Steems usd value is going to be driven by the ability to use steempower as a form of marketing to get global reach on the platform. If there's no money in the platform for anybody but the top 1% eventually users will leave for some steem 2.0 clone product and everything we have all built here will be worth nothing.
I'm going to ask you an important question, and you are going to have difficulty answering it, because your essential position is self-contradictory.
Actually, no – I'll give you a break. Let's start with the easy stuff.
You object to the idea that H-dude has received 7% of the reward pool on any given day, and, in theory, he can repeat that effort largely indefinitely. You are outraged that such a thing is possible, and your immediate response is not to improve the position of others by actually improving their position, but to suggest that the most successful people on the platform should be hobbled so that your feelings are less hurt.
Look, I'm not saying that H-dudes content is worth urinating upwind, but I am going to point out that your essential summary in your penultimate paragraph conflicts with everything that went before it. It aggressively subverts your own point.
You cannot simultaneously tell me that you want people to be able to use steem power as a form of marketing to get global reach on the platform and that H-dude is making too much money because he effectively has a massive amount of SP backing directing rewards from the daily reward pool to him.
Those cannot be simultaneously true. One of them must be false.
Now, for myself, I don't care if you get 7% of the reward pool as long as 7% of the SP which was active on the day in question was actually involved in upvoting him. That SP is the underlying influence that we all accept drives importance on this platform, and we accept it by continuing to use the platform.
You might notice that bloody near everything which involves making a change on the steem blockchain is scaled by SP. This is why everyone who seems to feel their opinion should be listened to, whether it should be or not, chirps on and on about "convert your everything to SP so that you have greater influence on the platform!"
So H-dude has people who have done just that voting him up, and as a direct consequence he receives large awards from the reward pool.
So here's the question I would put to you:
Exactly whose influence/votes should be considered less important than yours?
That's what we're talking about, here. We're not talking about allocation from the reward pool, not really. It's an easy line to say, but it's not real. We're not even talking about saying "he's making too much money!" Because if we did that, we would have to actually ask who gets to decide, and if they decide anyone more than they is making too much money – and they will, because they are human – why would you be ultimately immune to that sort of attack, either?
No, you posit a far more insidious problem: "some people's opinion matters too much."
That's what you're really saying. You are saying that the people who have accumulated more SP then you, and way more SP than me, can decide things that you have no say in – like how much of the reward pool that H-dude gets, and you don't like it.
I don't particularly like it, but I remember something that my father once told me that is applicable here.
"Life sucks, and then you die."
The problem that we have is that if your view of economic reality is the dominant one, we essentially just make it not worth the effort for investors - or even active members of the community - to bother trying to be in the top 100, top 1000, top 10,000... Where does it stop?
If you want investment in the platform, if you want people to think of SP as a form of marketing to get global reach of the platform, then you have to accept that they do so with the intent of being able to use that SP. And they will use that SP. They will use that SP to direct a portion of the daily rewards pool to themselves – because that's what the system is designed to do, from the ground up, and forevermore. That's what it does. That's what it knows. That's all that it knows.
This may come as some surprise to you, but the vast majority of SP is controlled by a very tiny percentage of the user base – and if they coordinated to any significant degree, they would and could (and do) direct the vast majority of the rewards pool wherever they like, with no input or even possible input from you and I.
But they literally paid for that privilege.
Now I understand that macroeconomics is not something that people pay attention to in any significant way anymore, so I don't hold this against you as a person, and understanding second-order effects is something that I normally expect from fellow game enthusiasts and designers – and not recognizing those is something that I hold against you as a person just a little bit.
But your understanding of the system and your proposed approaches to solving "the problem" are effective at both disenfranchisement and destroying exactly what you say that you want. That's pretty impressive. You have to go a long way to shoot yourself in the foot and higher along the leg at the same time.
There are 10,000 problems on both the steem blockchain and Steemit which are magnificently huge and will inevitably lead to a rival service providing more consistent rewards to content creators taking most of the Steemit user base. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow – but inevitably.
But that problem is not "some people make more than I think they should." That problem is not "these people paid for the privilege of having more say than I do." That problem is not best addressed by setting yourself as arbiter of what "too much" is, and it's not addressed at all by failing to understand what the prime mover on the blockchain is.
(I'm far more concerned that crappy content generating bots that use terrible Markov chains make more money than I do on a regular basis, but not enough to violate one of the central axioms of the system – that you should be able to have control of the system in proportion to your stake in the system. Not your emotional stake, your fiscal stake.
To me, it's far more disturbing that @dan is getting involved with picking winners and losers on the blockchain by means of directly keeping individuals from earning rather than supporting content that is a good, that is meaningful, that is good for the blockchain. Voting down H-dude doesn't actually help the blockchain. At best, it keeps parity. Far better to reward content that is good, making it more visible, making it represent what the blockchain is capable of creating. Down votes are dumb, triply so in this context. They serve no good purpose.)
