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
Another voice from the community that people need to hear. I want to promote this message and get it rewarded. 100% of the total STEEM, SP and SBD will be transferred to @charlie777pt after payout.
As I have already commented Steemit has the same exact state of the normal economy out the blockchain.
"1% of users have 99% of Steem
99% of users have 1% of Steem"
When there is manipulation in the discussion of collective solutions, by self-interest people or groups that fight for Power then it can't be called consensus, but an imposition of a hierarchical structure.
So 1% is stealing the will of thousands to benefit 99% to themselves, but they are destroying their golden egg chicken.
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.
Consensus is a general agreement on a proposition to act and change the destiny of all the members of a community.
1% of people make Code as Law for all the members of a community, instead of people generating consensus about the Law and get Justice.
(Justice meaning Equality).
When one group controls who gets rewarded, and who can have their rewards taken away, that's not an egalitarian/equal community where the community decides to reward people "organically". One group is calling the shots. The numbers charlie uses are an analogy to Steemit, not an exact number. So don't get hooked on the numbers and ignorantly dismiss the message... Thanks.
In other social media sites, people have equal rights to evaluate content and promote it's visibility through likes/upvotes. But not in Steemit. Only certain people have that power, because they are "rich".
This is about equal rights to affect the valuation of content, just like real social networking sites operate. Want to know what the result is when there is a concentration of power to determine how the community operates to value content? Read about the failure of Digg when concentration of power develops in a community. It's not good.
Steemit started with a concentration of power, and people have pointed out the flaws in this months ago. Yet the system doesn't change, and problems keep coming up because those in power don't want to let go. We don't have consensus of upvotes to value content, we have imposition of power to reward certain posts or remove rewards from certain posts. Influence to allocate rewards is centralized in few hands, not the community. This is not equal rights in the community for the community to reward others. The top posts get rewarded based on the power players who decide.
A just and fair system means that equal rights exist. When people don't have equal rights, there is an unjust system.
While I agree with what you are saying here and you KNOW I GET IT, as I've been shouting this for 7-8 months myself, I need to play Devil's Advocate here. I've done this enough time I know what the opposition's points are going to be.
Essentially that will be the most likely response you receive.
I am not for forcefully redistributing wealth in this system. That too is bad.
I wouldn't mind seeing a way that votes were equal, but the ability to award certain amounts was still somehow tied to your steem power.
This makes steem power attractive to accumulate, and it does help with the long term investment in the platform.
EDIT: Basically... incentive for accumulating steem power is a good thing.
I have wanted to get in better contact with you, can you contact me at [email protected]? Thanks.
Everyone keeps the STEEM they have. It's equal to vote and reward based on global delegation of power.
If all votes are equal, then how does one award more for having steempower? The votes aren't equal then, right? That negates the point of having everyone have an equal influence to affect the valuation of other content.
Yeah, accumulate SP right now is only to control who gets what rewards. So those who have the power decide who gets what, not the community, not like social networking sites work in general. This isn't social networking site per se, but stake controlled site for social media to decide who gets more or less visibility and rewards. Like the Digg fiasco.
I see investing like a corp. You invest because you evaluated the company and see promise in the stock going up, so when the company succeed you make money.
If SP isn't used to control rewards on the system, is there a point in it? Are we stuck with this because thats the reason to get people to power up so they can be part of that control? And the community will never decide for itself who gets rewarded, but it's always those who have the wealth power?
The SP as I saw it in global delegation where people have equal influence on each other, would be to allocate curation based on the SP you have.
Thanks!
+1 for devil's advocate, someone's got to do it! 😅
I suggested a reduction in relative power. Seems reasonable, would you agree?
I'm interested to see how these new curves work out. Though at this point, let's try anything. If it fails, backup, learn from it, and try something else.
Instead what we have now is people making assumptions about the results of experiments (in positive or negative outcome) without bothering to actually put it to the test and prove/disprove that.
Very true. I guess the problem is that there is "real money" at stake. But yes we're still in beta! We should experiment, and really this is happening, HF17 is coming very soon. I think there'll be a lot of interest in HF18 but we should see how the changes work out.
The biggest problem with the Hard forks is the amount of changes that come in each one. It can be difficult to correlate what thing caused what if there are too many. So we may have to wade through some of that.
While we are in beta I'd be interested in more frequent, but smaller forks so we can see specific impact from specific changes.
This is the best way to iterate changes to come to the optimal solution. Its how I set up optimization of an enzymes reaction conditions. Changing too many parameters at once makes it impossible to identify the root causative change agent.
Agree ⬆️
Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it and then learn the hard way that democracy is even more flawed than sharocracy.
An imaginary world where everyone was equal in wealth would leave everyone poorer, even the poorest of the poor would lose ground.
