Oh, I basically agree, regarding freedom. I, too, like Rothbard.
(I actually think Utopian has too much moderation. Too much in the sense that, paradoxically, using that platform for open ended MIT media lab sort of projects, say to implement a formally specified algorithm with Steemit participants is not currently supported by Utopian, while making a logo or a bot or solving a bug is supported. Due to the specific wording of the moderation rules ... oh, well.)
...
Rather, what I suspect we need is a loose organization involving a threshold couple percent of the user base that stubbornly only upvotes high quality content. And coordinates timing. Merely in addition to Steem as it currently does exist. Basically, it involves using renormalization for something positive for once..
What do you think?
Moderation, which restricts freedom, actually won't even work, and I am not suggesting it. We need organization, which is something more general. They are not binary. (0 1) is neither greater nor less than nor equal to (1 0). There are also the options (0 2), (1 3), etc.
It simply exceeds the budget (including time) for the majority of users of the platform to search the platform for quality content. If a search costs 1000000, to review even 1 percent of the posts, and the user has 100, then even if they use 100% of their budget to search for quality content that is not trending, and a search that finds quality content that is not trending requires 5 percent of the posts searched, then most of the time any investment in search is wasted. Users don't search much. This leads to positioning rather than search. King.com spends 100 million promoting games that costs 150 thousand to make each. If almost all budget goes into promotion, then quality is almost never achieved.
Moderation involves 100000 users banding together, giving 50 each to moderators in the organization, to search for them while they do other things and give above threshold results.
This however fails, too. Why? Simply because moderators delegated to in any such organization can promote whatever they like, in the end of the day. Which is not necessarily the best, or even good. It's not like users, who delegate to them, can do any better, or even check what is going on for the same reason that most individual searches are below threshold. Such moderation typically opens up users to instability of outcomes and risk. Freedom and decentralization is needed for quality. It's the only system where any possibility of recourse or feedback exists. Agreed.
Users themselves must curate, but a critical number of them must do so with timing organized. Otherwise vote buying will always outbid them. 50 votes in 1 minute are not the same as 50 votes over 2 days, when collusion and vote buying are in the mix, and users cannot search and positioning, not search decides what most users have access to. When amidst the hugger mugger of collusion and vote buying and worse, flagging wars, the same 50 honest votes whose timing is off have no effect, except where they are by sheer coincidence arriving at near the same time. Which is too infrequent.
Curation is currently too weak. Microeconomic in effect without macroeconomic effect. Perhaps we need to improve organization of timing of existing curation, that's all. Not implement moderation or restrict freedom, yes, even to spam, in any way.
As it is, I had trouble finding even that your (200 points) post in all the soup! Two days went by! Out of seven! Do you see what I mean?
Very vice words @tibra.
I would not agree more on your "treshold quantity of users" to trigger improvement of quality content.
Current curation method in steemit is "follow the money" instead of "follow the content" and it is assumed that money should follow the content but it does not thanks to purchased upvotes.
Search of good quality (this is also a relative subject)will always be outnumbered by earning money.
Any attempt of curation will be too weak according to this factor.
There are good curation attempts like @sneakyninja who pays 1 SBD directly to the curator for undervalued posts.link to @sneakyninja
What he is doing is awesome and should be supported.
Guess more curators like him is increased, people search for good undervalued content and get paid for finding them.
( I am not sure I know how the economy works on this...)
This may be a good solution.
It is good that you have found my post...
FD.
It's good that you posted. (And that @grumpycat resteemed and it was read widely enough.) You pointed out the problem and took steps to solve it, by declaring what you consider strictly unacceptable.
As mentioned, a small but unbudging minority of a few percent ends up deciding what the majority does, thanks to asymmetries, costs of nonstandardization, etc.
Many people agree, but until a few reveal clear stances most are is unsure about that. So everybody takes a wait-for-others-to-do-something approach. And the others take a wait-for-others-to-do-something approach. They are unsure whether anybody agrees with them. So nobody does anything. Everybody waits for everybody else. Yeah, they go far like that. All that until a small minority begins to speak, clearly, about their stances. (This is why anybody who wants to prevent change suppresses freedom of speech.)
Furthermore, people are more likely to do what they believe, if they or somebody else says it. People are shy, and afraid of others finding out what they think. Predictable means vulnerable. What they think is revealed both in their communication and behavior. If they or somebody publicly declares a thought, they are more likely to do what they already believe, even though they believe it no more or no less than before. Rather, because everyone already knows what they think, or other people reveal they agree with what they think, they see no additional harm in behaving honestly according to what they think. Which is what is needed!
I will further look into @sneakyninja. Looks good.
Basically, nobody, including the contributers of upvote proposals, can perform an above threshold search. Each one samples more or less randomly for ten or twenty minutes and what they get is as good as anything they find in an hour or two or three. They start looking in different places.
The Daily Sneak seems like a good project.
By having many individuals sample the stream of content and submit individual upvote proposals, the variation in which content is seen and evaluated is much larger. In this case, it's that of the sum of as many random variables as curators, not just of one. And it's multiplied by a constant, which is larger as the diversity of categories and accounts where different contributers start looking is greater. How much that translates to a higher probability of finding quality content, I would have to think about some more. It depends on how quality content is distributed, clumped on Steemit. Which is an unknown factor. The less clumped, the more probable it is for sneakyninja to upvote quality content missed by most users. If he's having some success, it's probably not too clumped at the moment. The fact that voting is then done by a larger account, an all at once bump, is good.
Maybe a hundred Daily Sneaks, operating uncorrelated, then comparing approved proposals, before voting around the same time, is going to be good enough for higher quality to appear to regular users. That will bring more people in, and with more people seeing quality content, more expensive to spam unlimited.
No, what he is doing is NOT good for the platform, or good for anyone. How is this
good for anyone other than grumpy cat making out like a bandit? selfvoting to 163 dollars a bullshit comment of "Rubbing it in"? This is more harmful to the platform than any of the spam posts he is downvoting.