Is Steemit Transparent and Fair? Cause and Effect Analysis
The Issue
I'm sure I don't speak only for myself when I say that I have wondered many a time if the compensation and ranking model followed by Steemit is really transparent and fair. I have had my doubts for a long time and I know other people who have been thinking the same. I was very excited when I first joined Steemit but soon afterwards, I witnessed the sheer manipulation and trickery which made me lose interest. Many of us have been talking about it among ourselves but nobody had come out to bring this issue to the attention of the general public before. Many of us joined the Steemit Community in the hopes of helping it become a platform where content creators from all walks of life could contribute value. If those members find that the platform has not been entirely transparent and fair, there will be serious implications! That is why I thought it important to come ahead and address this issue and allow for an exchange of thoughts on the subject among steemit members.
The Cause
Like many online platforms in their early stages, Steemit is bound to have issues. If you think about Google Adsense, people made a fortune tricking and playing with Google since the 90s. I personally know plenty of entrepreneurs who made 'sniper websites' which would steal content from other websites and spin it to promote it as their own. They used a lot of different tricks to manipulate their ranking in Google search. Now, all of these people got away with all these tricks for a long time but Google was also becoming smarter every passing day. Then came a time when that manipulation almost became negligible thanks to advanced Google algorithms and updates. If you think about that, Steemit is no different. It has to pass through the same stages as Google did and it will take time.
The Effect
The ability to profit from manipulation in the early days of a platform encourages the crooked and discourages the honest. People who find ways to trick the platform and earn rewards while posting useless content get more and more encouraged and keep working to find more ways to trick the system so they can profit more. On the other hand, honest content creators who spend hours researching and writing an article get discouraged to see that their work has received negligible attention and reward in comparison to a useless or copied post by some manipulator. This ultimately results in good and honest content creators leaving the platform leaving the crooked ones to manipulate the space and compete among themselves for finding the best tricks.
The Conclusion
Steemit is not the first platform of its kind. Many existed before Steemit and many will come into existence after it. The question is, "How serious is Steemit to do what it takes to make the platform fair and transparent?". We know that evolution is a process and things take time but there is a popular legal quotation which says, "Not only must justice be done but justice must be seen to have been done". The best way Steemit can retain good content creators is by offering incentives to those who add value to the community and by banning manipulators. This will encourage good content creators to work even harder to make Steemit a better place for all.