These are hard problems. Groups rarely if ever produce good collective decisions. This is even more true in a world where many are indoctrinated into poor thinking patterns.
Not equal in wealth. You have your wealth more than others, great. The stock goes up, your investment is worth more. But the influence in the system, who gets to choose who gets visible and rewarded is shared across everyone who is a human and active in the community. Not sure this works out, but that's the idea I am working on.
I agree with what you say.
But right now I can't post things without getting flagged if you upvote, while you can upvote other content and there is no issue. So I don't have much power player support, so nothing I can post can get rewarded beyond a certain point without the bad players deciding it's not allowed to get rewarded.
The white paper suggests there are good whales that counteract the bad whales, but that doesn't seem to happen. The concentration of power is an issue. How to resolve this? I see decentralization of power as the solution. And I'm trying to figure out how to achieve this.
Thank you for the feedback. Can we chat so you can dispel my false understanding, and why stake based concentration of power to reward content is how it must be? Please email me at [email protected] if you would like to. Thanks.
Agree. The idea is that good whales will step in to protect their investment but doesn't seem to be happening unless I'm mistaken.
The problem has been identified and a solution (vote cancelation / negation) has been put forth to balance the system. The problem isn't that good whales won't set up, it is that some of the louder members of the community have convinced a large number of people that it will create more problems.
What is worse, many people consider the "good guys" to be the "bad guys" just because they happen to be founders. This in turn has lead to a demand that the founders remain "neutral" and ultimately that cedes power to others who step up to fill the power vacuums.
It is a pity that some (most?) think the founders should be neutral and not use their stake, presumably because "picking a side" is inherently bad for some reason. I think it doesn't stand up. It strikes me that one of the biggest problems with that is that you then have a substantial SP stake doing very little.
People begin to have a problem with power when it is perceived to be used against them. Really it does all come down to the misinterpretation of down votes, which unfortunately has to be laid at the feet of steemit.com
If the founders had used their stake more wisely people wouldn't ask them to be neutral.
Wasn't it the good whales that voted up the post in the first place?
The good whales voted up their own posts in the first place?
No, the post that got flagged because it was making too much. It was the good whales that made it worth something in the first place.
Yes, upvoting from the "good whales" counteracted the "bad whales" already.
Interesting point, not saying it necessarily is... but could it be due to the dozen or so 'rant' posts recently?
What's a rant post? Talking about the issue? Right...
Oh no I'm not putting a label on it. Just the way you described it a few days back.
https://steemit.com/technology/@krnel/dna-computing-could-blow-quantum-computing-away
Still got flagged...
"A just and fair system means that equal rights exist. When people don't have equal rights, there is an unjust system."
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.
Without the share-buying mechanism, then there is also no reward mechanism, because there is no value in the steem token.
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. Invested vote solves this problem.
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...
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.
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.
Good point, I understand that. If there was a global delegation of power, then active real users who post and comment would get access to the community delegated power once they prove themselves. The SP would have returns of curation by the community engaging in activity to influence who gets rewarded. The accounts that aren't interacting in the community through posts and comments, would not have that power. People could give SP to accounts as sock puppet or bots, but no power to affect system since they aren't active in the community. That's the idea I have, but not sure it works. Thanks for the feedback. Please add more ;)
Everyone has equal rights to buy steem,but not equal opportunity,as some are rich,and some are poor,I don't know if this has escaped your attention?
The bot argument is a valid one,however,but there must be ways around that.The Viva platform is designed to be much more fair than Steemit.I'm not sure what solution they have come up with to prevent bot voting,you can ask @williambanks .The fact that Viva will be more egalitarian is crucial,and it's one of many reasons why it's a more promising platform than Steemit,at least for the average person,and also for investors.But the whales on steemit might be motivated to stay,it's easy money after all.
Remember that steem shares are distributed as posting rewards also and you are not required to have a single cent. There are users with more than 100 million vests gained through posting alone.
True,but this does not change my argument.Remember that people who are finacially secure also has more time to write articles,and also in general have a higher education,class definitely plays a role here.Having some whale friends and connections works wonders as well.
Well, if one doesn't have either money or time to engage in the platform, then perhaps they don't "deserve" a bigger say in how content is being rewarded.
The financial inequality argument is always problematic because it ends up with people wanting free money to compensate.
But even if free money was given out, and say, everyone had equal shares of steem handed out, what would the poor people do? They'd have to trade their steem power for $$$ because real life necessities are more important for their life than steem power that can affect the reward pool in the steem platform. So people with lack of money would sell their vests while people with excess money would buy them. And then the poor people would still say that the power distribution is unfair (even if they got the exact same slice as everyone else) because the others had more money and were able to not only keep their vests but also buy the vests of others, while they "lost" theirs for cheap.
