A highly successful crypto currency hinges on the fact that all participants will be economically aligned to do what is best for value and utility growth. We're not quite there with Steem unfortunately. While it's definitively possible to tune the ruleset, I think it is pretty much impossible to get to the point where people won't be trying to game the system. To avoid the "tragedy of the commons", we need etiquette guidelines, and there should be room to politely hint people in the right direction when we believe they break those guidelines.
I'm holding a fair amount of steem power - much less than the 30k-60k that @tarazkp thinks is ideal, but still - the award pool I control is significant enough. Or, at least, it was significant enough when I started writing this article some months ago. With great power comes great responsibility ... and even modest power should be treated with at least modest responsibility, hence I thought I should formalize some of the self-invented etiquette rules I'm trying to follow. I haven't always been following them. This is the first time I try to nail them down in writing. Does there already exist any guidelines written by others?
I've earlier been doing some self-upvoting, and I have some arguments in my hat for this practice. However, seeing a growing community scoffing at self-voting, I've more or less stopped with this practice.
My four-year old daughter, she hasn't learned to read yet, but anyway she came to see my work - and she commented that it was far too long. She has a point, so I'll split this up in several posts. This post will be about my authoring rules.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Two conditions must be met for me to come up with a post: I must have the time for it and I must have something to say. I have tried to post when I didn't really have the time for it, and I'm embarrassed of the results, it's needed to spend some efforts to get quality. I think there are too many here feeling they need to keep up a certain posting volume. I think it's better to post infrequently and have long breaks rather than to post things of low quality.
In general I'm writing two kind of posts; one is the personal updates on my life, facebook-style, "this is where I've been, this is what I've been doing, this is what I've been eating", etc, those will always be tagged with #blog. The other is more general and less personal, content that I consider to be of general interests, which will be posted without the #blog-tag. Of course, there may be grey zones, like sometimes I may try to focus more on presenting noteworthy attractions rather rather than blogging on "where I've been and what I've been doing", sometimes I experience things that I deem to be crazy enough that it may be of general interest, howto-guides, etc.
Whenever a post can be geographically pinned, I try to geotag it according to the @steemitworldmap standards.
I've installed the steepshot application, but haven't tried it out yet, and I probably never will, making a post consisting of only one photo is not my style. It may seem more profitable to post lots of small posts instead of one large post (particularly if resorting to self-voting), but it feels spammy. I'd like to sieve through the photos I take on my laptop, pick out the best ones and post those.
I will never self-vote personal blog posts, but if I believe I've written an article that I believe is of general interest, well-written and important, I will consider it.
I do try to use a mix of photos/images and text in my posts.
Quotes from other sources are clearly marked as quotes, and I will inform on the source.
I try to only use images with free licenses, and I will give credits and link to the image sources.
I try not to make too long posts, then it's better to split them into several posts
I will try to always read through a post once more before posting it. Is it coherent? Is it understandable? Are there typos? Should I try to split it into more sections?
I believe the comments field is to be used, I believe it's a good place for debating and argument, and I do like a good debate and argument. Getting involved in the comments may be economically good, by becoming a part of the community. Hence I have those rules in place:
I write comments as often as I can, but I never write a comment just to write a comment. If I don't have anything to contribute but noise, I should probably just skip it.
I'm always trying to be polite, I believe it's a good think to be polite, and in an environment like Steem it may also be economically favorable.
Another thing that may be economically favorable is to always pretend to agree with everyone, and never get involved in a good argument just because one is afraid of losing downvotes or getting flagged. This causes sort of a chilling effect and that's very bad. While I may shy away from a good argument for many reasons, I shall never let "fear of economical sanctions" be a significant part of that.
It's easy to digress, but some people may not like off-topic discussions on "their" posts, so I try to avoid that.
I will always link to any sources and references
In particular, I will link in relevant wikipedia articles
I realize I'm not a very good author, and I will never become bitter that my posts didn't receive as many votes as I feel it "deserved".
Do you have any thoughts? Does those rules make sense or not? Do you practice some similar etiquette rules? Do you have more rules that should be added?
