Landlords — Hive

Ah, so you've brought a new post into the world? You gave it a lot of care and love and now your post is ready to explore the blockchain on its own? So, did you save enough money for rent? Oh, you didn't. Most people don't. That's okay, there's enough room in the underground for your post. Sure, the neighborhood is kind of shady, but there's room available next to summarized news article and a plagiarized meme that looks affordable enough for you.

If you ain't got the SBD, you ain't gonna see the sunshine.

Ownership / Image Source

So who are the landlords of Steemit? The owners and investors of bid-bots. They lease out valuable real-estate to the highest bidder and the rest of us are stuck posting content in the slums of the platform. Where we have to compete against trash and hope that our existing follower bases don't quit, because getting new followers is now harder than ever. And if you are new? Well you are kind of screwed, unless you pay actual money to pay for rent to get followers in the first place.

But perhaps you don't agree with the premise that the "wonderful" and "innovative" "entrepreneurs" are effectively selling access to new users of the platform. But isn't exactly what they claim they are doing? They're selling access to valuable property and selling it to those desperate enough to rent the property. I say rent, because stays on "trending" and "hot" are temporary.

Well don't look at trending moron.

Look, I have an established feed and can look there. But sometimes I want fresh material and it's very hard to find. And I've been here for awhile. Take a new user that knows no better. They are stuck with "trending", "fast trending", and "garbage". Of course, they are going to spend most of their time on "trending". They know no better. So all the votes go there and the non-renters are stuck duking it in the underground trying to convince the few that do go on deep dives that their time is worth it.

Before bid-bots it was better. Sure circle jerks and whales still dominated, but they had to buy the land at some cost for themselves or their friends. They had to waste voting power on content. For free. But now they simply sit back and sell that land for a profit rather than at a cost to them. There's no work on their part. They collect rent from the people they lease the spots on trending and they parade around the platform praising themselves that they are helping people.

Taking people's money for doing nothing useful*, isn't something praiseworthy.

*Unless ROI is considered a useful feature. ROI for ROI's sake isn't useful outside the investor.

But let's say that we are okay with "entrepreneurs" selling the front page of our platform to everyone else. Let's look at some of the potential consequences.

Established users who don't use bid bots or circle jerks will notice their audience slowly become less and less responsive. This is due to many users on the platform simply quitting for a wide variety of reasons. Given that they now have less access to new users, the followers number may go up but engagement goes down.
Bid-bot owners's influence on the platform will continue to grow as they get to double-dip on rewards. They get curation bonuses and they get extra SBD for the simple act of voting. Given that such actions are theoretically performed at break-even, nearly all of the monetary value flows to the owner of the bot. This centralizes money and makes the problem worse. This makes it harder for organic writers and artists to compete and centralizes the currency with a small group of individuals. Centralization that may undermine the security of the blockchain.
Regular users will notice an inability to reach the content that they desire. They will also notice little interaction with their own content. They either are forced to give up money to rent prime real estate, are content with minimal interaction, or they quit. Most ordinary people pick the latter option, because at least they are noticed are other social media platforms (even if they aren't paid).
The price of Steem eventually goes down. As user retention suffers and new users are unable to connect to ordinary users, the platform stagnates and ultimately the value proposition collapses as the pay-to-play becomes more and more apparent. Also, competitors who have seen the initial success of Steem are beginning to launch dividing the market and removing Steem's first mover advantage. The platform slowly bleeds out and the investors eventually sellout to preserve profits.

Of course, these consequences are speculative and are not destined to happen. But let me remind you that ordinary people care little about decentralization or censorship. All they want is to ride their dopamine pony off into the sunset. If the user experience is bad, then you aren't going to go mainstream. It doesn't matter if you are offering money. There are plenty of fast-food jobs that are easy that ordinary people avoid because they have bad user experiences.

There are no easy solutions to this problem, but if there were easy solutions the problem would already be solved by now or there would at least be debate about a potential solution. Of course, many won't see this as a problem and will see such action as a byproduct of an open environment and are simply users expressing "innovation". But something worthy of such a label has to have tangible benefits to users that improve the overall experience. Such de facto ownership of attention degrades the user experience instead.

But I guess that might be a post for another day. How money corrupts the vision of innovators and tends to lean development towards tools that benefit themselves rather than ordinary people.

How much does a SBD cost? Apparently more than the health of the platform, the well-being of other Steemians, and prospect of changing people's lives for the better. But hey. That's the real world. Those in power can't see beyond it.