Will Hardfork 21 Operant Conditioning Prepare You to Accept Social Credit?

Steem is (or was) cool for the most part. Many people who use the platform do so to find authors and content they like. They then read, watch, or listen to said content and enjoy it. It's very similar to the real world. We look for things that are interesting to us, and we pay our attention to it, subscribe, swipe right, or what have you. Arguably, the cultural norms on the "old steem" favored rewarding quality posts. Flagging for ideological reasons was generally frowned upon, and this is because flagging obstructs reward value that is allocated for a specific post.

Few real-world equivalents come close to flagging. In it's most basic form, flagging is an interception in the conveyance of value. In a sense, it is similar to sanctions. Sanctions are a hostile act used to interfere with trade. They are generally done by nation States who wish to act punitively towards others to coerce conformity. Depending on the effect, sanctions are almost always received poorly and sometimes will precipitate war. On a human scale, however, there are not many things that seem equivalent to flagging outside of petty theft.

What I just touched on is a very divisive point. Some of you will avidly agree, while others will passionately disagree, so I think we need to ask ourselves a very important question. Why is it that flagging seems like theft to so many people on the blockchain? I think it is because, in the absence of this hostile act, both patron and content creator can do business with each other. When someone interferes in "their" business, or value exchange, it is seen by many as meddlesome. Not only is it seen as meddlesome, but the recipient of the flag knows that absent the interference, they would've most likely received the value in question.

I know there are intricate philosophical arguments to be made for why flagging is "technically not theft," but it can be hard to take these arguments seriously, that'd be like saying an injured party cannot sue for lost wages because those wages weren't theirs until they got the check, and seeing as how they didn't get a check, there were no wages lost and that right there is circular reasoning. It is a carefully designed argument which is meant to distract from the fact that there is a financially injured party. In the case of flagging, it's the flagger who causes financial harm.

It wasn't your steem until it was your steem, never mind the fact that I was an integral factor in determining this. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" - said the Wizard of Oz. Yes, this is word wizardry, mental magic, or psychological misdirection if you will. Right now there is a push for a "cultural shift" at Steem. They say that old Steem is going the way of the dinosaur, and the latest trend is "new Steem." Old Steem had flags that were used carefully by most, save for a handful of bad actors. Meanwhile, new Steem heavily promotes active flagging by all members of the community. I guess the line of thinking is that if we all flagged more, everyone's posts will be minutely boosted by some imperceptible fraction.

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"Every citizen seems obsessed with engaging in shallow and superficial moral grandstanding so as to appear virtuous and self-righteous." — Dave Cullen in his review of majority rule.

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Getting back to the title of this article, Steem has always been like a social credit score system, and this is because of the reputation indicator. However, with old Steem, most people only gave out carrots. They gave carrots to the posts they enjoyed and ignored the content they didn’t. This type of positive reinforcement is a very natural human behavior, and it’s beneficial to praise praiseworthy things. In this sense, old Steem brought the best out of most people. With the new Steem culture, however, flagging is rebranded to downvotes, and people are given access to free flags.

Because of the new tool, you can now either give out carrots to posts you enjoyed, or you can whack the post with a stick. Perhaps the author had a wrong opinion or said something you didn’t like. Maybe it’s your job to teach people what they can and cannot think or say or do. Does this sound at all healthy? If you think it’s healthy for the blockchain, I’d like to know to what degree? I ask because if the benefits are imperceptible, then is it worth doing? Should we try to influence what people say by flagging them because we disagree? I think these are some valid questions that we need to ask ourselves as individuals.

I'm sure some Steemians use the tool responsibly, and that's a slippery slope. I'm reminded of a Harvard Lecture given by Michael Sandel entitled: 'Justice: What's the right thing to do?' It's a simple-sounding question with a surprising amount of complexity. Look at the trolly problem as an example. Imagine a whale who upvotes the low-quality posts they publish, and you have steem power equivalent to theirs. Is it your responsibility to remove the value they assigned to their post? In doing so, is it protecting the blockchain, and if so to what degree? Or at what point are we doing more harm than good? Should we just live and let live?

