Would you want Google or Facebook algorithms to be used to uncover content they consider valuable for you to vote on and hide what they consider you shouldn't vote on? Think about it for a little while before answering - especially if you are a content creator.
Oh... but you don't want to downvote...
Upvoting and Downvoting is the algorithm that is used on Steem to uncover valuable content and hide what the community believes should be hidden. So far it has not been very attractive for most people to downvote and as a result, it has created a stigma in downvoting, making it a negative. No one really minds giving a restaurant or a hotel a bad review for shit service though.
What I still believe is the game changer for Steem in the HF21 is the 2.5 downvotes that can be used to order content alongside upvotes. While everyone focuses on what they are losing (10% out of the author pool for the SPS and then going to 50/50 so curators earn more - taking away from authors) they should really be looking on what is being gained.
Come HF21, everyone effectively has 12.5x100 votes a day instead of 10. That is an increase of 25% - 10 up, 2.5 down. I believe this changes things more than the percentage though because downvoted content doesn't get good curation returns.
What this means is that while some people have been aiming to frontrun on content that will get large votes, if those accounts will also receive downvotes later, they will stop voting on them and with the 50/50 split, there s more incentive to curate content that will get higher votes and not get downvoted.
People like to maximize after all and "wasting" a vote on content that'll get downvoted by the community will not be high on an maximizers agenda. This means that those voters are still incentivized to vote, but have to be more sensitive to what they vote on.
If everyone is using their 2.5 full downvotes a day ( I suspect it will be more like 1-1.5 on average), that puts more in the pool and more in the hands of those 10x votes that are incentivized to find content that won't be downvoted so that they can maximize their 50% curation. If it does work this way, it means that the maximizing behavior of curators benefits who?
Oh, the content creators. But, with the convergent curve there will also be incentive to have votes land on content that isn't going to get downvoted and is going to get community support also. This means that there is more chance that good content gets rewarded and when in the spotlight more as bad content is reduced, it could get rewarded even more. And what happens when good content gets rewarded on Steem? oh, it also could get rewarded in PAL or a few other tokens also.
Not only that, what happens is that over time content creators that do consistently produce interesting content will get driven consistently upward and then they become influencers on Steem and attractors of more wanting to be like them. That is actually what an influencer on a social platform does, it isn't to hawk products - it is to attract more users who want to be like them and do the hawking through their own social circles. As I have said, your data isn't valuable, how leveragable your network is.
what happens when there are people on Steem who are truly getting paid well for being here? More people come wanting a piece of it, and that will coincide with the drive of mass interest in crypto. At 10 dollar Steem, my account will be worth 500,000 dollars for 2.5 years digital work. Tell me, how many people on Youtube are in that category? How many people WANT to be in that category? Right now my account is worth 20k dollars. I am holding.
At some point, accounts like mine are going to attract people in just like accounts with 100k followers attract more followers on Instagram, it becomes a point of mass that has gravity and as prices rise at the same time global interest in cryptorises and at the same time global economies fail, Steem is going to be a shining star of an example in socialized distribution and creation of wealth. 10 dollar Steem means that over the last 3 years, there will have been three billion dollars distributed to the community and, still no central owners.
At what point has Youtube given 3 billion dollars to its userbase? How much have they made though?
People really don't seem to understand where all of this is leading it seems and while they argue about what they are losing now, what they are really losing is their ownership of a future position by not participating in the growth of the platform.
What is going to attract people to Steem in the long run is seeing success happen on Steem. Successful bloggers, gamers, application developers and the like and once that is seen and attracts a wide range of new users, they pour in to find that this is much more than a social media, it is an economy that becomes more stable the more participants.
I think that while in the short term HF21 is going to be quite painful for many, in the long-term, the community algorithms start to find their equilibrium and the upvoting / downvoting balance will be both relatively healthy and accepted as part of managing a community where there is no centralized policing.
It is going to be immensely fascinating to see what actually happens in the days, weeks and months after HF21 because for the first time in Steem's history, the management of content will be up to the community and incentivized to maximize upon. I think content producers like myself may be happy once things settle, if they have decent hustle. And if a content creator doesn't have hustle, they aren't likely going to make it anywhere in this world with their content.
Participation is key in a community.
Upvotes and Downvotes.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
