Great post, @dwinblood.
I always try to explain to people just what you mentioned here as I am trying to get them to sign up.
Steem is backed by our creations. So is a piece of metal (e.g. Gold) worth more to you than something you created other than for a purely monetary reason?
Things only have value in so much as one places their value on it. My only question would be is every entry equal in value? Is it the upvotes that determine value if not? What about posts that are better than top posts but receive no attention? Is there a way to objectify value within the blockchain?
One thing that amazes me about Steem is the speed at which everything updates/changes, especially when there is an issue. I love having been a part of the beginnings of such an incredible project.
This happens regularly in life as well. It is mostly about visibility. Something must be noticed to receive votes. So something being perceptually better does not mean that the people that can lift it the most saw it. As we get more people this will spread out more and more. I already often miss some cool posts from people I follow simply because I am not looking at my feed at the right time and I don't have time to go through it in detail every day. I also try to look outside of my feed some as well.
Yet one thing I know is necessary to enjoying being here is to avoid getting hung up on the money. Let it happen when it does. Avoid looking at posts and then thinking, that post did awesome, I should write about the same thing. Avoid looking at one post and thinking that one did better than mine and mine is written so much better.
As all of these things happen in the real world as well. We are just so used to them that we kind of don't pay attention to that anymore. We are desensitized.
You raise some very good points, especially that valuable ideas/entities go unnoticed in the real world. However, do you think that the exposure level of valuable content is going to rise with an influx of new users? I know that there will be many users who will buy into Steem and thereby creating more whales and dolphins to distribute the exposure a bit, but do you not think that a large number of the new users are simply going to accept the loaned SP, if not for the fact they just cannot afford anything else? And if that were the case, if most of them became content creators and were not doing as much curating then would there not be a flood of new content that would wash out even more of the already unnoticed valuable content? (I'm not sure of anything, just spitballing here :] )
And just because something is happening in the real world doesn't make it right. ;) We're doing many things here that we aren't doing in the real world (some of us do, but I mean in general) because they work better. So why not think of a better way to do something?
I totally agree that we shouldn't be hung up on money, and that mirroring posts isn't the best of ideas, but I do think that you can find inspiration through other posts and see how the higher paid posts are formatted and such. Noticing trends and working along with them to set your own, in a manner of speaking.
I think it may be further diluted. Really the best way to get exposure is to get followers, and that takes time. The other ways are if someone with followers notices a great piece and resteems it.
Also we will be switching to a linear curve for voting power instead of n^2 in the next hard fork. I suspect that will change quite a few things for the better. Spread voting power out in a linear progression 1:1 per steem power instead of exponential like it is now. So the super powerful at the top will not actually be as insanely powerful as they are. This will shift some of the voting power down stream as well. As far as I know this is coming soon.
Plus if they get the communities eventually developed that will change things a lot so that we are not all looking at the same bucket with ever post in it. I know that is planned in the future as well.
True but it also doesn't make it nefarious. A lot of it can also be chance, and quantity of people that notice it, or a person that is sufficiently influential noticing it. If it were intentional and nefarious then that would be an issue, but I don't really see that being the case.
This is usually called "Discoverability" and it is an ongoing problem that nowhere has mastered yet. People keep trying new things though. Nothing wrong with trying. Yet often it is just trying to deal with how to get good content to people when GOOD content is a very subjective thing. If it was programmatically easy to detect the GOOD content from the bad content then there wouldn't be much need of us.
Yes, you can learn techniques. You can also be inspired by a post and offer your own unique perspective. These things are good. Some people though simply become more clone like than original and this should be avoided.
Yes this matters to some people. It doesn't really matter to me at all. I rarely even look at trending. So I'm not the best person to talk to about that as it is completely unimportant to me to the way I choose to do things. Some people may find it very important.
Thinking about it, with the more users there are the more chances to gain followers there will be.
I don't think I quite understand the voting curve change other than it's "going to be good" lol I know very little about coding.
Communities will definitely help to highlight material better than we're seeing it as of current. I look forward to that development.
I wasn't necessarily stating that there were nefarious motivations behind the way things may be, but just that when something is brought to attention that more than brushing it off as happenstance may be in order.
This is sort of what I was asking with the first question of whether it is possible to objectify value on the blockchain. I think there could be a way to detect it but then have us being the filters. I do not know how that would happen though.