Is 'Quality Content" Like Holding Onto The Rotary Phone And Steemit Inc's Conflict Of Interest

There is a core group on Steem who are in the quest for "quality content". This includes the development team at Steemit Inc.

There was a proposal put out this week that included a couple ways for the community to deal with this quest. The first dealt with changing the reward pool and the second with adding a downvote pool. It appears many of the Witnesses are on board with this.

I must state that Steemit Inc, in addition to being the blockchain developers, are owners of Steemit.com, a blogging interface. I wrote an article some time back questioning whether there was a conflict of interest. Here is another step that only makes me question it more.

Before getting into that, let us take a look at the proposal briefly.

The change in the reward pool will go from 75/25 to 50/50. Many feel this will stimulate manual curation. The question is will it? Can any of the Witnesses say this will result in smaller accounts making more STEEM?

Or will this, instead, provide those with large stakes simply more money? Most of the Whales are not participating in content creation, usually delegating their SP out for a return. Hence, this move is simply going to increase their return.

https://www.steempeak.com/statistics/@arcange/steem-statistics-20190525-en

After Hard Fork 20, when we saw the Witnesses just embrace what Steemit Inc said, we now have a proposal put out and majority of the Witesses appear in the "Yes" camp from the start.

Adding a downvote pool is meant to incentivize people to go after abuse on the site. The feeling is that the reason people are no downvoting more (flagging) is because it costs them.

In my time on here, I saw two major flag wars that got pretty nasty. Not, according to the proposal, you are going to give these people 25% more ammunition. Yet this is whole-heartedly looked as a good thing.

One of the promises of this is that the downvoting will alter the behavior of the offending party. I will start that one of the main culprits in one of the "wars" is still posting 10 times a day and "circle" voting. Perhaps this is an outlier or maybe it simply is human behavior.

Changes to the base layer should be made only after great thought and very slowly. The attitude "hey let's try it and if it doesn't work, we can change it back" is not acceptable. You do not go around changing the economic basis willy nilly.

Nevertheless, this is missing the entire point. The reason people are jumping on board is because the retention rate of Steem is low and the token price is in the toilet. The challenge is that nobody can be sure that the lack of downvotes or the lower curation amount is the cause.

But again, that isn't even the biggest part of the issue. The fact is that people might be focused upon the wrong thing.

Quite simply the Steem blockchain offers two things: it is fast AND free. This is something that separates it from most of the other decentralized blockchains. They are either slow (BTC/ETC) or have costs for transactions (EOS). This is very appealing to developers (and ultimately users).

Steem started as a blogging platform. That is fine. The challenge is that it is moving away from that. Steemit.com was the first application on here and the landing platform even today. It is not, however the only one. We now see gaming, proof of activity, and a host of other ideas starting to emerge. We even saw the first defector from Ethereum join Steem two weeks ago.

Yet many are holding onto the idea of "quality content" like it is going to be the epicenter of this blockchain. If that is the case, accept the position of low token price and being a small potato.

The reason I say this is for two reasons:

A) Most of the Internet is not quality content.
B) The highest valued company are not quality content providers.

How much is Medium worth? How often do you hear Google's blogging platform mentioned as contributing significantly to the overall numbers? Hell, a quick search reveals the worth of the major news entities (yes a stretch to quality content but anyway) is worth $10B-$12B.

A non-quality content providers?

$13.8 billion after a very rough week in the markets.

Catering to lovers of the 1987 family of Cabbage Patch dolls might find a loyal following yet will not make one a billionaire. I would guess that is a rather enthusiastic market while being very small in size. Targeting that could make one a big fish but it is still a tiny pond.

Are Steemians looking at this in a similar manner? In a quest to protect the "quality content", we miss the entire move. With a quality blockchain, the sights can be set a lot higher. We all know Facebook is a forum of surveillance and censorship. It is also very valuable while attracting hundred of millions of people (maybe billions but with their reporting, who knows).

Of course, this brings us back to Steemit Inc. When I posted the article questioning whether there was a conflict of interest, the major of responses appeared to be that Steemit would do what is best for STEEM since they are the largest holder.

Is that really true? Witnesses better be damn sure of that.

Steemit.com is a blogging platform. They are now using it to fund their operations. The start of the advertising is only going to be taken to higher levels in their efforts to generate revenues. Hence, they need their numbers to improve. They already showed how they cannot use the tokens fund their operations.

The Economic Proposal came from Steemit Inc. That is where it originated. Do you think they really care about other developers on here? When it comes to the survival of their company through the generation of revenues or the advancement of some other project team, where do you think their loyalty lies?

I think the answer is pretty clear.

Would Steemit Inc like other entities on here helping to advance the usage of the blockchain? Of course they would. But that is secondary to their vital advertising dollars. Thus, they need to keep Steemit.com relevant as the premiere blogging platform. This is where their present business model resides.

We never know how things work out before we do them. However, we must do all to ensure that we are not having a "New Coke" moment. Without being even remotely sure what the problem is, how can we address it? People seem to think the retention rate on Steem is so poor yet I guarantee you most cannot tell you what the average retention rate is for applications on the Internet. How do we know how bad we are if we do not know what the average is?

I stated repeatedly that Steem token distribution is in line with many of the other major chains. And the thing is we are seeing an improvement. Certainly, there is a chance that changing the curation reward rate could accelerate the evening out of this but there is nothing that says it will stall it. My intuition is that larger accounts will benefit. In fact, the hated bot owners will most likely only see their holdings grow too since they are getting a bigger chunk of the pie. These individuals are smart enough to figure out ways to maximize their return no matter what you do to the system.

It is interesting that this proposal comes out before SMTs, something long promised by Steemit Inc, are introduced or the topic of the onboarding issue is even discussed. There could be a economic problem that needs addressing yet when you cannot sign people up in a timely manner, I think something is being missed.

What are your thoughts?

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