RE: "Derivatives" - A Series About Fixing Steemit - Part 3
You are such a brilliantly delicious writer that I even enjoy your insults ... you S.O.B. :-)
The premise of Steemit is flawed. The whole idea of "quality" is subjective. There's no such thing as objective quality when it comes to content (or much of anything else, really). Try reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and you'll begin to get an idea of what I mean. The very idea of quality is such that everyone with half a brain cell is qualified to judge what it is. Few people are good at judging and all of us who are use flawed criteria or prejudicial ones (there's a reason that confirmation bias is a thing). So any system designed to rise or fall on the basis of quality has doomed itself from the get-go.
Yes ... quality is subjective. But not that subjective.
Some Supreme Court Justice once said (paraphrasing), "I can't tell you what pornography is ... but I know it when I see it." Playboy's porn ... but naked Greek statues aren't, even though the subject matter is the same.
In any event, my issue is not about what you and I might variously consider quality, but rather the systemic way that quality is determined, and hence rewarded, on the blockchain. If you're buying your own upvotes (bidbots), then clearly any notion of Objective Curation is being violated.
Ironically, I DO NOT blame anyone for using bidbots. It is a sensible adaptation to the realities of the environment. Nevertheless, it is destroying the blockchain by making it untenable for those that don't. It is creating a Tragedy of the Commons. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tragedy-of-the-commons.asp This is something I will address in great detail in the next Article of this Series, "Central Premise."
Gaming tokens, for instance, don't need government or banks to survive if the gamers who buy, sell, and trade them agree on the value within the gaming system wherein they interact.
Agreed, and an issue I will address in the future Articles of this Series. As you can see, this one was getting pretty long.
Quill
Quill,
We agree much more than we don't. And then you go and illustrate perfectly well what I was saying by trying to refute it. Thanks!
But there are people who take issue with Playboy, and with naked Greek statues. Feminists and conservative Christians both agree that Playboy is bad, but for different reasons. I don't know why people take issue with naked Greek statues, but they do. Maybe it's just because they have to take issue with something even when its level of innocuousness is obvious. But there you go.
I certainly do agree with this, however:
The systemic way that quality is determined on the blockchain is by allowing people to upvote what they consider quality. Here's a question for you: How is a person spending 5 STEEM on a bidbot to earn back 7.86 STU on a 6-day layover for a crap post any different than two creators of crap posts agreeing to upvote each other's mediocrity? Or, how is it any different than using SteemAuto to upvote every post in a curation trail with a 5% upvote even though you won't read any of them just so you can get your 100% upvote from the upvote bot run by that curation trail? Each of these moves is an economic decision. And they're all made on the basis of the flawed Steemit premise that you're taking issue with.
I am waiting eagerly for your next installment, sir. You certainly provide food for thought, and thought for food.
Curation on steemit isn't about selection of quality content. It's a matter of taking an action that has certain outcomes in 7 days. If it were about content, we would find interesting articles in trending. Curation is about hording. There are companies who do this openly - you can see over a thousand votes, but not a single comment. If 1,000 people read something, how is it that not a single person commented?
I think objectively curating content is all about me reading it, assessing if it is worth paying for a vote to get it to be seen. It is way less time consuming than waiting for some jerk to objectively come to the conclusion that my content will trend well. In the end, my content may still trend long after berniesanders and his brilliant meme's are long forgotten. Maybe something is broken, but I think it's broken in human nature, so any system will be weak to counter act those flaws in human nature.
Anyway, your article is brilliant and thought-provoking. Thanks for all the efforts!