Some thoughts on Steemit issues

dApps, blockchain, smart contracts, descentralized economy, governance, ecosystems, computation, storage, etc; all these are mere buzzwords driving the hype around the new web standards that are emerging to enable true descentralization. Not only that, the buzzwords are also part of the resistance that comes when you revolutionize a market. Centralization is all we know and use in the web and it is going to take huge efforts to change no only the tools and platforms we use but also our mindset. We are used to centralization and it does provides a sense of security and enables our lazyness and general ignorance.

Most centralization occurs when lots of people don't want to do things themselves. There is always going to be some level of centralization, as we can't reinvent everything and just do everything through our own efforts. We are extremely limited beings in terms of time, space and energy. Thus, we rely on third parties. Operating systems are hugely centralized around windows, linux and macos. However, the centralization in the tools is not that bad. The descentralization the dweb is fighting is more with respect to the services we use in the internet. Still, this rises centralization issues.

While fighting centralization, steemit enables certain ugly centralization issues, such as the ones pointed out against witnesses and specially the fact that content is centralized in steemit blockchain. Somehow, this enables the blockchain to know what content authored who. This is the cost of having the rewards system and the whole content inside the blockchain.

Though, I think that web content belongs to anyone. We all can simply copy whatever we find online, see the source code and tweak it for our own purposes. This is the spirit of creative commons media and open source software.

Speaking of descentralization, it is a sort of regressive behavior. Moving our data and software out of the cloud means priorizing offline computing and storage. This may not be necessary. We could also contract storage and computing online, but the main question is: what for? Perhaps to socialize, sharing our thoughts and opinions (like usual social media). Perhaps to do business, to trade goods and services. Other good application of this would be to recognize each other and reward those who contribute to our entertainment or general needs (this is similar to what steemit is supposed to do). Other important thing is to simply not depend on offline devices. If I have my data on the cloud I can access it anywhere anytime. That's useful as well.

In this spirit I propose a wider use of truly descentralized and offline first technologies. Think dat protocol, torrents, openbazaar, ipfs, etc.

I think steemit is deceiving because it attempts to mix personal blogging with viral content production motivated by economic gains. Somehow a strange mix of these things works out for some people. But in general I don't like it myself, meaning I don't think it fits well with me and many others.

If you put in the same bucket the rewards for open source development, memes, literature, porn, opinions, news, jokes, fake news and every social media use case, I think you get a real mess. You get steemit.

I am still not yet sure what is steemit really good for and it depends too much on accumulated capital (whaling) and a not democratic governance that has been allowing value leaking through botnets and bad quality content. But it's ok. It would be really silly to idealize steemit and expect it to be the heaven on earth social media for all possible use cases. It is certainly not, and It is great that whales such as steemstem, utopian-io and other exist. They bring a huge balance in terms of meritocracy to the ecosystem. Other promising thing is the introduction of SMTokens but nothing stops those SMTs to become corrupt and allow the same vices steemit already permits.

I wished steemit governance allowed it to evolve democratically towards better ways. But I don't see that coming.

I think a simpler media blockchain where content lives in descentralized repositories, such as ipfs and dat, could be interesting. Imagine for instance removing steem power and make vote value depend only on reputation. Remove bandwidth issues because content is no longer a limiting factor. Inflation should also be more flexible and depend on the amount of votes with good reputation.