"The importance of communities in Steem city".This post is a response to @tarazkp 's recent post
We cannot rely on communities to do the work of facilitating relationships, and therefore productive exchanges, on Steem.
A community is a group of humans with some shared purpose or trait. This excludes then groups of people who simply exist in proximity (be it physical or virtual) with each other, which we may instead just call a "society". While I would be willing to split hairs on this in a debate (come at me bro!), I am using this definition as pertaining the post this post is in reaction to. And to boot, it is sensible.
Therefore, as such there are a multitude of communities here in Steem city, but the persons in the city themselves do not constitute a community. This fact is important to establish and understand for two reasons:
- It was clearly assumed by the founders that a single community of some sort would form in order to evaluate the members' content fairly, and
- Knowing now that this has failed, calling for communities to take up this failed job will also fail.
As someone who has attempted to create several communities, both on chain and unconnectedly elsewhere, I know a thing or two about how they work, and more to the point, fail. A few minutes ago I shut down the Nth Society Discord server. The Nth Society community died long ago under my experimental anti-leadership-leadership, but thankfully not without achieving at least a few steps of it's hoped mission, to discover more about what a voluntaryist simulation game would look like. RIP Discord server, the project lives on - barely - but the community is dissolved.
Success for a community however is not uncommon here in Steem city, though it always seems to rely on a few key factors: good leadership, lots and lots of volunteer personnel and time, and most importantly, some kind of agreed goals. Wonderful as this is however, it does not scale to the size of a city. It may work at say 80% inclusiveness maximum in a large village, but not a hundreds of thousands size city.
What people need in a city are services, and the communities will take care of themselves.
You might be familiar with what a cooperative (co-op) is, but there are multiple variations on the theme of mutual ownership. Consider here one of the definitions from Wikipedia:
businesses owned and managed by the people who use their services
This is essentially what so-called "communities" here are. Take a moment to consider that definition to see that the benefiters of the business (who use the service) are those who run it. This ranges from a circle jerk voting ring to @adsactly 's self-voting content mill, from @steembasicincome to the PAL network. The members benefit, and so to sustain it it needs many members, many of whom who must benevolently sacrifice their time and energy in the pursuit of the goal, and less of whom end up benefiting in knock on ways, all of which submit to it's norms and aims.
I don't criticize this model per se, in fact I used it once upon a time to create the short lived Steem Coop! ... kind of, we didn't actually do anything except discuss Steem topics 😅 I do however call into question the notion that this kind of project can scale.
You might retort that Steem itself is in fact such a system. Perhaps on the surface it appears that way but it is not. Not everyone can really benefit, as we all discover at one time or another, especially those who at today's prices gambled on a higher token price when they bought at say a 80c STEEM, those who were once the beneficiary of fairly consistent whale votes which dried up, or a delegation, or have seen their readership grow disinterested on no account because of a writing change.
People will form communities around their interests, goals and common beliefs, that's what people do, but that does not mean that those communities can or should replace the systems which stop a city from collapsing. The language of "community" is an appeal to sign up to someone else's vision, to join a cause or pitch into something. These can be great and worthwhile things, but I repeat, it does not scale, not everyone can share your vision, and most importantly they should not be required to for the ecosystem to thrive.
As I see it members clubs are not the way forward. Impartial services are the key to success if we are really concerned with benefiting everyone. For example a cinema generally does not force you to become a member to watch a movie, and they do not need to know who you are, or ask you to rally for the cause of great and better movies just to enjoy one. Neither, for that matter, do soup kitchens (though you may be accosted in tandem by the religious). Communities, in their natural inclination for closeness, demand more than the causal user is willing to invest in the medium and long term. We must create places in Steem city we can walk up to that are not simply for buying votes (or money now for money later), watching videos or, yes, writing blog posts. It can be more I think, but not primarily through the narrow lens of community.
There is no community which is diverse enough in aims to include all people without simply being "society".
Photo Attribution
The photo used is "People Girl Woman" by StockSnap, licensed CC0 public domain. No attribution required, but doing it anyway, really nice photo with a lol-tastic keyword title 😂
Man, ive waited too long to hear somebody else say that.
Ganging up to increase rewards shows a lack of class in that it disadvantages anybody that doesnt play along with the norms of the gang.
Throw in their insular refusal to vote outsiders and we have a classic circlejerk.
Good luck finding many more to agree, tooo damn many socials around here, not enough heads.
Cliques are a thing that's going to happen but I don't think we should fool ourselves that there's anything virtuous about forming a group to pass around pats on the back and votes for members only, for real it's that which is totally lacking in class.
