My Steem Philosophy is Adopted from Primum non nocere.
A special thanks to @valued-customer and @planter for the interesting comments on my last two posts. It just goes to show that the blockchain and all its complexity, can be viewed from starkly different perspectives. I think it all comes down to human nature, the biological imperative, self-interest, and or greed. Depending on how you view this one human condition that has many different names; It will most likely determine which word you choose to use. Bear in mind, as Milton Friedman said: "Of course none of us are greedy, it's only the other fellow who's greedy."
I'm of the mindset that markets evolve from the ground up, and almost all actions are taken with self-interest or self-preservation in mind. America first if you will. Similar to a biological organism, if you tamper with it via genetic editing or code changes from the top-down, you'll mostly end up with unforeseen consequences. It almost always ends up destroying what the people have collectively created on a subconscious level with their self-interest and free will in mind.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." — Declaration of Independence
But when does the pursuit of happiness move from self-interest to greed? This is a very subjective question, and some people are more content while others have insatiable appetites, and so long as these hungry, hungry, hippos do not violate the liberty of others, I say, let them have their fill. However, the Steem ecosystem is an artificial marketplace, and property rights are murky at best, the reward pool is finite and replenishes daily.
Investors purchased Steem for the reward distribution rights, but because of some irreverent, twisted code, the blockchain also gave them reward redistribution rights. In part, the first 50% aligns with normal human behavior. In the latter portion, however, the redistribution rights go against human behavior and play into the behavior of crabs who are stuck in a horrible predicament while they await their imminent demise. Ultimately, people have a choice; they can act like war crabs, and try to keep each other down. Or, they can live and let live, allowing people to pursue their self-interest. Some people, I've noticed, attempt to operate in a bipolar fashion, with one foot in both worlds, handing out lollipops and groin kicks to everyone they meet.
My personal preference is to stick with self-interest and to live and let live. I don't want to be a crab in a bucket. I don't want to be a guy that hurts someone else's potential or causes people to loathe and to hate me for doing so. This kind of culture that #newsteem is promoting is so disharmonious and destructive that it should never have been implemented in the first place. Social networks should not be a place where people are programmed to act like crabs in a bucket, or snipe people's rewards as that is the pinnacle of antisocial behavior.
In a perfect world, one where everyone is an altruist, all Steem investors would curate the most quality posts. However, we do not live in a perfect world, and not everyone is an altruist. To think that we should try to modify people's behaviors to solve trending by using the punishment side of operant conditioning is a horrible failure of imagination, and I know I'm not the first to suggest that we can do a hell of a lot better to encourage the right behavior, even if it's only on the condenser level. If we want to present the product as social-media-centric, then let's not encourage antisocial behavior.
Some people see self-serving investors as antisocial. However, they do bring value to the coin. They did this when they purchased Steem for reward distribution rights, and they continue to do it with the HODL (or powered-up Steem). As of right now, Steem is still a very niche product, both the blockchain social network and the alt-coin. The fact of the matter is; a lot of times, people who invest in things are looking to make a quick buck. That's the self-interest I was talking about, and you can call it what you want.
You can call it capitalism which may or may not be true depending on your understanding, or you can call it profiteering. But the fact of the matter is, the goal of capitalism is profit, and the same goes for profiteering. So the two concepts intersect, and perhaps they take different roads to get there. I think most of the people who invested in Steem, making it as successful as it was, were riding the BTC wave and looking to make a quick profit. No matter how you cut it, both types of individuals propped up the value of the coin at the point of sale and also help to maintain Steem's value while theirs is powered-up.
What Steem needs is an off-chain condenser-oriented solution to fix the problem of trending, and the Drudge Report is a wonderful example of why we should do this. The Drudge Report, one of the most popular websites in the history of the internet, is successful because it showcases fresh links to riveting information on a single webpage. When we can fix trending, without the need to promote flag wars, the general attitude on the platform will be more desirable and far less disharmonious. We can retain both content creators and investors. Whether they are "good" or "greedy," we need them all if we don't want Steem to become doge.
After seeing the title of my post, some may wonder, "Is the author a bonafide monetary physician?" To that, I would respond; Is Steem bonafide money?
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I appreciate very much you not blocking me LOL. The shout out is icing on the cake of your character. I see why I follow you, because character is generally why I follow anyone.
I will but briefly point out that civilization is the result of capital gains; of building enterprises into greater and more rewarding enterprises. While investors in the underlying investment vehicles of such enterprises do gain capital thereby (to wit, capital gains) society in general also benefits.
However there is a different way to profit, that comes from extracting the resources such an enterprise needs to conduct it's business, and some companies buy a controlling interest in a business, sell it's plants and equipment, fire all the employees, and sell the stock for whatever they can get, making a quick buck by destroying the business. As you might guess, such a business plan does not benefit society generally, and even the minority investors are often reduced to legal action due to losses they suffer as a result of such profiteering.
