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RE: Did you think we were going to leave human nature at the door?
You don't have to change human nature to make larger systems work. Larger systems such as honest institutions work by creating the right environment and incentives for human nature to result in a useful/cooperative outcome. Generally successful examples of such institutions have formalized concepts of accountability, meritocracy etc. that are pretty lacking on Steem.
Yeah, I completely agree, but they have some sort of hierarchy which allows for someone to decide and enforce who it works. As you point out, we don't have that.
They have hierarchy, which makes some things simpler and easier to achieve. But there's nothing to say that hierarchy is necessary for accountability or meritocracy. Indeed when you compare systems of government, feudalism and monarchy are more hierarchical than democracy, but democracy has far higher accountability and in the modern world is more associated with meritocracy as well. It's actually moving away from hierarchy that brings in those traits.
The real benefit of hierarchy is that the process of making decisions is less expensive. The decisions aren't necessarily better, but they're able to be made more easily. Yet, this advantage is fairly moot when it comes to consensus on a blockchain network, whether at the block production level or the liquid vote. Every payout decision is made in the same time period (7 days precisely) and we are making 150,000 collective payout decisions every day. Other kinds of decisions can be made collectively and efficiently if we put our minds to it and the system in place.
So in our context, hierarchy shouldn't be necessary for that either. There is no need for it to achieve those things and no need to give up on concepts of accountability just because we have given up on hierarchy.
Interesting perspective. I will consider it further. Thanks for the thoughtful response.