Why and how Steemit needs to improve (or face future competition that will come in to replace it)
So after being on Steemit for more than half a year, I feel I have the right to critique some serious issues with the platform. I certainly don't raise these issues to bash the platform, but rather to begin a conversation to address some serious design and incentive model issues and to start to look at alternative approaches to make Steemit far more fair and successful for all Steemit content producers.
The other thing that I would like to request you as you read this post is that instead of getting emotional on a topic near and dear to your heart, rationally ask yourselves with each of the issues identified, what is the underlying issue causing the symptoms identified. As an example, some people will say that buying upvotes on Steemit is a problem, but then the question that needs to be asked is "If Steemit incentives are working properly, why would people buy upvotes?" The answer in my view is, "they wouldn't." So isn't buying upvotes really a symptom of Steemit's incentive model not being effective?" The point here is, I would like to get to root causes of the issues on Steemit rather than discussing the visible symptoms, otherwise this will just devolve into an emotional rant page. Enough said..
Some very significant Steemit issues
I know that I won't hit all the issues on Steemit at the moment and so I'm happy to take suggestions for additional issues in the comments section below:
Real value in the Steemit system only comes from what large whales choose to distribute
The symptoms here are that everyone on Steemit ends of chasing whale support. I've heard lots of advice that it's necessary to build relationships with whales to get ahead on Steemit. How is this not just social media nepotism? What develops out of this are Steemit factions and Steemit "circle jerks" where people hover around key whales to get fed through upvotes. This just can't be the right way to drive good content. How is this really better than buying votes. It basically says that if I don't build a bunch of key whale supporters, that I go nowhere on the platform, UNLESS of course I buy a load of Steem and have everyone come running to me for votes. Then I get lots of Steemit friends very quickly. This is not how a healthy social system runs in real life, this is how systems based upon nepotism and corruption function. How can this be a healthy approach in a virtual society like Steemit? And yes, I understand the reasons why Steemit was designed like this, but it's not working properly regardless. It needs redesign based upon a better incentive model - as we'll also see in the next example.Whale downvoting often is just serious censorship
What a f**king mess this issue is. I've been watching the @haejin war on the sidelines for what seems like ages now. This is basically a running joke on how bad the downvote / censorship model is on Steemit. Whether @haejin is a good TA or not is irrelevant. If people truly like his content, so be it. It's genuine content and he's found a great niche. The issue is that a bunch of whales are now pissed that he's taking a big chunk of the rewards pool because he's really popular and posts at least five times daily. What's the answer? These whales downvote the piss out of him and write a litany of posts to basically ruin him on Steemit. WTF?? What is this? This is the equivalent of a local gang targeting successful small business owners on Steemit. It has really turned into a small war. I and many others simple stay out of its as not to get on the wrong side of specific whales for fear of literally being destroyed by them through downvotes. This can't be how Steem was intended to function. Sure, @haejin probably doesn't upvote that many people, but hey, there a loads of whales that just sell off their upvotes anyway. I don't see anybody targeting them. And once again, isn't this just a major problem with the incentive model? Sure, nice idea to make Steem self-managed by whales, but frankly it's not working properly in these situations and needs to be fixed.Tools for the searching and tracking of good content and similar content is basically non-existent
If I compare Steemit to any other social media platform, the content tracking and search functions are frankly horseshit. (Maybe because it's Google?) What this means is that as a small fish on Steemit, you are never found for your content. So again, what do people do instead? They go fishing for whales to upvote them. This is a tedious and completely ridiculous mechanism for rewarding excellent content. If you could easily find the content that you are looking for then a lot of people would be discovered for this content. Instead, they post to a category like "cryptocurrency" and their post is gone off the most recent 100 posts in an hour. After that, you can forget anyone finding you. For big whales that have minnows floating around looking for upvotes, they are fine. For everyone else, it's pretty hopeless.Tools for properly managing lists of content producers are missing too
So we all get one big list of people to follow. What if I have different categories and priorities of people I want to follow and upvote. Well basically, too bad. I guess I'm stuck with external bookmarks. I know that I have certain people that I would prefer to follow because I have a better chance of finding content that I like there. I also would like to give them upvotes for this. Nope, I instead get one big homogenous list of people that I can't differentiate and track for different types of content that I'm interested in finding. I would also like to prioritize them for their recent posts and not have their posts disappear in an avalanche of posts. No chance for this either.Tools for controlled upvoting are only for whales
Why do I need to have around 500 Steem (1 MilleVest) to get a slider bar for upvotes? It's not meaningful to give out a less than 1 cent upvote. This makes no sense. I'm sure the original concept was that people would do more voting then to spread out their upvotes, but frankly I don't have time to search for good content all day on a system not designed to support it. I would like to upvote a few great people rather than giving them a couple of cents. So I patiently wait until I have a massive Steem account to do this. This makes no sense and would allow people to really upvote good content and be more selective with their votes.Upvotes having value only over the period of a week is way too short
