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RE: The Fundamental Currency of Steemit Is Not Steem
Good post.
"Now the owner of the attention and the potential buyer can negotiate directly."
Not really. Clarification. In reality (not Steemit) there is a free market, and that requires putting something up to get something back, risk-reward, buy-sell. Steemit, you join, get free token, then you can keep going, for free, and not have to "buy" anything at all, ever. The proper term would be vying (competing) for attention to get part of daily rewards, not buying it.
Thanks for the comment, @krnel, but I don't agree.
I wouldn't mistake the free tokens you get right now in order to join Steemit for a lifelong support income. Those free tokens are what it's called in marketing "cost of acquisition". That's the cost Steemit pays in order to attract users in the platform. Even if you add up inflation for 2-3 years, you end up with no more than $6-$7/user in 2-3 years. In the gaming industry, for instance, users are bought for $60-$100/apiece.
I am more than 100% sure this bonus will disappear once there will be enough people here. Even more, I am sure there will be a fee for getting into Steemit as well and it may start as high as $10. We'll see.
I gave a clear example of someone joining, who paid nothing, and pays nothing, to get or give attention. You aren't buying anything if you're not paying. I made that specific example for a reason, to show how they, themselves, aren't buying anything, no matter what the "cost" is overall, for the platform, they don't see it or care. It's not part of their costs.
Behind the scenes, yes there is a cost, that affects new users, ant he growth and the value of Steem/Steemit. True. And there is a cost in society for doing things, even if you don't buy anything with money. But that's not what this means: "Now the owner of the attention and the potential buyer can negotiate directly."
That is making an analogy to real world, buying and selling, where there is a risk of purchasing something because you have to actually give something of your own in order to get it. Steemit does not work this way for most people, unless you invested some actual real money you worked to get before coming into Steemit, then you're not even spending any money of your own. You're spending a "currency", yes, time, attention, we spend time and pay attention, but lets make the distinction between actual currency and symbolic money/currency. It's not comparable to say people who spend time or pay attention are "buying" other people's content or something related to buying when there is no actual buying with their own risk.
Only those who actually invested something from what they previously had, would be part of the losing in terms of risk-rewards for real market exchange. When you don't have a real risk for what you symbolically "buy" with your attention towards others and reward them for "buying" it, then there is a lack of responsibility on the part of being a buyer.
You have nothing to lose, so why not, if you don't really care about what you are valuing, what you want t promote more of, what success you want to create, etc. Some people just want the short term gains, free rewards, 0 risk, and that's not a real free market buying-selling risk-reward. It's something new. There is no loss risk aversion psychological factor playing in to honestly evaluate and weigh decision making in a broader understanding.
I disagree. This philosophy would perhaps be true to one who considers monetary currency to be more valuable than time. But, to someone who considers time to be of more value, then there is risk involved with devoting a lot of time to something without getting something in return-- especially if you were anticipating something in return, such as money or social connections.
I agree, I do value m time more than money. But I can't buy an apple with my time. So when talking about buying things in reality, we aren't simply equating it with the relative time someone is paid for a task. Some people get paid way more for their time. But $1 is still $1 no matter who makes the dollar. The buying of an apple is done with $ for everyone universally, not time. The time cost is subjective. So I'm looking at it that way ;)
Steemit is a gamble-luck overall, in getting rewarded for putting in time, energy, effort of relative degrees for each poster, and it's not universally valued for each person to buy equally like an apple, as I see it. The time and attention cost isn't the same as the cost of an apple everyone pays the same to get. Know what I mean? That's my gripe on that distinction. Thanks! :)
Hmmm, you seem to overlook the core meaning of my post (or maybe I wasn't clear enough).
My point is that what's bargained in Steemit is attention. Period. Steem, as a currency, is just a symbol mirroring attention. Every time you spend attention in something there is a cost, called "cost of opportunity". You could have spend your attention on something else, allegedly more profitable. Facebook, for instance. With Steem, the currency, you have a way measure this cost, but the "transaction" isn't done necessarily at the currency level.
It's ok to focus on Steem, the currency, but in that case you are simply positioning yourself as a buyer, because that token allows you to buy more attention.
In my opinion, Steemit is not a Steem marketplace, it's an attention marketplace. Hopefully, the tomorrow's article, about attention's characteristics from a currency perspective, will make things clearer.
And I agree, it's time spent and attention paid that is "supposed" to value things. Thumbs up lol. But we know that's not how autovoting and bots work. Consciousness is required for salience, valuation, and weighing importance.
I'm not paying attention to your comment. See? Got it now? :)))
Resteemed your post, I agree with most of it overall ;)
LOL, yeah essentially how a bot works. It doesn't see anything. They don't see and evaluate what to upvote, it's blind. Not looking. i.e. not paying attention. Just programmed to do certain functions, regardless of what is there, no actual vision of the content.
We'll talk tomorrow about bots. They do work, but in an infinitesimal way, it's actually delegated attention. For certain atomic tasks, attention can be delegated and it's perfectly ok to do it. We do it all the way, when we take for granted our spouse for picking up groceries or the movie we're going to watch, for instance. But the value you get by delegating your attention is way smaller than if you were there, with all your consciousness.
I still see a false analogy, to delegate your attention to a non-consciousness program, vs. to trust and delegate to someone else, a consciousness, to do something for you, like groceries. The analogy does not float for me. ;)
You delegate your attention to your alarm clock, to wake you up in the morning. Last time I checked, alarm clocks are non-conscious. :))
LMAO, you keep coming up with these distinctions that only apply to robotics. Programmed, repetitive, non judgment functions. I made the point last time, and mentioned it before that, of the consciousness factor. You can keep trying to equate them analogously in terms of delegation, but its not the same type of delegation, You used the delegation argument in response to my initial mentioning of consciousness. No matter how many analogies you bring it won't change the pont I was making about consciousness for valuation. Delegate or not, doesn't matter, a bot is not a consciousness for valuation of content. They don't see, they don't value. It's blind. Keep doing the same thing, until I say not to. Keep voting for someone until I wakeup, look around, and realize I've been upvoting shit blindly... oops... LOL. 1 example. A human can actually make judgments and be like... hmmm... well Even if they like this person and though they would keep posting material they wanted, I can see that they don't post that way anymore, so I'm not going to upvote this even though my friend thinks their content is trustworthy no matter what they post...
Analogies between delegating groceries and bots to upvote, are not comparable in the context of what we are talking about in terms of valuation. The issues are being convoluted and mixed together which is creating semantic misunderstanding.
We can agree to disagree, I have no problem with that. I don't think in terms of robotics or I don't know what. I think in terms of attention, delegation and trust. You can delegate attention and you do this all the time in the real world (the most extreme case is, for instance, a blind man who relies on a companion attention to get around). In Steemit, you have a few options to delegate your attention, but it takes the form of a smart tool, if you want and only for a limited set of activities, which are usually extremely atomic, like voting. You "lease" your vote to somebody else (being it a human or an algorithm you designed yourself or somebody else).
Again, I hope the tomorrow's article, which tries to describe attention's characteristics as a currency, will shed more light on this.
Either way, I enjoyed the debate.