I’ve had a thought about decentralised social media like this very place.
Say you’re Mark Zuckerberg. You’ve got access to a lot of working capital. You decide that, say, you’re going to install five massive whales onto the network. Once in place, you can do several things:
- direct the reward pool to your preferred sources
- ensure the promotion of content you want to see pushed
- protect yourself from the sole community tool of flagging through wealth alone
- take down content and users you don’t agree with your flagging power
At that point, you pretty much are the central influencing factor on the chain. How do we know this is possible? Because it is happening right now with the entire drama that is playing out. And that’s one user, one whale.
Now I love this place from my experience so far but I feel it is going to face challenges from its decentralisation as it can actually disempower individuals. Decentralisation is great for some things, having controls in place is better for others.
I’m watching with interest to see how this all plays out over the year.
Yes, the lack of distribution in Steem Power definitely creates issues. From my perspective, it's another lack of decentralization. The main token holders, right now, are too centralized which gives some people more power than others. The way to fix that is to have other rich people with good intentions buy in to combat the bad actors. That would also increase the value of the current token holders which may make it too expensive for anyone else to reasonably get enough influence.
As for someone like Zukerberg doing it, well, they have more money than we can comprehend, so yeah, that definitely could do it. The nice thing about that is how Smart Media Tokens may create situations where we can continually fork our own communities off the main line and use them as we see fit with our own SMT Oracles to enforce rules that specific community wants.
That latter part sings to me. I think that is where the benefit will lie, especially for the niche interests. Plus more control will help communities manage people just in it for the money.
I’ve seen some shockers on here. People who grabbed photoshops of bad Christmas jumpers to win community competitions, people who literally copy and paste your comment with a few word changes and an upvote to nick any potential interaction rewards. Mad!
One of my concerns with the SMT model is that we'd create to many echo chambers where different communities exclude everyone they disagree with. That might get weird.
Thanks for this thoughtful reply. Just learning Steemit strategy. Smart Media Tokens do seem like the way to build your habitat.
At least if multiple real world "whale" groups start competing with each other for Steem influence, we'll all get rich lol
We’ll have a whale of a time.
@heymattsokol good point there! The steem price will go very high if this big real world whales deciede to inject funds into the steem blockchain, and this might happen sooner or later!
Regards, @gold84