Untangling the Gordian Knot that is Steem Ethics
Based on a user’s stake, the code allows for both downvoting and drawing rewards from the pool. Now If you own a ridiculous amount of steem power, then with your vote you can assign a super fun amount of rewards to your post. Dependent on the quality of the content you rewarded, people may or may not see this as reward pool rape and downvote it. If they downvote it, you may or may not see that as theft. The main point here is the code considers both acts as legitimate no matter where they fall on the human morality scale. To deny that one exists is to deny that the other exists. If flagging cannot be theft because seven days, then the reward pool cannot get raped because it’s done with legitimate stakeholder power.
If we are honest with ourselves: either neither exists -or- they both do. According to the code, neither exist. If we look to our morality, either or both, exist. Some people will pooh-pooh flags, and this has something to do with whether they have the steem power or influence to defend against it. Whereas others might be more dismissive of reward pool rape. That is where I fall on the morality scale. The reason I think this way is that if I put myself in the shoes of a steem investor, then why would I invest if I can’t use my steem to capitalize off of the blockchain? I think many people buy into steem so they can have those larger votes and therefore draw more value from the pool than a non-investor can.
From the perspective of a content creator and consumer, the only thing a larger vote does is to allow one to reward or punish posts to a greater degree. If you reward your posts too much, someone might call you a god-damned reward pool rapist. If you downvote someone’s content, somebody will call you a thief. From the perspective of one who looks at the blockchain from within the realm of social media only, my best advice for escaping this Gordian Knot is to not invest. This is because no matter what you do, you’ll most likely get criticized for how you wield your investment. If that’s the case, why even bother, you’ll have a poor experience and get roped into meaningless drama. You could let your money sit in a bank and collect an APY hassle-free.
From a financial perspective, one could always buy steem to delegate to one of the many businesses on the blockchain. For example, many blockchain games offer micro-transactions. These games generate wealth for investors because games with micro-transactions exploit people’s tendency to get sucked into addictive behaviors. Even though I might be talking with a smarmy tone on this, I’m not one to judge, because I too, or #metoo if you will, am addicted to one of these games. But are these businesses more moral or virtuous than something like a bid-bot business? I don’t have the slightest clue and wonder if the question is even worthy of asking. Games have a utility, that is to entertain. Bit bots also have a utility, and that is to allow people to get noticed via advertising.
Somehow we’ve gotten to this weird and tenuous place in the world where people virtue signal and try to sanction or cause harm to each other for what they did or didn’t do, because nobody can seem to mind their own business. It used to be we lived in a world where everyone was trying to do whatever they could to make a buck. And so long as this action wasn’t causing people direct harm, it was acceptable. I look at the blockchain economy as I do the world economy. People will do what they do to make a profit. Are some people’s profits ridiculously high, yes, but that is the nature of the game. Is it my job to police these people, so that they do not earn too much? Would it make the world a better place? I don’t think so. But what say you, what is the right thing to do?
Is a Robin Hoodesque massive downvote on an overly rewarded post tantamount to a dusty upvote for everyone else? If so, how much good does it do, and is it worth it in the long run? Now I know we could argue that if everyone does this, “everything will be so much better” and this is what hard fork 21 tries to do, it tries to get people caught up in the drama of manipulating people’s fiscal behavior through the punishment end of operant conditioning.
And although punishment may work well with children, it is not received well among adults. So despite the culture that is being pushed from the top down, I think we need to ask ourselves what kind of ecosystem we want on the platform. Are we pushing for the social justice warrior type of atmosphere in trying to punish people for what they say, or how they reward themselves with their stake? Should we never rest until there is parity in all things, or is that and has it always been a pipe dream? I’m sure folks smarter than I will figure this out one day.
I have already noticed some hypocritical witch hunting taking place. Supposedly the post in question was plagiarized too ( I say supposedly as I have seen some accused and acted on before it was verified they were the actual author at the other site). This post was the beneficiary of large paid for bot votes and the disagreement was over being valued to highly.
