RE: Improving the Economics of Steem: A Community Proposal

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RE: Improving the Economics of Steem: A Community Proposal

valued-customer in #steem • 7 years ago (edited)

I agree that society is critical to solving the problems of the community, but eliminating financial incentives to harm society is not ineffective. Profiteers are NEVER going to act as you recommend, and will respond to financial incentives that financially reward them for benefitting the community.

It's facile to simply appeal to their better nature. Some people have no better nature. They're called sociopaths. They're broken, and the best thing we can to is to implement financial incentives for them to act beneficially. Further, the lure of financial gain corrupts even non-sociopaths, and I think this applies to @trafalgar.

While we should grow our community in all the ways you suggest, doing so will be useless unless we also implement appropriate financial incentives to encourage beneficial acts by those susceptible to the lure of mammon, or are incapable of proper socialization because they're sociopaths.

7 years ago in #steem by valued-customer

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iflagtrash 7 years ago

I flag trash. You have received a flag.

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sorin.cristescu 7 years ago

Yes, what you write is not false. There is a degree of evil in each one of us. We are all doing a permanent balancing act between our righteous self and our uglier urges. We need an economic system which encourages people to act beneficially. My position is that, absent a social dimension, such a system does not exist. Even if you modify the current one and close the avenues of abuse it has exposed, its replacement will reveal relatively quickly completely different weaknesses and new possibilities to be abused its designers have simply not anticipated.

The only way to "plug the holes" in an economic system (albeit incompletely ! ) is to add a social dimension, a shared sense of "good" and "bad". It will not completely eradicate bad behavior but it stands a chance of bringing it under control, below a threshold which the system as a whole can cope with.

One of the first things I proposed, and I think at least one of the future communities will be built on that, is personal responsibility. That implies voluntarily linking your steem persona with your real life identity.

I am Sorin Cristescu in real life and I am sorin.cristescu on steem. I do that because I want to send a message: I pledge to act with a sense of responsibility and do things that I will not be ashamed of in the real life. I understand that might not appeal to everyone here and I remember reading your arguments against that. Fair enough. When communities will be around, I imagine we'll belong to different communities.

But let's not forget that there is an English proverb saying "the best disinfectant is sunlight" (or something like that). That is because exposing bad behavior from an actor (provided the actor has a sense of belonging to a community of values) usually leads to that actor decreasing the number of his bad actions or stopping acting evil altogether. "Naming and shaming" it is also called. For that to work, I agree, you need a commonly agreed definition of "shame". But once such a system is in place, it is effective, it significantly decreases abuse.

You can then bring abuse even below that level with some kind of an "enforcement entity" (a "police" of some kind). Here perhaps the "free downvotes" or "downvoting pool" might help, but it is essential that it be paired with an elaborate set of "rules of engagement".

I don't see any realization of that in those peddling the idea of "free downvotes" or "downvote pool". I've only seen people advocating such a thing implying that every user should be free to use them as (s)he sees fit. That is a recipe for chaos and disaster, like the old "wild west" (everyone is a police onto oneself) which had to be tamed to make life livable.

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valued-customer 7 years ago

I agree we will be in different communities, but also that does not mean we cannot agree on truths we both accept. I have been tortured and held as a slave by the very kinds of parties you consider beneficial. I will fight such parties to the limits of my life.

The 'wild west' is difficult to grasp for someone that has not been free. It is true that criminals take advantage of defenseless people in the absence of police - but it is the existence of police that convinces free people to leave their security in the hands of others, and this generates opportunity for criminals to prey on them.

Worse is the horrifying depredations of maniacs and criminals in present 'civilized' cities, where people are forcefully disarmed and helpless to protect themselves, and where police have zero actual liability to protect them. Worst of all is when those criminals are the actual police you expect to protect you, and that criminalize any attempt to protect yourself from them, or tell others the truth.

Let me know if your opinion changes after you have been beaten by cops. Mine did not. I already knew they were thugs from my earliest youth.

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iflagtrash 7 years ago

I flag trash. You have received a flag.

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