This may seem like a positive story overall, especially for Steemit, but think again. The author points out some of the public-image issues that Steemit faces with the previous and existing mechanisms and behaviors.

And yes, this relates to the "dreaded" topic so many people apparently can't handle understanding objectively: quality content.

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Fake News Crisis

The CoinDesk.com article is written by Bailey Reutzel. The author opens the post with the statement:

"The shitpost is mightier than the thinkpiece."

That is powerful, and quite true, in our attention saturated market economy vying for slices of our time, which translates into slices of our lives. The more we give to the attention economy, the more of our total lives is "spent" and "paid" towards finding and giving attention.

Reutzel continues that truth has gone by the wayside ("degradation" as she calls it), as we progressed from print media like newspapers to more digital information access. Indeed, as the internet became available, it wasn't like a network owned by a company for you to get your voice out by hosting your own show. You could simply create your own web site.

Whatever you believe can be said, and anyone else can believe it to be "true". This freedom comes with responsibility that few actually question.

Bailey makes a point to mention the mounting criticism on Facebook and Google to tackle this "epidemic" of fakenews, after mentioning how 20 fake news stories outperformed 20 real news stories. Apparently, some mysterious "criticism" exists that Google and Facebook need to ban fake news from their sites.

Facebook also recently announced a tool to warn users about content that has been flagged as not reliable.

But is that really a solution? I mentioned in that above post about the flagging, that this allows them to create more restrictions on alternative media information sources that the mainstream media does not cover.

Whereas newspapers where people worked to uncover facts used to be the model, now it appears that money drives the content creation to feed the attention economy. Ad revenue is the main source of income for Facebook and Google, as I have previously covered as well.

Show Me the Money

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The development of the attention economy to monetize human attention and interaction, has led to block chain technologies getting into this social media revenue generation idea, as Bailey points out. The author mentions that they are worried as a journalist about the state of their profession given the new digital age.

Bailey also rightly is concerned with this monetary motivation behind social media and content platforms. Just as the former television networks were people grew disillusioned with the type of content available and their restriction to access of information leading to the success of the social media networks at the beginning of the new millennium, people are now becoming disillusioned once more with the control of our personal data for their monetary gain.

We have more freedom than with the television networks, but there is still more freedom to be had over how we make money for the attention economy that we generate, rather than having a corporation exploit our desires for attention and make money off of us.

It Looks Good

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Bailey's next point is important, although a bit naïve in some respect. The author asks if the new block chain content platforms will have the same consideration for truth that current social media giants allegedly have. What? This is what I find a bit naïve on their part, to think that Facebook, Twitter or MySpace or any other platform actually had truth as a consideration for a business model.

The author does recognize that this is not an issue for the block chains either. The new platform Yours is advertised as "getting content creators paid on the Internet."

Reutzel has no issue with this, so long as a consideration for truth is embodied, which I happen to agree with, as you might know if you follow much of my original work. Reutzel wants to emphasize the importance on well-written, factually corrected content as a content creation platform. Otherwise, you're simply creating more fodder and low-quality nonsense that takes up people's time and attention.

Bailey asks a pivotal question:

"Why should I, or anyone else, pay them?"

This might not seem accurate when thinking of Steemit or other platforms, but if you're thinking of outside investors looking at a new business model and what it represents, this is incredibly important. And this is why I have been adamant about quality content creation since I have joined Steemit. At least from a perspective of an alternative to the mainstream media, Steemit does not represent a journalistic community of integrity and quality.

This is why certain content types, being rewarded for not actually promoting a quality content creation platform hurts both the visibility for new users, and the visibility for investors. As Bailey mentions, why would anyone pay for low quality content? Or content that is simple "picking" one choice from another and "rewarding" people as an incentive to keep making someone rich by getting others to play that game?

Continuing with the article, Bailey mentions the founder of Yours, Ryan X Charles, saying that they work under the principles of market economics which allows the users to pick the rules like Reddit moderators do. The idea is all in good and well, that users who create good content should get paid for their posts.

Steemit Under Fire!

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Bailey talks about the typical image people have of steam it, where someone can make $1500 writing a short post that probably took them only 15 minutes to make. Compared to journalists, who get paid a lot less to research topics, which take weeks months or years, the new attention economy block chain reward system does not value quality investigative reporting, but instead seems to favor and incentivize the quick unsophisticated content.

That might just been a stereotypical caricature that steam and has garnered being described by Bailey, but it isn't. Bailey goes on to target Steemit's executives, purporting that the big payouts are used as a marketing incentive to get more people onto the platform. He imagines that as more people sign up, the higher price the token goes which makes the executives richer, especially since he believes people go out and sell their tokens back to the executives that gave them the rewards for their content in the first place.

But it's not all bad for Steemit from Bailey. He mentions how Ned emphasizes a reward on "positivity and accuracy over garbage content like some of the things you see on Facebook".

Good news is short-lived for Steemit, as he brings back Charles from Yours to talk about how the whales need to be pleased in order to get ahead on steam it, which is true. Charles says they avoided creating a new crypto currency so that there would be less of a chance of power grabs and outside skepticism that this was a Ponzi scheme.

Journalism Revived

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Bailey's article closes with an emphasis on identity and identification. Anthony Duignan-Cabrera and Jeff Koyen are two other journalists who signed up for Yours and think that the block chain technology can play an important role as an identity verification layer for posting credible news from a credible source.

This, Bailey says, "could be the key to saving journalism."

As as previously mentioned with the emphasis on monetary gains in ad revenue through the attention economy, journalism is still playing under the rules of advertising to gain revenue by targeting the attention of the consumer. The blockchain can also assist in dealing with fraudulent ads and click farms. Fraudulent ads could be recognized and stored in a ledger as a blacklist which would make propagation of these ads less common. This would allow journalists to be freed from the influence and impact of advertising on their industry.

Publishing Potential

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The final point covered about the block chains potential, is that the trust and vetting process to promote the establishment of trusted relationships between content creators, advertisers and consumers. Payments can be issued through the block chain, through smart contracts in the trust us ledger where fraud can be mitigated and people have less of an opportunity to defraud and screw each other over. When a sale is made, micro-payments for each sale can be distributed amongst all parties instantly, rather than waiting for a certain time period to elapse.

Publishing will not be accepted in the block chain until such secure verification and trust methodologies can be implemented and used easily by all parties concerned. As such "decentralizing publishing is terrifying" for now, according to Duignan-Cabrera, one of the journalists mentioned earlier.

If we are going to allay the fears of the public and many sectors of industry surrounding the security around the block chain, there are tools that need to be developed so that we can demonstrate the power of the block chain and bring the future into existence, sooner than later.

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This was a review and analysis of Bailey Reutzel's CoinDesk article title I Want the Truth: Could Blockchain Stop Online News Distortion?

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Thank you for your time and attention! I appreciate the knowledge reaching more people. Take care. Peace.

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@krnel
2016-12-27, 7pm