I find it hypocritical they went after this person, yet ignore the *cough cough respectable large account holder facilitating the sale of these votes. They purposely walk past the mountains of greed and bully the pebbles of greed. All while feigning the moral high ground.
Ironically, the power players selling these votes that we are told is horrible then get their slice of the pie grown from the return to the pool of the downvoted rewards.
You just can't make this shit up.
I saw the writing on the wall when Dan began talking about the 50/50 split some time back again. I powered down about 3/4ths of my stake and invested it elsewhere. I also think it was timely that all these "tribes" came up to replace the denigration of rewards, although it seems a reach to me that tokens not traded elsewhere have any value compared to the plummeting Steem that is listed on major exchanges at least.
I believe they have lost faith in the common user base to soak up the supply and are looking to replace the masses with a new targeted investor group. But similar to the woman who monkey branches from relationship to relationship, they aren't quite ready to let go of the useful tools they are hoping to discard in the near future.
That's interesting. I can't help but wonder if it's possible to drum self-interest out of human behavior, or if it's a realistic goal. We can try to create voluntary systems filled with complex rules, but if they don't closely resemble the free market, I think we'll find ourselves short on volunteers.
I think history and personal experience bears out the idea that self interest is not only the natural inclination for us, but sadly for a majority it is taken to extremes that harm ones actual self interest. This experiment itself is proof on the shortsighted preferences of the masses. And I do mean masses, not talking of the whales here. If the masses who came had ever thought to invest an amount equal to their weekly coffee or work lunches the valuation would never have tanked.
I remember when the dust sweeper program came along, and I watched as those who rewarded way above dust minimized their votes to dust under the assumption it should be the person they were interacting with to ensure there was a payout. Speaking of dust, I see it is saying my vote on your comment is worthless. It already was at dust, but Steemworld still shows it worth .01.
Please don't waste your vote on anymore of my comments. Or if so, maybe what I will begin doing and vote symbolically at 1% voting strength.
I read you loud and clear, and many times capitalism does go to the extreme where it becomes harmful and socialism too. Sometimes I can't help but wonder if they're not polar ends of the same system. Like when capitalism is achieved too thoroughly if the natural next step for governments is socialism as a means to temporarily pacify its population and then economic collapse. No worries on the comment votes bro, don't feel compelled to vote on my replies. I like to vote on all the comments I receive because I appreciate the interaction and feedback on my posts. You're the one doing me a favor by sharing your thoughts!
You misapprehend self interest, confusing profiteering with investment. Investing for capital gains depends on self interest, but not only for investors. The operators of business seek investment to improve the conduct of their business, and their self interest dovetails with that of investors intent on capital gains, who inject capital into the business by purchasing the underlying investment vehicle, such as stock or bonds, and seek to enable the business conducted to compensate them for their investment by increasing the value of the stock, or paying the interest on the bonds.
Steem does not facilitate this mutual cooperative benefit, simply extracting the value of the content created and using substantial holdings of the underlying investment vehicle to manipulate rewards as allowed by specific code. That code is not human nature. It is a mechanism that can be different, and potentiate self interest to be cooperative and mutally beneficial, rather than parasitic and extractive.
The devs were not experienced investors, and simply chose the easiest route to ROI, despite that being contrary to capital gains, which are far more productive of ROI over time.
Well, I had to break out the dictionary because you said I'm confusing profiteering with investment. According to merriam-webster.com.
investment = the outlay of money usually for income or profit
profiteering = the act or activity of making an unreasonable profit on the sale of essential goods especially during times of emergency
The investment in the steem is the outlay of the money for profit. Whether or not these profits are unreasonable I don't really know? They might look unreasonable to small stake holders. But the more SP or money you have the greater the potential to earn with it, even if it's with curation alone. Just look at millionaires today, they put money in the bank and can skim off the interest at the end of the year and live off of that. I mean that's how the system is designed. Steem is similar, the more steem you have the more you can draw from the pool. I'm not saying it's right or good or bad, but that's how they made it. Just imagine if they called the APY at the bank a reward pool and all bank customers got to see who got the most rewards? They'd get angry at the wealthy for taking all the rewards. The bank might change the rules to spread it out equally and then the wealthy would simply close their accounts and find a more lucrative place to put their capital.
