I'm glad to see you're coming around to arguments I made to you personally months ago. Planting seeds is how to get good fruit, and your evolution in thinking is a perfect example of that principle.
Principle. Consider principle in your examination of fruitful endeavors for a social media platform capable of benefiting humanity as Steemit is.
Bots are antisocial. Votebots are a direct threat to free speech, not merely the utility of upvotes to pitch Steem. Automated voting is also.
Delegation. While your experiences with delegating to individual accounts resulted in some discouraging results, I would point out that other delegations, such as the one I have received, have had markedly different results.
You can check my wallet. I have never once upvoted myself, purchased votes, or done any such thing, because I am intent on using my SP to create the signal you speak of. I suspect that if you sought delegates for your SP with similar track records, your results would reflect those produced by @fulltimegeek, @stellabelle, and @aggroed in their experiment that became known as 'The Stewards of Gondor'. There were very few examples in that experiment that didn't reduce self-voting, increase engagement, and improve the distribution of Steem by upvoting newer accounts.
Almost all of those delegates improved those stats over time.
Since those stats have tremendous impact on user retention, which directly impacts Steem price by determining how many people are possessed of Steem and who then seek to use it as money, the Stewards of Gondor experiment shows how to create the best conditions potentiating increasing Steem price, and the capital gains returns you allude to in the wider cryptocurrency market.
I have noted that Steem, and Steemit, have potential to transform society and finance globally. The key to that potential being optimally realized is the basic principle that people are society, and their speech and curation is the mechanism necessary to optimize it.
All automated mechanisms essentially decrease that potential to varying degrees.
Keep on thinking and acting based on sound principles you discover are best for you, and we will almost certainly come to agree across the board on most things, because that's what I do, and facts are facts.
Thanks!
If you're referring to this comment, I still don't agree a "post-money" society makes sense. Money is a mechanism we use for keeping track of value itself. To be "post-money" would be "post-value" which would be valueless or meaningless. I do think a collaborative commons will still have tokens for determining value and usage and as I said in my comment back then, time will always be a scarce resource.
I've been thinking about how STEEM might someday power a UBI for almost two years now. I do think markets, economies, and money itself will change, and I think it will be a proper balance of rational self-interest (not altruism) that also values everyone else around us.
You have a phenomenal memory! While we do presently not agree regarding a post-market economy, it is that disagreement I referred to here. I expect the nature of capital to be a tool for oppression and unenlightened exploitation to continue to provide strong impetus to oppose it, and automation and non-point source production to increasingly enable that opposition.
Regardless, the value of interpersonal interaction is not related to capital, except as capital constrains us through oppressive mechanisms. Many people using selfvoting, other scams, and votebots cite the need for capital as some kind of panistic justification for their actions. As you point out, these short sighted extractive undertakings degrade the entire community, and are counterproductive to capital creation overall.
There is good reason to restrict monetization to particular mechanisms in particular venues, to reflect the purpose of participants and prevent exploitation. Failing to do so can destroy the potential of venues to deliver the value participants are there to create and receive.
Conflating interpersonal discussions with advertising is likely to create that destruction. That doesn't mean advertising is the devil, just that it isn't appropriate in every venue. Perhaps SMTs will make that kind of separation of venues possible, as Steemit hasn't yet.
I am confident my vision of the future is both flawed, and will evolve. I am but glad to see I am not alone, and that your evolution you illustrate here shows I am in good company in that regard =)
Edit: just to belabor the point, while money does have value, it's not all that does, nor is all value possible to be monetized. Mike Tyson said Don King would sell his mother for a dollar.
That is post-value.
Society is much more than an economy. We are much more than mere assets. Most of our value isn't possible to reduce to money.
Love, family, and many other things are far more valuable than can be expressed in terms of capital. When such things are merely considered for the potential financial return they can generate, they become no more than prostitution and slavery, which I am certain we will agree are dramatic reductions in their value.