Unfortunately, this seems to go along with the fact that past posts can't easily be found on Steemit after one week because the search sucks so bad. This again provides wrong incentives. People will only invest a certain amount of time on content for Steemit since they can't keep earning, even if it's at a lesser valuation rate. Additionally, because I (and I'm sure others) don't hover on Steemit 24/7, I might miss great posts that I want to upvote, but it's too late after one week. This is again another big weakness in the Steemit incentive model.Views and number of subscribers have no influence on value received
I get no additional incentives for the number of subscribers or views. This means again that it is all up to individual whales to give any value to the minnows and support excellent content. As noted above, this trickle down approach just isn't enough to support the many good content developers that don't ever get recognized on Steemit and therefore just walk away after a while. This is frankly just dumb as an incentive model since there need to be more measures than just whether you are popular with whales for getting ahead.Purchased upvotes is simply a symptom of a poor incentive model
I hear lots of bitching about upvoting on Steemit by whales, but the only reason purchasing upvotes is so popular is because the system is incredibly poor in allocating appropriate value in the current system. The consequence is that people realize they can get better value for time spent from paying for upvotes. This wouldn't happen nearly as often if the other incentivation mechanisms weren't so poorly designed. This is of course when many whales throw up their hands about buying upvotes because they think they earned the right to be there through climbing up the Steemit ladder. Yet, if I bought a load of Steem today, I would immediately get loads of supporter upvotes because people would flock to me to get my upvotes. This is a completely duplicitous system that has more holes in it than a fishnet stocking.Content aggregation versus content development is not properly differentiated and valued
Different types of content need different types of valuation models. Developing good content certainly takes a different amount of time and effort than aggregating good content. This doesn't mean that content aggregation is not of value, but it takes much less time and work to develop it. I hear people complain about people that make a successful blog from finding and aggregating good content. This should be rewarded as well, but differently. Also because it it so difficult to track all the good content on Steemit, people upvote good content aggregation too. Again this is a problem of the Steemit structure and search capabilities as well as the incentivation model.
OK, that's probably enough for now. I'm sure I've missed plenty of other critical points and you are welcome to include them in the comments below. Please however refrain from turning this into an emotional bitch fest as mentioned at the beginning. What I want to really talk about below is what are the real root causes for Steemit symptoms and what are the potential design solutions to address these. This is where a constructive conversation on these topics should go. From there, hopefully the Steemit team can take these ideas and bring the platform to a much more sustainable and scalable model for the future.
Thanks for participating in a productive discussion.
Good post @newsandviews and grats on earning $43.40 for it. Nice one.
Thanks
The system is just as the people creating and maintaing it are. If people are revengeous and thirsty for the instant vindictive gratification then they'll build into the system the possibility to revenge. Just recently I read a comment on a post explaining that the commenter downvoted the poster by just as much as the poster would earn by a bid bot. In his vengeful reasoning the commenter forgot that 1. the poster invested his own SBD to the bidbot, and the commenter took thet too, 2. the commenter didn't have so much insight to consider the changing price, so by the payout the price my be different that when he downvoted, 3. when the poster pays it out into fiat the value may be different again, and 4. by downvoting also other upvoters loose.
Now imagine this type of payment system for work. You can't order and pay work of others by such a system.
The other thing is, that in one post I read a recommendation of one more wealthy guy around here that for those havlesses around here it is better they just comment on the posts of havlots, because they might earn far more then by writing their own posts, up to 1,200.00 USD per month he said.
Thanks for your insights. And yes the system is designed (wrongly) to allow vengeful actions by whales. You are also absolutely correct that a number of people don't even post and make pretty significant money just off the comment upvotes on whale blogs. This again shows that the incentives in the Steemit system are simply wrong.
The crappiest part about all this is that after people get used to a system and have worked their way up in it (i.e. whales), they somehow think that everyone new should have to do the same thing too because they did it. (Some ridiculous self-righteous attitude that I can't truly understand.) They don't seem to bother to ask the question as to whether it makes sense at all in the way that it is structured along with the ridiculous hoops that people need to jump through. Through this weird social mechanism, the whole system becomes self-reinforcing despite it being a crap design. It reminds me heavily of this experiment done with monkeys but in a different configuration:
This is great. Has anyone actually confirmed that this experiment was done this way? Or is it a story?
I honestly haven't looked for the original study documentation, but I'm quite convinced it's from a real experiment. This is exactly how people operate in any case.
