7 Ideas to turn this crashing Steemocracy into a rising Steemtopia

in steemit •  8 years ago  (edited)

Vision-  An economic system within Steemit that supports new users, rewards constant posters, distributes steem not solely on the whim of 25-50 people, and allows for long term financial gain for investors.

Current status- 

Steemit is a steemocracy where the top 1% control 97% of the steem.  The corporate account is largely accountable for this as it holds 76M SP where as the larger whales hold on the order of 2.5M.  Essentially, the corporate account and the top 30 accounts (which have a lot of Steemit employees) make up 97% of the wealth of steemit in a system that has 100,000 registered users.  Steemit doesn't have a 1%.  Steemit has a 0.03% that run this place.  That's worse than feudalism or modern banking.

Because of this distribution posts that get 200 likes may not get rewarded at all.  Posts with 1 like may be rewarded 50 Steem.  It creates contention.  While flagging is a good thing on the system its misuse totally discourages users.  While low prices of steem may encourage people to purchase in at a low price it's more likely that folks find they are more incentivized to spend time elsewhere.  Lastly, nothing sucks more than writing a thoughtful post that you spend time on when some dipshit's post about something trivial and meaningless generates 1k, and that's because the whales are scratching each others backs.  

For example.  I hand make Aggroed's Antidote.  That's not a bot.  I spend 2-3 hours reviewing my FB news feed.  Eliminate trash and find gems.  Then I take 30+ minutes to post those gems into a fairly organized news page.   If I attribute say 1 hours worth of work to the post (as opposed to just my curiosity) and it gets rewarded at 50 Steem, which is now worth $17 that's ok, but honestly my time is better spent elsewhere from a strictly financial perspective.   For starters, I don't know if my posts that sometimes get rewarded will continue to get rewarded and so there is inherently much more risk to spending an hour doing Steemit work than say mowing a lawn.

Soltuions

I was recently inspired by @stellebelle to write this post and think of more solutions.  Honestly, I've already put together 7-8 posts about this, but here is my most serious attempt yet to fix the issues at hand.

1.  Give away Steem from the corporate account as per @stellebelle

2.  Delegate Steem from large accounts into smaller accounts.  Whales can manage this on their own with the right function in the program. The big corporate account could have a witness vote style approach where people put together proposals for SP from the corporate account for specific purposes for specific periods of time.  

For example- I want to spread Peace, Abundance, and Liberty if they delegated me 1-3M steem I could ensure people that write articles relating to those things could be rewarded and thus see more content like that up here attracting that audience to spend their precious time here.  This method could allow the corporate account to grow through curation too (maybe split it 50/50 with the designated curator and the corporate account).  Also, since more people would have large power votes this would help decrease the power of a handful of whales and employees and be more reflective of the actual community that's been created here.

3.  Hire authors with Steem.  You don't have to pay cash.  You could promise authors set rewards for continuous posts from folks who will draw an audience.

4.  Buy stuff with Steem.  People can barter stuff for steem so that the whales and corporate account can power down without dropping the price of steem.  They still get rewarded.

5.   Price of Steem is going down because more people are selling it then buying it and no one trusts that it will reverse because of the steem distribution and no end in site of whales selling.  I think you need to get a professional team of Steem sellers acting like stock brokers.  So, create a way to give commissions to people that want to sell Steem all day.  They can call contacts etc and find people willing to purchase Steem like a stock broker might.  If you can get the investment class in this country to purchase Steem that's a bigger effect than the whales pushing the price down so you'll see an increase in price.  This will help more people migrate here because if their 50 Steem is now worth $150 USD you'll see more activity.

6. To make something like 5 easier you have to be able to convert steem to USD with a credit card or modern banking rather than resorting to trading through bitcoin.  Real investors don't want to eff around with converting multiple times especially when folks in the middle just take value out more than once.  How can you help make trading SD for USD happen?

7. Central support of curation.  Make bots and programs for us to help us make our own project Curie.  Help us get rewarded for good content creation and content curation.

Conclusions

Overall, people don't like systems like this where the distribution is broken and the folks at the top have all of it.  If you haven't been paying attention that's why America itself is going through such horrible times.  We have a central banks that's been ruining our economy and shoving wealth at a top class.  Does that sound familiar?

To fix this you have to fix the distribution, raise the price of steem by helping to sell it, and either destroy, trade, or delegate the fat stack sitting in the corporate account.


