Communities Are The Only Thing Capable Of Curbing Abuse On Steem

Volumes have been written about the supposed failure of Steem as a mechanism for quality content discovery. I'm not sure it's a such an abject failure in the first place and, on the other hand, I'm not sure it even could've worked much better given human nature and the fact that curation is not the only thing Steem Power is meant to be used for. Steem Power represents network resources (Resource Credits) and witness voting power in addition to power over the allocation of author rewards. Steem Power is universal across all applications and niche communities on Steem. I think the original vision was to form communities each with SMTs of their own to curate content. Niche communities where the members know each other personally and where there is freedom to adjust the token parameters according to the specific needs of each community are much better equipped to deal with abusers than a disjointed collection of users such as all Steemians. When people do not know each other there is no sense of community and there will be no accountability. The power of communities in curbing purely selfish behaviors that harm the whole is basic to our species.

This is why I don't believe tweaking the math of reward distribution will do much to improve the situation. I don't think it will make things much worse, either. What I do think should be done is for large stakeholders first and foremost as well as the rest of us to look for ways to empower communities. Delegating to apps that reward their users for generating decent content is key. That is why I found DSound and Musing losing their delegations so disappointing. If curation is to be done using STEEM, SBD and SP, then having powerful app specific curators is a good thing.

The reason why the perceived poor content discovery has been an issue on Steem for so long lies in Steemit Inc's inability to implement the SMT protocol for quite some time despite promises. Now that the Steem-Engine team has implemented the SMT White Paper on a side chain, the Steem vision can begin to come to fruition. There is no reason to abandon ship now. Things are finally looking up.