RE: STEEM's Biggest Villian
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You raised some good points here, and some not so good points here, so I would like to address some of them:
Steem is not and never has been "proof of brain" but more proof of stake.
I can agree with this to an extent. I would personally say it's more of a hybrid, since it's still individuals deciding what they're supporting, and those decisions are weighted by how much skin they have in the game, but I can see the argument both ways.
Then comes free downvotes, which is a terribly stupid idea. Now every account has more power to do harm than it has to do good. In the past people had to ask themselves if it was worth it to them to take a hit in order to be a dick to someone, but no, now the dickslaps are free. We just made it so accounts can put more negativity into the environment than they can positivity, great plan...
With 10 free upvotes and 2 free downvotes a day, I would say each account has 5X the capacity to positively affect someone's rewards than negatively affect them. From my perspective, this has worked better than predicted. Bid bots are scrambling to react to the new market, the trending page is looking much more usable, and Steem's biggest reward pool abusers are finally getting their posts drained. Has it been perfect? Absolutely not. Is it better than it was? I can say without a doubt that's it's much better since now we don't have to ask our biggest stakeholders to choose between losing curation rewards or fighting abuse.
I have been running a flag neutralization service, named @freezepeach, every single day for over 2 years now. I did it because I hated seeing people being driven off the platform for having the "wrong" opinion, and I wanted to do something about it. Flag abuse is real, and it hurts steem, but we need flags or else the shared reward pool becomes exploited in a classic case of the tragedy of the commons.
The value of Steem, as I see it, is the immutable blogging space available to a person online. I think the more logical path for its design is to give SP a cap on all accounts, and that SP is not reclaimable. This means that for an account to have SP you are effectively burning that STEEM, or at least making something fungible into a non-fungible asset.
I don't know how I feel about a cap on steem power, that doesn't seem logical to me but I'd have to think about it more. The never powering down option is interesting though, and definitely needs more exploring. That would radically change things, but I'm not sure in what ways exactly. The devil is always in the details.
That way no single account could be 1000x the vote influence of another account, and owning STEEM would be more about owning decentralized "digital blog property" rather than some currency. The currency could be like potential parcels, very much similar to Mana/Land with the Decentraland project on Ethereum.
What's inherently wrong about having 1000x more influence? What about 999X the influence? 500X? 100X? What makes any of those other figures better or worse? If you own any amount of Steem above 50 SP, then essentially you have a working blog and have "digital blog property" as you put it. It's the influence that comes with putting your money where your mouth is, and that's important in structuring things like resources, rewards, and future forks of the platform.
(paraphrased) Why not fork Steem? Why SMTs? Steem accounts are a barrier to entry.
Plenty have forked Steem, but you may fail to realize like I have done in the past what a pain in the ass it is to be listed on exchanges. You think it's hard to turn your hard earned cash into steem, or vice versa? It's way harder for forks, because you need tons of money (not just minted shit coins) to get listed. We take for granted the few exchanges that support Steem and usually want more, but the reality is it's not a trivial task to get listed.
SMT's are going to be something like the tribes you see popping up on steem-engine, but with the added advantage of being added to exchanges that already support steem with little effort. This is essentially going to allow tokenization of Steem, much like ETH, but with the benefit of the 3 second/free transactions, and its own proof of stake algorithms.
Steem accounts are a barrier to entry, but a very small one that's getting better and better. New tools still need to be made/refined and put into place to allow the masses to join easily, but even now it's absurdly cheap to get started with just a little bit of cursory reading.
Steem is not a huge community (when counting active accounts) to tap into,
Steem is not a huge community? Relative to who? Facebook? Because as far as crypto communities go, this is the biggest one I know of. Bitcoin may have more users, but they're not really a community in the sense this place is.
