Steemit is a collective intelligence experiment || a SteemiansChallenge Entry
This contest asks the question, "What Steemit really means to you? Besides money of course!"
To answer this, I'll begin with what steemit does not mean to me.
Steemit is not just another computer-based net to capture attention for the sake of capturing attention.
Nor is it a place to abstract people into revenue streams and then farm these people like cattle.
Nor is it ... uhh ... whatever this thing is.
What steemit does look like to me is a place where humans and machines interact as part of a collective intelligence experiment...
...that uses social computation to ask and answer questions that were previously unapproachable...
...and sends a very clear message to social media sites that operate under the thumb of corporate regimes:
So that's what steemit looks like to me. But what does it mean ?
It means that I can communicate with people online in an environment that sort of reminds me of how cool the internet was in the 1990's.
It means that my writing - which has always been geared towards a small, smart audience - has a bunch of new eyes on it. And that I can find some of the best and most forward-thinking minds all gathering together in one virtual place. So it is a great opportunity for learning.
It also means that I can share my vaguely subversive art with people that actually appreciate it:
And so on.
As a complete noob to Steemit, and in fact blogging as well, I really have no idea what I am doing on here most of the time, well probably all of the time actually.
But as I am going through a very trying time in my life at the moment, I am finding this platform has been so beneficial to me for just allowing me to put words to paper, to get my thoughts out there into the universe, and to get inspired by others.
I don't really care if I make money here, that is not my objective. More like free therapy I guess!
Interesting post! So far is a great article! Good work.
What sorts of questions does one ask a social computer? I've read a couple of your other posts and I'm still vague. The closest I can come is the firm Edges in this Sage Walker book from the 90s.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1883438.Whiteout
The social computer that is steemit is asked the question, "How should online content be valued in relation to other online content on the steemit platform today?" This computer may also be asked other questions which fit into its manner of operationalizing disambiguation.
Sometime in the next few weeks, I plan to do a big post on collective intelligence and how steemit fits in with C.I..
So in that view, it's a market for content. OK. I was trying to squeeze the idea into a human version of earlier massively parallel computing like SETI@Home. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects
Or of the real-world tasks that Dagmar would secretly crowdsource to her players in This is Not a Game, by Walter Jon Williams. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Not_a_Game
Well, you could theoretically ask steemit all sorts of questions. The trick is figuring out how to encode those questions into the system and derive meaningful answers from however the social computer responds to your question.
Also, I suspect there are several people already in the process of crowdsourcing real-world tasks to their steemit connections after the fashion of Dagmar. Ha!
Like Th Emma Goldman Quote
So True
Thanks For Posting
Steemon