The value of Steem is it's social media. The extant extraction of rewards using stake weighting is comparable to selling the forges and presses of a manufacturer by profiteers. The content created by users on Steem turns up on the chans, on Twatter, on Fakebook, and Goolag's Youtube. That's where I found out about Steem. That is the marketing department of Steem: user's posts and content. That's probably how we all got here.
Profiteering is not the equivalent of investing for capital gains.
Thanks!
I wouldn’t if I could, it’s fun to exchange ideas and or spar with you from time to time. Who knows, perhaps we’re both a little right and a little wrong. Maybe in the distant future, the free downvotes will get discouraged for posts not exceeding a certain value. This, for the sake of a broader distribution and to appease most struggling content creators that don’t want to flag or like getting flagged. Maybe your new car will cost twenty-seven Steem instead of five. And perhaps what you see as profiteering is abuse, or maybe it does work to distribute the currency as the whitepaper suggests. I don’t know; I didn’t write the whitepaper. However, I got my hands on the first one and have all five authors’ names now. I find it interesting they omitted the names from the 2017 version. They should just make a nice one with pleasant metaphors for the 2020 edition, then they can feel confident in putting their names back on it. Not that any of this means much coming from a Somalian pirate whose eating strawberry ice cream and speaking through a nom de voyage on a connection that piggybacks off of five different defense satellites from three warring nation-states. I jest though, no self-respecting ma'am eats strawberry ice cream after noon on hump day, that'd be the epitome of blasphemy.
w/doctorate in pecuniaryology.
I have read the white paper, but failed to note any suggestion that self votes distribute the currency. Perhaps one of us will learn something if you reveal to me that suggestion. I need to learn more, so would be very happy if it were me.
Could you quote that part to me, or tell me where to find it?
“Eliminating
“abuse”is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to“abuse”the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts atabuseor collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure thatabuseisn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.” — Steem Whitepaper 15/32Please note how they speak to the "issue" or "none-issue" either agnostically or amorally by using the word abuse in quotes an equal number of times as it is used not in quotes. This suggests competing viewpoints in the minds of the various authors. Who knows, had the "it's not abuse" crowd won, maybe there wouldn't be downvotes at all? I have no clue how deep the rabbit hole goes in that regard. Or I could be wrong entirely if this is some kind of sick and twisted social psychology experiment designed to see how people react than that would be another reason to employ the doublespeak they used.
I do appreciate your pointing this out to me. Perhaps the abuse they refer to isn't self voting, but circle jerks and botnets, as I don't think they conidered self voting abuse, since they provided a check box to upvote your own posts on Steemit.
Thanks!
Sure, it's tough to say, the whitepaper is very wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, stuff. Written intentionally abstract and open to subjective interpretation. It's no wonder why people cannot agree on what is right or wrong behavior. Another reason they may be using this technique is so they don't hoist themselves on their own petard. There is no right or wrong way to explain how to "fairly" divvy (X) the number of rewards to (Y) the number of people. And like you pointed out before, it's not going to be fair because there is no equality in outcome. Any attempt to explain how to do this fairly is open to a very credible debunking. This doesn't stop people from yearning for a semblance of fairness when they invest. It's why I think we can't expect investors to act 100% altruistically. It's why I respect whatever investors do with their stake. For every person out there who capitalizes to the maximum, there are loads of others who are rewarding content. It all comes down to character.
This.
Yeah, all this blockchain think put me into a meta-ethics jag the other day. Well, it was just one video that aptly summarized many of the branches and categories. I found it interesting to realize there is this entire world of ethical foundations strictly defined.
Interesting up until where I heard him say: “Most people don’t identify with just one. Instead, most people identify with principles from several that help them form their moral views.”
Anyway, philosophy, ethics, and meta-ethics are all part of what forms a person’s character, and people might subscribe to one or more of these schools of thought or styles of beliefs without even knowing of their existence as it pertains to the realm of philosophy and or psychology. Similar to how one could be a Pisces or a Libra while knowing nothing about astrology.
The sentence I quoted made the entire branch seem somewhat unimportant, kind of like astrology. I guess it’s interesting, but only in the sense that we’re all living in a world with radically different ideas of right and wrong and what the best way to do things is. What’s concrete and real to some may be less concrete and real to others.
This is how you can have a world where; Flagging for reward disputes is a “wrong” in the eyes of some, while revenge flagging is the “wrong” for others. That reminded me to do some research into Ayn Rand's objectivism because that's a thing, albeit fringe. Before getting too deep into that one, I was thoroughly exhausted.
It would be useful if they had personality tests to find out where people fall on this scale and how that correlated to different religious beliefs, personality types, Myers-Briggs, for example, etc.. etc.. I bet a lot of these different ideas or people made categories interrelate or correlate to one another.
Not only that but where does it say it should be fair? The fairest thing is for people to earn relative to their stake, anything other than that brings subjectivity into the equation and the crab bucket.
Sorry, I got to this late. But I do agree
with you when it comes to self-voting.
Yet, it also pertains to all of the voting.