RE: Improving the Economics of Steem: A Community Proposal

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RE: Improving the Economics of Steem: A Community Proposal

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raj808 in #steem • 7 years ago (edited)

As someone has mentioned in their comment that we might drive away some whale stake in the form of pay for vote services, I say... So what! And here's why.

Those, so called, services take a huge amount out of the pool without ever creating any value. Unless you labor under the delusion that there is value in meritless content achieving fake standing. Why would we want such investors or such mechanisms? I'm not sure.

There are businesses on steem, such as steemhunt etc, trying to build genuine marketing/advertising use cases for serious investment in steem... Yet the bidbot driven shitshow drives all the potential growth of audience away within weeks of joining. This stifles any chance of further, and larger, positive investment in this space. Why would anyone invest big buying millions of steem to try and incentivise a none existent audience?

There is far too little consideration and concern for the small users on steem and what they represent; audience for any development (new games or dapps) or potential businesses thinking of building on steem. The users, and their UX, are what will make or break long term success and at the moment steem is not a pleasant experience for new users. Anything that systematically destroys UX is counter intuitive and should be weeded out asap. If this proposal could even come close to achieving that, it would be worth it in the long term, however painful it may be in the short term.

There are plenty of people in this comment thread preaching that we need to just ignore all this and focus on SMT and community. I don't agree, as SMTs without a solid coin and Blockchain functioning to limit attacks on the USP of the platform, will simply become another mechanism of abuse by bot owners and vote farmers. It would end up like a never ending spiral of tokens perpetuating centralised agendas. The irony being that many community SMTs would probably be created to try and address the balance but their value will be dragged down by closed communities (circle jerks) building hype and inflated value through carrot/stick mentality.

So yeah, get the ship in order (steem rewards mechanisms) as well as inventing new ways to power said ship. If the holes aren't patched though, the ship will sink regardless of any shiny new outboard motor!

7 years ago in #steem by raj808

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dana-edwards 7 years ago

I agree. Bidbots are essentially the main problem. They simply have too much power at this point and there is no curation involved. There was a time when the bots actually did some level of curation but now it's simply pay per vote which is agnostic to the content entirely.

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raj808 7 years ago (edited)

Yup. While some bidbot owners do have separate curation initiatives it's honestly like a dictator throwing scraps to a bunch of starving people. That may sound overly dramatic... but the analogy stands up! As what you'll find in most of these 'so called' curation bots running separate from bot owners bidbots is that they are autovoting people who either work for the bot owner or who keep quiet and perpetuate the status quo. It's less about content than it is about political maneuvering from people who are gaming the system to the detriment of everyone other than themselves. They are taking directly from this economical system, without giving back anything (apart from to their supporters), while single handedly destroying steem's reputation in the wider crypto community and the mainstream. I'm still completely baffled why the community and steemit.inc puts up with this? It's not rocket science to join the dots on how these people operate.

I've been on the fence about powering down and waiting for my opportunity to sell at a reasonable price for a while now. Yet at the same time I've been tirelessly promoting steem on twitter and spearheaded a (failed) tweet storm to get steem listed on coinbase. I wonder why Brian Armstrong didn't respond in listing steem? We missed a golden opportunity to leap up in market cap and token price and It's undoubtedly for all of the reasons I've stated above. Coinbase won't list anything they deem shady! My desire to see steem work comes from both a selfish and an altruistic place. As a freelance writer, I envisioned steem could help support me in launching a digital nomad lifestyle. But also, I saw this platforms potential to fulfill business aims as well as decrease global poverty. How would this work?

no vote selling = more and fairer manual curation
the carrot and the stick effect works in a positive way to encourage people to up the level of their content (I saw this happen as a curie curator during the market peak)
hundreds of thousands (especially from poorer countries) onboard to a fairly rewarding steem system
advertising and business invest big sums to engage and incentivise this ever increasing audience

This is how steem could have (and still could with done intervention) created a unique, world changing, virtuous cycle

I've put so much time and effort into steem in many ways - I was involved in building a charity on steem last year - not to mention losing first publishing rights on creative writing that I've been advised by a friend who works in publishing to take down. Curating for curie, teaching writing workshops in a discord community, all of these things I've done to make steem better and I'm quite angry about the way people have allowed steem to go. Steemit.inc could have used there missive stake or found development options to nip vote selling in the bud long ago. I understand that they want to remain impartial... but to the extent of allowing the whole thing to go to shit seems strange to me.

Ha ha, rant number three over 😉

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dana-edwards 7 years ago

Even services like Steem Follower work much better than Bidbots because with Steem Follower you still had manual curation. The bots essentially are, you pay for votes. So I'm specifically against paying for votes.

If it's about promotion then set up a separate mechanism for people to promote their work without completely breaking it for people who want to earn their way up.

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