Thanks for the comment, glad to have a few readers still in these lacklustre times 😆 as I said in the piece, agreement is not required, very important to realize. Nice when it happens though, and important to debate none the less.
Yep, im a big supporter of dissent, as you may well imagine.
At some point im expecting the turmoil to die down, maybe then we can change the world with well reasoned innovations.
Keep working, stop paying.
Great discussion.
I am truly sad that the Nth Society Discord is over. I realize I contributed nothing, but it remains something I am interested in, and hope achieves realization. I very much appreciate your effort in working to achieve goals we share, but that you are driven enough to possess the skills to effect.
In the bandwidth desert I now reside in, I am able to expend about a day a week in reading and commenting, and if I make a post/mth, it's almost a miracle. Please don't mistake this for lack on interest. My activity online this week shall impose a internet moratorium for at least two weeks later this month.
Thanks for your agile mind, and dedication to sound principles.
You do yourself a disservice with your judgement, you definitely contributed in comment on previous posts, while not maybe to the Discord, but you are in good company in that regard! There were only ever a few contributors.
Steem looked very different a year ago and it was easier to get interest in such things. I think the sun will rise again but it's certainly looking a little quieter outside now. That said I think I need to look better at what's going on and I'm trying to prepare a tool to help with that in the little time I do have for such things.
Your bandwidth issue is probably more of a blessing than a curse, there's more to life than blah blah blah blah blah blah blah .....
I would argue that there are many communities here as intended under an umbrella of Steem, which could constitute a society.
When it comes to the community rating content, that can never be the case as only a portion of the whole will ever even see it once there is more than a couple hundred people here, which it has been since very close to the start. People will stick largely to their interests, their niche, their community.
The city still holds even though not everyone knows each other nor are likely to ever meet and I agree, the city needs services and the communities within will sort themselves out. I see the services as the infrastructure requirements to house those communities, the bandwidth, nodes etc - something not everyone can provide meaning that those that can could be considered their own community of sorts.
The project I see can scale by providing the infrastructure required for communities to leverage. It just means that not everyone is going to be doing the same jobs which is why there are various group classes that i roughly see as investors, developers, contributors and consumers. While they might all want different outcomes, it is in their best interest for all (as many as possible) to be satisfied.
When it comes to Steem, the diversity of content is as just about as diverse as any content delivered on the internet since, it is all just content. And as I have said previously, it is possible that through SMTs new users might never know of Steem at the core. It could be akin to a CMS where the users don't care about the underlying code, just what it delivers to them. Most users of Youtube do not care what feeds them the videos.
While this might be the future of Steem, at the moment there is a small and connected enough group that one could consider that it has components f community involved, for example in the SOS forum now on PAL. While not everyone is in there, that could be considered some kind of town hall, community meeting.
This is an opt-in system that no one need join nor stay at yet, even if they don't do anything, it is also an open system that they can still use.
My hope is that in time people will find each other and build communities based on their interests and then agree to build something they love rather than wait for others to do it for them. However, this requires some level of infrastructure that most do not have available to them now on Steem. Nothing is stopping anyone from building communities in the myriad other platforms out there but, there are some added benefits of Steem and if supported broadly enough, the massive benefit of stability through diverse usage.
The project itself I see as a future conglomeration of many projects that are independently owned, operated and supported in various ways but, run somehow connected to steem whether directly or through SMTs. This way they can all rely on the system to provide capabilities through their various witnesses and nodes but, live freely under whatever banner they choose to wave.
You haven't exactly disagreed with me here, so I'll take it as tacit approval. To restate I think that the focus on communities as creating a mutually beneficial Steem is not the most important focus. I would be interested in you direct reaction to this point.
Thanks for the long reply, I considered it all despite my short reply here. I am sure that people will create communities and need very little encouragement to do so, it's very natural.
I definitely agree with the CMS future of Steem, if it survives long enough it will become that largely I would say, seems a sure bet. We'll probably look back on these times as like people who were really interested in a certain database 😂 but that's precisely the point, things that use Steem are more important (or will be) than things about Steem. Perhaps the market is drying up for think pieces about Steem, I'm now never breaking $1 on posts, so perhaps it's time to put my money (or rather time!) where my mouth is.
I don't disagree with most of it.
Focus now or overall?
As said, I see this much like a city that needs to service everyone but, it is in the developmental phases. What brings everyone (most) together later is getting the foundations in now. There is an order of business and while I think that groups need to align their incentives, the timeline is not going to meet all needs simultaneously. Sewers and roads before opera houses and amusement parks.
Well, I find all of it a big amusement park already :D
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