@ned @dantheman @jamesc @stellebelle @blocktrades @cryptofiend


And the mandatory counter argument-

I don't do that because Facebook is a shit hole that has so much censorship it's unreal and this place is cool and can be salvaged for sure.  Steem might also drop to pennies making this place no better than say blogspot.  Let's hope this cool place gets turned around.


URGENT:  You don't have tons of time for this.  Everything you want to do will get harder as the price of steem drops.  So, you gotta move!

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I feel like almost all of steemit's issues stem from a very very poor initial distribution, the centralization is truly unacceptable, and as far as I see it is 100% the reason why people don't stay/call steemit a scam/or are now leaving.

It needs to change, even if the whales gave up 20% (or just the steemit corp account) the amount of change that would create around here would be phenomallh beneficial.

I also wanna be very clear I love steemit, I understand money and the creation of very well and steemit in my opinion is a cut above the rest, it is truly exceptional. The only thing I hate (and I think it may just be the sole factor that could make or break steemit) is the centralization.

Edit I want to add as well, I see steemit getting better, the rewards and steem power are changing and I think the system itself will work, really well in fact. But only once the power equals out a bit, it's just really slow getting there, it's a little worrisome for the short term but like everyone else believes, the long term potential is huge.

Second Edit I sit pondering these things, I don't understand why steemit is so centralized but it doesn't seem like the founders or most whales want it to fail from what I've seen. It seems like they're putting in a lot of effort supporting various projects wanting steemit to succeed. I truly don't know.

I feel like almost all of steemit's issues stem from a very very poor initial distribution,

I agree with you. Some things are not really fixable though. Every attempt to do so would likely 'solve' one problem by introducing one or more worse problems. Possibly time and markets will solve it (already things are vastly better than they were 3-4 months ago), or perhaps this will just end up being an experiment in teaching people "How NOT to Launch a Crypto Currency Legally while Raising Funds".

The relationship between Steem trading volume and Steem prices is a complex one which, when understood properly, can lead to many insights into the Steemit soul itself.

With a top heavy SP pre-mine this was always destined to happen anyways. People initially join Steemit to EARN $'s too - not to BUY them - as we may first think.

But time will tell @smooth. I hope you are right and that this is fixable. OK, my mini-rant is over for today - I have a 5000th celebratory post to write. I shall leave thee in peace to improve things around here! Best of luck getting this SP whale pre-mine sorted out! I still believe 1-5% of all SP MUST be retained by founder whales to help us market Steemit out of this mess with new users! Hopefully we can all power this marketing process ourselves too!

See and that's exactly why I added the edits, I love steemit, truly do I didn't want it to sound like I flipped my script up like a few people have, and all the games coming out now are wicked. You're exactly right things have been getting significantly better as of late, even the rewards have evened out quite nicely over the people they are going to.

We have tons of posts getting 1-100$ now and that in itself is exciting. I hate being the one talking about this stuff because overall steemit has been extremely enjoyable, and I'm making money here and there plus when I put effort in it's usually a good time. The conversations have been excellent the topics have been good (could use more but for what is here the quality is quite high), the connections made have been great and reached beyond steemit for myself. It's been great.

Just like you said, now by trying to fix one thing another problem will appear, its not practical to say give up some steem power, but Its also not practical to have everything so centralized either.

Always a pleasure talking to you, literally hit the nail on the head with what you said. Overtime things will get better that's mathematically proven, I think it comes down to can steemit last and grow long enough to even out the poverty gap and become huge... that I do not know. Either way I'll be here till she dies or I'll be here for much longer (assuming she thrives, here's hoping).

Great post, you have put some serious thought into this.
AS I see it, you are pointing out the fact that Steemit is essentially very much like our current shitty capitalist system.
I still believe we can succed in changing things on Steemit(and in society)
and if not,people will find other platforms. Synereo, Safe Network, and akasha are all good alternatives.

Super interesting. Race to the bottom?

Great post! I agree about the distribution part... right now there is no incentive to buy Steem... so no one is. We have to create that incentive.

The idea of hiring writers is an intriguing idea. Right now the Steemit economy is really just full of sole proprietors. It hasn't yet evolved into entrepreneurs and employees. But it very well could, now that you mention it.

aggroed very well said

Steemit can become great if the right changes are made

Make Steemit great again!

The price of Steem is a race to the bottom. Only thing is, it's not competing with another cryptocurrency because it is competing with itself. The synergy of Steem, Steem Power and Steem Dollars is watered down by the multiple steps to retrieve rewards in fiat. Centralization makes that a double-whammy.