The Game
Things getting higher, things getting shaky.
A long long time ago, I can still remember, I said a phrase toward the developer of a popular game about its problems. That phrase was “fix your game, dinnerbone.” Is this a guilty admission that I played Minecraft, yeah, so what who didn’t. Anyway, as I’ve been getting more and more ingrained into the crypto world, and as I’m taking a fairly heavy philosophical ethics course right now, I’ve decided to try to merge my desire to keep being involved in Steemit with the need to get good grades. Here goes.
Fix your site… ned, witnesses, everybody? That’s the bastardization of that old phrase of mine, but just what needs to be thought about, or fixed actually. I will start with the origins of Youtube because I know enough about it in the philosophical sense to be able to disregard empirical information (Which is pretty much most of philosophy). When youtube came about, it was a centralized project that enabled people to share videos. There was no monetization and as then and still now, you agreed to their terms of service and knew for a fact that you upload to Youtube’s servers upon which they have total control. This makes things simple, if you use their service, your shared information is subject to their rules. So then, where was the problem, and how did it arise? I believe two major things happened:
- Monetization
- The realization of the importance to be able to share non-censored information.
The first one is easy as people got used to the money, which at one point was quite serious, and could not handle the massive drops in their paychecks after rules started being enforced. We have seen this here on Steemit in the small scale as people often see flags as theft of their earnings. This is because we tabulate/compound our post earnings over the seven day period always expecting it either to stay the same or improve. That makes flags a sort of transient rule and enforcement system part of a decentralized consensus rather than a centralized authority. When you want to monetize content based on what others are willing to give you for said content, then it comes down to basic supply/demand. Now, Steemit does not work on direct peer to peer transactions to drive this model, so you can’t expect the dollar you see today to be there tomorrow. It is similar with Youtube, in that an advertiser could deem your content immoral and cut you off, the difference being that it is the advertiser’s choice and not those who are directly consuming the content. This being said, we come to an interesting similarity between the flaws in monetizing both on a centralized, and a decentralized platform.
What are these flaws?
One of the things advertisers know is the likelihood that the vast majority of people watching the ads on videos will not heed them absolutely any attention. But, because they cannot know with certainty how many consumers were influenced, they scale the pay with the amount of total views hoping a certain percentage will buy or talk about the product because of that ad. Here you have a fundamental flaw that maybe doesn’t matter but exists either way. What is the equivalent for Steemit you may ask then. Maybe one piece is the fact that many top earners here on Steemit are not actually read very much. I have seen $100+ posts with less than ten views. This is obviously a side-step to how the system is supposed to work in an ideal vacuum. Yes, this can be contested because maybe the ten dudes who read it were big investors in the platform and thus had more justified influence on monetization but for now, we will disregard that. Essentially, this helps that theory that says popular stuff wins, the flaw being that it is artificially popular because it could be speculated that all the people flocking to and voting up the content are doing so because it has a high payout, and thus either already popular, or will give out good curation rewards. Both of these monetization based ‘flaws’ end in the positive for the content creator right? So then, why are they similar and how are they problematic.
Easy, in both cases, the content creator is being paid because of something that may or may not be true, or come true, or within the primary/secondary rules of the payment system. As for how it is problematic, I speculate it could destabilize the monetary worth of the platform thus destabilizing the paycheck of each individual user. This in my opinion has already shown in both Youtube and Steemit but in roundabout ways such as Youtube advertisers leveraging the cost of bad reputation to ad visibility/influence, and Steemit rewards naturally gravitating toward singular individuals and their circles exponentially increasing the gravitational pull. As Steemit has an actual cryptocurrency token that can be used to determine the platforms health, it should be easier to see which HF’s work well. Problem is, even poor HF’s could make massive profits for some leading to artificial short-term health, similar to Youtube’s super advertiser era which inevitably crashed. If I may be so bold, I would say that Steemit is currently in its own non-backed run-up just like Youtube was and if it continues on this path, will end up in the exact same position of the rich getting spooked and the dolphins and orcas becoming minnows. I’m not trying to find solutions per se here, but just trying to tie things together. I mean, the problems and theories around monetization are huge and it is really difficult to pinpoint what is good/bad/fixable. Also, most of the things that could seriously hurt steem, at least in my opinion, have been exposed for a while now and steem and SBD price has gone up overall, either I’m just off, or we’re playing a dangerous game of Jenga. That being said, Hard Fork 19 has some very obvious things that at least need to be experimented with.
