The role of governmental interference
I am not an anarchist. I am an objectivist. I follow the teachings of Ayn Rand, so to begin this discussion, I will start with two quotes from Mrs. Rand regarding government.
"A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws."
"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force."
*The Virtue of Selfishness*
“The Nature of Government,”
The Virtue of Selfishness, 107 - 109
I defined government in these terms because I wish to communicate that it's not up to a government enforcer to build communities. It's not up to the powerful to increase the social and economic prosperity of a group of people. This is instead, the position of the individuals themselves. The whales are not responsible for the community, they are members of the community. They should do what's in their self-interest and only what's in their self-interest, as should you.
We are the community
When we talk about steemit, we certainly throw the word community around a lot. Specifically in many of the articles discussing "flag wars" many cite an appeal to the steemit "community." I'm not attempting to insight a witch hunt so I will not name any names, but trust me there are many articles out there.
I happen to agree with these sentiments in the sense that we are a community. I think it's pretty obvious why: we are a group of people ideologically similar, within the same economy, who all speak within the same forum. I think any rational person can agree and see the correlation between steemit's user base and a traditional community.
Community through ideology
Many people Anarchists and Marxists alike, believe that communities can arise from an ideological uprising or enlightenment. The idealistic believe that through a grand education, they can inspire a wonderful society. I may agree with this in theory. In reality, however, we have time and time again disproven this theory.
Marxism
In Communism, we often see those in charge of distribution or decision making succumb to corruption. This can be seen through the government contracting friends, mysterious death of activists or politicians, and salary bonuses to members of the party.
Anarcho Capitalism
In Anarchistic systems, we see the same violations of ideology. Even if a large majority of members are in agreement with the capitalist model, we see violations of basic human rights. We see this in places like Somalia and the middle east. Out of the anarchy evolves government, and often not Ayn Rand style government, but instead an oppressive regime.
Neither of these enlightenment based models for communities has seen success. It's always because people decide to abandon the common ideology and instead enjoy their own immediate self-interest. Their own incentives outway the incentives of the many, and instead of a utopian society, we end up with a seedy and corrupt society in which nobody is achieving their full potential.
Incentives as a means of justice
Instead of focussing on how the ideology of everyone in a society should change and how the community might enjoy a new level of consciousness, the world has shown we should appeal to self-interest of the individual. The current ideology and the selfishness of man is not a problem, not something that needs to change. it's a tool that can and has been utilized for the betterment of a community.
This incentive based model has proven very successful in our modern day society. Capitalism capitalizes on it. The main focus is to gain happiness. In order to do this many citizens focus on obtaining wealth in a capitalist society. Each man is acting in their own interest to improve the lives of themselves and those whom they love, for selfish reasons. As it turns out this promotes win-win situations, a happier society, and a more productive community. Governmental interference is only needed when one's fundamental rights are being violated.
It is because of this incentive-based model that it all works. There is no re-education required because this is an intuitive ideology. One people already understand. When the incentive structure is in place, the community can grow around it. Who provides this incentive structure? Nobody because it's intuitive. The government simply provides the means of objectively enforcing the incentive structure. Allowing for the beauty of the incentives without the atrocities of violence.
Bringing it all together
The flag wars (and further more any future issues) cannot be solved by "reaching a new consciousness" and re-educating the existing citizens of steemit. It can only be solved by coming up with incentive structures and ways of enforcing them. An example of an incentive structure about flags might be
If a flag is rejected by the community, the flagger has potential to lose money.
edit: This sentence above is not one that I support. I was simply giving an example of "incentive structures" as the pertain to steemit and specifically the flag wars. How they could be applied to suite the current situation. The line above does not represent my opinion of a good solution.
You see that this appeals to the intuitive sense of self-preservation in people. I would like to see more solutions in the form of incentive structures. Any other solutions will likely see very little success. Sadly, the members of the community discussing the alleged "flag wars" have rarely suggested actual solutions, and beyond that they solemnly suggest and incentive structure based solution.
I appreciate you taking the time to read my post. I firmly believe that if everybody approaches issues from a similar stance we can brainstorm better ideas that will stand the test of time. Thank you again. Nate.
Nate said:
This is my favorite thing about blockchain technology and that's what I was going for with my Flag Rewards article. We can talk about what is acceptable behavior but if we don't express and enforce the desired outcome with consensus rules, the "undesired behavior" (if there is any) will continue.
In my post, I say:
So, the idea here was to incentivize flagging of plagiarism and spam. Stakeholders who just want to reduce payout of "overpaid" posts would have less of an incentive to do so.
Setting aside whether or not this is a good idea to implement, this is an example of an incentive structure solution.
Absolutely inertia, that's the spirit of what I'm trying to say. I think you're right that undesirable behavior is going to continue if we don't inforce it. Asking the whole community to change is simply not an option.
