Does It Really Matter How People Make Money on Steemit?
Steemit is an online community much like any other. It is not exempt from fundamental laws of economics or social dynamics. When it comes to people interacting based on financial rewards, we have to understand that every possible transaction is based on demand and supply.
Like I mentioned before in a previous post, capital is compartmentalized into social, financial and intellectual. Every company or individual falls under the same economic spectrum. The only difference is that Steemit is unique in the way it merges social capital with the financial one. Nothing more, nothing less.
Throughout the past year, there were plenty of views in regards to how value is created in the platform. Every now and then, morality was invoked as the means to rectify specific incidents. Nonetheless, morality is irrelevant to value. A given environment dictates the morality of the group. Depending on the point of view one examines an economic incident, some parties might feel they have been treated unfairly while some others not so much.
Some whales for example have invested heavily in the platform from the very beginning. They were the ones mining the tokens. It is expected from them to be opinionated about how things are run in here much like with every other major shareholder in a given company.
Others have joined Steemit following team members from previous projects. This is also something that happens in the outside world. These members have invested mostly in people and they feel they should be treated much like any other shareholder. Many other dolphins and minnows have been interacting with one another, created personal connections and formed groups of interest. Again, much like in every company or organization social capital is extremely valuable since it enables the other two forms of capital — intellectual and financial.
When a member of the platform utilizes their shareholder power, no matter how big or small, then it is to be expected not to be frowned upon. People on Steemit can sell their services and products — heck even their own tokens if they so wish. They can also counter other offers with their own version much like in the free market. This is what makes the blockchain so great. Complaining solves nothing. Acting (or reacting) is all the money, literally.
In a recent example, the whaleshares initiative introduced the concept of buying whale votes with their respective tokens. As a counter market act the Random Whale Vote initiative was introduced offering a different reward system that relies more on gambling. Both initiatives, aim to raise capital in their own special way.
People can buy votes if they so wish with their financial OR social capital. People tend to forget than having connections is much the same (if not more important) than having money. A group of people can decide to vote for each other for rewards because they have invested time to create a social bond. It is no different than someone spending the same amount of time to write an article. Both are valuable investments in their own way. Whether we like it or not, it is what it is. There is nothing that can be done to prevent this nor anyone should try to do so.
If we try to regulate economic exchanges on Steemit we would be doing the same exact mistake as in the FIAT world. A truly free market can and will inevitably correct itself. For example, If someone is milking the reward pool with little to no effort then eventually everybody will have to pay for the irresponsibility. The overall value of the platform will fall due to bad handling. The big guys will correct the situation our of self preservation. Same exact pattern is observed everywhere in nature.
There is a parable that describes how a greedy fellow killed the goose that laid one golden egg per day in order to get the gold out. The people within the community will eventually spot the greedy fellow and take action to balance things out otherwise they will be inevitably harming their own investment. A 'regulator' will always fall short since, at the end, who would be regulating the regulator?
I would advice my dear Steemians, whether they are whales, dolphins or minnows to try and understand the motives of each and every person on the platform. Most of the time, they are pretty obvious. If you believe something is "unfair" then try to understand why something happens rather than focusing on the fact that it happened. Any situation can be turned into your own advantage if you play your cards right. This is one of the beauties we can enjoy in the blockchain and one that we should all cherish.
I consider Steemit as a heritage site. It's not only what we have now but what we will leave for the future. And the future is determined on how we behave to what we have now. It is our collective responsibillity to guard this art of social media culture from all sorts of attacks that will eventually come with mainstream flood. I willl use this a bit cliche quote to sum up this tought:"The best way to predict future is to create it".
Well, the blockchain IS forever :)
That's the key. We are able to choose between different types of "forevers" in the blockchain. It's actually fascinating that we have accomplished what generations of humans tend to believe they will have after death: eternity in the physical sense, lol.
This is becoming a true social meaning of eternal good or bad deeds. Steemit along with blockchain is so revolutionary that it will not be easy to coprehend for the masses for a quite some time. It's philosophy of humanism, economy and social philosophy in general is - state of the art.