A great video. The funny thing about this self-righteous attitude is that they have changed the system, because in 2016 they were able to get 1000 SBD for a post easily (that's what one of them said), so buying a car with cash or paying out the mortgage was easy. But not many say anything about how it was before that fork. Now, they don't pay out more than 1000 SBD per post, or at least that was to read somewhere. Well, the rich always like to preach about hard work even if they got with entirely other methods than hard work.
I'm here for 2 weeks and I already see the point in this post. One of the things that could be also better is the blog of every individual. You have all the content, yours and resteemed, in the same place. This should be divided into two sections: your posts and resteemed. It would be much better. Sometimes you scroll and scroll through resteemed posts, before you find the post of the user, you would actually like to check out or read it's contents. The blog would be much nicer, if it had those two sections, that I already mention.
Agreed. This would also be a very sensible improvement.
Great topic about an incredible platform. I so much hope it lasts and know that something like this will last, whether it's steem or a next generation.
Your post is around the intercept between human nature and the game rules of this platform.
People are greedy. Many people are vengeful. People are good, selfless, bad and selfish all in one. If the game rules set up an opportunity to work the system (like buying votes, setting up pools, gang like intimidation etc) then people will do it.
We deal with this aspect of human nature generally by creating laws and enforcing them. The better the legal system works the more people want to live in that country.
Bitcoin deals with it by having very strict and simple rules that cannot be broken (unless programmed differently). As a concept it might be anarchistic, disruptive and transcend classic governance structures. But the tool itself is pretty much a rigid and limited set of rules and functions. Value can be transferred - but only if there's value in that account. You have a very safe password - but don't lose it or you're value is toast.
Reddit is more chatoic and has limited adoption. Facebook is much more controlled and has much greater adoption than Reddit. People want that safety and control.
But this system is based on a more anarchistic philosophy. And censorship is intentionally restricted and not centralised (though in effect a few whales do have a large say). And I think this is going to be something that limits mass adoption.
I actually think that one of the platform's greatest attractors is also the thing that's going to demotivate people. Giving money back to the people instead of shareholders is beyond awesome. But where on Facebook people write because they want to write (for whatever reason). On coming here with an expectation of making money, when they see that in fact the majority will make only cents what's the point. Thing is, the point is it's a great decentralised and democratic system. But the focus has been put onto money. And with this focus on the money I think it changes things in peoples' minds.
A double edged sword.
I imagine it's going to be the whales that bring people to the platform. Famous people with lots of followers seeing that they will make a lot of money here drawing their fans across. So in this sense the whale is essential.
As a side note. I've had this great post up all week but have not had time to look at it. Last night I finally got into it but could not finish my responses so left it for the morning. If I were on this platform and not getting rewarded by money I would have done that without question. Just come back to it later. But as there is money involved my thinking was I should get it done right away or not bother. As I could not do it right away there was a voice saying to work out how to do it and still get rewarded or not to bother. So the financial incentive was both motivating and demotivating me. And this is despite the fact that I would only be looking at a few cents if any!!!!
So I think expectation management is a huge issue that should be addressed. I have seen much advice about posting for the sake of the content not the money and I've seen many other posts/videos about "how I made x$ on my first post". The latter is going to draw people but then they will be disappointed when they discover that just as in life, most are only going to earn cents.
So I think that having the money as a "side" note of a much greater system is how this system will push aside FB.
So true - great points - especially the one about goofle being horseshit!
Thanks a lot.. and the picture is especially appropriate since Google leaves a trail of shit (and slime) in whatever business they engage in.
Another aspect that will hold back mass adoption is the uncontrolled nature [by design] of the platform. Many people won't feel safe. And especially in the west, safety is what most people want. That's why we have so many laws and spend so much on enforcing them through centralised mechanisms. Whether it's banks and banking, the roads or Facebook.
Given that the majority of people will not earn much. Perhaps just cents. And given that users of Facebook seem to congregate in groups. Either friends or a common interest cause. Perhaps if the game rules of steem were changed to reward the group behaviour instead. Working together people achieve something that is "worth" achieving.
This currently does happen and it's centered around whales.
BTW I think there is a second payout at 30 days isn't there?
I think I heard that once, but they change the incentive system every so often. I've never seen a payout from it myself.
Jordan Peterson talks about how many things in nature break down into the Pereto principal. The 80/20 principal. 20% of poeple have 80% of the wealth etc. In this case, 20% of the people having the vast majority of the voting power.
Could it be that aiming for anything else is to fight against nature?
I think it was this interview where he mentions it.
It's not a question of whether it's 80/20 (or 90/10), it's rather a question of whether the incentives are designed properly to account for this and not be distorted and badly manipulated by it.