10 Simple rules for Steemizenship - for discussion

In the 1990s, many people wrote many messages on the topic of netiquette (Internet etiquette). After years of discussion, some lasting but informal standards emerged and still persist to this day. A similar exercise might now be useful to develop Steemiquette for the Steem blockchain. This post makes a contribution to that sort of discussion.

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Introduction

Recently, I came across the article, 10 Internet Etiquette Tips From the 1990s in my RSS feed. Sadly, I'm old enough to remember when "netiquette" was a pressing topic of conversation just about everywhere you turned, so the article stirred some old memories, and ironically, those memories reminded me a lot of Steem, today. On the Internet, code is not law, but many of the informal netiquette standards are still widely known and adhered to. Those endless seeming conversations seem to have paid off. First, just for fun, let's review those netiquette tips from the mid-90s.

1. KEEP EMAIL SIGNATURES SHORT.
2. DON'T EXPECT IMMEDIATE RESPONSES.
3. TURN OFF THE CAPS LOCK.
4. LIGHTEN THE MOOD WITH EMOTICONS.
5. TAG SPOILERS.
6. DON'T ASK STRANGERS HOW THE INTERNET WORKS.
7. KEEP FLIRTING TO A MINIMUM.
8. DON'T LOG IN DURING RUSH HOUR.
9. LET GRAMMAR MISTAKES SLIDE.
10. AVOID FLAMEWARS.

Some of these were transient concerns, but a number of them have stood the test of time, and two others that really stuck with me are missing from the list - "RTFM (Read the 'fine' manual) before asking questions" and "Don't feed the trolls". Here on Steem, however, the addition of rewards adds a new dynamic, so maybe some new guidelines are also in order.

In the remainder of this article, I'll throw out some suggestions to start or continue a conversation about "steemiquette". I'm just brainstorming here, but I think an initiative to enumerate some community expectations for conduct might be a worthwhile exercise. Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments and also to offer your own suggestions.

For the record, when I refer to "voting badly" or "bad votes" in the remainder of this post, I am referring to votes that don't accurately reflect the value of a post. I am not making a values judgment.

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1. Steemizen, not Steemian

   
   

   pixabay license: source

   
   
   I know, this is already a settled question, but I don't think I've ever expressed this opinion before, so I'm going to lead with this item anyway.

   A "steemian" is someone who is here. A "Steemizen" is someone who is part of the community. "Steemizen" conveys a sense of shared purpose, goals and responsibilities. So, I prefer the term, "steemizen" for myself and anyone else who's using the blockchain.




2. BYOA -- Bring Your Own Audience or Build Your Own Audience
   
   

   If I'm unhappy with my rewards, "The Whales" are not the solution to my problem, and neither are the various curation teams. Votes from these stakeholders are certainly nice, but the platform is going to fail if everyone looks at the existing whales as some sort-of Steem-based tooth fairy. Just like any other social media site, the way to succeed is to have viewers or readers, and that requires building an audience. If I build an audience, I honestly believe that rewards will follow (although I'm not aware that anyone has really proved this at any significant scale.) Expecting the whales to short-circuit this requirement is unrealistic and unhealthy for the platform.

   So, posting is just step 1. Steps 2 through 99 are marketing. That doesn't mean marketing Steem. It means marketing my own blog on places like Twitter, Facebook, and/or Linkedin, and anywhere else I can without spamming people.

   (Side note: there is a meritocratic and symbiotic niche here, where people who are good at marketing could partner with people who are good at writing by marketing blogs in exchange for a beneficiary setting on the posts.)



3. Unless a post has ethical problems (spam, plagiarism, abuse), don't downvote it to zero
   
   

   I've said before that I'm not a fan of downvotes, and to the best of my knowledge, no one has shown that their benefits outweigh their harm. If I were a whale with a lack of ethical inhibitions, I might use downvotes in a cycle where phase I would be to aggressively and visibly - with great fanfare - downvote people and chase them away in order to drive down the price of steem so I could buy low, then phase II would be to let the price drift back up in the absence of flag-wars, at which point I could sell high and repeat the process.

