RE: "Derivatives" - A Series About Fixing Steemit - Part 3
Alright, I've finally read through this (very insightful and well-written) piece, as well as all the comments.
I am really not sure what to add.
I guess where I am on this Steemit journey really doesn't involve me considering the long-term health of the platform. If it folds, great, I go elsewhere. I have nothing serious invested here in either time or money.
I do get annoyed at the high payouts I see on ... mediocre ... content. I posted the folloing on one of denmarkguy's threads, which I will repost here because I am lazy and I am proud of my analogy.
Robert Denham is a name I would bet a STEEM you have never heard of. He is a former board member of the company Chevron, and also its second largest single shareholder. Now, Chevron pays a dividend on it's shares. A pretty nice one, too, over $4 a year. So for doing absolutely nothing, Mr. Denham is pocketing hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars a year thanks to his stake in Chevron.
Imagine if Mr. Denham worked out a deal where instead of dividends, he could go to the local Chevron gas station, pour himself a Slurpee, take one sip, and then hurl it against the window. Then the cashier would then open the drawer and hand over $500 and Mr. Denham would leave the store and carry on with his day.
Can you imagine how frustrating that would be for the cashier? This guy is making less than $9 an hour, and yet this other fella gets to walk in, act like an idiot for 2 minutes, contribute nothing of value to the store or the company, and leave with more cash in his pocket than the cashier brings home in a week.
When I look at Steemit, I see this play out every. single. day.
And I try not to let it bother me, but it does.
So some of what you are proposing sounds like it would mitigate this to some extent? I'd be all aboard that train.
I'm not sure how you separate the reward structure for content creation and witnessing/investing. I guess you'd need a second currency that couldn't be exchanged for the first. So it probably wouldn't work.
I guess the bottom line is that, with all due respect, I really don't care. I will vote for the witnesses that I see doing things I like and will follow the lead of people who have ideas that I can get behind. But there's just so much else that matters more to me than the fate of cryptocurrency, so it's hard for me to offer much more feedback than this.
Sorry if that disappoints you. I'm only 4 months into this platform - get back to me in a year and I might feel differently :P
The only answer to this type of abuse that I see is quite simple but effective and already proved. It calls taxes, but to take measures like this you should change the Steemits code and this is something that I think the whales wouldn't approve. Is obvious that the first adopters, the witnesses the most powerful users of Steemit won't take a measure like this because is going directly against their interest, but I don't know maybe some of them would see right the redistribution of the benefits.
Then we should see how to distribute those taxes and with what purpose. The basic theory is that the bigger you are they more taxes you pay, but in the real live it's not like that. Because the richest people always find the way to trick the system and they have the tools to make it happen.
It's a very complex theme and of course isn't the panacea but could solve some mayor inequalities that we can see today here.
@palasatenea,
There's no need for taxes. The only thing we need are Rules of Conduct and a pragmatic way to enforce them. The litmus test for what's allowed and what's not would be the Central Premise, that: Content Shall Be Compensated Commensurate With Its Quality. Anything that diminishes that end would be prohibited. Anything that furthers it, encouraged.
Quill
That's definitely one possible solution, although as you say, one unlikely to see the light of day.
I think people will flog it to death with the "redistribution of wealth" label, so it would have to be presented as a tax on earnings (not SP). If you made the tax rate variable and correlated to SP, then I think you're on to something that just might be able to get some traction.
That could be a good implementation, as the way you said that label could be quite unpopular, the idea of do it correlated to SP and only applied to earnings is good also.
That is a form of direct taxes that could be useful but the indirect taxes to discourage some bad content or to foment others, could be another good initiative as well, I know that there are bots like cheetah that do it already but I don't know if they're very effective, for the things I see daily I would say that they aren't.
Anyways it's so polemic issue that I'm very skeptical of the application of such measures I think that is a problem that brighter minds than mine should try to solve.