Towards a Human Curation Token part 1: the case for an SMT

When philosophical conflict arises, I find it useful to look at the issues from a more and more basic level until I can find one that will support something closer to consensus. Often going back to basic goals and taking a new path from there can give us an opportunity to get out of habitual disagreements and find ways to take action that will be effective. I think that's particularly necessary right now in the conflict over automation and vote-buying vs. manual curation on Steemit.

If you pay attention to what I do around here you'll have noticed that I don't buy into the strict dichotomy that a lot of people do on this topic, and I hope you'll approach this post with an open mind. When I push down through the arguments and the theories, I eventually find a simple statement that I think I can find broad agreement with:

Adding more human-guided curation to Steemit would be a good thing.

In this series I'm going to take off from that perspective and see where I can get to. This post is going to be about why I think Smart Media Tokens are a good approach to focus on. Future posts will address refining specific goals and how to pursue them effectively through an SMT-based strategy. With any luck I'll get somewhere useful before SMTs come out.

The Basics

Steem is a cryptocurrency based on a Proof-of-Stake system. This means that as the supply of currency grows, it's distributed to users in proportion to the amount of existing Steem that they have staked as Steem Power. Steem has a novel voting system that obfuscates a lot of this but on a basic level that's what's happening.

Staking has a fundamental time cost, in that staked Steem can only be cashed out in weekly increments over the course of 13 weeks. This cost maintains the price of the currency and essentially powers the functioning of the network.

The staking system and the way rewards are allocated as voting power has led to emergent behaviors that some find troubling. In order to receive the value of their stake, a user must make sure to use their voting power in some fashion. Spending voting power through human votes is a resource-intensive process that requires both time and the ability to consume extensive amounts of content.

As such, users have developed various mechanisms for automating their votes, some of which have had the result of returning more currency value to users per amount of voting power spent than they would get by using them manually. Over time the cost differential has shifted more and more of the voting on the platform to automated methods, as users seek profit over engagement.

Why do you want to change this?

Users have many different priorities on this issue. Mine is that currency value, while an important component of the system, is not the greatest value to be had here. Engagement also has value, and over the long term the resonance between community engagement and the generation of currency value is what should allow the platform to thrive.

Through the strategic use of currency value, I've had an immensely easier time generating engagement here than I ever have on any other platform. And through engagement, I'm gaining an easier path to currency value every day, and also offering an easier path to other users. This is the ultimate promise of Steem as I see it.

Therefore, I would like to see the platform change its cost structure to provide more immediate reward to users who are participating in the socially interactive aspects of Steem, in order to increase that currency/engagement resonance across the platform as a whole and in the end generate more value for everyone invested here.

Why not just change Steem?

A lot of the most dedicated proposals I've seen to accomplish this involve changing the fundamental platform to ban some or all of the automation behaviors. Humans really love banning things. However, banning just about anything is rarely effective, and banning automation on the blockchain is particularly difficult. One of the fundamental characteristics of blockchain-based systems is that they are incredibly easy to automate. This has advantages and disadvantages but they're ones we basically have to live with.

In addition, while Proof-of-Stake systems have a great many advantages, they have one large disadvantage: it's very difficult to change from Proof-of-Stake to anything else. If a fundamental conflict arises in a traditional business partnership, and the business is to go in a direction one of the partners dislikes, it's relatively easy to come up with an equitable buyout arrangement. This is not true of Proof-of-Stake, where any change must be followed by the users who have been disadvantaged maintaining their ownership equity over thirteen weeks.

On a purely practical level, if you succeed in telling all of the people currently automating their votes that they can't do it anymore and have to vote manually, how do you predict they will respond? Three months of whales, orcas, and dolphins aggressively flagging everyone who has pissed them off while crashing the price of Steem by cashing out seems like a very bad idea to me. I really try to be optimistic but if you think any significant percentage of those people are going to start trying to become good manual curators I think you're deluding yourself.

Why a Smart Media Token?

Because they're almost here. Maybe we could come up with something better. Probably we could come up with something better. But then someone would have to implement it, and that isn't a fast process. If we can find a way to use the resources that are nearly available to us, we can build something with far less time and effort.

Because I like adding better than subtracting. Let's stop talking so much about taking rewards from the people we perceive as not deserving them, and start talking about adding rewards for the people who we want to encourage. That's the community-focused, supportive attitude that we really want, right?

Because we can get a boost from that new-car smell. When SMTs come out everyone is going to want to play with them. The best-designed, most-thoughtfully-created tokens have a real chance to become fundamental to the future operation of Steem, an opportunity that doesn't come around much even if you're a top-20 witness. So we want to be prepared with a strong, nonprofit, community-supported Human Curation Token before they're ready.

Because I said "nonprofit" above and I believe that's the proper way to go about things. If we don't do the work of figuring one out ahead of time, someone else is going to, and it might be someone who wants to keep a huge percentage of the tokens for themselves.

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I don't want ownership of this. I'm willing to do some of the work of actually building it when the time comes, but this is a project I'm interested in writing a lot about, not one I'm interested in operating by myself, or making executive decisions. The end goal here is to get a token that has broad support and incorporates the best ideas of the community. I have a bunch of thoughts, and I'm going to share them as this series continues, but if none of them get used that means somebody else came up with better ones, and we all win.

When next I post on this topic I'm going to talk about refining our broad goals into specific actionable ones.

I feel like I need an ending line. My ending line on convention panels is always "go make stuff," which works well enough here I guess.