I appreciate you being forthright in seeking factual understanding. However, I have clearly indicated how I contrast the two terms in practice. Outfits like Bain Capital that buy a controlling interest in a stock corporation and then proceed to sell off it's assets to profit are profiteers, and those like Berkshire Hathaway that acquire stocks to build the companies and profit by the gain in price of the stock are investors.
The business model of profiteers, extracting the working capital of a business, is contrary to capital gains.
Regardless of ethical considerations, doing so is destructive of the underlying investment vehicle. It reduces the prices of stocks, and in our case, the price of Steem, by destroying the ability of the company to produce. The history of Steem reveals that destruction, and I but point out that the reason for that destruction is demonstrable and has long been understood in financial circles.
Stake weighting extracting rewards prevents content from delivering value to creators and Steem. It's the equivalent of selling the presses, forges, and real property of a business. It's not building the business, but taking that value as profit using stake weighting, just as KK&R does. Stake can be used to build, which I call investment, and has been driven by capital gains to create the blessings of civilization we enjoy today, or to simply part out such as the hard work of others has built up, as we observe has been done to Steem.
Profiteering destroys, investment builds.
I see what you mean, and I am not suggesting that bid bots help to bring content value to the platform, it might in rare cases make valuable posts more highlighted, but, that kind of business is amoral concerning the quality of posts boosted. I’ve seen some of these bot enterprises use blacklists for users who boost low-quality content, at the very least that is a good thing.
An additional aspect worthy of consideration outside the realm of the social media marketplace and the value of said content is the market value of the crypto itself. Regardless of how people use steem, by HODLing as opposed to selling, one is helping to keep the price of the steem to dollar ratio in the black. Whereas if overnight these systems come to a halt, you may see them sell-off because their business is no longer profitable. And most of these folks are not interested in content creation or curation so what else would keep them invested in the coin? In that case, the value of steem will suffer.
So yeah, I know where you are coming from concerning the quality of content, but we also want to consider the value of the currency. If STINC wanted to discourage bid-botting, they should have nixed the trending page altogether. Most posts on trending are not organic, even if they were, with unequal SP it is still not organic, only means that some people’s opinions are more important than others.
I’m waiting with bated breath to watch how events play out. The schadenfreude will be real. When all is said and done, market planning and controlling never works out well. I’m not against a utopian market either, it’s just that I know these things always backfire and result in dystopia. For me, the similarity is someone who is throwing water on a grease fire in slow motion. I expect a rise in the klepto culture of self-righteous downvoters who think they are saving the blockchain by looking down on their noses at the quality of their neighbor’s content.
In cultures where people eat the rich. When that kind of thing becomes trendy, and we have eaten the rich, then the bar for whatever is rich lowers. And that class of “rich” is eaten, and the bar gets lowered again. With each free meal, the mob gets hungrier and hungrier until the appetites are insatiable and they become “superiorly entitled” to well, in the case of the blockchain, other people’s stake, steem power, or how it’s used.
Whatever this whole blockchain social media thing is, it feels more like a social-psychological experiment and we are the rats experiencing it first-hand. I’d rather see it fail online than in IRL, as the stakes are much higher IRL, even though, when you add value to it in the form of currency... it makes it quasi-real life, just on a smaller scale depending on the size of one’s stake.
Regardless of how it plays out, I think we can both agree it will be a shit show. There are some, and I’m guessing you might find yourself in this camp who think the curation changes will cause an unjust enrichment through the simple act of curation alone, and although it’s not something I’ve put too much thought into, I can see that argument.
However, not much one can do about that aspect after the code has changed. They keep fiddling around trying to change the rules and make it “perfect,” starting to doubt anything like that will ever be possible, it doesn’t, however, stop people from trying to manifest a utopia.
I think they have not undertaken to potentiate capital gains, but to enable profiteering, and continue to perfect profiteering, expecting capital gains to result.
