You know – it's funny. You are absolutely correct.
In the absence of active vote services, we would simply have crap of a different flavor popping up in Trending. It would be equally worthless to the majority of users and equally pernicious.
And before I go any further, I want to be really clear – I'm not one of the people/analysts/punditry on Steemit who is aggressively against bid bots. I believe that if a system exists that allows you an easy exploit, you would be a fool not to take advantage of it. In the case of bid bots, it's not even in exploit, it's an implicit functional operation which the mechanics of reward distribution on the blockchain not only allow for but explicitly promote.
Some people here are going to disagree with me. They're wrong. When a mechanical architecture privileges inhuman methods of engaging with the system, it's no surprise when those methods reach primacy.
But I think as cogent, capable analysts, people who can look at an environment and determine whether the results are what we would like to see as participants, we both have to agree that vote services are doing a disservice to users who want to actually find good content.
Yes, they provide a different flavor of bad – but it's still bad.
In your defense, I'll point out that the recommendations are bad because of an invalid assumption about how the system works, and the value of consensus versus individual worth. That's not your fault.
But it kind of is your fault that a system that you have implemented and support is making the situation worse. I don't hold a grudge about that, but I do see it as true.
From the perspective who isn't making a fat load of cash off of running a bot service and trying to make the best of the crappy situation that we all find ourselves in, you can certainly understand why your success at making our lives worse might be a sore spot for some people.
From my perspective, it would be fascinating if your system decided to take on an air of radical transparency and start publishing weekly numbers about how effective the vote bot platform really is. Not as advertising but rather as a means of depicting how much effect moving that much SP around on the blockchain has in manipulating the results at the top.
I'm not going to tell you to stop; that would be foolish. And stupid on my part. But I would ask that if you're going to manipulate the experience that we have, you might at least return to us some measure of value in terms of information. Yes, all of that data is probably available on the blockchain for the effort of mining it out, formatting it up, and crunching it. I am probably more than capable of making those reports happen alone.
As a gesture of good faith, it would be great to see you and others in your position take care of that for us.
Maybe, with more information at hand, we might be able to come up with a solution which is more agreeable (if not completely agreeable) to everyone involved.
Fair points.
The last section RE information would be a nice to have, but I suspect it will not be forth-coming. Which means at some point one of us will have to go delving into the accounts of these bots/owners.
Dirty work and not for the faint hearted.
I strongly support almost every point you make, save that it is necessary to have bidbots on a social media platform.
There may be communities where that is beneficial. For most communities, potentiating paid upvotes seems like a definite drawback to the society, who are likely focused on a different metric of value.
If hivemind doesn't enable this kind of exclusion, SMTs will. We'll have to see what shakes out.
Otherwise spot on!
Let's be clear – I didn't say that they were necessary.
I said that they were inevitable.
Given the mechanics of votes as architected on the steem blockchain, voting bots which take money and operate as bidding pools are inevitable. They were inevitable from day one and they remain inevitable. They have every advantage over a human curator at a deep, mechanical level.
Are they necessary? In this environment, it appears so. In a well-designed environment? Much less so. But you go to war with the environment you have, not the environment that you want.
Hive mind does not modify any of the underlying motivations that give rise to vote bots. Nor do SMTs. If anything, both of them, which will require hardfork 20, will simply give rise to more bid bots and vote bots spread out across a wider attack surface.
And it is because we have a singular metric of value, only one judgment which is assumed to apply to everyone. The most, most powerful votes win.
Individual accounts can't decide what they want to see more of. They get no decision-making there. Their votes go into the great consensus, and if they don't agree with a great consensus – they are effectively meaningless.
Hardfork 20 is going to make this worse by tightening the time limit on curational votes and a number of other issues. Manual interaction on the blockchain is going to be even further deemphasized, and there is only one inevitable result.
Systems are as they are. We must observe them accurately and assess their impacts if we want to make good judgments about what to interact with and what to do with our time.
So it seems social platform projects on the Steem blockchain will inevitably fail, unless they create and extract value in some way other than the distribution of the reward pool. Does that make the collapse of Steem, the blockchain, inevitable, too? Maybe what remains to play out is how SMT projects will generate value for Steem, whether through hucksterism or real value for their users.
Actually, you probably could have stopped with "it seems that social platform projects will inevitably fail."
Statistically, we can observe that to be true.
But as regards social platform projects that leverage the steem blockchain is a backend database – yes, they really need to extract value in some way other than the distribution of the reward pool because the distribution of the reward pool is purely done by proof of stake, which means that it is purely divided up by the actions of those who have the most stake already with out concern for anyone who has lesser stake. And why should they?