So? They'd say they need more vests to get voting power and then, even if it was gifted to them, they'd sell it due to RL needs being more important. Again. And then complain. Again.
Steem can't hope to fix the global inequalities in wealth or education, but it can provide opportunities for people to make money by participating in the platform.
Thanks for taking the time to comment,but I did not mean that we should hand out free money.And your imagination about the poor people seem to betray a certain disdain.Research on basic income has shown that poor people are quite capable of handling money.I'm a poor person myself,and I would never dream of powering down,I'm not stupid.The risk/rewards asessment clearly speaks against that.You seem to think that poor people just lack competence or intelligence,or they would have succeeded.This is a very popular view in certain political circles,but it does not hold up to scrutiny.In order to succed in this system,start-up capital is essential.Right now I'm trying to crawl my way up from the bottom,and I can promise you it's very slow.And posting on steemit is not a good deal for me at the moment,as I'm suffering from a burnout.Which was caused by unfortunate circumstances which I will not go into,but suffice it to say that these circumstances are most definitely class related,and if I had more money,it would not have occured.
Consensus is not possible in centralized structures.
We can't solve social problems with centralized despotic authority, regulations and power clustering.
Consensus can only exist when:
a) - Everybody is involved in building solutions for the community,
b) - Everybody is informed with proper continuous feedback,
c) - Everybody knows the risks of taking that decision.
Consensus is a general agreement on a proposition to act and change the destiny of all the members of a community and face the risks involved.
Consensus can be "good" or "bad" because collective decisions involve risks that reflect in all the future of the community.
Any consensus in equalitarian groups can be right or wrong about the consequences of the collective choices and actions agreement.
When there is manipulation of the discussion of solutions, by self-interest people or groups with the need to fight for Power then it can't be called consensus, but an imposition.
Consensus exists only in equalitarian groups, where everybody has the same rights to express their importance by influence and be influenced by all the others.
This is the SNAFU principle, which states, true communication is only possible between equals.
When a power hierarchy exists, the members with less power will distort the facts to adhere more closely to the desires of those with more power. This distortion may be conscious or not, but it is inevitable.
There is a fail safe that can be used by rulers aware of this. The court poet and/or fool are employed by wise rulers to keep from falling into a "bubble" mentality. This allows the ruler to maintain a connection with reality, while surrounded by fawning sycophants.
As long as the truth teller is given no real power, but given incentive in the form of privilege, the ruler is safe.
Thanks for that insight form history, very interesting. I knew about the court jesters, but not how it tied into giving a ruler feedback that others were afraid to give. hehe.
Even the Jester's costume is a parody of the king's garb. The points on his hat, with the bells, are the points of the crown, and the jingling adornments of authority. The Jester, in parody of the king, even has his own fool, which is the scepter he is to be seen carrying with him that is usually topped with a little jester's head, a sort of infinite regress in parody of parody. The ventriloquist and his dummy, that talks back to him, is a derivative of this as well.
I often wonder if the president and vice president might be patterned after this arrangement.
Indeed! And today's court jesters can still be seen as the group of ostensible "comedians" who wrap their political criticism in a thin veneer of "comedy" while actually saying things mainstream network news could never get away with.
They are also to provide a vicarious rebellion against the ruler by the the ruled. If the fool shoves it in the ruler's face then the subjects are less likely to get it in their head that they need to do it.
In a company, normally shareholders have voting power over the company's guidelines, not on the details of a product's production, not on the pay or behavior of each employee. On Steemit, every shareholder has power at all levels, sometimes there is collusion, sometimes it's a basket of crabs.
For a newbie, it's ridiculous to see whale war, bots war, flags war or the massive vote of a few whales for a picture without explanation, a picture of dishes or just a link without explanation.
When will we see inspiring, informative, constructive and fun posts?
I don't know. Steemit is not the potential I thought it was going to be. At least now I know that bringing an anarchistic model to the real world is not going to happen through Steemit as I once thought was possible: Steemit is an Anarchistic Model We Can Develop and Bring to the Real World
Thanks for the feedback!
People won't stay on Steemit if there is no potential for moving up the food chain. So hopefully more dolphins will move into the ecosystem in time, however there has to be enough food to feed the growing dolphin families. We are all born equal in spirit but not equal in our abilities 😇🤑
Indeed. Each person should be evaluated on what they can do, and in Steemit that's the content that get's evaluated. In social networking, the people in the networked community usually have equal rights to influence and be influenced, to upvote others. But Steemit doesn't work that way. The concentration of power is something that I want to find a resolution to that works on Steemit. Can you contact me at [email protected]? Thanks.
Okay! I look forward to further communications.
