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RE: Self voting will now NOT be default steemit.com behaviour
It seems silly but I think there actually is some disagreement on that assumption, that the aspect to maximize is social utility. I think for some people the investment (or rather return on it) aspect is the most important.
Perhaps this should be the topic of another post, it's coming up a lot.
mmm... a post on the philosophy of monetised social communities - not so different to a big city. I could write it.
There is room for multiple strategies - we are not bots, I assume - but the underlying algos must promote the "common wealth". If there are only the vote-miners then earnings as a percentage will drop until such "income" reaches an equilibrium which may still be good but no longer great.
What then is the role of newbies?
The common wealth!? Socialist! It's that misunderstanding that would be good to unpack because it's what many people hear when you talk about social good here. Add to that the idea that a change in the rule set is more regulation and you're well on your way to a comparison with Marx.
This might be the touchstone of the rebuke.
Less politics and more analysis would be useful.
The common wealth is a term used by Francis Bacon, philosopher of science and advocate that science and technology should improve the lives of everyone. Technology is thus a wealth multiplier not a redistributor.
The Steem White Paper is not crystal clear as to the ultimate metric of success; as a startup it talks a lot about the number of users, but can that be a valid metric: to maximise users?
That's as close as we get to a "maximal social utility". We may call this whatever we want but what it amounts to is the total wealth within Steem. So it may make it easier to drop the economics jargon and call it essentially "maximal market cap of Steem and SBD". Possibly more useful is "total market cap per member". For highly skewed distributions such as Steem wealth, a median of earnings is a better measure.
The White Paper also mentions the Prisoner's Dilemma but, I think, makes an error here:
The current problems were foreseen but the algorithm was not created to mitigate them. Indeed, the subsequent paragraphs are used to justify the N-squared rewards curve, now changed to proportional N.
Looking at this more closely there is a hidden variable that should be changed: rshares or vests. Changing that formula will allow us to return to more votes per day.
Well put, thank you for that.