I’d like to know if the reward pool increases or decreases based on the total of powered-up Steem? If this is the case, then chasing off stakeholders no matter how good or bad their voting history will affect the total amount of rewards in the pool. We see people try to protect the commons, as you call it, with flags. Now if this results in dejected stakeholders who feel disenfranchised from their investment, then the next logical move for them is to go liquid by powering down. In this scenario powering down will cause a smaller reward pool. Even worse, if those little piggies as people see them, go to the market, it’ll cause the value of Steem to decrease. If the premise of this commentary is untrue, then why distribute unequal votes at all? So yeah, folks like Marky mean well, but I wonder if he understands the equal and opposite market reaction that it causes, and that’s outside of all the interpersonal turmoil that flagging does to self and others. If you ask me, this behavior is on par with measuring the efficacy of a carbon tax without taking into consideration the cons. There might be a net gain, and a net loss, or maybe they both cancel each other out making it a fruitless endeavor in its entirety. Imagine if STINC and other condensers or wallets implemented a power down quiz asking people why. This, so we can gift the community with feedback concerning the main reasons that people power down and sell.
We definitely need more market research in understanding the reasons for powering up and powering down among other things. This type of data is gold for every other social network out there, but nobody seems to care or have enough time to be bothered about it here. This is exactly the type of insight we need to stop stabbing in the dark and start informing our decisions for building a better platform.
AFAIK, the reward pool is based on a % of the inflation, and the inflation is determined by total supply. The inflation % changes year to year, steadily declining, but as the supply keeps rising, the effects of the percentages are compounding.
I do think there's a bigger cost to some flags than people realize, but without any regulation (flags), we've seen how much the reward pool gets abused. I think the community can find a balance if the right incentives are baked in, but it will be a bumpy ride there.
I sure can't wait to see how the #newsteem folks plan on marketing the platform to prospective investors. One of the big incentives in investing in Steem is having more control over the reward pool. However, once people learn that it's unethical to reward yourself, then the only benefit in buying into the blockchain is the prospective of becoming either and unpaid reward poolice officer or and unpaid content curator. That's a hard sell.
Content curators get 50% of the rewards now since the last hard fork, so it's not exactly unpaid. And "reward policing" pays as well, just not in the same sense. It's more of an abstract payoff in the same sense that keeping a clean house doesn't provide monetary returns, but still provides value.
Oh, that's a fair point about the content curation! The other is abstract indeed, I know some are really getting jollies from it. May they live in interesting times. Steem really needs to define itself concretely in an easy to understand way before pitching itself to investors. It seems after you join it becomes very commune like. But the idea is to sell capitalists on the venture. Not sure how this plays out in the long run, but it'll be fun to watch.
Well even if you're not a content creator, or a curator, and just want to earn a passive return, delegation rental is still a thing as well. I agree though, steem really needs to define itself as a brand in a clear and concise manner, then the userbase will have the necessary means to go out and spread the word.
True that, and the big obstacle there might be, will the user base embrace said brand.
Thank you for the thorough response. I have a few things to answer back.
This is an incorrect interpretation. The 10 "free" upvotes are not free, they cost mana. Before HF21 there was one (1) mana bar, and this bar required for you to choose between positively voting or negatively voting on someone's content. This was even, everyone having the equal power to do something positive for someone's post or something negative. However, negative actions resulted in lessened ROI for yourself, thus in order to harm someone you had to be self-sacrificing.
So, the entry of a new mana bar for downvotes created a free 2 downvotes. Now there is an imbalance, because you do not have to sacrifice anything to harm someone, at least twice per day. This is not true for upvotes, because the original mana bar is still equally for upvotes and downvotes.
Maybe this will drive home the point. The community dislikes bidbots, but what about a downvote bot? See, downvote bots are more powerful than ever now, they can receive compensation through transactions or SE token sales, and nobody can stop them.
You can damage the ROI of an upvote service, but you can't do anything to a downvote service, and they now have 2 extra downvotes per day available to them.
Valid point, maybe the max SP should be 50 STEEM. But there is no logical reason to give any person 1000X+ the influence of anyone else, and maybe no one should even have 2x the influence of another person. True proof of brain requires 1 vote = 1 person.
