No country for Hu-man: Steeming into the future?

Last night I wrote a post about helping curation bots better target quality content. You can read it if interested here. The reason I wrote it though is because I think that finding good content and upvoting it is important but not everyone has the time to actually do it. Those that have the most influence may actually have the least time.

Anyway, a lot of people actually don't like the bots at all as they are insensitive and would prefer manual curators do all of the work. I agree which is why someone should read the post as it is a 'happy middle ground' solution, at least in the interim.

The problem is, bots are already at work curating and they have very advanced algorithms to do it. Just not at Steemit. Facebook for example filters everything for each individual user under the claim that it is for user experience however, we know this is not true. It is to maximize their own curation rewards. 

Yes, facebook does have curation rewards only the users have no access to it, they keep 100 percent for themselves. It is called advertising revenue and the more successfully they curate our content, the more they make and the more we spend. All of the social media platforms are being buried by advertising, about every fifth image in my Instagram is a promoted post, Twitter the same. It is the algorithmic bots that tailor this view for me and it is refreshing that it is limited at Steemit to internal users.

When advertising really starts here, we are going to see the real age of the bots and do you think they are going to be curating our content or those that pay them? Does your content really compare to that of a dedicated group with the sole purpose of content creation for the Steemit audience?

People want quality content similar to other platforms and I actually do not. I want real content that is not engineered by a team of marketing professionals to best engage an audience and maximize upvotes. I want up and coming artists to have a space where they can grow and get support and writers who are looking to develop their skills. I want traders who are ordinary people, not bankers looking to maximize the value of their billion dollar funds and thinkers willing to actually think for themselves.

People want the rich and famous to come in and drive up the price of Steem. It sounds good right? Well, how much Steem do you currently hold because once professional organizations come in and create polished content with a team of highly skilled experts behind it, who is going to read our work? Who is going to upvote our content? Think about where you spend your money in the real world, are you paying the local artisan or your friend to build your furniture, or do you shop at Ikea, Walmart or some other conglomerate? Do you pay 2 dollars to hear your cousin sing or 200 dollars for Adele tickets?

Once the big name entertainers, comedians, philosophers, actors, photographers etc flood in and build an audience, it will create an environment like every other social platform. There will be so little chance for the average user to get traction that it is close to useless to try. It becomes a popularity contest for content and the site will lose it's charm and become a cookie cutter platform except, on the blockchain.

It may be decentralized at first, but can the witnesses keep up? The witnesses who spend time chatting and helping minnows develop or with lost passwords, the witnesses who are invested each day in the platform? Soon, they will have to invest in banks of servers and professional IT management teams that occupy industrial complexes instead. It becomes business again and business has a very familiar pathway. 

It is why many of us are here in the first place, to create something new, to get off that pathway where everything we view is driven by monetization and marketing from a few large governments and corporations that want to control our behavior. A place where humans can grow. What happens to our freedom, at what point do the advertisers demand censorship of content?

Once people's livelihoods are dependent on the money of advertisers, the decision becomes a default suvival one and money nearly always wins. The advertising dollar will drive trending, will push only the content it wants, only the authors it wants and they will nearly exclusively be those who pay to play. People complain about seeing the same accounts in Trending, those accounts will be buried as the professionals move in.

Yes, those that hold a lot of Steem now will walk away very happy indeed but, the dream of this becoming something great, something freeing, something that returned control and agency to ordinary people will be gone. It will be just another social platform except all of the data will be even easier to compile, scrape and sell to the massive companies and advertisers who drive content back in to upvote it again.

There will be no space for Real. Talk about a massive circlejerk.

Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]

I am not technical enough to know if this post is fiction or the coming reality.