Steem & Steemit/other Steem platforms are most likely the future or a very large part of the new Internet they build in this space.
almost like the concept of god :)
indeed. that's perhaps the biggest hurdle
YEs and theres always some guy who will print out the entire 100GB bitcoin blockchain and the im sure several gigabyte long steemit blockchain, and yeah text is small, im sure steem blockchain cant be that big, and it can be enscribedonto some cave walls undderground, or etched onto the moon as a QR code we can scan from a telescope!
imagime that, backing up ddata by sending a robot to the moon to create a pattern in thee dust, engraving a QR code that can be read from a telescope, that would be a cool way to preserve code (untill an asteroid or meteor comes and wipes it away)
THIS is what we should be aiming for.
That is some imaginative thinking there buddy. And I like it.
That quote speaks wonders. I'm stealing it for myself and holding that close. Thanks
Most of thing can only be done/change at the system level. Regulating by the participants in the system may not be possible.
Current Steemit system basically put all power under the big whales hands. Dolphines or Minnows are like mid-low rank staffz of a company, they have to use their own ways to survivw and get "Paid" so to said.
Teams / groups / voting rings arw just naturally born under the current eco-system. This is how the lower ranks guys struggle to move up the chain.
So unless the system changes, hence, the rules of game change, the way Steemians act in Steem won't change so much.
Having some kind of police to bar all those "bad guys", it will only drives away majority of Steemians and what remain here will be the whales.
Hard Fork 19 will change the distribution in favor of the small guys
Great post and lots of analogies which I love.
You're exactly right. At first it's quite easy to get disappointed and even angry by some things you see here. For example there are users who will post multiple articles of ''low quality'' every day and will get hundreds of Upvotes. But what's important to understand is that if they are not offering quality then they are offering something else to the platform. If they offer nothing then the community will eventually punish them as you said very correctly.
It's also important to understand what Steemit needs, decide what you can offer and finally invest in that. The better you understand what people need and the more effort you put in giving them what they need, the better the outcome.
Awesomely put.
This. this is all the money.
Yes. If done correctly, even trolling can be fun in its own way.
So, how is that different than saying a drug dealer is offering value to the community, b/c people are buying their product? Clickbait is popular but that doesn't make it good for the community. I don't know what the answer is, but buying/wanting isn't the same as needing or it being good for you.
and how or why is that bad? Drugs offer many things to people. The fact that they have been demonized doesn't make them inherently evil.
@joyninja
You are trying to make a moral judgement about drugs, but that's not the issue here. Demand/Supply don't care about the morality of the goods/services being traded. If there is demand for something, there will always be someone out there willing to provide what is demanded. There is nothing in this world that is 100% bad or 100% good. And as kyriacos said, many times our perception of bad/good is affected by other factors (eg media) and not by objective information. I think, for example, that it's quite likely that recreational drugs will become a normal thing in our lives in the future. Maybe not exactly the ones we have today, but as demand for them will increase, better ones will be made.
I believe that there are many ways to make money here that are and will be detrimental to the success of steemit in the short and long term.
I don't think a platform built on plagiarism, copy/paste, and grey areas like posting torrents could be successful. If someone thinks it can be, I say go start one up! Good luck to you!
There have been a lot of innocent ideas such as sports betting, lotteries, voting schemes that on the surface look to benefit individuals and/or the platform. The problem is there are ways to exploit them. Several of these ideas come from well meaning and upstanding community members with good intentions.
What happens when someone else who isn't invested in the success of steemit copies their idea? Then another 10 or 20 do the same thing. In the case of lotteries and sports betting it turns into a vote buying and post spamming nightmare.
Both initiatives you mentioned seem fairly harmless but one has already upvoted plagiarized posts. It was fairly simple for them to buy some votes and get a few whale sized votes. The problem this creates is that with a high rep it takes more weight than groups like @steemcleaners have to effectively neutralize bad actors even with the support of the community without the help of other whales.
Like anything else this will escalate if there isn't a means put in place to counter it. The "bad" minnows will swarm to those initiatives in hopes of getting rich with little or no effort on their part.
Is that in the best long term interest of steemit?
Of course I enjoy the opportunity to earn money from my posts, but that is secondary to being a member of a community with diverse backgrounds and opinions. Sure I will post very simple jokes and other less meaningful fun things, but I also take the opportunity to give and receive feedback on a multitude of issues and hobbies.
