VOTE DELEGATION - THE SOURCE OF ALL EVILsteemCreated with Sketch.

in #steemit6 years ago

While I followed big discussions about voting bots and vote buying, I never saw a discussion about vote delegation or steem power delegation per se.
And this kind of confuses me.

So steemit with its reward and incentive system is a pure liberal market construction.
The end product should be fine, useful, entertaining and valuable content that can be easily found and consumed and in a feedbackloop gets rewarded by views, comments and on a monetary basis.

So why is there any use in someone delegating his or her voting power to someone else?
Lets stick to the basics again:
An author creates content that is consumed by readers.
Hence an author wants a general or a targeted group of readers that is as large as possible.
Where is the basic benefit for him if he attracts a reader that has voting power delegated to him?
What is better for him? 150 readers or 5 readers with double the voting power of the 150 combined?
In the real world its option 1, here on steemit atm it is option 2, and that makes no sense.

In monetary based systems you usually get at the end that result where you targeted the incentive onto before... and here on steemit atm this is to attract big voting power but definitely NOT to reach as many targeted readers as possible.

So while I get that there are on the blockchain basis useful things you can do with a delegation, on steemit it doesn't make any sense at all.
So voting with delegated SP should be impossible at all, or count 0.
The "lost votes" will not drain the reward pool and hence make it bigger for everyone that actually votes as a human being and keeps this community alive.

This of course should also stop any vote bots and vote buying. Why is this a good thing?
Just go to the sentences above.. why should any author be interested in a bot voting for his content? He should be interested to attract readers.

And please do not come with the "you have to buy votes to gain visibility bat".. if good content can not be found on a platform there is a problem with the user interface or search engine. If it is found and voted by real human being readers the feedback loop with the votes as described in the whitepaper kicks in and everything is fine...

There are many more things that could be implemented to make steem better... as for a basic vote for every steemian, etc.. but the main cause for the current bad situation is IMHO the useless and stupid delegation mechanism.

Not only does this scare off any newcomers but also long time steemians and at the end witnesses and whales will end up with a steemit where bots create garbage that is upvoted by bots with no human reader involved...

There are many initiatives like minnowprojects or regional groups that all help to make this problem smaller.. but the big elephant in the room is the above described mechanism...

And this is pretty sad as the steem BC and steemit are great ideas and could definitely thrive if managed properly.
Problem is: The catalyst for such a radical change that endangers a lot of business models of the whales and witnesses could only come from the steem price: If the steem price falls further, lets say below 34 cents or even below 20 cents, also witnesses and whales will see that they lose bit by bit all their steem value and need some radical change for the better.

And I ask myself: Could this also be the reason why @NED is focusing on the DESTINY project?

Happy to take your comments and fire... ;-)

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Steemit is not bringing real value. Most of the articles (including the most successful) are short and poorly-written. Elsewhere, they would not make so much money. If you take the most successful articles on Steemit, if you remove the whales' vote and the votes made by "fake" accounts, the number of real readers is ridiculous...

I fear you are right, hence the need to change a lot of things here... while we still have many engaged users..

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