An environment of whales and minnows creates an oligarchy, which is not a good thing, especially for the purpose of Steem. While I get the skin in the game concept and respect it, you don't have to have STEEM powered up to have skin in the game, you just have to own a lot of STEEM and be doing something to make it successful.
Ned himself commented in one of the Steemit youtube videos that it would be ideal to adjust voting to be essentially 1 vote per person. This is because people do not enjoy an overly hierarchical social environment. Sure, elitists get a kick out of it, but most of us that enjoy human-to-human interaction to be a matter of free and equal exchange as peers do not like such concepts.
Dan Larimer has also rejected the oligarchy of Steem's design for something less hierarchical and more social in nature for his later social application Voice. This social app is much more similar to Minds.com, an Ethereum-based social site that has attracted Youtube celebs much more effectively than Steem.
My favorite would be Steem, though, because the data is all on the blockchain. But not in its current design can I say it is my favorite. I sincerely do not believe this whales and minnow environment will be adopted by the world.
Sure, you can attract the most impoverished of communities that are willing to do whatever whales want to get some tips, but it will not work on the masses in the US, UK and Europe, people that are quite conformable with telling tyrants to fuck off. These communities have a strong sense of what they believe is equality and they care about such things.
Based on what metrics? When talking about what blockchain has the largest developer community, Ethereum is a massive lead ahead of everything else. From the aspect of 24hr user activity, a dapp on EOS named ADM is quite ahead of Steem according to dapp.com.
Steem is a social media blockchain, so even if you can say that it is the largest community, well, its expected to be. But your definition of "community" matters here. Who count? Because Bitcoin most certainly has more hodlers than Steem does.
Steem is a location where people can talk about cryptocurrencies, and as a location for that it could be said that it is slightly more popular than bitcointalk.org, but not by much. However, I most certainly believe that Twitter is more used for cryptocurrency conversations than Steem is. I'm not making a comparison of Twitter vs. Steem, I'm making a comparison of #cryptotwitter vs. Steem.
Most of the other blockchains have many social presences and are not congregated in one single place online like Steem users are. Reddit is hugely popular for blockchain communities, with Ethereum having over 400,000 users in their main subreddit, excluding all the other additional subreddits like ethtrader.
Actually, this goes along with my point. I did not say that small community hosts would not go with SMTs over forking, I said "any reasonably funded project" would likely prefer forking rather than doing an SMT.
So, it really comes down to what you think SMTs are going to be used for and if it is the right path. SMTs make sense for small niche communities that don't plan to be on public exchanges anyway and are used for in-site stuff. Another beneficial use for SMTs is as a currency meant to specifically target Steem users as customers in exchange for STEEM or SBD.
This is because when you have 10,000,000 users or plan to have 10,000,000 users for your coin/token, you're going to try cutting costs and RCs will add up. You have to spend RCs to get them accounts and spend RCs to allow them to interact. Its much more economical for a sizeable project to fork, ninja mine and directly sell tokens to users like Minds.com does.
However, I would argue that truly good projects do not need to be on the exchanges right away. The fork of Steem I would do would have STEEM only be used to purchase your immutable blog space and be burnable for network-wide feed display. Your 50 locked SP would be your witness vote influence, reward pool influence and RC pool.
The token would have utility and be primarily held for the use of it in promotion and in speculation that demand for immutable and decentralized blog space would go up.
Why do you believe this would be so? I do not expect that to happen. Steemit Inc. is designing an ICO system for SMTs and while they will likely create a dex similar to Steem Engine, I would not think most SMTs will be permitted on the major exchanges.
Look at BCH, right now you can make SLP tokens, but that does not mean SLP tokens get to go on the exchanges that BCH is on. They have to pay the exchanges for their listing the same as a Steem fork would, and so will SMTs.
Ethereum is unique, because smart contracts can be created on Ethereum as a dex, and because the dex is permissionless any token creator on Ethereum can get their token on that dex. This is very different for Steem, which does not actually have that capability built into it.