If stakeholders want to protect their stake, and they think the payouts are too large, one way to fix this might be to get the witnesses directly involved using parameters. Witnesses could set the size of the reward pool. Then we can get some price discovery going.
If the stakeholders know that the reward pool is half the size today compared to yesterday, wouldn't they be half as likely to flag "overpaid" posts? Granted, any given author would also know this, and maybe he'll put off posting his big article until the reward pool goes back up. That's the whole point of price discovery: "Should I allocate this resource here, now?"
Last night on SteemSpeak, @noisy told us about an idea he had: one day a week, the max payout is set to something like $10. I thought it was a pretty neat idea. It would be interesting to see how posting habits changed if something like that was implemented. Would people just post twice as much because they have a good chance of getting $10 (each post), since all of the people who routinely get on trending would avoid that day?
I like @noisy's idea, but I don't think it should be once a week. I think it should be another witness parameter. If all of the witnesses decide on an exact day and an exact max reward, only then will it happen. Then there'll be a 1 week cool-down. Then they can try it again.
I wonder what bots would do in that situation? It adds a bit of uncertainty that would be difficult for bots to predict until a few of these "max-payout" days have gone by.
Fascinating ideas in this post. I love what @noisy proposed. If bots don't know the potential outcome then bots become useless. Seems this particular solution solves the trigger happy flagging and pushes bot to the brink of extinction.
I think the bots will know better than most human users.
It's true that bots would know with certainty that the witnesses have set these parameters, they just won't be able to predict the behaviour of the authors and stakeholders under those parameters.
I envision the creation of 'post rape gangs' designed for the specific purpose of reducing posts to zero. For those engaged in such behaviour outside of such gangs, it becomes a kind of gambling .. "Will people agree, and drive this thing down to nothing!? Let's seeeeee! "
These things aside, it is adding complexity .. this is certainly not easy to explain. I can't seem to find anyone to fully agree, but the problem is solved by making flags/downvotes of equal weight, so that 'numbers' of users are required to kick the shit out of bad actors.
BWAHA! 'Exactly!'
If you use numbers than you have bots flagging posts. You actually enable even worse bad-acting because it's practically free to make an account. It becomes very cheap to flag a post into oblivion.
Reputation would have to be a factor then, to limit the use of bots in this fashion .. I suggested 50+, or perhaps even more! There is no reason that people who have not invested any time in the platform be given the right to flag others who have.
Bots must be pretty easy to identify, given access to account / login information (location) and blockchain activity .. perhaps one downvote per post, per IP within a 24 hour period. Certainly some 7-proxy wizards can take on that challenge, but .. wow, what a waste of a life, just to sneak some literally-lousy bots in to do some entirely destructive flagging, that gains the bot-master nothing? Once identified, these bots should be completely destroyed for breach of terms, and whatever STEEMPower they have collected would go into a pool for later distribution to the entire LEGIT userbase! :)
Pretty interesting take 🙂 But that rejects the idea of reducing "overpaid" payouts, which is currently a feature of the system, not a bug. There'd need to be acceptance of that as a bug.
Great piece on this issue 🤔 I like your measured writing approach.
The flaw with this and Ayn Rand's approach in general is that it an extremely narrow reading of human nature. However I do agree that incentive structures work best were there is little commonality between people. For example, we do really know each other here, much less so when new, so it works well in this context.
It take a lot more work to deal with the many messy community structures we can conceive of together than to make broad maxims about self-interest. The debate here could go on right down to self-gene level 😅 It can be well argued that everything, even seemingly altruistic behavior is in fact self-interest. Then what's the difference?
I would say that incentives such as we see on Steemit leverage the short-term self-interest which is more about the individual and current needs, as opposed to long term self-interest which may be about long terms goals at the expense of short-term gain, or in the interest of a group more so than the individual, to gamble on support from them. Or something like that. But my point is that there will always be more to it and community solutions can also work.
That said, I think this could be a good idea:
The challenge is how to arrange it. @inertia has a good idea. There was a [poll version too] that looks interesting by @winstonwolfe, you two might have common ground on it.
unless we also applying the following rule:
else we will end up as a community where everybody tends to say yes to everything, and nobody dare to stand out saying no.
This is not my personal opinion on how to solve the issue. I was simply giving you an incentive model, an example. I didn't mean that that was my solution. I was just trying to illustrate my point further, sorry for any confusion.
nice clarification.
btw, the current curation scheme is actually biased towards up-vote IMO. (up-voters always has potential to earn something, while down-voters has zero potential earning while still losing his votes power)
if we were to make the game fairer, we should also reward the down-voters if a post end-up in a negative value in total-accumulated-votes.
but, to do this, we had to first decouple the curation reward from post-reward,
as suggested here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@ripplerm/proposal-decoupling-curation-rewards-from-post-s
Good point.