A perfect response that I fully stand by. Couldn't have said it better. I was going to follow you but then I realized I'm already a follower.
I thought I had remained rather emotionally detached from the issue, I know i'm not a very good writer so perhaps it appears emotionally charged. I should clarify that i'm not an anti @haejin supporter, in fact i disapprove of members colluding together to downvote an individual account because it's too successful. I did mention it seemed incredibly unprofessional that @dan would wade into that too as the creator but i'm starting to wonder if he is the creator anymore or only by name. As in do we judge him for his actions harsher because he is the creator or is he downvoting because he no longer holds the power of the creator and shouldn't be held to higher standards.
I am not at all outraged that @haejin is making 7% of the daily rewards good on him for mastering the system, somebody had to do it. My concern is the future of steemit, in decades to come if a collective of organised accounts should ever reach 51% in theory they could post the letter a 20 times a day and still generate over half of the reward pool meaning that their lead will just continue without them producing any content. Also should it ever get that far. it's also safe to say the witness program would be theirs to control as well.
I see no reason steem power cannot be a form of marketing with a daily reward pool cap based on the volume of active users to make sure the reward pool doesn't end up almost entirely in a handful of wallets. Physical companies will in a sense be paying for marketing as their steem power will not be generating as much reward as it could but they will not be restricted from posting or trending it would not lower their weight of their posts merely the reward after a certain limit.
That said even this idea still has holes as money can be divided across 20 accounts equally with each account making 1 post and upvoting each of the other 19 accounts posts. Extending the power of a large volume of steem by 20x the market cap. Thankfully for both of us i suppose that it's not up to me to fix this problem.
I've heard about this peripherally in my feed, and now I just got a huge serving of humble pie reading this post and your replies. I'm just barely holding on here trying to keep it simple and just contribute content that isn't pointless drivel, yet there is this whole underbelly of the mechanical beast to contend with. Thanks for the informative reality check.
If it's any comfort, you'll notice that I keep putting out content on a regular basis that I think is an pointless drivel. I certainly allow for the idea that it might be pointless drivel, and I would certainly accept if someone said to me, "Lex, this crap you write – all the stuff about games, screenplays, and reviews of fast food restaurants? It's crap. It's garbage. It's complete pointless drivel."
But I keep writing it.
Because in a real sense you don't have to deal or even care about the underbelly of the mechanical beast. It doesn't really matter to you. You have a Reputation of 52, which means that you've been around for long enough and have produced enough content that people with higher Reputations have voted you up a fair number of times. Somebody likes what you do. Somebody likes what you say. You're doing it right.
Don't let all of this get blown out of proportion in your mind. The people who farm outrage are up in arms about H-dude possibly reaping 7% of a given day's reward pool. For people like you and me, who write on a regular basis and feel good about getting four or five steem on a post, and feel great if we hit the lotto and get the magic whale vote that gives us the big payout once in a while? Even the entire power of @steemcleaners and all that they do on a day-to-day basis barely makes 7% of a difference to a given reward pool. Maybe it's a few cents either way to you and I.
We will never live long enough or earn long enough for that to add up to anything significant. It's not worth worrying about.
If there's a reality check you take away from this, that's the one you should take. We are talking about cents on a good day for either you or I. The needle does not budge. This tempest in a teapot? In fiscal terms? It means nothing to us.
In philosophical terms – maybe. If you care about social movements on this platform and possibly understanding them in the context of being a subset of the attitudes and beliefs that people bring in from outside of the sphere of experience, something here might be educational and worth paying attention to. Maybe.
But don't think of it as important.
Keep it simple. Hold it down. Do what you do. Keep writing. Keep creating. Keep using the platform, smartly, to create what you like and reward what you like. Don't let anybody tell you to do things any differently than that; you know what is in your best interest.
Do it.
Anybody tells you anything else, they're selling something.
Thanks for saying that, I keep beating the drum that creativity is the highest currency and I'd like to just stick to that because it's too easy to give in to the conditioning that it isn't, and then nothing happens so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of inaction. If nothing else, I prefer to act against that tide of naysayers.
We have to be honest with ourselves in order to make decisions which are reflective of reality.
Creativity is definitely not the highest currency. It never has been.
Currency is the highest currency.
Which follows hot on the heels of the highest commodity.
Time is the highest commodity. Everything that you do is trading off on some amount of time. Your time, someone else's time – time.
Now, it just so happens, some people have an affinity for trading time for creative output. They're good at it or they're efficient at it or they get a rush of pleasure from doing it. For whatever reason, they are very good at converting time into creative output, which is itself another commodity.
That commodity can sit on a shelf. It can be posted publicly for free. It can be posted publicly for passerby reward (like on Steemit). Or it can be burnt.
But it is a commodity, it can be traded for things, and only an individual can decide if it is an efficient trade for them to convert time into creative output and further exchange creative output for other commodities.
Once we put things into context, we can make decisions which specifically speak to what we gain from them.