   Downvotes strike me as anti-social, and exactly opposite to the spirit of a social media platform. Additionally, I think that patterning the rewards algorithm after a second price auction with a super-linear rewards curve to discourage stake-splitting could solve many of the problems that downvotes were meant to address. People could be incentivized by the rules to regulate their own votes (up and down).

   However, I recognize that this is a closed issue. Whatever I may think of the topic, mine is a minority view, and downvotes are here to stay. So my steemiquette suggestion is that downvoters should almost never vote a post all the way down to zero in disagreement over rewards. A good rule of thumb for disagreement over rewards might be to follow the spirit of a second-price auction, and downvote enough to cancel out the rshares from the highest value voter. If someone has already cancelled out those rshares and the post is still overvalued, then a second person can cancel out the rshares from the 2nd-highest voter, and so on...

   Meanwhile, I'll just keep hoping that some day a steem-engine token or SMT will be able to experiment to see what happens when reward allocation is fashioned after a second price auction.







pixabay license: source

4. Voting selfishly means voting honestly
   
   

   To some extent, I think that the debates over auto-voting, self-voting, and even bid-bots all miss the point. If Steem is going to succeed, it needs to appraise the value of content in a way that's reasonable. A vote that brings a post closer to its "true" value (in some ideal sense) is a good vote. A vote that moves it away from its "true" value is a bad vote. It doesn't matter who casts the vote.

   At it's core, Steem is a content ranking system. If one post closes at 10 SBD, and another closes at 20, it should be reasonable to conclude that the 20 SBD post is twice as valuable (in some sense) as the 10 SBD post. If, at payout time, the more valuable post is rewarded 10 SBD and the less valuable post is rewarded 20 SBD, that indicates a systemic problem of some sort.

   This has implications for different voters:

   • Bot operators (paid and unpaid) should have quality control mechanisms in place to try to continuously improve the accuracy of the votes that are cast by their bots. The goal of the bot should be something like an appraisal service.
   • Manual voters should try not to let off-chain relationships in discord groups, Twitter, or real-life distort their appraisals.
   • Self-voters and voting circles should try to honestly calibrate their vote values against other posts on the chain.
   
   

   So, in my view, everyone should feel free to vote for themselves, their friends, and even to use bid-bots, but in the long term for anyone who is accumulating Steem, we protect the value of our stake by voting honestly. Case in point, a certain account was worth somewhere around $8 million when it started supporting another account with 10 votes per day on low-effort posts. Today, that whale account is worth $200,000. None of us smaller stakeholders has been punished more by the bear market than the large stakeholders who have been voting badly. (badly in a technical sense, not a moral judgment.)

   It's nearly certain that there will always be a mix of short-term voters and long-term voters, but large stakeholders with short-term voting strategies are likely harming themselves and the platform. This should be discouraged by our social norms, and by other voters. (To beat a dead-horse, this may be another case in support of experiments with a 2nd price auction reward strategy.)



5. Don't talk about Steem (much)
   
   

   Some reasons for posting about Steem might include:

   • To discuss topics that effect significant portions of Steem's stakeholders.
   • To market the platform to off-chain users.
   • Publishing metrics
   
   

   However, unless I am a developer or point-of-contact for some Steem-based application, business, or organization, the percentage of posts that I devote to writing about Steem should probably be low.

   As a play on the "attention economy", to grow the value of STEEM, Steem needs new eyeballs. As a general rule, posts about Steem are not the sort of content that will attract eyeballs.



6. Votes are stored on the blockchain. It is not necessary to announce a vote in the comments (although it may sometimes be helpful to enumerate the reasons behind a vote).
   
