Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy Applied to Steemit.
IRON STEEM
I was having a conversation with @everittdmickey in the comments today and he highlighted to me Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, I thought that Steemit would be an ideal model to model this on.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy specifically states that within and a corporate or government organisation there are essentially two types of people:
# 1. Those that are devoted to the overall goals of the corporate organisation
Applying this to Steemit, this includes all the minnows and dolphins who log onto Steemit faithfully everyday. This would indeed include myself and others like @barrydutton and @everittdmickey
#2. Those that are devoted to the corporate organisation itself
These guys on Steemit are the real big fish who are dedicated to Steemit. They have huge holdings of Steem Power (SP) in dormant accounts with reputations of 25 that never blog. These are the people who have ninja pre-mined Steem and hold enormous influence over the network, and only a few of them ever delegate Steem power to others.
The Iron Laws goes on to state that at all times, group #2 will hold the reigns of power and consensus over Steemit, as some of them are witnesses - the people who run the Steemit network. I have indeed petitioned for other Steemians to have a say over consensus.
These are the people who write the rules and order the hierarchy structure on Steemit
I'd say a good 80% of large Steem Power whales are good benefactors to Steemit, but there are rogue whales who downvote posts on those they feel earn to much or abuse the system. There have been several occasions where I have agreed with them if someone has abused a curation trail for example. I myself am a long term fan of the whales @smooth and @berniesanders
As for the power structure on Steemit, I'm pretty happy with it. This initial shareholders were needed to get Steemit going, but some changes do need to made to make sure that they and their buddies don't crowd out the Trending page with the same faces day after day. I agree with the whale @berniesanders on this one.
Hopefully HF-19 can address some of these issues that still plague Steemit, but we must remember that we are still in the Beta phase, so it's best to get all these pains ironed out before we move to the Alpha phase in 2-5 years time.
Have fun wherever you are in the world ... and as always ... Steem on!
Its not an iron law.
But it sure seems that way right now.
Octologues and similar really destroy this notion.
The future looks... different
Steemit is an octologian overdose!!
Nice post.
There is some overlap between the growth complex model, the bureaucratic politics model, and Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy; basically though, we can say the the bureaucracy of an organization (meaning the folks in the bureaucracy) start directing the organization to better themselves, rather than the mission of the organization.
The third law of Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics asserts that:
From the link:
Since politics basically means "who gets what", it's easy to see how this plays out on Steemit...BUT...
...the good thing is that Steemit is decentralized. While there are those who can use their individual strength (or combine their strengths) to work against the interest of the platform, we have also seen where other Whales have jumped in and fought those efforts . Part of the danger in the Iron Law is that the bureaucracy gains control through manipulating the organization through central control.
Much harder to do here!
Thanks for the discussion!
Hi Steve, I love your combo law thing going on there ... Steemit is indeed a very strange marine ocean mix of creatures! Be interesting to see what consensus brings for HF-19, but I'd like to see others represented in there too ... like the top #20 trending authors for example. Consensus should represent ALL Steemians!
Pournelle's Iron Law was one of the first theories I encountered...and it made so much sense to me I tend to apply it to everything LOL
Me too! My favourite is relationships. Ha ha!
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