Those of you who know me, and pay attention, know that I occasionally write analysis and opinion pieces for a non-mainstream and politically unaligned news site: Independent Australia.( Maybe slightly more than occasionally - published 10 articles there last year - full list here).
Anyway, they recently agreed to run my piece on steemit. For the record, that title is not the one I suggested - other writers will understand.
I don’t expect that everyone is going to be happy with what I’ve had to say in this article. Yes, I did have to radically simplify the technical details for the sake of the length of the article. My brief survey of news stories on steemit and steem is that this is pretty common, and that mine actually gives more detail than most - with the possible exception being @andrewmcmillen's piece in Wired last year. I hope that I got the fundamentals at least roughly right though:
When I post something on my Steemit blog, it’s written into Steem blockchain. People vote on it (known as "curation") and, after a week, I get a cryptocurrency reward based on how much I’ve been up-voted. Post rewards can reach hundreds of dollars, but most blog entries will earn no more than a few dollars. As more accounts vote for my posts, my reputation – which is supposed to indicate my overall trustworthiness – rises.
It’s also true that I focussed on the economic and philosophical issues that are (in my opinion) not entirely positive. I think it’s possible that I’m going to get a bit of heat and/or hate for this. I mean, it might sound good to some potential investors to say:
Paid up-voting means that anyone with sufficient cash can make it to the top of the trending page, regardless of the quality of their work.
But that’s not what potential smaller users necessarily want to hear. Nor do I think people will be thrilled to bits to see this:
This unevenness of voting weight means that while a minnow might be able to destroy $0.10 of a whale’s earnings, that whale could totally demonetise a week’s worth of a minnow’s posts without even breaking a sweat.
Some people will disagree with my assessment of the situation. Others might agree, but feel that we shouldn’t air our dirty laundry in public. To people in either group: if this is how you feel, write your own op-ed on why the stake-weighted voting system isn’t inherently flawed, or how bidbots won’t destroy the Steem ecosystem, or how our trending page is exactly what your average Facebook user does actually want to see.
You might not like what I wrote, but it’s honest - and honesty is important. I do actually really like steemit, and the vast bulk of the people I’ve met here - sometimes despite our ideological differences. Believe it or not, I’m saying those things because I want steemit to succeed; I’m not convinced that it can ever reach its potential, even with @ned’s leadership, unless some of these things change.
I’ll be interested to see if this post gets any traction. It would be nice to see this get some organic interest and upvotes, but, on principle, I won’t boost it with anything I have to pay for.
If you want to read the full article, it’s available here. You should know that I will only get paid for this (by the publisher at least) if I get over a certain threshold of unique clicks. So if you could visit the article, even if it’s just to leave a comment to tell me that I’m full of crap, I’d be very grateful. Resteems are deeply appreciated, as are any efforts to share this via other social media if you still use it.
As always, thanks for reading.
Image source: https://steemit.com/ (Where else?)
Custom footer by @bearone
Everyone has their own vision for how the platform should work.
Hopefully SMTs will make Neds of us all :)
Lol. I had a little chuckle at that, having lived in Scotland.
Agreeed, this platform is great but will never reach its full potential without a few changes. It’s come time to evolve.
Nice. Seems like a pretty balanced and well written article to me. You aren't telling anyone anything that's untrue so I'm not sure that you'd take heat for it.
Thanks, I really appreciate your feedback on this. And my worries are probably misplaced - they usually are.
At your request I will say the same thing I did on reddit.
"Importantly, you cannot reduce the reputation of anyone with a higher reputation than you."
Wrong, wrong wrong wrong.
I am telling you that it would affect my reputation, would it drop the number? No because it takes a long time and a lot of votes to get it up there. However your flag would reduce my reputation score (you can view the real number on steemd). We're I to be flagged enough, by people with lower rep, my visible rep would in fact go down. Its not that someone with a lower rep can NOT affect someone with a higher reputation, its just that the effect that their vote has on the person with higher rep is small, relative to the reputation that person has.
Lets take an example, say an account with a lower rep-score but a LOT of SP, flags me. That would have a fairly significant impact on my reputation score. However it may take more than one flag to actually start dropping the number, even by a larger holder. Just for the same reason I described earlier, it took a whole LOT of votes to get it up there in the first place.
The official documents are not incorrect, you are just sort of mis-interpreting how the system works.
Thanks for responding - I appreciate it because this is something I really want to get to the bottom of. I had taken this part of the FAQ at face value:
I also read this post by @archange, which pointed me this page on github. I'm not an expert, but I think I captured the relevant bit of code in this screenshot:
I would happily accept that I'm missing something here - not least because this is something that I would love to be wrong about.
Based upon this it would appear that I am wrong and that you are correct. Those settings are idiotic and further solidify my opinion that reputation on steemit is stupid. So I can just go around flagging and killing peoples rep, and theres nothing anyone but a few people with rep higher then 70.5 can do to stop me?
Hence the nature of my concerns. Thanks for being so cool about his.
I am more depressed that I have been on this platform for as long as I have, and have fundamentally misunderstood the functioning a relatively high level aspect of it.
If you can't affect my "reputation" then reputation isnt a reputation at all. Its a bullshit number.
I've had my PhD for nearly 3 years, and have been teaching for nearly 10, and I'm still wrong about things on a pretty regular basis. Adjusting your views in light of new evidence, or a better understanding of existing evidence, does not require you beating yourself up about it.
I'm not. Being disappointed is a natural emotion, but it's fleeting. I am wrong about things daily, part of being a research scientist. ;)
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by SamD (at samueldouglas) from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows. Please find us at the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
If you would like to delegate to the Minnow Support Project you can do so by clicking on the following links: 50SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP, 5000SP.
Be sure to leave at least 50SP undelegated on your account.
Thx for another informative post. Easy to read.
"I won’t boost it with anything I have to pay for."
Why not? Im quite new here but I learned that authors are using bots not only to boost their own post but also because they want to help their own curators to benefit.
I decided lately that I will be upvoting my own posts just 1 day after I posted it and also just then I will use bots.
"You should know that I will only get paid for this (by the publisher at least) if I get over a certain threshold of unique clicks. So if you could visit the article"
Consider it done.
Please continue up with creating interesting content. Steemits needs solid content builders.
Already followed and upvoted :) Cheers, Piotr