You know the Steem whitepaper says "Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal."
I am not sure how many actually read the whitepaper. I see a lot of talk about abuse and how to "stop" it etc but in many ways I view that as fighting against the stream of a river. You can fight it all you want and get nowhere, or you can harness it and use it.
First for a section of the whitepaper that I think many should very much keep in mind.
Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse”the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.
The goal of building a community currency is to get more “crabs in the bucket”. Going to extreme measures to eliminate all abuse is like attempting to put a lid on the bucket to prevent a few crabs from escaping and comes at the expense of making it harder to add new crabs to the bucket. It is sufficient to make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping.
I also find this concept important to keep in mind.
The impact of this voting and payout distribution is to offer large bounties for good content while still rewarding smaller players for their long-tail contribution. The economic effect of this is similar to a lottery where people overestimate their probability of getting votes and thus do more work than the expected value of their reward and thereby maximize the total amount of work performed in service of the community. The fact that everyone “wins something” plays on the same psychology that casinos use to keep people gambling. In other words, small rewards help reinforce the idea that it is possible to earn bigger rewards.
I think an informed user is the best kind of user and the concepts above actually help put the system in perspective as to how it was designed and thought out.
To quote DMX "Always know the rules of the game before you play it"
Do you have a link to the whitepaper?
If you click the three lines next to your profile icon scroll down you will see the white paper towards the bottom.
You're awesome! You should use @dustsweeper.
I am not to worried about the dust. It has been a while since I have had a dust post but I know the people behind it and I like what they are doing cause the plantons too many times get dusted....
It works for comments. A lot of dust people are wasting their votes on your comments. I would have upvoted your reply.
Once again that is a plankton vote issue. For me myself I think if you have your slider you don't need a service like this. I would rather those without their slider to save their votes for content anyways and not waste their limited voting power on my comments.
You make an excellent point, but not trying to eliminate all abuse, also doesn't mean we should ignore all absue.
Finding a balance is the challenge.
Agree that everyone should read the whitepaper! :)
Agree completely!
I totally agree with you my friend, we that’s is why it is left to all of us to do it together, the slippery wall are the rules and penalty set to reduce abuse and the strength of the other crabs is us together fighting against abuse . You made a good point my friend
If you can’t beat them, join them.
lol saw the bot vote!
It was actually supposed to be for my comment... Oh well - enjoy the gift :)
It's a game in reality. Yes words are written but the ranking, the voting system, and really everything involved through the system makes it a game. Where you build your alliances and pick your battles to try to climb to the top or in our case grow into a whale. Glad to have you apart of my alliance.
Wow that was surprisingly well communicated, given that a couple of sentences felt like abstractions.
Still, I think they made their point come across very clearly. This approach is pragmatic and keeps in mind that people at large would keep working together for common and personal progress on the platform. Although a part of me wants to say that this thinking might be naive but the other part also understand that until we have sufficient number of years behind us as a platform, a radical step to punish the abusers might actually backfire rather than doing good.
Exactly.
Every time I mention eliminating selfvoting (I know, I’m horrible like that) in order to make sharing “compulsory” to earn second accounts and Sybil attacks are the usual response.
Aside from the fact that those tend to be something rather specific to internet pros and early adopters, is it so hard to understand that a perfect system doesn’t exist and that there will always be abuse.
Even in systems with rules, systems with a Justice, there’s jails. There will always be abuse but the reality is that most people will also live by by rules. All systems with rules tell us that abuse is always a minority.
Why are we being so blinded by the few rather than focused on the good we can do.
No system, no blockchain was as unique as Steem in the sense that the #untalented can even earn, create a new revenue stream. No system has the potential to create a whole new economy and generate social vertical mobility in the way Steem can.
Yet we are wasting all our energy, and VP, on the few bad ones. Rather than design a system which minimizes their possibility to abuse.
I think it could also help prepare new people who first get here. I think many get discouraged when we could sort of focus on the positive at least a bit more.
The negative gets amplified IMO so its sort of a distorted view that in some ways hurts the community.
Really good comment btw.
The negative is definitely an echo chamber, just like fake news quicksand even. Once you’re in it...
But that also fits the both libertarian and ancap attitude. Welcoming isn’t necessarily their focus, they’re mostly angry against the existing.
Sometimes I wonder whether it’s more an anger management method than a political adherence tbh.
This is needed to be shared, abuse can never be removed but can be contained/limited. I totally agree with you
Where is the line?
When I cant "profit" :)
Not everyone wins something because redfish/minnow upvotes are dust. But I read somewhere that it might be changing soon.
If that's what's in the whitepaper then we are all crabs. 😂😂😂 If there are bad people then good people should stand up and make their voices heard too. Those who can will take action and those who can't will just be at the sidelines. If I could be an expert at programming/coding I'd join in too.
This is why the flag wars that go on are a waste of time - they spend so much time and effort on flagging each other rather than focussing on what they can do themselves
They are focused more on the hate and the hurt and who is right and so on, so they go on and on.
Yeah I just sit on the sidelines and think how immature it all is