All upside: the cost of community benefits

Plagiarism, Spam, begging for votes, link dropping blah, blah, blah...

The problem with handling these things is they always have to be handled after they happen but, they are incentivized before they happen. The next issue is that the handling of these things is a community action which means someone must first recognise and then act to stop these behaviours and that incurs a cost of time, VP, effort to those handling. After that, anything earned by these accounts up until the point the activity is stopped, is kept.

There is no cost to doing this before they happen. The only cost is future earnings and when the ecosystem is already under strain, people are more incentivized to paste trash than take a risk posting something quality for nothing. But investing without guarantee, that is business. And here, the investment is time and effort, not financial outlay.

People talk about the freedom of action here and how social media should be free yet, in a community, there are costs. Part of the reason that most people in a real-world community act well is because there are social costs to not acting well, future costs but, that future cost is potentially forever as people can't change bodies. There are also benefits to being part of the community.

Con artists however generally move around a lot so they can keep running the same scams without paying the social costs since they are never actually a part of the long-term structure of the community. Here, people just get a new account once their con has been burned, they don't need to move house and Steemit will even fund their next startup.

This is the catch-22 problem isn't it? A cost can't be introduced because it will decrease interest levels in users but, without a cost, there is only upside to behaving badly. People want to have the best of both worlds but there is an incompatibility between the two. People want to protect the new accounts from costs so they can grow but in doing so means the system is getting swamped by those that only care for profit.

If you look at the engagement rates on Steemit, they are quite poor considering the numbers of users and comments per post etc but, the numbers do not tell the whole truth. For example, there is one person who has 7829 accounts created in the last 10 months spamming. There are parked accounts, and alt accounts that are barely used. There are farming bots and trails and there are the many stat auto-posters spamming content every few minutes. All of this (and many more things) destroys the accuracy of the engagement statistics.

Also, this is what all new users have to compete with for their little piece of the blockchain. A new user isn't in competition with me who is already established, they are up against the Spam accounts that are trying to mimic real users so they can get rewards. Clearing away spam goes a long, long way to making space for the real startup users to get established.

I use the word startup a fair bit these days because I think it is fitting for this environment on a few levels. The platform itself is in its infancy and the concept of the platform is even younger. Both need a lot of kinks worked out to be effective and go beyond startup phase.

But, new users are also startup entrepreneurs if they want a return on their posts. Anyone can post here without a return if they want, there is absolutely nothing stopping them. However, if one wants to realise some financial value, that is going to change their approach. It is going to come with costs and time is only one of them.

This is a social media and it requires being social but, those who are actually attempting to engage are being drowned out. What are they willing to pay to clear out some of their competition? Well, if we look at the people using bidbots, a lot. However, why not instead of paying to rise above the spam, pay to clear out some of the spam?

In the real world there is a cost to sending junk mail through the post but this changed with the internet and spam emails. They could target globally for almost free. This created a whole new industry, spam filters, censorship. But, if there was a cost to send, they would be much more careful with their campaigning and would target much more accurately making it, no longer spam but advertising.

By adding a cost to post? Again, we run into the same problem don't we? adding a cost to adjust community behaviours is seen as oppressive to those trying to earn yet, will also oppress those looking to game the system and, there are many more gaming than engaging. Any costs the user must pay are shot down yet, there are zero social costs to gaming the system. Zero. Only upside.

The upside might not be large to act badly from the outset but, it is large enough that people are willing to engage in it heavily and with volume, some are making a lot from it. This in turn drives the chance to be seen for others down and after being swamped, they are going to disengage and either try behaving poorly instead or just leave the platform.

No solution? Perhaps there is no solution to the problem but discovery has always been an issue here which is why I have kept pushing for community interaction and nodes to be built that can support a wide range of willing to work accounts. Nodes don't just support though, they attract.

New accounts shouldn't be concerned about being discovered as that is very unlikely in the current spam fest and bidbot hell. What they should be concerned with is getting discovered and this means doing the work to engage with the community. There is a cost to this that few want to pay and that is it isn't always comfortable work, it isn't always fun and much of it is unrewarded and may go unrewarded for a very long time or, forever. Nothing here is certain.

People want the poor behaviours taken care of but, not if it costs them something to take care of it. I do understand this however, what that does is leave the job up to a smaller percentage of users each day who don't have the eyes or the ears to keep up with the 10,000 new accounts each day and all the potential spammers within.

Yes, onboarding should outline what is good and poor behaviours better but again, people see this as authoritarian as do what you want is in play. Everyone can 'do what they want here' but if what one wants is to also earn, that is going to require certain behaviours which may mean, no longer being able to do what one wants.

A community is not a place of freedom, it is a place of responsibility and responsibility by definition is a constraint on freedom. I don't have solutions to all of the issues facing Steemit but expecting others in a decentralized and financially incentivized environment to act in the best interest of the community is unlikely to help me build what this place could be. So, it is going to take more thinking, more discussion and a hell of a lot more work before it is functioning as a constructive community where individuals can flourish.

Work is a down payment on the future and, it has a cost. You want upside? There are going to be downsides too. Expecting that only others should pay them is not how strong communities are built. This platform is not a charity, it is an economic business model that ties effort to reward. It doesn't mean all effort is rewarded directly though. Instead of thinking about what costs are unsuitable to put on the community, perhaps we should look at what costs are suitable to be a part of it and enjoy the benefits.

Taraz
[ a steemit original ]

I have a randomly busy day ahead so I may miss comments until tonight.