Monetizable Posts.
Amount of monetizable posts per day. I can understand the general futility and how this is not a major topic for the next Hard Fork. I briefly scanned some info on HF20 but it seems to only focus on getting new users on board and make bot voting and creation a bit easier. As far as I can tell, the biggest problem on Steemit with regard to monetization that can be easily tested, is the amount of monetizable posts per day. The biggest recent scandals surrounding reward pool rape could have both been avoided if oh you know, a simple fix to stop it was added(again), without discouraging creation being a key phrase here. Haven’t read about the specific fix I’m about to propose but if it has been said, great.
Fix:
- Standard work day = 8 hours
- 24 hours / 8 = 3
- 3 fully monetizable posts per day + 3 fully monetizable comments per day I suppose.
- All extra posts would be halved based on the previous, so 50 – 25 – 12.5 – 6.25 – 3.175 and probably capped at 5 extra eligible for money.
- The 24 hour time period would be the hard set Steem block-chain UTC time.
- After the 0 – 24 UTC period ends, all posts inside would be grouped together.
- After 7 days, when it is time for the first of these posts to receive rewards, each post will then be locked with respect to how much reward it will receive, the 3 biggest earners up until that point being chosen to receive full rewards.
- The rest of the posts could either be flipped, with the 4th biggest earner giving the smallest rewards to the poster but retaining curation rewards for voters, or just go down the list normally giving the 4th earning post a 50% reduction and so on. The same exact thing separate for comments.
I don't think it'll discourage people from posting too much since 3 true detective quality posts take a shit-ton of time to make anyway and I continue with my belief that time is the best value controller for steem. If people are not only here for the money, then this system might actually encourage more non-time-consuming engagement that does not carry the premise or expectation of massive rewards and is instead just to talk or have fun. At the end of the day, I believe decentralization and enjoyment are the real MVPs here.
Multiple Accounts
Most proposed solutions are hindered by the all too real possibility that anyone could create and control multiple accounts. Is there a solution to this? No, it’s a soft no. Accounts can be bought or mined, and ultimately act as wallets as well, so a solution to curb multiple spread accounts is bordering on compromising the integrity of the steem block-chain itself. If we go back to the n curve or whatever it was that required multiple upvotes to register the reward of each vote, then the only people hurt would be minnows as whales would just spread and upvote/circle jerk, leaving minnows even less realistic rewards then now. As for my proposition, yes, multiple accounts would compound the amount of profitable posts but at least it’d be fair with regard to how each person can soon mine their own multiple accounts or buy them just the same as any whale. It would also prevent singular personalities from taking exorbitant amounts like we saw with haejin. The real issue is with explicit abuse like the SBD correction comments from grumpers, as that type of abuse means the person responsible has no regard to the personality or reputation of their account, and doesn’t care if they have to make multiple obviously ‘malicious’ accounts to game the system. Even then, at least it adds a bit of a barrier, and he’ll have to buy those accounts/mine them anyways which does some good if the attack is inevitable.
As a disclaimer in the unlikely case that this post does well and transisto comes to audit, I really like his idea of having a separate downvote meter with an option to not-censor content. For some reason though, I still have a slight philosophical disapproval of separating a power that is supposed to be self-managing. I, for now, cannot say anything against it though because it’s a well thought out idea and I recommend reading about it on transisto’s blog. As for whether or not it’s necessary to keep harping on these solutions and topics, yes, yes it is. Not sure about the entire role of witnesses to actually build HF’s or manage the system, but they are not mysterious rich guys in skyscraper boardrooms. The people have got to keep on sharing ideas, talking, it’s the be all and end all. If my rambling was shite, tell me, say why, I’m truly curious. Also, I wanted to make this semi-academic looking but it came out more like just a general philosoraptor talk, aww well.