Before you decide to agree, or disagree with me, grant me the opportunity to explain my position thoroughly. As a fairly new Steemian, every day I spend on this platform is an chance to learn something new, and there might be a time in the future were I will think differently. However, it is my intention to start a conversation with some of you with the intention of maybe revising my own convictions, as well as sharing my current opinion.
There is an old post by Dan Larimer that we could say encapsulates the original vision he had for this platform. I would encourage any new Steemian to read it carefully, it seems to me, that the almost Utopian idea of a system designed to reward people who help other people was nothing short of genius.
But just like any socio-economical idea in history, there are elements and concepts left up to interpretation, which of course always leads to disagreements and potential conflicts.
These are Dan’s own word, while describing the Ethos of Steemit and the roll of its Whales.
“Good Whales act in ways that maximize the value of their capital. The side effect of their actions is to increase the value of everyone else’s capital at the same time. These individuals are motivated to counteract any abuse they see. The larger the whale, the more incentive they have to be a good whale”
One of the flaws with the statement that may have not been predictable, might be that most of Steemit’s whales think themselves to be good whales acting in the best interest of Steemit. In a system that does not have a central authority, or even a set of well defined rules and laws, right and wrong should really be a consensus of its citizens, but as we know today only those who hold a lot of Steem are the ones with a loud voice or a vote.
I am not saying however, that all is lost and it's time to abandon the ship, I’m certainly not leaving and I still believe we can find the right compromise. I’m simply stating that these problems are present, and our current fork has enhanced some of the logical warts.
But taking a step back, let me start by asking one question...
I could attempt to approach the argument from a strictly technical angle, but since it's not really my strong suit, I will leave such task to those who understand it a lot better than me, speculative markets and blockchain technology are subjects that require a lot more than one blog post in my opinion, and I’m not the best man for the job.
I will attempt to define the socio economic worth of Steemit; When I first joined this platform, my initial impressions were maybe oversimplified, and thus easy for a noob to understand.
I would like to say that this rule holds true all the time, but we know it not to be the case. I’ve stumbled upon thousands of posts that I believe were incredibly undervalued and it was almost painful to see them almost ignored. This is not to say everything on Steemit is valuable, there is a never ending influx of Spam/Shit content, and what I could only describe as wasted computing power, flooding the network every single day.
There are of course ongoing efforts to Clean the Network from these spammers and plagiarists, their work is extremely valuable to Steemit, but they are not without their flaws, and sometimes make painful mistakes. But that is a subject for another post all together.
It would probably be pointless to attempt to make anything resembling a moral argument when talking about resteeming services or upvote Bots. By their own nature it's an amoral topic, it would be like me attempting to talk about the morality of eating pizza.
I chose pizza for this example because I think it might do the best job of explaining my position. Just because eating pizza is not immoral, it does not mean that I believe that eating pizza all the time is good for me. I would be delusional if I thought so, and would end up paying steep consequences for holding that idea.
Using the same logic, if using upvote bots is not necessarily immoral, or to use a less charged word unethical. This would not mean that is necessarily good for the the network in the long term, they could if they continue to be abused, become the catalysts for uncontrollable shit posting.
There are of course many authors who are adding a lot of value to Steem, some treat Steemit like a job, and a good percentage of these authors use upvote bots and resteeming services to gain some visibility with good results. But, on the flip side of that coin there are users who are simply here to gamble their casino money, their posts are for all tends and purposes as valuable as fart on a windy day, but by playing the upvote bidding game, have managed to get a return on their worthless content, and I find this problematic.
Maybe I’m guilty of worrying a bit too much, but maybe I’m not the only who has been thinking about this. But, lets say for the sake argument that Steemit’s content keeps on getting diluted with shit posting, let's say that more and more people stop making a conscious effort to make good posts, to add value to the platform and decide to throw in the towel and give in to the casino upvote game.
What would that look like? What would be the motivation for mass adoption? What would make a big youtuber jump onto this platform and abandon twitter, or facebook? If the value of the content becomes unimportant, how are we to grow from the beta stage? I'm having a hard time answering these questions, and finding bitter flavors at every turn. But it hurts me to imagine what the worth of 1 Steem would be on a blockchain like that.
Granted, I may have painted a grim picture, and it might never get to that point. But I would like to think that this reflection, this blog entry will get to someone who might be thinking about lowering his/her standard, and simply jumping on the upvote/resteem game to reconsider his/her convictions.
I’m hopeful that sometime in the future, the groups and whales who run the upvote bots can find a way to balance the scale again, not because of any ethical or moral argument, as I’ve said before there is nothing there to discuss, but because they as well should have an interest in the growth and mass adoption of Steemit, and it would very short sighted to ignore this problem and sweep it under the rug.
Musically yours
