RE: Just another day on Steemit, why I feel helpless.
What Im seeing on steemit is basically the same thing we see in the real world. The compounding interest of the wealthy leading to the centralization of power.
If you have money, you can make money. If you dont have money, you cant make money. If you have a lot of money, money makes itself. If you have almost no money, you not only remain poor, but go increasingly into greater levels of debt.
In terms of steemit debt looks like making lots of quality posts but getting nothing in return for it. You go into "increasing levels of debt" because if you were on a blog like Wordpress you could at least make money in the future for your time. Here on steemit you have 7 days, then thats it.
So the way I see it is that in order to stop this from happening either bots have to be removed entirely, or extremely limited to how many bots can be used on a post. Secondly, a tipping system would help, or a permanent "payout" system where somehow the content you create can permanently make you money, so there is an incentive to continuously build quality content without feeling the need to resort to bots and people who find your blog can reward you for past content that they like that maybe they have missed.
Im a super noob on steemit though, Im mostly just researching the site and seeing how it works at the moment. But I have a whole list of content I want to create for this platform but am feeling hesitant to do so. Im seeing that at least if I create content for the next year and nothing happens, I can take all that content and just paste it into a wordpress blog or something and start again. I believe in steemit as an idea... but it seems to be a mirror image of centralized power but on a decentralized platform...
You called it. Steemit is an oligopoly hegemony, where the people with massive amounts of steem power arbitrarily making their own rules and squash anyone who may one day challenge their power. It's one big clusterfuck just like the real world, but even more screwed up because their isn't a social agreement, very few concrete rules, and no one to enforce infractions except for the oligarchs and occasionally some sort of pseudo posse.
Pretty much what would happen if libertarians ran the world.
"Pretty much what would happen if libertarians ran the world."
Ha-Ha! That's a great analysis. I think they like to sound cool by calling themselves, "Anarchists," and tout their love of freedom. They hate it when people point out how they are using their money to limit other people's freedom of speech, though - so don't say that to them, or they're likely to use their $$$ and Steem Power to destroy your "social media reputation."
The problem is the system hasn't accounted for ways in which the system cam be gamed. .That's all it is. THAT is what need to be fixed and that is a developer problem that needs to be tackled. The same problem is also found in the censorship potential that comes with someones powerful flagging vote. It has just as many problems associated with that and will only get worse the more market share Steemit attempts to take from services/platforms like reddit and Youtube. It needs to be solved in the same sort of way Bitcoin solved the problem of trust, in that it didn't matter how much someone wanted to screw you they couldn't.
One can already do that. Simply send the tip in a transfer and explain it is a tip in the notes.