There is an identity crisis in nearly all of the recent discussions about Steem and the upcoming hardfork. I can no longer figure out where Steem is headed and what it wants to be when it grows up.
First I thought we were fighting about Math, but this morning I realized we are fighting about Vision.
Will it be:
A blockchain for Apps? (which would make Steem the utility token for RCs and Witnesses)
Is it a reward token for a content discovery site? (this is different than social network, it makes it about quality content)
Is it a token to reward social media?
There is nothing wrong with any of those types of platforms, but they all could benefit from different economic incentives. Any of the models would be great and with the right team and promotion could be very successful.
Here is what I mean:
For a social media site, for instance, you would want to reward people for engaging. So that linear rewards would make more sense. You would want small network of people to engage with each other and be able to reward each other. <-- this was the vision I originally bought into.
If you were using Steem as a utility token one might want to reduce the inflation all together and use Steem for RCs and Witness Pay and for Development funding.
For a content discovery rewards token a high curve would be the best fit. This would promote the most voted on posts to the top and leave less on the rest of the content.
So, after a week or more of arguing all of this and wondering how so many people could see it so differently... The changes will work for some use cases and not for others. That's okay, but some will win and some will lose. That is also okay.
The huge angry debate has EVERYTHING to do with the lack of vision and Nothing to do with what math will work the best. Because there is no one best Math.
I personally am looking past Steem now to the apps, as I can't really figure out what the game plan is and what to use as a filter for where we are headed and what Steem might be when it grows up.
The fight rages on, but I've realized it is more about vision than Math, and I'm done fighting. :) This isn't about the fork it is about the vision. No one is right and no one is wrong. They just all have different visions.
Without a Vision we cannot decide which Math is the best Math so any Math will do. No one can possibly know which road we should take if we have no idea where we want to go.
Getting the price up on Steem is not a vision it is a destination, but I think we should pick a vehicle and learn to talk about it.
Multiple Visions
It's great to delineate the different visions like this. Without doing this, it's hard to argue for or against certain proposals.
Like, if I think Steem is a utility token, but the person I'm having a dialog with thinks it's obviously a content discovery/social token, we're not going to see eye-to-eye on how inflation should be allocated.
We Need Each Other
The utility folk should remember that the content/social side is what makes Steem unique. You can launch an app that has zero content/social features, but that app can still benefit indirectly from the content/social features (e.g. talking about the app, forums, or just recognizing other players).
We Can Ignore Each Other (to some extent)
But we also have the flexibility to ignore each-other. The content/social folks can do what they want with inflation and I can power down, for example.
This approach is a little frustrating because, in a way, we're working against each-other in some areas. But I don't think this is actually a real problem in the long run.
If the content/social folk fail to communicate their vision and goals to the general public, they can just languish in their failed experiment while simultaneously, the utility folks get to work.
Camps
There are probably more than three camps. And this is not to say that the one camp can operate just fine by completely ignoring the other camp(s). But if something is being mismanaged, it's not the end of the world either.
I also believe the utility camp can be justified in making fun of the absolute crazy garbage coming out of the content/social camps. Those guys are crazy.
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Yeah but if you are in the utility camp, there's no point in having anything allocated to rewards at all.
The camp I'm in is about first seeing if we can get rewards to be better allocated by changing the incentives, and barring that, jumping on the utility bandwagon and banishing rewards in its current form.
And someone already said it, but the content camp is what makes this platform unique, so it doesn't make sense not to try to improve it. We tweaked it two years ago, let it sit, and never re-evaluated the system until now.
I suppose that's not entirely fair, because some in the utility camp likes the way that you control exactly the proportion of the rewards pool that corresponds to your stake. In that case it makes sense to abolish downvotes and let it sit like that forever. I don't have much faith in that particular system though. May as well make that SPS driven. Anyway I'm just rambling now, maybe some of these ideas make sense, maybe not.
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Na, then Steem would just be another Tron. I can see "utility maximalists" make the case that rewards are a total distraction. I happen to understand that belief, but I also disagree with it.
Having said that, I would like to see the content side make a better case for their fiddling. Otherwise I feel like just telling them to:
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steem does not need their below average content creators (if they were good they would be earning money elsewhere with thousands of followers). now they are just taking the steem from witnesses and big stakeholders
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What? :) Most of them do not have or earn enogh stake to do that at all.
So who is supposed to buy the steem that the witnesses and large stakeholder sell? For what reason?
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The numbers work, but only if we catch a sizeable chunk of western union and wally world's remitance business.
A zero cost, 3 sec coin is hard to beat once crypto moons.
The trick will be holding on until then.
Clearly stinc has no intention of serving it's current customers beyond tmvp level that strings out the bag holders.
