App Accounts Are The Best Curators

in #steem5 years ago (edited)

The grand vision of Steem was using the wisdom of the crowds to uncover worthy content and reward it. We've seen how that has turned out. The essential contradiction is between ROI-seeking stakeholders who shy away from no trick to maximize theirs and those stakeholders who use all of their stake to curate as best they can without regard for their personal ROI. Suffice to say, the current system of decentralized Proof-of-Brain puts the latter at a clear disadvantage in terms of stake accumulation thus slowly but surely drives them away from positions of influence.

The Steem Economic Improvement Proposal and the Worker Proposal systems have drawn a lot of criticism lately on the basis that ostensibly the little guy will be getting screwed even worse than now when HF 21 is done. While I don't think the free downvoting quota is going to change much of anything, I don't think changing the author vs. curator split is going to screw the little guy, either. It would if the big guys had been curating altruistically so far, which seems to be the patently false tacit assumption behind this line of reasoning. What has been going on so far is circle jerking and vote selling. That's what most of the big guys have been doing so far. What the change in the author vs. curator reward split will do is make manual curation more lucrative in comparison to automated vote selling. Vote selling will not stop but some large stakeholders will notice that manually curating content can more often be more economically rewarding than it has been before, which is why I believe there will be more of it. That will require them to consume the content, of course, but if content creators are unable to create any content interesting to consume even if the consumer gets paid for consuming it, then I believe the situation is entirely their own fault.

When it comes to the convergent linear reward curve, a couple of things should be noted. First of all, it does not concern vote value but content value. The little guys are just as capable of upvoting highly rewarded content as the big guys. With the 50/50 author/curator split, it makes much less difference who authored the highly rewarded content than before. What the convergent linear reward curve will do is encourage the concentration of votes on fewer pieces of content. Where the little guy actually has a disadvantage at is that he will benefit less from self-upvoting than the big guys, relatively speaking. A lot will depend on the actual parameters, though.

The main point of my piece was, however, that none of this an issue when the biggest curators are apps who own most of the stake in an SMT or a SCOT token they use to reward content creators. There is no need to wrestle with ROI-maximizing stakeholders when a team of curators is hired by the app owners whose job it is to reward the most desirable content. In a situation like that content creators are rewarded according to how well their content serves the business model of the app. If the curators are not doing a good job, the app-owning company will fire them. I think the most successful communities on Steem will be like this while holding Steem Power will be left with the purpose of renting out Resource Credits to apps and users and witness voting. The ecosystem will most likely end up becoming a decentralized archipelago of centralization like this. No longer will Steemians have to tolerate individuals owning millions of Steem Power acting like two-year-olds and messing up Proof-of-Brain without the ability to shut them down or having someone both with the vested interest in and the ability to do so.

Decentralized Proof-of-Brain using stake-based voting has proved a failure. But that doesn't mean Steem, a DPoS platform with stake-based voting has to be a failure. DPoS works fine. There just has to be a set of tools to easily create controlled environments for variants of PoB to be implemented in communities suitable for each purpose that, through trial and error, may find the right parameters of centralization/decentralization combined with the right kind of culture. That way, an evolutionary process can take place to weed out the bad ones from those that can work.

Secondly, the content reward mechanism is but one side of Steem. Both EOS and Ethereum are expensive to build applications on and to use them. We've already seen how well-suited Steem is for building decentralized games involving digital assets. Splinterlands is ready to be marketed the wider community. Fast and free transactions are a central requirement for games like that to gain any traction. Imagine having to pay for transaction validations with GAS like on Ethereum as a player or for the app developers having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for purchasing RAM to run their app on. Steem is clearly moving away from being merely a blogging platform.

One more thing, I think the success of Steem is hindered by a branding issue. I've noticed even some seasoned Steemians using Steem and Steemit interchangeably, which is ignoring a huge distinction. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the company developing Steem is called Steemit, Inc. I think rebranding the chain should be on the table. It's not for me to decide but as the price keeps tumbling despite development having picked up in the last six months, something's got to be done about the piss poor perception of Steem the rest of the crypto community has.

What do you think?

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Hi @markkujantunen!

Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 4.011 which ranks you at #3944 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has dropped 69 places in the last three days (old rank 3875).

In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 144 contributions, your post is ranked at #51.

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