Awesome man. Glad you enjoy the community and get to do your own thing.
The cool thing about Steemit is that it often encourages people to write about things they love.
It never just about the money. You look at reddit , facebook. It is never about the money and it is more how people would interact with each other and so on. I am now exploring steemit and have nothing but good thing to recommend to my friend. Thanks for your post
Totally agree, I think everyone here has an account on multiple platforms like Facebook, Reddit and Instagram without ever being paid for it. Steemit is just another cool upcoming community which people want to be part of!
I do not have accounts on those platforms, and only have an account on Steemit because of exactly the reason you mentioned. I am not willing to be a cash cow.
However, I am learning that Steem is not apportioned to the value that my speech has, in a fair way, but is, in ways I do not yet understand, being apportioned according to the wealth of the upvoters, and speakers.
This will impact my participation in Steemit, and I don't believe anyone doubts there will be competitors to Steemit very soon. Steemit is the first of it's kind. It will not be the last. If Steemit is eclipsed by a competitor that values speech fairly, and some profit in the short term from Steemit's failure to value speech fairly, the rest of us that help to provide value to Steemit with our valuable speech that isn't compensated fairly will regret it.
I don't want that to happen, and that is why I am speaking out.
I am sure you can acquire wealth by participating in Steemit but it won't happen overnight. I see you just joined in May and you didn't write a lot of posts yet but are already making some money with them. I get your point but I don't see it as a big issue.
I am, as I hope is clear, not discussing my own financial rewards from Steemit, but rather how an appearance, if not actual practice, of unfair distribution of rewards for posts and curation, will potentially impact Steemit.
I do want Steemit to succeed over the long haul. I have no interest in redistributing the wealth of anyone, or make any claims that I am deserving of upvotes or wealth myself.
Most people strongly believe that every situation where desirable things are shared or distributed should be fair, and the arcane way in which rewards are variable depending on the wealth of the posters and curators is neither easily understood, nor does it seem to be necessary at all to create a thriving community of diverse contributors with integrity.
On the contrary, it seems to have been designed to enable economic manipulation and censorship, much like is happening on Youtube at the moment. Whether I simply don't understand the reasons for it, or why it isn't actually a censorship mechanism, or device to manipulate and concentrate wealth, it certainly appears to do so.
As most people will likely not get past the appearance to an understanding more nuanced, that I have not yet attained, and do strongly react to unfairness in a negative way, it is highly likely that, as new users join Steemit, and begin to understand the system, Steemit will suffer the loss of many potentially valuable contributors.
I am not making an accusation, and I hope that is clear from my repeated statements to that effect, and further my direct confession of lack of understanding of the weird way in which value is distributed in Steemit. I have asked for an explanation, and here do so again.
Why isn't there simply a value provided to upvotes dependent on reputation alone? Why the bizarre interplay between the wealth of the poster, upvoters, and time of the upvote? None of this seems to make any sense - except as a mechanism potentially useful to concentrate wealth, and censor speech via an economic mechanism of control, exactly as is so alarmingly being done on Youtube today.
That censorship is driving a lot of the adoption of Steemit, and that is a very clear and obvious demonstration that people will flee to competing platforms as a result of such manipulation. Steemit appears, and purports, to be devoted to creating a new way for people to use social media, that is more fair and beneficial to it's users.
Making it more simple, and removing even the appearance of unfair distribution, and worse, the potential to censor people economically, just makes sense. I want Steemit to succeed, because we do need to change the world, so that people do have more freedom to speak, and are rewarded more for their contributions that bring value to their community.
That's why I am posting. None of my concern is in the least little bit seeking wealth for myself, and I hope that is very clear.
Thank you for your substantive reply!
The way you write is very unpleasant to read with all the comma's but I think you should try to figure out how the system works. It might take away some of your concerns.
Thank you for your constructive advice, on both counts. Believe it or not, I think you are right about my writing. My problem is that my fingers are unable to keep up with my head, and so I make lots of run on sentences (amongst other things I am sure).
I'll work on that, thanks to your good advice.