(It would serve us right after telling the truth about them all this time for them to adopt a very very long view, they have their millions whether steem goes to pennies, or not.)
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!dramatoken
It's a rough time and I think everyone is feeling stressed. It is also easy to feel disappointed by the recent direction.
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I feel pretty disappointed in our direction since ned took over,...
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You're upping the drama to new levels! Have a DRAMA.
To view or trade
DRAMAgo to steem-engine.com.Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
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interesting. so you get new acc in but then you make a system where they get nothing so they get pissed off and buy all the steem so they could upvote themselves. genius 😁
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some of them are earning money else where and have realized that there may be something to this crypto world. They are trying it out and we get the benefit of their decent content creation.
Any good content creators that I know, and I know a lot of them, diversify. Crypto is another way to diversify. Make their work less valued, then their willingness to diversify into crypto falls with it.
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sorry, my sarcastic mod was maybe not too obvious to people that don't know what i do and think :D so most of them :D
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From all what I read, there does not seem to be direction in Steem blockchain.
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yep, as a avid reader i'm for content discovery, it's my hobby. engagement is a sometimes thingo, writing blogs - leave that to you guys and apps? -bonus!
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Any of the visions are fine and has a huge amount of potential. They are different beasts though. I realized that is why there is so much confusing and conflicting information about what the HF is supposed to accomplish.
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The problem with trying to turn Steem into a 'quality content discovery platform' is that it doesn't have and probably never will have the functionality of WordPress and a self-hosted web-site.
None of the front ends allow indexing (pages) for example (at least I don't think they do.
As a result I think it works quite nicely as a social media site where we can reward micro-interactions around the various DAPPs being built.
I think I used to get annoyed at the quality content not getting rewards, now I've just come to see Steem as more about utility - now I don't know what it'll be, other than probably a lot more unequal.
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Also, can anyone point to a model that actually looks at quality and is successful?
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Not really. The shear volume makes it difficult to be successful finding good or quality content.
Medium.com employs people purely to curate content and give quality work more exposure and they can't keep up.
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Doesn’t exist. Never will exist. The lowest common denominator works because it is common.
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Steem is a social media platform first and foremost, posting, commenting and such engagement is encouraged by any of those "visions", after that it's use case is in content discovery powered by rewards for both creating content and curating/consuming it which consequently ties right back into social media for engagement and last it's a platform that can underpin all manner of apps. The reward mechanism is not going to get dumped, ever, as that is what makes steem what it is, so thinking that it's going to morph into "eos 2.0" or the next ETH is wishful thinking among the fringes of the community. That is why math is so important, because the game is "create content, build an audience, and win" or "engage, get rewarded, and win" or "engage, build a following, and win" and right now winning is simply a matter of milking the system for the detriment of the whole network, short term win, epic long term lose.
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There has to be a reason for people to care to read it and vote. 5 people having the ability to vote and actually reading isn't going to change that. If we don't have eyes on the site... There will be no meaningful curation.
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Why do you think we don't have the eyes on the site. As far as I'm concerned any site in the top 10k Alexa rank has more than "5" sets of eyes on it. We get massive amounts of traffic from all over the web, from web searches especially, and our search ranking is very good because of the incentive to create good content that even though it gets hardly rewarded like the shit content, it is completely irrelevant to a search spider that crawls the web for keywords, those bity spiders love our content, it's new, it's SEO inadvertently by the incentive to
be the best you can be
We are major hub of traffic, bring back the view counter and you will not be able to make any such disparaging remark regarding the lack of traffic. What we need is a good turnover rate, a good retention rate, and then we will explode, network effect chain reaction, and you do that by making the math as good as it can be at encouraging honest behaviors and discouraging dishonest acts. Yeah, vision of a decentralized governance is not crystal clear, and I don't think it will ever be, but those things mesh together, like a good stew.
#steemystew
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I agree, summarises my own, not as clearly articulated, thoughts. The proposals make some kind of sense for a blogging platform, but I had thought steem was more than that (there I go, in a different camp). Certainly, for the two groups of potential investors/users I'm working with (public and charitable bodies), the focus has been about distribution and impact rather than about accumulating wealth. But maybe that could work, too :)
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I’ve thought about selling most of my Steem and converting to pal. At least I understand the vision of the Pal team!
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What is PAL's vision?
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@clayboyn sums it up pretty good here.
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I feel like Steemit is designed(poorly) to be Content Discovery first, unfortunately all the mechanics for discovering content are either broken, corrupted or underpowered.
So it ended up functioning more as social media, but it wasn't really designed for that, so that's why people end up engaging more off the platform. I see social media less about content and more about communication and sharing. Share something here and that might get cha flagged.