Hi Nate. I just followed you and up voted your post. I had a question... What happened to Screem?
Screem became Squeek, and that was up for almost 2 months before I took it down for a while. There were lots of bugs, and back then the tools weren't really up to par for what I was trying to accomplish and there wasn't a lot of demand for it, and I didn't really like working on it at the end :p
I could get it back online if I began working on it today, but fortunately I actually work for Steemit Inc now so I don't have the time.
Too bad. It looked like a good idea. With all the demonetization on YT and Gab replacing twitter (not so well at that) I thought we could have our own set of platforms. Have you seen "bitchute"?
It streams really well, but they are not opening it up to grow as of yet.
Solid post brother, following you too now.
Interesting and worthy post.
I've long felt that the incentive based model works well as long as it is predicated on the fundamental idea that we live in a world of "plenty." Alas, many incentive based models (including various versions of capitalism) seem to run on the "world of scarcity" model... which (when married to human nature) leads to fear of missing out, which leads to greed, which leads to hoarding... first by many, subsequently by a few, "Monopoly" style, while the majority end up "bankrupt."
Maybe that's just the natural order of things? Maybe I'm too idealistic, and the idea that we can have something other than a repeating cycle of building-tearing down-rebuilding-tearing down is pie in the sky.
I prefer incentive based models... I prefer to do things to gain benefit, rather than avoid things out of fear of consequences.
No! That's a terrible idea, Nate! Your solutions are terrible! Furthermore, the whales will never agree to this change, so it's pointless to suggest such a thing.
Now I'm going to go back to reading only tiny pieces of people's articles and making unhelpful comments about out-of-context statements.
Indeed, incentive structures work on the base automatic self-interest. Even you recognize the community corrective process though:
The community can evaluate and review individual cases. The community is the one that is involved in deciding what is the problem and how to resolve it when it occurs. To get an overall compliance on the best course of actions, rewards and punishments can be used. This is a basic mode if living where not much thinking is required beyond the small circle of interest in self or the family to promote optimized survival even at the behest of others in some cases.
Enlarging the circle of identification to encompass others, and valuing them more than not, allows for a shift from a more ego-centric self-view and worldview to encompass a self+other view of how we are to behave. Recognizing that our success in cooperative survivability requires a concern for others as well, not simply ourselves or immediate family/friends.
Self-interest is always there, but it recognizes self+other interest. For example the concentration of power that people have addressed before that I think you do support. On a social media platform, this has been demonstrated to fail. Only focusing on self-interest to create something, without a larger-scope of viewing self+other together to create something, will limit the ability to realize the success of something. Not everyone can get along, that's why you speak and influence those who can be and not work on arguing with a wall that doesn't want to budge, and eventually more people are influenced and get the information presented to forma consensus. Spending time to get those who don't want to listen to listen and learn, is a waste of time. The community eventually gets movement into one direction as more information is spread about it. But... people need to understand this process and work to make it happen. It takes time. Effort.
Eventually codes of conduct, rules, are established based on everyone understanding what is better for all as a way of living/acting, not simply based on their own self-interest alone as what is required to get them to want to do something. A larger perspective apart from personal self-interest alone is required. If someone is primarily thinking about making their pocket bigger, or enlarging their investment, while they don't consider the larger picture of self+other, then the proper solution and path to take is often missed from that lack of vision.
We start with self-interest incentives, and work towards a greater understanding of how things function and the possibilities of where we can willfully go without the primary focus on self interest, but not ignoring self-interest either.
What happens when a powerful member is mentally ill?
You would see 'mental illness' as subjective wouldn't you?
Since there are no curation rewards for flags, a flagger is already losing out.
The solution would be, if the major stakeholders spent some time curating; rather than the excessive use of bots that result in overly inflated payouts.
That wasn't my solution to the problem, it was an example of an incentive structure. It's purpose was to give an idea of what I am talking about.
Your solution is the exact type of solution I would like to avoid. That's what the whole post is about.
"The solution is if we re-educate the whales on how to use the platform"
True.
It wasn't a solution.
This, can't wait to see how HF17 will change this.
Hardly.
can you please try to give understanding marxism and communism a shot before including it in your writing lmao
I would like to add anarchism to the list as well. :)
Anarcho capitalism a.k.a. Voluntarism Is not a system for all I know.
It self ownership.
It's me living my life and letting others live theirs the way want. No system needed.
You or I could live in a system, or ideology or whatever.....any system of your choice or making. But you can not force other to obey or partake in your system of choice.
Well of course you could but I would not be a very willing slave ;)
Who writes and enforces these laws and what happens if someone were to disagree about their "objectivity" and refuse to obey them?
Who actually pays for the services of the policeman? And can one withhold any monetary support for this policeman's "protection" if they don't want or need it? Can one peacefully refuse to recognize the policeman's declared jurisdiction?