If a wealthy steemian wants to sell their voting power to people for upvotes, is that the end of the world, or is it the free market at play? How is it any different if they used their voting power on themselves? There seems to be a concerted effort from people who code the blockchain to manipulate human behavior so that people act in the desired way, but is this possible? If so, what are the long-term consequences of these efforts? Is there any blowback, or does the will of the people prevail over the new code with clever workarounds? Whether or not we are aware, people are governed by self-interest. You can try to drum this trait out of people by changing the rules from the top down, however, these things seldom work out as planned. What it ends up doing is interfering with the market, and many times this will result in new and unexpected problems.

There is a maxim which says: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I will not say that steem is perfect, but that maybe it was a flawed system all along. It’s the maths in the coding which dictate the percentage of steem that any one individual can convey. If this number is too high or is incorrect, perhaps it needs tweaking? What I don’t understand is the unnatural behavior that this foreign system, which is three years old now, is bringing out of people. As an example, on the blockchain, we all have superpowers and can see into everyone's wallet. Not only are their wallets transparent but so is their activity on the chain, or what they do with their steem. Now we’ve got to ask ourselves, with these newfound powers are we exercising great responsibility?

There are two ways to look at and answer that question. Some of you think you've become spiderman overnight and have been tasked with punishing "financial evildoers." That is, those who would dare enrich themselves or capitalize off of their steem investment. So that is one way that some people are using their "great power" with "great responsibility." To be quite frank, these people annoy the fuck out of me. Don't get me wrong, I think that they mean well, but what these fellow Steemians need to ask themselves is would they be willing to subject themselves to the same type of scrutiny and nanny state tactics in real life as they do to others on the blockchain? Let he or she that is the paragon of financial morality cast the first stone. If by some black magic, I got queued into the fact that you shopped at Amazon, and that you got a spectacular deal on a new widget that would have otherwise cost you a fortune at the local Ma and Pa shop, is it then my responsibility to take umbrage with the fact that you didn't shop local? I guess what I'm trying to say is, when did it become cool to be that person?

The other way of looking at the great responsibility that x-ray vision affords us is, do we have the fortitude that it takes to treat people the same on the blockchain as we would in real life? If I learned that someone shopped at Amazon, and for whatever reason, I was rabidly against this, I might give them a piece of my mind. What I won’t do is cause them economic harm. I will not steal from them, slash their tires, punch them in the face, TP their house, or ding dong ditch at their front doorstep with a bag of flaming poo. This would be childish and silly, and it in no way respects the autonomy of the other person. Now if I saw this person breaking into someone’s home or assaulting someone, then all bets are off the table. Such a situation requires an intervention, especially if you need to come to the aid of someone in need of immediate help.

Getting back to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." For some reason, people haven't been appreciating the blockchain, and I think this is because BTC's initial overvaluation created a lot of false expectations about what the value of steem is. After the BTC bubble burst steem was one of the very lucky few that didn't go into the red, and I think that's something special. It shows you that the blockchain has value and that people appreciate it's utility. But some see now as the time to start tinkering and to change the atmosphere a bit. So they drop the nitrogen down to 50% while bringing the oxygen up to 42% because that's a nice round number right? The fine coders decided to keep the argon where it's at because nobody knows what the fuck argon does, and then they take carbon dioxide down to zero, because who needs trees anyway? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Ultimately, regardless of the will of the culture creators (those who write or promote the new code), we Steemians on an individual basis will decide what the new culture is. Now If you want to have a nanny state on the blockchain, and get all up in people's business by rewarding demerits to people who don't do it as you do, well then may you live in interesting times.

As for myself, I'd rather pick the path of freedom as opposed to engaging in so-called blockchain environmentalism. I want to see people do what they will with their stake in the same way they might act in the real world. The maths have already been figured out. The reward pool isn't mine to police. "All the base are belong to the maths," and no matter what the coders set the percentages to, there will always be a type of person who will try and capitalize off this.

If by some magic coders can make it impossible to capitalize off of the blockchain, that'd be the day that the investors' bail. I think we all need to be very careful what we wish for because if we get this utopia that some want and are trying to create, then all the smart money is gonna be off the chain, and I don't mean that in a good way. So if you can't default to freedom naturally, and you want to volunteer to be a steem blockchain environmentalist, this is something worthy of your consideration.

There is a symbiotic ecosystem on steem of stakeholders and content creators, they both rely upon each other and this is what made steem. Scare either party off en masse, and the market value will collapse.