Simulating a STEEM writer business

Or: see how rich u get ;-)

In this series I want to introduce you to System Dynamics, a visual Modelling and Simulation Language. System Dynamics allows you to understand the dynamics of a complex system, like STEEM, and make predictions how a course of action turns out in this system. 

System Dynamics was invented by Jay Forrester at MIT to understand dynamics of a system and it became famous through the Club of Rome report: The Limits of Growth. What you don't know is that the model was accurate in predicting the future.

 

Jay Wright Forrester (born July 14, 1918) is an American pioneering computer engineer and systems scientist. He was a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. - Wikipedia

Ok lets jump right in

The intellectual goods you are producing are a stock of articles, content you are writing. So there is a flow of writings over time that and up in the Steemit content management system accessible to anyone.

Figure: your stock of articles has an inflow of new writings.

The arrow in the figure is a material flow in dis case it is the creation of new articles. All the articles you write are accumulated in an article stock. A stock is often described as a bathtub and the inflow is like water you pour in. 

For example lets say you want to write 5 articles a month. This will result into the following increase of article stock over time.

The next step would be to simulate how the articles are upvoted and translate into steem dollars.

In this simple model I introduce the new concepts of variable (the round shape) and information link, the dotted arrows. 

A Variable in its simplest form is just a number and I would set the Voting Rate variable to the average expected votes expressed in SMD that I expect per article in a month. 

The information link shows that the monthly stream of earnings depends on the Article Stock and the expected Voting Rate. For the sake of the argument lets say that a written article brings in one Steem Dollar per month. How would your earnings look like?

The figure above shows that because of an accumulating stock of articles the earnings would increase more than linear over the months and 1000 SMDs are just earned in the 21th month. 

All models are wrong, but some are useful. - Don Box, Statistician

There is many things that this simple model does not consider: How will your production vary over time? Are you getting better at writing? Do wales like your content? Are your articles timeless or does voting deprecate over time? Empirical evidence shows that voting has a decay function, depending on the properties of an article. 

This is just a start to get you into the System Dynamics world. In the next installments we will refine our model and present the tools to do your own simulation.

#steemit #steemithelp #system-dynamics #simulation #science