People like @lextenebris, @itstime, @shaka etc..., raised some concern regarding the presumed viability of UserAuthority project which finally defied the defence by @jaki01, @cryptoctopus etc, I guess it is so because they have not taken quality time to study how the project will revamp the reward system for good.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
Alternately: I don't think you've taken the quality time to actually study what I wrote or know how involved I've been in the project since the beginning. If I were in a less generous mood, I might suggest that my arguments which point out that UA says nothing about quality, is very much and ordering which is still just SP in a frock coat, and is fronting for a system which is essentially just vote selling under another name were unimportant to you because you don't actually understand what it is that you think that you want.
Luckily for you, I'm in a mood of grandfatherly kindness.
We all know that the idea that discarding the idea of quality in order to improve the success of the steem blockchain and of the social media-facing interface in particular is stupid. We could put more generous phrasing around it, but the truth is that it's stupid. No one goes to a system which does not provide them some degree of personal gratification and content of quality. No one. Facebook, Twitter, not even the ancient and venerable MySpace. All of them are centered around the idea of providing a quality experience to the user, and as long as they did so better than their competitors, they ruled the ecology.
There is no question that quality is a key trait.
The problem is that the vast bulk of steem blockchain participants (and @taskmaster4450) believe in the top down, authoritarian-imposed idea of "quality." That all of us know better than some of us what some of us you'd like. That all of us know better than one of us what one of us should do. Once you adopt that mindset, it's easy to believe that more successful competitors which deliver value that your platform doesn't to a larger community is inherently toxic and wrong and thus you have to accept and adapt toxic and wrong behaviors in order to "be successful."
I reiterate, this is stupid. It is no kind of reason, it is no kind of thought. It is the mindless ranting of the jealous.
Instead, we as reasonable people should look at what is successful and recognize why it is successful. Facebook and Twitter capitalize on quality content for their users – but that quality is determined by the bite sized nature, the extremely personal community, and the easy discoverability of that content. That is the quality measure on those platforms.
Just because that is the quality measure on Facebook and Twitter doesn't mean that the same quality measure is ideal for other platforms. If anything, it would be more reasonable to compare Steemit (and the rest of the steem-based blockchain social media architecture) to Medium or even WordPress, as a loosely centralized/federated architecture of blog systems. In such an environment, quality is measured in an entirely different way – quality is the importance and usefulness to someone looking for more longform content that they can find, that they consume at their leisure, and whose authors they can reward with the assumption that such rewards will get the reader more of the things that they like.
To that end, individual quality of content posts on the steem blockchain is absolutely critical. Stepping away from that goal, taking your eye off that prize, is a certain way to making the platform degenerate.
In a real sense, this goes back to my criticism of UA, which is itself a top-down, authoritarian-focused imposed metric which assumes that the witnesses are effective authorities of what we should like (since it roots the trust metric in their nodes), that long-established authors followed by more people are the things that we should like (even though quite a lot of them are spammers, scammers, and write about topics that neither you nor I may necessarily care about), and that decisions that you and I make are wholly unimportant to our experience. It effectively repeats the architectural mistakes of the underlying steem blockchain in terms of social media promotion, just replacing votes with follows.
That's a broken system. It's always been a broken system and just wishing in your fist and throwing it at a wall won't make it any less broken a system.
If you care about whether the steem architecture underlies a working, functional, useful social media structure, you have to be interested in quality – quality as defined by the individual user. The user has to be getting something out of the platform that they want, every time that they go to the platform. Every time that you advocate for click bait, or hype, or whatever, over quality – that is one time that user is going to go to the platform and not get a quality product. And when the user goes to a platform and doesn't get a quality product, they don't come back. If they don't come back, the value of steem only is maintained and retained by the function of the vast automated architecture which turns away under the skin and provides about 80% of the activity that hits the blockchain.
Maybe that's what Taskmaster wants. It's certainly a lot more predictable and easier audience to cater to, because the bots simply don't care about content. (Neither does UA.)
It is pointedly not what I'm interested in as the substrate of social media network, and I don't think that someone truly interested in supporting a social media network worthy of the name would be interested in that either