Even more elementally than that, the reward pool is entirely constructed of inflationary value. Everything in the reward pool at every moment of distribution is truly money being printed from nothing, if you accept that steem is a cryptocurrency. It is declared mechanically as the inflationary increase in the number of tokens per unit of time, and it is literally the rate at which tokens that you already hold become less valuable.
Which is a long, roundabout way of saying that distributing that inflationary currency by way of waiting the votes of those who already have proven stake has an inevitable outcome. The only way that new stakeholders can find value in relation to currencies which people will actually let you spend on their goods is for the demand to increase faster than the inflationary rate/reward pool.
In order to do that, services need to offer something to an individual user of more value than the steem crypto-commodity itself. Something which inevitably offsets the lack of privacy afforded to a public blockchain as well, let us not forget.
"You might get paid a little bit" is not going to be sufficient to maintain a social network. It might barely be sufficient to maintain a platform, but it is entirely the wrong approach to building a social network. The shock is not to that steem as a social network exists because of it, the shock is that steem is a social network exists despite that being the major pitch for the entire system for the last two years.
Is the collapse of the steem blockchain inevitable?
Was the collapse of MySpace inevitable? In a sense, yes. The same dynamics in many ways are at play. Except that steem as a social networking platform was never popular, certainly not to the level that MySpace was.
Maybe, if we get very lucky, after the current wave of state interest in ridiculously overreaching regulation of crypto-commodities dies down a little, the market as a whole will recover and a rising tide lifts all boats. But it's only functional so far as that tide lifts faster than the combination of social media disinterest and actual fiat trade value counter one another. When one of those two stops being an exceedingly useful pillar, the whole architecture collapses.
I would make the argument that all blockchains generate value through hucksterism. And they do so less transparently than fiat currencies generate value through hucksterism. It's certainly possible that SMT projects will generate value through attracting interest in the steem blockchain, and some of that will be purely marketing and emotional manipulation. It's also possible that one of the SMT projects will actually be put forward by people who understand gamification, social network design, social media, and UI engineering.
Possible.
I wouldn't hold my breath, but I would keep my eye open. Just one.
From the start, I understood that Steemit was not expected to be, or even designed to be, the value generator for the Steem blockchain. Promising to pay people a little bit did produce enough transactions to demonstrate the speed and reliability of the Steem blockchain, as the developers intended.
I did like that posting on Steemit allowed me to accumulate SP, as a way to be part of whatever would emerge as 'the thing with value'. I looked forward to watching, and being part of, the evolution of an interesting ecosystem. I really want to see a project that works. You said:
I want to see what something like that is. I don't have an understanding of what that would look like - that's not in my background or experience at all. So I will keep an eye open, for sure.
I'm not too proud to say that I might enjoy earning a little money, but I think it might be a little disingenuous to say that Steemit was not expected to be or designed to be the value generator for the steem blockchain. The white paper is pretty clear, the blue paper at be clear – all of it indicates that the creators knew that Steemit had to be a solid proof of concept and ultimately probably the heavy lifter for value and delivering value. Hand in hand is the obvious understanding and expectation that offering to pay people is one of the best ways to get people to show up.
The thing is that SP is, in and of itself, not actually being a part of "the thing with value." It's proof of stake so that you can get more stake, and that's the only purpose it has. In exchange for that stake, the steem blockchain effectively locks up crypto-commodity that you've earned/bought for 13 weeks as trade-off for that leverage.
It's a terrible deal for anyone that wants to earn a living via the sort of mechanism because it puts you in the terrible bind of first doing the work of being successful and then having to choose between being a "bigger part of the community" in a mechanical sense or taking that success in currency out of the network to do silly things like buying food and paying to sleep indoors.
It's great for investors. It's even reasonably good for media consumers. It's a rough row to hoe for media creators who have a broad appeal and a near impossible one for media creators who work in a niche.
Ultimately, I really want to see a project that works – mainly because I like to see things that work.
I do know (in a rough sort of way) what sort of architecture it would take to have a successful social media platform. The core of that experience, however, focuses on the individual and providing them a good feedback loop, delivering them media that they want to experience or access to an audience that wants the media that they create. It would have to manifestly avoid the belief that consensus determines value as opposed to simply reward.
That flies directly in the face of the philosophy that the steem blockchain is based on, so you can see where if there might be some problems if one wanted to expect such a thing to come to be.
Until then, however, we'll just have to see how things go.