Steemit, The First Truly Self-Evolving Crypto: We Don't Ban, We Incentivize! - or The Inefficiency Of Forced Central Regulation #doyourpart
Recently there have been a flurry of fraudulent posts which were exposed as such. And of course some which were suspected to be fraudulent which were proven to most likely be legitimate.
In both cases several community members actively flagged suspicious content, which served to lower the reward that some fraudulent posters received for some, and for others it ensured that those that produced fraudulent content were not rewarded.
What have we created?
Decentralized community curation that rewards content that contributes to the value of the ecosystem and punishes those that threaten the growth of the ecosystem.
There was no central decree, this grew out of aligned interests<\b> resulting from incentives embedded in the system.
That is, posters compete for exposure, because the more exposure your post receives, the more Steem you are likely to be rewarded.
Moreover, posters are not incentivised to recklessly flag posts, lest the favour be returned and everyone's earnings are reduced.
So users are in a quandary: every competitor that can be killed increases the potential exposure your post can receive, which increases the expected value of rewards for posting, yet reckless flagging to kill competition risks retaliation and so probably carries negative expected value.
This incentivizes users to flag (literal flagging or exposing) those who produce content that can be expected to reduce the value a poster and similar posters can expect to obtain from rewards.
For example, users that take the time to write content invest more resources than a plagiarist, though they may receive the same rewards as the plagiarist.
By flagging the plagiarist, a user can reduce the rewards the plagiarist extracts from his posts, and by exposing the plagiarist the user galvanizes other users with aligned interests (insofar as their expected value is also threatened by the plagiarist) to also flag and expose the user and so on...
This results in low quality posts being exponentially debased until they disappear.
And the remaining posters are in consensus.
This creates a more efficient curation system than one dependent on a handful of users paid to curate who's incentives are not necessarily aligned with the majority of the network.
This shows the power of distributed governance, which in this context acts as a sort of digital natural selection, to prune out valueless posts.
This could not be done as efficiently if censorship were forced centrally.
I have also praised your efforts to encourage better curation, in my post. Keep up the good work!
https://steemit.com/steemit/@anduweb/steemit-take-your-community-back-or-we-ll-all-loose-everything
Thanks for the mention, that post was excellent #doyourpart and remove the value leechers!
Hey it's you both again! Thanks for the shoutout, let's definitely keep pushing the cause... I'm almost sure it's the same set of eyes that are seeing every other post, so HEY YOU, THE ONE READING THIS, #DOYOURPART #KEEPSTEEMITCLEAN
Awesome effort! I couldn't agree more. I will be following you guys, you got my support :)
Great info! You are doing a good job for the community!!!!
Thanks a lot! Means much to me!
Definitely not the first but much more successful than The DAO.
I added 'Truly' for nuance :-)
Appreciate your original thoughts. Thanks a lot