RE: A Design Failure of Steem, Pointed Out by the Architect and Creator of the Steem Blockchain, Dan Larimer
I've been circling around this broad issue since I came here, and have penned a few speculative rants of my own. But I think you've really nailed it here (and done so in a form that is so well-written it's a little humbling for me).
Your's and Dan's views on communities are pretty well supported in broader philosophy and literature. Yes, everything is contested, but the idea that communities can only exist if people in those communities can decide who can join (or not) is not a new one - i.e.: Michael Walzer's extremely influential ideas on immigration, the core of which was that "Admission and exclusion are at the core of communal independence". A community that has no control over who is in and who is out - and what behaviour is rewarded and which behaviour attracts censure - is no community at all. I'm not necessarily endorsing Walzer's broader views on immigration, but when it comes to communities of association, he does seem to have a point.
You are also correct to characterise the behaviour of vote-selling as rent-seeking in nature. This is true in the literal sense that buyers are 'renting' attention. But it's also applicable in the way that political economists use the term to describe activities that "seek to to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth" - this is distinct to profit-seeking, that is productive in nature and creates new wealth. In steemit terms, creating new content that enriches the blockchain is profit-seeking, collecting SBD from those creators so that they can get attention is rent-seeking.
In the political sense, rent-seeking is seen as businesses lobbying government to manipulate conditions of the business environment in order to increase the economic 'rent' they collect, without increasing productivity. Here, there is no need to lobby - the bidbot owners, and the people who make the big delegations to them are the government.
Great supplementary analysis, thank you for adding it :) You distinguish the profit vs. rent part well.
It was you and @tarazkp that pointed me in the right direction, but thanks!
Looking at what behaviour on steemit can be characterised as rent-seeking is really important, because rent-seeking is generally considered to be bad for productivity and growth within economies.
When rent-seeking is too easy a way to earn money, investment in production and innovation falls. We see this here, as people move away from content creation and manual curation in favour of investing in bidbots to generate passive income.
If the economy has enough diversity and overall strength, this might just skim a few percent off GPD. But if too much money leaves other parts of the economy, it can't end well, because modern economies can't run purely on rent-seeking. The equivalent here would be if so little new content was produced that seeking rent in the attention economy no longer paid a worthwhile return. I can't imagine that such an end-point would be very pretty.
Even as a newbie this is something I noticed about Steemit quickly. Most new non-Steemit themed content received few views or upvotes. Other content that focused on how 'to play the Steemit game' seemed to get many views and upvotes, even if the posts were very short. So many posts trying to sell bot services, or explaining how to use bots etc. If this continues, it seems to me Steemit will end up being a platform about itself, a mirror pointed at a mirror sort of. New content creators will have fled. As a newbie, I have the distinct feeling that if I don't pay for a bot, I will forever be invisible here. Time will tell. Thanks for the very useful comments and observations.