This is not a recipe for encouraging capital gains and investment. Only looking at problems based on foundational principles enables solid foundations to support structures. The encouragement of stake weighting as a means of extracting rewards from the pool is a flaw in the foundation that prevents support for certain structures, and those enabling capital gains in particular.
There are relatively trivially simple mechanisms that can prevent profiteering that can be written in the code. They are not because profiteering is intentionally the foundation of Steem.
i think you are missing the social aspect. if a large portion of people downvote a post, that is an agreement that something in that post did not meet criteria. same as with upvoting. for example, if someone shitposts and awards themselves $300 thru upvote and bidbot, that is draining the pool unfairly because it isnt giving any value. that person could have invested their money, but it might not have made that huge reward. so in essence they are abusing a loophole for personal gain. does investing a huge amount of money give them the right to make this gain? thats the question.
since i didnt invest in this platform solely for financial reasons, i think the whole entitlement about how much money one deserves to make from social media is ridiculous. to me its in the title :SOCIAL: It isnt investment media, it isnt get rich quick media. The whole concept is getting skewed off the original premise; one of interaction with other people, trying to build something worthwhile to profit everyone, not just the few whales on top. no one made people invest. if they made the mistake of thinking its a free lunch, thats their fault. The group gets to decide the value, not the individual.
I agree and second the above question. I also can't help but wonder if a hard fork ever does thwart capitalists from capitalizing will it cause a mass exodus? If so, wouldn't that prove yet again that the enforced sharing model, no matter what name one calls it, generally tends to fail flat on its face?
when you are dealing with a lot of capitalists yes. i happen to be more of a socialist, which i get a lot of flack for, because they have a different concept of socialism than i do. i think there are people who are willing to work together in a way that it benefits the community, as the community supports the individual. people that come in with a purely capitalistic mind set tend to get upset because they envision quick profit, which is a problem. steem is a group investment, not a short term stock with dividends. i feel people should come here with the idea of investing in the community, because they believe in that vision. i think this is really tricky, because if we are appealing to capitalist investers, it wont wash.
Thanks for your feedback @torico, it's always good to get your take! Any ideas on how steem might appeal to socialist investors? It should be interesting to see how it all pans out in the long run. I think it was an interesting experiment to have, but now they're going all weird with it, and it will be interesting to see where that goes too.
well i'd like to see it take crypto and go into a new social movement geared towards sustainability and grassroots, more decentralized government. not everything has to be pure socialist or pure capitalism. it sounds illogical but i favor a sort of decentralized socio-capitalist democracy, the kind that takes the environment into account. this would take a huge cultural paradigm shift in so much as no, you dont need 8 cars and 3 houses and 10 million dollars. just people who all work toward a common goal of a thriving community.
im not sure where steemit will go. im not really a financial person so i keep my nose out of that, but i'd like one day to see a steem village.
I want 10 cars. Don't stop me from doing what I want to do. Private property rights. Otherwise, who decides? It always comes back to centralization or decentralization of powers in regards to who decides what is best for the environment, etc, etc.
Your version of socialism exists in the free market in the form of partnerships, relationships, teamwork, the free market, in working together, in competing, in being humans, in the fundamentals of eternal love and eternal principles. Regardless of how you see socialism, the problem is within federal governments, globalism, authoritarianism, tech cartels, corporatism, monopolism, etc, etc, in what they have been doing, etc.
I disagree. Part of your argument involves bid bots. But how would you stop a bid bot? And what if a bid bot is doing exactly what a person would have done in upvoting and downvoting? Would you steal money from Facebook or McDonald's for making too much money? We may want to but the free market is about supply and demand. We should focus on making money. We can focus on upvoting what we think will make a lot of money. We could get mad if we lose the upvoting game when we find out that these other posts that we didn't upvote made a lot of money. I believe in trying to make a lot of money. A lot of people can be poor. Some people can become very rich. Some can try to get richer. That's life. It is the struggle, the fight upwards.
I disagree. Let me rephrase the above statement to make my point: 'we should ignore the myriad far more important benefits of society in order to focus on making money.'