I'm happy you understand I meant it as constructive advice. I think it will help you get your points across as they are interesting.
here is someone who gets it! :)
Lovely cute animal! I do love their face, which always reminds me to think of those innocent face like children. Especially when they are sleeping. Just always thinking god is so amazing that he created lots of being and all of them are beautiful ( I should say most of them.. as I hate insect..)
I am lost
As a new user I am pleasantly surprised how although people have different intentions, they do appear to come together to create a relatively cohesive community. You mention regulation - to what extent is there a regulator on Steemit to prevent spam, copyright infringement or porn etc that may create income for those users but damage the community for others?
porn is designated by tag "nsfw", else spam, scam, copy/paste, etc. tends to be downvoted rather quickly, especially if it gains some traction. Just look at what happened with the recent Matt Trainer post, "Steemit-Based Reality Game Announced: $10 million prize pool". How's that for a great "community effort"?!
Suddenly there are thousands of Steemit users now clicking on "nsfw" to the delight of not one of their spouses.
I'm sure there are plenty of better places for them to find porn than on steemit, if that's really what they want to do lol
Yeah, that 'Reality Game' post was a bit too much, lol!
@steemcleaners pretty much handles copyright and spam
porn is 'regulated' from the NSFW tag.
and of course anybody can use the flag to "adjust" the community as they wish.
remember, not even steemcleaners is a "regulator" but an independent body that was formed from a large number of people in order to solve specific problems that were a major concern from all.
should probably throw in a mention for @cheetah too:
Link: FAQ about Cheetah
oh yes. our dear @cheetah :)
You can have "regulation" without a "regulator", in this case, the community. I don't think we'll see the situation that you have in, say, Reddit's TIL with users getting up-voted for re-posting items or even blatant plagiarism. When you see this effect there and check out the comments, all the established users and top comments are attacking the poster, pointing out they down-voted, complaining how "the sub is garbage".
Yet, the post is still upvoted, why? Because all votes are equal at Reddit and the platform is flooded with mostly non-posters who don't engage beyond a few voting clicks. Steemit has reputation and voting power adjusted by your investment in the platform. My guess is if you applied that to the "Reddit TIL" model, suddenly those top commenters (who spend most of the time there and know the re-posts) would be able to drum out the low quality items, rendering them without reward. Remove the up-vote and financial incentives to post garbage, you should get less of it.
I will note that there are parties with external financial incentives to distort speech, and these parties engage in practices, like buying Reddit accounts, to manipulate the platform.
This may also be something that impacts Steemit. It should not be allowed to, unless you feel that Steemit should not be a platform for free speech.
I just realized that Steemit is designed to be a platform for paid speech, and this is antithetical to free speech. I will further consider that before commenting further, but to state that this will impact the community and the platform, particularly in a time where England has just proposed a drastic and utterly unworkable censorship law.
Countries are enacting laws against free speech, to greater and lesser degrees, surveillance is chilling free speech, propaganda is distorting free speech in order to distort political power. These are problems I seek, personally, to solve, and reasons why I came to Steemit.
I hope this is food for thought for others. It is for me.
Unfortunately, government intrusion will always be a problem.
The rewards in Steemit are a fascinating example of game theory at work. We are all gaming the system in the manner that best suits us.
Creating quality content, giving thoughtful replies, using chat, buying steem to power up, following whales, using curation bots, maybe a mixture of many strategies will work for you.
More importantly, find what works for you, and stick with it!!
Thank you for your perspective :)
+1, well said!
We need more leveled head individuals like you in here. Very well put man. Thank YOU for your eloquent response.
Seeing that there is so much randomness to this platform, I think that the random walk theory is a better illustration of this environments framework. There is so much randomness and luck on here, it is hard to determine what exactly is even going. The uncertainty is so frustrating, its getting old quick and starting to look like other iterations of similar environments from the past.
It is still a baby learning to crawl..give it time it will learn to walk, who knows how big and fast this thing will get. I hear yo on the random but I think we are partially to blame ... who we follow affect what we see... and the groups are harder to establish, because of follower content can vary ..,
try and be patient, give it time,I have only been here a month.
:-)
namaste
well said..."game theory" ...a new user can bust their but for weeks with super content and it is painful to watch when you put soo much in to something that gets nothing compared to others. So it is understading. There is a saying in sales that "compensation drives behavior".
Excellent point, and well said.
Thanks!