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RE: Thoughts about authenticity on the Steem blockchain - Volume #1: Identity
As a community, we allow users to post utter shit every day in order to get their vote from upvu. We "allow" it because these users are seen as investors.
This type of "investment" has been toxic to Steem as a social blockchain. The original whitepaper envisioned holding Steem Power as an incentive to improve the ecosystem. Instead many large SP holders have tended to operate like slumlords, trying to extract as much value as possible while waiting for somebody else to improve things around them. From the beginning the norm should have been "no self-votes", and delegating to a bot that votes for you based on your delegation is essentially a self-vote. Instead the norm we have is "don't piss off the big accounts".
The whitepaper also envisioned people of equivalent wealth policing each other, but that isn't really happening. So (with one exception), at the upper tiers of stakeholders, we basically have a proof-of-stake blockchain masquerading as a social media platform.
As the whitepaper said, it's still doing the work of distributing the token, so it's really not harmful to the blockchain... but, I agree that it's toxic at the social layer. The problem is, downvote wars are also toxic at the social layer, so it's almost a matter of "pick your poison".
We've talked about the self-vote phenomenon before, and that aspect doesn't really trouble me. I only see over-valued and under-valued. If we find a way to get the values right, I don't care who does the voting. Campaigns against self-voting (IMO) will just spur the creation of Sybil accounts.
As I replied to @the-gorilla, I'll have more to say about this in a future post. Hopefully next week.
Yes. It crowds out genuine effort. At the top end you have a purely inflationary high-APR DeFi chain that wants plausible deniability. And at the bottom end it's easier to churn out spam or plagiarized posts than it is to write genuinely good content (which has a high chance of getting lost in the shuffle anyway).
I think that it's a useful rule of thumb to assume that people aren't reliably good at evaluating the quality of their creative output. And humans are better at understanding bright-line rules than at making difficult judgments like what a post is worth, so I think it would be a beneficial norm to have even if it isn't 100% of the solution. I could also be on board with a norm like putting a rewards cap on posts that get auto-voted on (I think there can be good arguments for things like UBI, but it doesn't make sense for people to be making as much as the big accounts are making with upvu posts).
Sure, there's no single perfect solution. I just think the chain would work better if it had some more robust norms than "whatever big accounts can get away with".
Yeah, I agree with this. I guess the reason I don't focus on self-voting is that a very low percentage of accounts actually have enough stake to over-value their posts without help.
I agree and similar to the ease with which self-voting could be banned, I can't imagine it being difficult to make it impossible to vote for somebody who's delegated to you.
These voting bots are hugely popular and embraced by the Korean community and I don't think they'd consider using the platform in any other way. Which is the round-a-bout way of saying: "we know nothing will ever change" 🤷♂️