In the real world, our social interactions are far more valuable and beneficial to us than money.
Steem social media is a segment of society, and it's economy is not the primary benefit to people.
Mike Tyson said Don King would sell his momma for a dolla. If making a profit on pimping out your mother sounds like a beneficial result to you, I submit you have misunderstood value. I am confident reflecting upon the actual value of society will refine your understanding and reveal that making money is not as important as your statements here indicate.
But that is money. I agree with you. I believe in making money. But what is money? My definition is more generic than your definition. When I say money, I include "SOCIAL INTERACTION" which is what you said and that is money by definition because money is anything of value. I mean anything. My definition is as general as it gets. I hate ROTHSCHILD MONEY. I want fiat money to die. That is FAKE MONEY. I want FAKE MONEY to die. But I do want to compete and to get bigger and bigger. I want to own as many houses as possible. I promote that. I also promote other things as well. But I do not promote slavery or the desire to be as poor as possible.
Love is not money, friend. I don't suppose money evil, but elevating money's value above it's social benefits devalues society, and it's clearly happening on Steem, just as Mike Tyson observed it happens in real life.
Money has real, substantive value, but not more than my neighbors to me. Neither does the value of Steem exceed that of the community here, or the stories and ideas we share. Limiting how we value to financial results in mere economic considerations being factored in to how the social media platform is structured, and this devalues the society and the people comprising it.
The result has been Steem has not retained that society as economic tweaks have enabled substantially staked users to extract the vast majority of rewards. Users with more rational values have left, and the mere financial aspects of Steem have lost economic value as they no longer support, or derive support from, rational society.
Mining Steem can be done more efficiently with bots. Using bots to do so by selling stake/votes devalues people, and social media is people. The focus on the economy of Steem has it bass ackwards. We should be developing communities, and the markets they undertake will create economic value in the money they transact with.
How is love not money? Your definition of money is too specific. I am not against bots. Is there not new community feature for Steem, like Facebook Groups? Do you suggest people leave Steem and go to Weku, Bear Shares, Smoke, or Serey? You might be right that Steem has it backwards. But then again, I support capitalism. If Steem is utilizing free markets, then I would not want socialism in its place.
Experience informs me that if you don't know, I can't explain it to you.
The same goes for granting devices the same rights as people.
May the experiences that reveal the material differences between these things to you be easy, and your distress at the harm you suffer due to not grasping the differences mild. Sadly, the consequences of such misunderstanding can be existential. Loving your toaster may produce lasting burns in sensitive areas, and everlasting regret.
I recommend loving only people, and not conflating love freely given with that paid for by the hour.
Also, not loving toasters.
I believe in giving people the freedom to determine for themselves whether or not they want to do that or not.
They've wrecked this place-
Fuck these psychopaths who wanna conditionize their sheeple..
I'm not too keen on the behavior manipulation either. Not biting on that one.
Because actual investors seek to build value into the business so that the underlying investment vehicle gains value, which inures to investors. This is called capital gains, and is disabled by extracting value from the conduct of business. The latter is called profiteering. People that extract that value before it can inure to the underlying investment vehicle are called profiteers. They are not investors.
For millenia, capital gains driven by improving businesses have proven to be nominal means of driving investment. During that time numerous profiteers have destroyed businesses for profit by extracting the value of the business and the value of the underlying investment vehicle, typically stock. While the stock owned by profiteers becomes worthless, their purchase of that investment vehicle has been compensated by the ROI gained via selling the assets of the business, such as the forges, presses, and real property owned by the business.
Steem has no such real property, and the creators of content cannot be sold, leaving only the rewards generated by content available for extraction, which is accomplished via stake weighting such that ~90% of rewards has inured to whales, not reaching the creators of that content. As a result of this profiteering, Steem price is reduced, as is market cap and the user base.
