.
From a game theoretical perspective, we always need people that do not follow the optimum strategy and make a loss to curate good content. There is simply no way around it. Not at 0%, 50% or 100%. Yet people believe that 50% would magically transform the system when I think that 50% will just give rise to a new strategy of abuse that may or may not be better than what we currently have.
In the end I dont care that much. My stake here is low and if this goes wrong I will just loose a few thousand $. But people that have a substantial stake should be careful what they do. And if I were among them I would be very careful to use simple flawed logic to change a fundamental part of the system which risks breaking it.
Yep.
Because of this I reckon that putting out good content should be the driver of income on Steem, not discovering it. Curation as presently implemented is quality agnostic. It is profit driven. Removing the profit motive from curation removes the motivation for agnosticism, which is profit.
I favor reducing curation rewards to 0. If whales want to make money with their Steem, let them post content, not profit from the content others post. There remains another profit mechanism that is also content agnostic available to whales, and that is capital gains. Any increase in the price of an investment is capital gain to investors. Throughout history, this has been the mechanism that has driven investment.
Curation rewards have created profiteering mechanisms that allow profit to be generated without increasing the value of the underlying investment, and this type of mechanism depresses the value of the vehicle, in this case, Steem. There are various mechanisms that potentiate profiteering, rather than investing, and they create downwards pressure on Steem price.
Consider a broom manufacturer seeking investment to improve production. Should they promise investors half the brooms they produce? No. Selling the brooms creates profit for the manufacturer, which increases the value of the stock investors purchase, creating capital gains. Just so, allowing accounts with SP to extract rewards through curation decreases the value of content - which is the driver of value of Steem (as the token underlying social media interfaces, such as Steemit).
Even giving investors 25% of the brooms is sketchy from an investment perspective, and that's what we have now with a 75/25 split.
Let investors increase the value of their capital by boosting the value of the token they invest in, which increases in value as more people create more good content.
Profiteers should be chased off with tar and feathers, since they extract the capital which the rest of us, creators and investors alike, depend on.
Thanks!
Exactly. It may seem that 50% curation would help the bigger accounts, but there is no free lunch. 50% curation rewards hurt the steem economy and that directly cuts into the pockets of the holders.
In addition, instead of just voting as you please, bigger accounts will be even more forced to vote algorithmically to not miss out compared to others that do so. Instead when curation is removed, big accounts do not have to try to outsmart each other and can focus their energy on promoting steem, which is the only proper way to get more money out of their investment.
Not all whales are experienced investors, and, while the ninja miners are certainly intelligent, we shall have to see if they gain the necessary understanding to grow their stakes, or, like lotto winners broke a year later, lament the poor decisions that leave them as broke as before their windfall. It is counterintuitive to realize that grabbing all the cash one can and maximizing short term ROI can be harmful to ones financial position. Some folks do grasp how investing differs from profiteering, and the blatant censorship being undertaken on competing media present a remarkable opportunity to grow a platform and create unimaginable wealth in the process.
The disruptive nature of cryptocurrency lends some hope that investors in Steem may yet prevail, as censorship is a means of retaining control, and Steem natively disrupts the extant banksters. There is a natural concordance between the two purposes of implementing a censorship resistant media and growing the value of Steem. Even should some whales sellout to Goldman Sachs, I don't think the war will be lost.
Rather, I reckon the acquisition of stake by GS would drive deep into some the fact of the potential of Steem to be more than just a quick profit opportunity, even more than an emunerative career, but such a game-changer that playing it well could replace the top players. This contest hasn't really started yet, IMHO.
The driving question behind the 50/50 decision is: who does SteemIt want as investors. I've read several whale accounts. They appear to want to bring Wall Street in as the primary ... just as Wall Street is the primary investor in the rest of social media.
The question is: How can we get Goldman Sachs to buy a million Steem. Not, how can SteemIt attract and retain a million users.
STEEM is a deflationary currency. The only way to get Goldman Sachs to buy a million STEEM would be to have mechanisms where Goldman Sachs can harvest a lion's share of the rewards pool.
Goldman Sachs could harvest the reward pool with bots and the new 50/50 reward pool.
SteemIt would could then scoff at the useful idiots who thought the company was trying to create something for the people, when they are looking for the first chance to sell to the 1%.
I spose you're right, but it doesn't have to go that way, and if it does, another UI will do what ordinary folks want to do, which isn't to heel to Goldman Sachs yanks on the choke chain, but to relate to one another freely.
SMTs may provide both directions of progress, without going off the Steem reservation. I don't know @ned and the Stinc team well enough to say they'll do this or that with confidence. I have discussed this a bit long ago with @ned briefly (offchain) and find him forthright and bright - at worst. While I can't predict what he'll do, he has kept his word to me, even though it was months later, and I had given up by then. I reckon he could grab all the cash he can and run, but I do suspect he has specific goals that aren't purely financial that he is intent on achieving.
I find it odd that so much depends on such fungible and ineffable things as principles, standards, and spine. It is literally impossible to imagine what the world may transition to if he personally holds a particular view, or doesn't. Even more odd, that's true for all of us, and we can't predict how we impact key personnel with our casual talk. A chance word can change the world forever. All I do know for sure is that he did, in time, fulfill a commitment he made to me, and while that's little to base a prediction on the future of social media on, it's a good sign.
Those that ask that question aren't looking past their own bank accounts. For them, cash is king. Warren Buffet would ask the latter question, because he's an investor, not a profiteer. @ned doesn't strike me as a profiteer, and his remarks in Korea last year show he's not merely an investor either. I hope he's a leader, and seeking to blaze a trail into a future where the people of the world can create communities at their sole option, and not need to buy from Goldman Sachs the privilege of joining theirs.
Thanks!
I started using SteemIt because I felt the platform was infused with youthful idealism. For the platform to maintain that ideal the platform has to figure out how to get a large number of people to have a moderate investment in STEEM POWER.
It is a tough game. I actually feel that there is a core of people in the company that has its eyes on larger communities and not just the price of STEEM. The investment bankers have knocked the idealism out of numerous computer companies in the past.