Wish vs Reality

In my last post I spoke about the difficulty in incentivizing behaviour in a complex system. Basically, it is impossible to predict the outcome of group behaviour in response to planned incentives. People are smart and unpredictable; they will always seek out the easiest way to attain a reward, even if the outcome runs counter to the stated goals, or the health of the entire system.

More about why this happens here: Prisoner's Dilemma, and here: Game Theory.

Steemit is a very interesting system created to cross a social media platform with a cryptocurrency. The vision as I understand it was for the 'best' content to rise to the top by incentivizing the rest of the community to only upvote content that they believed would be the most popular. This is achieved by sharing the payout with those who vote - the curators. Find a great article? Upvote it, resteem it for your own followers, and as more and more people recognize the value, you earn more and more for your vote. Seems simple enough, if you are a creator, you should be able to make money by making quality content, and if you have some saved up Steem power, you can earn by upvoting the 'best' content before everyone else does.

But what really happens?

The first problem is the idea of good content.

@techwizardry summed it up very well in a comment that he left on my last post:

Standardizing subjective behavior/perspective is just not possible: some people value memes more than 1000-word posts, and vice versa.

So the first problem is that we don't know what good content actually is. I guess we can assume that someone who is a professional writer, photographer, musician, videographer or the like has the skills to produce better content than average. Or maybe someone who is very good at using Markdown, and can really make their blog 'pop' with great formatting might be said to be producing 'better' content.

The breakdown then, is that nobody really tries to write the best content, or to upvote the best content. We aren't professional content creators, nor are we experts in predicting what others will find valuable. So instead of using Steemit as was intended, we look for ways to make money that doesn't take time, effort, expertise, or guesswork.

The second problem is that of inclusion.

So lets assume that the professional content creator, whether that's a public speaker, writer, musician, meme maker (are there professional meme makers?), cartoonist, photographer, videographer, whatever are creating better content than the other 95% of the population. How do those users earn Steem?

Steemit was not only designed to be a place to create the best possible content. It is also supposed to be a social media site. In order to fulfill that promise, it should be accessible to everyone, and everyone should be able to expect some piece of the rewards pool if they stay engaged with their friends/followers. That's basically the promise right? "Why post on Facebook, when you can get paid to post on Steemit?"

Well Steemit "could" actually work that way. Have 500 Facebook friends? You all can come over here, upvote each others posts, and share in the rewards pool. You aren't really creating quality content, but you are certainly "social media-ing".

The problem with that scenario however is the "Flag" feature, and the community itself who, in an effort to fight copyright infringement and plagiarism, have downvoted normal social media behaviour into oblivion. I personally think that this is extremely shortsighted and does a huge disservice to the community, but other than try to convince @ned to delete the flag button in the next Hardfork, we are stuck with this misguided attempt at self-censoring the exact thing that people want to share in a normal social media site..

I mean really, do any of you see quality original content on Facebook? No, of course you don't, because most people are not capable of creating interesting content. So what do they do? Post about last night's dinner, or check in that they are at the mall, or share other people's content with their group of friends. Even on Twitter, you are either looking at a tweet with 280 characters (is that good content?), or a link to what is often someone else's content. If Steemit wants to seriously get a piece of the social media pie, then we are going to have to allow 'normal' social media behaviour. Why are we limiting people here to having to create? Shouldn't they be able to be rewarded for interacting in the same way as they do now on other sites? Now that would take off!!!

So the breakdown here is that we lose all those users who are not yet capable of or interested in making marketable content, as well as those who were just expecting a social-media site. They either go back to Facebook or Twitter, or they start to devise ways to make money here without developing the skills of a professional content creator. They certainly don't bring all of their FB friends and set up shop over here doing what they did over there. (Our community doesn't allow it). If we want more people to use Steemit, then we need to allow people to post whatever they want without censorship.

In my next blog post, I will discuss ways to maximize returns by accepting how Steemit IS, instead on focussing on how Steemit was expected to be.

I will also get into the incentives/dangers of changing the vote system from a stake weighted system to a 1account/1vote system (which would be disastrous). I will also point out the Steem incentives that are work vey well.

Thank you for reading, voting, sharing. See you next time,

SnubberMike