RE: How Steemit Becomes Irrelevant and Dies - A Newcomer's Perspective on Why STEEM is Today's MySpace
It’s not a simple issue. After my first month here I spent about 2 more trying to fight the good fight, only to feel it was falling on deaf ears. Later I learned that almost everyone active in the community is trying to solve these issues in one way or another but it really comes down to ideological differences and a big fat elephant in the room, that is this:
There is no new paradigm in cryptocurrency without change in culture.
Cryptocmarkets work just like the stock market. The more you have, the easier it is to gain. The rich continue to get richer and the poor continue to get poorer. We try to set up implementations to fix that because yes the system is broken, but you can’t make a system that isn’t broken until you change the ideas upon which it is built and work on the culture it resides in.
Steemit is like this for exactly the same reason the crypto market is doing well, because it offers opportunities to make a lot of money. All that talk of a better world, it’s not up to crypto to create that, it’s up to us.
There are many arguments that are unpopular because they don’t fit the crux of free market capitalism. I believe curation rewards should be 0 and anyone serious about curation should earn from making posts on it. I believe there should be a cap on voting power. But you get into all kinds of problems with this....if there’s a cap, what stops someone from creating 100 accounts and filling them to the brim.
I can understand the desire for a reset too but think of how that would feel to someone who has worked hard for a decent place on the platform. You are essentially stealing from them.
The problem isn’t steemit, it’s our relationship with money and power.
Stick around, you will be surprised at the good you can do despite having the odds stacked against you. Your opinion is valued. Sometimes It’s just overheard in all that’s going on. There are way more decent people here than you think.
Let me be clear that I'm not bashing the vast majority of steemians as a whole. I completely agree that there are a whole lot of great people on the platform, and for those who are finding success as newcomers I am both encouraged and encouraging. My wife (@byn), for instance, is doing remarkably well here. Of course, she's quite extraordinary (all personal bias aside) :)
Where you and I disagree is regarding your point that you cannot make a system which isn't broken until you fix the underlying cultural and societal issues. I understand what you're getting at, and I agree that the inherent nature of humans will always lead some to seek out gain well beyond their peers. However, steemit as a platform could easily be modified to at least mitigate the impact that the top 1% is currently having in terms of presenting a barrier to entry for newcomers to the model.
I wouldn't want to - as you put it - 'essentially steal from [established accounts]'. I do understand that they've put in the time and effort, and that simply by being early adopters they profited disproportionately to what anyone coming to the platform today could reasonably expect to gain in the same amount of time. The same thing is true of any crypto. I tend to think of posting here on steemit as effectively running a mining rig for STEEM. Instead of a PoW mining concept, STEEM is just using a PoC (Proof of Content) model instead. By getting in early when the mining difficulty was very, very low they were able to mine huge amounts using very little in terms of resources. They deserve those gains just as much as someone who set up a BTC mining rig in 2010. The place where this analogy runs dry though, is that someone who mined a whole bunch of BTC early on doesn't have an unfair advantage at mining additional BTC today, which is very much the case with STEEM.
That leads me to an interesting thought in terms of how to express what I'm trying to get at. In my above post I called it a 'reset'. It may be more appropriate to term it a 'difficulty adjustment' that is applied relative to the age of the steem that you 'mined.' Some sort of algorithm that essentially weakens the influence a unit of steem power can have over time without devaluing the actual underlying STEEM.
I don’t know how much we disagree really, I don’t find many problems with what you say, I’m just trying to share my perspective. I also want some changes in the algorithm, but what I mean is, a change in the culture would mean a clearer idea and agreement of what we want steemit to be, how we can accomplish that and coming together to pressure the witnesses (some of which may not even need pressure if they feel it’s what the community wants, @timcliff comes to mind) to make changes that would help the distribution of wealth. Rather than jut focusing on the negative, try to make a proposal. If it sound a good, I’ll share it. If it’s good enough, I’ll send it to all the whales I know and mention it in my circles.
One of the changes in culture that I propose though is less focus on what someone “deserves” because this is where people always end up arguing and it’s all subjective and based on personalities beliefs. We all deserve more, especially those of us who struggle, no one really “deserves” less unless they don’t care about others, but even that is a subjective call.
Your idea sounds great to me, is it realistic? I have no idea but you should talk to people in the chats about it and see if anyone bites. There are a few witnesses who hang out in #general.
I've not been involved in any of the chats to date. To be honest, I don't even now where to find them :) What chats are you using?
We have a chat called be awesome, linked in most of my posts. We are all small fish though. If you want to talk to the big fish, steemit.chat or do a search for the steemspeak discord channel. There are about 4 or 5 whales that Hangout in each but you need to hang around and meet a few people first otherwise they’ll just blow you off cause there are a billion minnows who think they’ve been wrong and wanna complain :-P
Good points. I agree that it will be difficult to make changes due to unintended consequences. I've worked with companies that have caused serious issues in their marketplaces by giving perverse incentives to members to do things that caused issues.
It’s kind of a mess already, but I think we still have a shot if we recognize our own ability to influence others. @serapium has some good ideas that I hope he can channel into some conversations with people who understand the tech more than I do!