It feels like the things it's actually best at is housing applications because the underlying tech is super solid.
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The blockchain works perfectly the story we tell ourselves about what it should do is broken.
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All this time I thought Steemit was a place where people just argue lol :)
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That might be the best plan I've heard so far! :)
!dramatoken
Just for fun!
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You have
DRAMA!To view or trade
DRAMAgo to steem-engine.com.Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
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That has been my argument all year so far. SMT where promised back in 2018 when funding was crazy high and devs where out the butt. We ended up with literally NOTHING all 2018 I have no idea what the hell happened to all that money. (Honestly seems like stacking it, parties and sitting around collecting cash for nothing)
Then 2019 rolls around and after a pretty ticked off community and steem prices at $0.23 finally we saw more action then ever. Cuts, reduction in server costs, more fluid systems all good things. Then came dumb stuff like this hard fork and still no SMT lol .
All they keep trying to do is fix steemit and well there honestly is no fixing it. Whenever "free money" is involved there will be people that cheat it. It's what has crashed every social media company that went to pay its users such as yuwie, TSU etc.
The amount of rewards a few people get on here for legit trash posting is crazy and yes something should be done about that. But honestly after that we need SMT or people are not going to invest. Steem honestly has a VERY small market cap. Hell if you really want to make a change remove SBD lol
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We came out of Beta and into a huge lack of anyone understanding what we are doing and why. However many daily users we have they all have their own vision.
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Everyone wants one great solution which will work for all, but there never wok be one, because everyone wants something different. Some may like a socialist governance where they are kept safe and looked after in return for giving up some freedoms and choices. For others, what they have to give up is not worth what they get in return, so they'd rather just take care of themselves, come what may. Each side wants to put in different rules to accommodate themselves, which means that they must make the other side conform.
Steem is no different, except that we can leave. I think you've hit the nail on the head with it being down to vision. There will always be winners and losers, no matter what happens.
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I mean, with SMTs (or Steem-Engine tokens) there can be many visions coming true, am I right? Each niche can decide how they're going to reward their users and Steem is just the underlying infrastructure that enables it all - I think that's the ultimate vision of Steem, but most people still argue as it is just a token used to reward people for content, when in fact, in the future there could be multiple tokens that could even exceed the value of Steem (like PAL).
@tarazkp has talked a lot of Steem as being a developing city, and it seems fitting to me. We're still on the process of laying the infrastructure to what is going to be a city ready for broader audience. And living in a city that is just a big construction land is not appealing to most people - therefore many people are whining and leaving.
I don't know, it could all end up in a crash, but seeing how things are going forward with the "infrastructure" (Steem-Engine, reduced cost for nodes with MIRA), I think it's way too early to doom Steem as a failure.
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Yeah there could be many different models using SMTs.
But with a lack of vision or marketing, who will know?
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I disagree with "lack of vision" statement. Tokenize the internet was a vision that I do believe is still held in steemit inc. However there does not seem to be anything else to it. If we ask a question, "how do we get there?", we find that only answer one has given is by getting the smt protocol done.
There is not even a 1 year strategy, just next thing that is going to be developed.
Some claim that steem is somehow backed by "good content", as if every time somebody posts here a good topic, it is going to make someone buy steem. There is no explanation what is good content, and why does it nescescary make demand for steem.
To summ it up, there is only this moment and the vision, nothing concrete about how do we get to that vision.
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I think we are fighting about words. If there is no plan on what ads value and what we are looking for I would call that Vision.
You call it execution. I think.
It's the same problem described a bit differently.
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I do agree somewhat with what you say. I do however see this inconsistency of words in steem community a problem that distracts. I believe that year ago if someone would have said that steem lacks vision they would have been corrected as rather the lack is strategy. Ned had a vision and was complained to be a dreamer, and critiscism was excactly about lack of communication and concrete progress. Now it seems to be presented as there is no idea of anything, no dream, no plan, as if steemit inc. is just throwing dice with every change they make.
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honestly I don't think engagement is needed, fake engagement brings no value either.
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The engagement is what makes people stay, you have friends and people and are talking about things, like on Facebook so you stay.
The benefit it ads is secondary. Where people gather an economy develops.
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Its the combined effect of all these big changes we must worry about.
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I absolutely agree that it is reckless to do them all at once.
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I don't see why they can't just pick an order of priority and do it like 1 a month or something. It will allow us to figure it out much easier.
Another thought of mine is after all these small vote nerfs, will I still be able to throw around small upvotes to everyone who writes a meaningful comment on my post? As of now 2.3 cents is around 20% vote for me. if the changes put it above 30% I start getting really picky with upvoting comments.
I guess that puts me firmly in your SNS camp. I do like blogging here.
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