   

   For the most part, replies from curators seem to be intended mainly to give people something to vote for to support the curation effort. However, the blockchain's mechanism for rewarding curation is curation rewards. In a way, the act of commenting on a post in hopes of also picking up some author rewards seems like a form of double-dipping. It's conceptually similar to an author who reposts their blogs.

   Curation teams may want to reply to a post to raise awareness of their service, but those comments don't necessarily need to go with every single vote, and they probably should give some specific information about the post to describe why the vote was cast.



7. Don't vote for comments that announce votes
   
   

   Obviously, this relates to the previous item, and I have to admit that I'm schizophrenic on these two. Out of a desire to express gratitude and in recognition of the work that curation requires, I fairly often find myself voting for replies that announce votes. However, I have recently been discouraging myself from doing this because I don't necessarily think it's in the best interest of the blockchain.

   Under the #newsteem rewards regime, the authors already took a substantial haircut in rewards percentage. Personally, I had hoped that the new rules might raise Steem's value and the increase in value would make up for the loss in percentage, but so far, that hasn't happened. In fact, the value moved the other way - substantially. Every time I vote for a curator's vote announcement, that's siphoning even more rewards away from authors who are doing actual content production, so I am increasingly trying to avoid casting those votes.







pixabay license: source

8. If one Steem author includes content from another Steem author, the post should add collaboration rewards
   
   

   If you watched @jarvie's first presentation at Steemfest, you saw that one of the things that interests full-time content producers is the ability to direct beneficiary rewards. To the best of my knowledge, Steem is virtually unique in this capability, and we should make the most of it.

   Additionally, one of the guiding principles that was outlined in the whitepaper is the desire to reward everyone who provides value in the ecosystem. Including someone else's content in my post is a clear indication that their post added value, and I should recognize that value with a beneficiary setting. It's like tipping for services in the real world.



9. Don't retaliate for downvotes
   
   

   This could also be categorized under "voting honestly", but it's a special case. Under #newsteem, I am aware of at least two long-time Steemizens who have been persistently targeted by high-powered retaliatory downvotes. A vote should be a reflection of the value of the content, not a way of settling scores. Flag wars drive users away, and even users who aren't targeted can be frightened away by observing them.

   The more Steem Power a person holds, the more this sort of behavior devalues their own stake.



10. Steemiquette should be reinforced by voters
    
    

    Authors are going to follow the incentives. If someone is running a content creation account, but cashing out quickly and doing little or no curation, then they have very little incentive to protect the value of Steem. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's up to the voters to do the protecting. This means that beyond personal interest in an article, voters need to also include Steemiquette factors when casting our votes. The voter should also ask questions like:

    • Will this post bring an audience?
    • Does the author have a history of marketing their content outside of Steem?
    • Is this post relevant to people outside of Steem?
    • How does this post's payout compare to similar posts on the platform?
    • Does an author need protection from retaliatory down votes?
    • Is the author designating beneficiary rewards to other Steem authors who provided value to the post?
    • Is the author burning rewards or assigning a beneficiary to the SPS?

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That concludes my list, and I don't claim any of these are final answers. I'm basically just brainstorming here, and if you ask me again next week, I might give you a different list, so this is definitely just a starting point. Maybe it will be helpful for the platform to go through this exercise and see if it leads anywhere, though.

Of course, we're all individuals with our own stakes, so no one can dictate how anyone else acts, but as a community we can suggest some best practices. Just like no one has to enforce the "Don't use all caps" guide-line, community standards can sometimes be implemented by persuasion instead of compulsion. So what are the standards of conduct that the Steem community should promote?

Please comment if you have any thoughts on the subject!

Beneficiaries

• @jarvie - 5% - Linked Steemfest presentation
• @null - 10% - Burn rewards
• @rgkmb-unofficial - 10% - Fundraising for the Rustin Golden Knights Marching Band
• @steempeak - 5% - Support for steempeak.com

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Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

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