HF21 has increased the financial incentive to extract rewards via stake weighting, and is accelerating the decline of Steem. There are a few thousand active users left on Steem social media presently, and many of those accounts are socks of the original ninjaminers, the whales. As the whales continuously concentrate Steem in their wallets via stake weighting, they recapture that Steem sold while retaining the money received for it from purchasers. As a result, the market for Steem is reduced, and the value of Steem declines.
Due to the necessity of stake to extract rewards via stake weighting, the whales have a dilemma: as the value of Steem declines, the monetary returns from their business model decline in real terms, but they need to hold stake to extract value, and are left holding the bag increasingly worth less over time. At some point, they need to abandon that stake as ROI no longer supports extracting diminishing rewards compared to other profit centers. Until the value of Steem declines below a certain point, they remain financially obligated to holding stake. HF21 accelerating the decline in price enables them to sell their holdings and move on quickly.
I believe this is most of why HF21 has been imposed on Steem: to enable profiteers to move on to other profit centers without suffering the gradual loss of their stake in real terms.
Let's take a look at bid bots for example. A lot of times people with heavy votes do not focus on curation. This non-curation by many causes a market condition where advertising is required to be seen. So when a bid bot and a user of their services freely decide to help each other by doing business. The buyer feels like they are receiving something of value, else they wouldn't have paid for it.
I'm sure the seller also feels/or felt the same. I'm not sure about the current state of affairs with that business model after HF21. Also, I would be hard-pressed to tell you the difference between that and a gambling/gaming app or what have you. If one is more meritorious than the other, or which is the profiteer and which is the capitalist.
Markets are complex, they just happen on their own. It's much harder to design one from scratch from the top down and that's what steem tried to do, they tried to create a social media marketplace and just assumed that it would work the way they wanted it to without evolving how markets do. And you can call it evolving or devolving, but the market does what it wants to do. Tinker with and or break it and I suppose we'll see what happens.
Systems will either adapt and survive or they shut down and move elsewhere. I remember for a while there the Walton family enterprise was the scourge of the nation causing the local ma and pa shops to shut down. And now that we're in a trade war with China, the economy is shit, and Amazon is in its primacy it's causing people to panic because of the closures of various Walmarts in the US. I've got a wait and see approach it should be interesting to see where it goes. If we're going to experiment with this kind of stuff, I'd rather see it done on the internet.
Buying a botvote is marketed as profitable. It's essentially leasing the SP to self vote a phat bank.
Upvoting posts and comments requires no financial incentive, and the biggest social media platforms prove it. While we can opine to our heart's content about the quality of content on those other media, the truth is that folks actually curate on those platforms, while on Steem the financial incentive reduces actual curative upvoting, and encourages profiteering.
I have been of the opinion that HF21 will make that worse. I am surprised by the coordinated assault on bidbots the community has undertaken. I hope it lasts, and that I have been proved wrong about retaliation.
We'll see.
From a free market perspective, it would be better to just upvote in the same way we buy stuff. I don't downvote. And upvoting is like betting on the horses that may win. The ability to upvote and downvote might be like double betting where you create a win win situation if you are able to bet on both sides in a scheme to always win. Not saying we have that with Steem. I believe in supply and demand.
It would be better if we were focused only on upvoting what we liked as opposed to also, at the same time, trying to police the place in trying to minimize posts that might earn too much money subjectively. Having the freedom to do both is what we have currently it seems. I know some people might like that freedom to do that. But people don't go to McDonald's and steal money from them because they earned too much money, right? Facebook earns billions of dollars each year from us. Can we go and downvote Facebook for making too money? They don't share that money with us. That's sad. But I would not downvote Facebook.
You basically read my mind. There is a thing
called put options, but I don't think it belongs
married up with social media. It's unnatural.
I've not heard of put options before.
Put options, shorting a stock, or short
selling is betting that a stock will tank.
It's a risky endeavor but their are gains
to be made with that particular tactic.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shortselling.asp
Same thing in the crypto market, when Bitcoin up to a high, like 10K USD, or maybe 20K, then many people sold their Bitcoin, perhaps, right? But then again, if you sell your Bitcoin, then somebody else will have that Bitcoin, right? So, why would the value decline in Bitcoin?