Why one dolphin will want to buy steem power -to reach the whale , my solutions is simple limit of steem power that counts ( idk 50 or 100 000 dolars ,or less or more ) so no one will blame whale for power down , dolphins will buy to get same vote power , more whales will balanse the sistem and the price will go alot UP . What about this ?
More dolphins will have a collective power, however your idea is great as well. I'm working from the system we have here in the United States. Our power comes from our middle class, well it used to, the middle class has been eroded by the lose of small businesses, too many regulations and over taxation. We are the ones who buy stuff, cars, houses, clothing, fancy stuff like boats, cool products made by artisans, vacations and so on. We drive a thriving economy.
There can be formed several clases if you can define overpower so if you have 1 milion you can be happy or try to hit the max ? Maybe 100 milions ? Here we need to define some maximum for voting power not how much steem you can have .
I am not a mathematician, but I do understand a little economics, wouldn't it be cool if we could build a free market experiment. There really hasn't ever been a truly free market and I can't define one off the top of my head. It would be fun to explore the possibilities..
If we uncouple voting power from steem and tie votes to how active one is in the community would that be easily gamed? I remember tying your vote to reputation opens a community up to sybil attacks? Can this be weakness in reputation scores be addressed because I see this as a possibility. However this brings to mind a show I saw called Black Mirror, season 3 called nosedive and how living with digital reputation scores was like living in a prison.
My favorite scene after the heroine ruined her reputation which was tied to ones ability to work and find good housing and ended up in prison and became free.
In the beginning of Americas growth corporations were chartered and corporations had to be located in the state they sold their goods. If the corporation did not serve its community its charter was revoked. I see the huge accounts acting a lot like modern corporations.
https://hbr.org/2010/04/what-the-founding-fathers-real.html
With a larger ecosystem of middle class the 99% who own most of the steem will lose a lot of their power and the rest of us will be able to work on community and economic consensus...we will be able to change the system if it becomes dysfunctional. No system is forever hehehe, except for the law of nature, cause and effect!
Agree!
I m looking for Time to write an article on that point ;) glad you started to discuss some interesting point @krnel
Steem reproduce the system and any 'fake' democracy based on elections where money control everything and allow the richest to buy Power and influence.
If you want something fair and equal you have to look into two important and mandatory points :
people have to be involved and participate on writing the rules in equal right. If not. The richest will Always choose rules that fit their interest and stake. Dpos solves Sybil attack issue but somehow also brings the ''i have more money = more power" issue which basically leads to have rules that benefit to the richest as usual.. this cant be a equal right system and is not designed to be. Your voice count on steem only if you are able to invest enough money to be in top stakeholder
election is a rigged system that allow the richest to buy power . By 'buying' votes using their stack as minnow (poor masse) are easily corruptible :) if you want to have fully equal right system the only solution is to work with Sortition + ability to revoke Bad behaviour + short period gouvernance and equal voting right for people. (To have that it cannot be weighted by stake but if it's not we need KYC to solve Sybil or other solutions..)
Concl: steem is a very cool system and it can still disrupt many things and bring alot of value but it's definitely not design to bring voice and value back to people on a fair and equal way ;)
If something like that is getting build please keep me informed i'd like to participate. I've been working on these questions for years..
Sorry for mistakes in this post made with my phone ;)
I will try to develop later on my computer i dont want ppl to misunderstand my point as I dont trully believe that everyone having equal right could actually work. But all i know is that steem is not design to be that project @krnel ;)
Thanks for the feedback. I read your BUSY DECISION MAKING GUIDELINE, good stuff. But yeah, I thought Steemit was trying to create a decentralized online space to eventually bring into the real world. But the way it is now, I don't really want Steemit to carry over to the real world... I think I may have to go look for a better blockchain or content project with real community centeredness in mind, instead of money centered control over how things work. The new HF17 might resolve some things I hope :). This is what I thought was the potential... but I was wrong it seems: Steemit is an Anarchistic Model We Can Develop and Bring to the Real World. Thanks for the response. It confirms what I was suspecting that things are not going to change towards decentralization... will just stay like this. I received information that the concentration of power is growing into fewer hands from December to February.
My husband says if Steemit does not fix its invested class whales overreach people can or will move to other crypto based social systems like Etherium has...did I spell that right? I haven't looked into alternatives yet. Steemit Inc...better fix things quick because people will not stay on dysfunctional social sites...my husband mentioned Digg again, he was so sad when it died from mismanagement.
Yeah. The Digg article came out last week. And still ... some people don't want to see the issue.
Yeah, expectations and huge investments can blind one to the obvious.
Being Steemit and Steem are going down the shithole I can't see why @berniesanders would call this a bullshit post, it is mostly correct, I see some whales even have a damned flagging bot, now why in the hell would you need that? Can't these people even take the time to read what they flag? Are they so damned lazy?
Yeah, not good.