Potential Moral Hazard in Steemit
Currently, we are mostly aware of Social Media companies selling our mindshare. As someone who pays for social media ads to sell products from my small business, I know what the back end of the system looks like and am painfully aware of when someone is paying me to look at their stuff.
credit: Tom Toles
Therein lies a potential issue that I detect in the Steemit whitepaper.
"SP is a requirement for voting for or against content. This means that SP is an access token
that grants its holders exclusive powers within the Steem platform"(9)
To me I see the potential for major abuse in the future due to the combination of power bequeathed by SP and the free-market access to SP in the form of freely powering up. This means that if I want to spend money to influence which posts are being put in front of the community, I just buy STEEM and then buy SP.
Imagine that Steemit achieves mainstream popularity, sometime in the future. There's an election going on in the US and there are fake stories flying around defaming both of the candidates. The power of the community gives them the responsibility to read and judge the worthiness of each of these posts (something Facebook has already proven the public is incapable of). But the wildcard is that the campaign can come in and buy up SP and start pushing their agenda. We wouldn't necessarily even know (without some heavy digging in the db anyway).
So here's where moral hazard comes in. The future I just described probably benefits everyone reading this (monetarily). If we have companies and political challengers buying up SP to buy our mindshare, the price of STEEM would go up. As early adopters, we will hold a pretty decent amount of the STEEM in this future and would probably enjoy it becoming more valuable.
Please share below potential solutions to this issue below! (I have a few thoughts that I'll either share in the discussion below or in a future post, but I don't want to poison the well.)
People can run their own version of steemit.com locally:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@neoxian/steemit-uncensored-presenting-the-uncensored-patch
I'm not sure I see how that helps with the issue of the SP being purchasable and giving wealth more power over the community's mindshare. Can you elaborate?
Sorry, I'm just saying that if people ran their own version of steemit.com or their own steem block chain viewer, then you would have more control over your viewing experience.
Someone being censored unfairly by a whale? The uncensored patch would show everything anyway. Or there could be code to let you follow a person you like, regardless of their reputation.
Makes sense.
I still think that allowing SP to be bought so easily prevents giving power to active members in the community in the long run. If I understand your suggestion correctly, you're saying that you can just whale-proof your viewing experience to make it more democratic. I think in some way that would throw out the baby with the bathwater. If someone has a lot of SP because they have contributed over a long period of time, I would want to see their contributions to trending etc. I just dont want the DNC, GOP, Walmart, etc. to start shaping what I see and read.