RE: Untangling the Gordian Knot that is Steem Ethics
"We should focus on making money."
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.
The freedom of others ends when it diminishes mine. Adding toasters to electoral mechanisms is not a right. Bots voting destroys human rights. We do not have the authority to grant rights, we're born with them. Toasters aren't born with them, because they aren't born.
Bots are programs. And programs are programmed by people. As I type to you right now, I am using bots, AKA programs, to type to you, through the web browser program and the operating system program. So, it comes down to drawing the line. Where do you draw the line and how do you enforce that line? I have a code I know for autoclicking. So, I know how to make my mouse auto-click again and again. That could be a bot. Of course, a lot of people can be against the automated bots. I understand that preference. But how do you stop a bot? I could turn this account right here that I am writing from into a bot account simply by adding a program that could do things. So, what would you try to do with my account as soon as I did that? Would you want to only downvote me as soon as you see the same comment coming from my account again and again or would you try to ban my account or what? How do you stop the bots without stopping the people who program the bots? It's like trying to ban guns, drugs, wars, etc.
Using toasters to make toast is fine. Letting toasters vote is not. There's the line.
Well, regarding the issue on Steem, which is bots voting, the reason bots are used to vote is to manipulate the rewards mechanism profitably. Eliminating the ability to financially manipulate the rewards mechanism will end incentive to use vote bots. I have proposed a functional mechanism to do so, which I will not detail again here. I have called the mechanism the Huey Long algorithm, and if you're interested you can find it in my comments on a post by @blocktrades some months ago when they sought a plebiscite on how to fund SPS.
I have limited means, and so selectively downvote spam and abusive self votes using botnets where I can reduce the ROI of such vermin. I don't bother flagging bots that aren't used for profiteering, nor do I vote other than organically, so I don't follow any trail or use an autovoter. Votes are only valuable if they are something people do personally, IMHO. Financial value inuring to votes tends to corrupt voters, and using bots to do so is but one means of corruption.
I don't want to ban them. I want to make it valuable to be a person in society, and mechanisms that make it just as valuable to be a bot are bad policy. Guns and drugs are something people use to craft society, so keeping them from being used to financially manipulate is something I also support.
I don't want bots to be economically encouraged to dole bullets or heroin out either, for the exact same reason: doing so degrades humanity.
People are what create value using their judgment. Corrupting that judgment by bribery is therefore contrary to societal benefit.