RE: Steem earning fairness and the consumption revolution

avatar

You are viewing a single comment's thread:

You bring up the interesting issue of whether or not the underpinnings of so-called Meritocracies are really concrete and measurable, or ambiguous and largely subjective.

Now we also have the secondary question of what "value" means.

Now, I do try really hard to put out decent content and I try to do this a couple of times a day, because not only do I like writing, I also like earning Steem.

In your particular case, you provide value (quality/interesting content) in service of getting value (Steem). That is one version of "using" the system. But for many, the term value simply means how can they extract as much value as possible for the least possible effort. That's a different version of "using" the system. Providing value isn't part of the equation, any more than someone who goes to work at a company and hopes they can (as much as possible) get a paycheck for simply standing by the water cooler discussing last night's TV shows or football games cares about their actual job.

From my perspective, the variable here becomes our attitude towards reciprocity. Do we expect to get "something for something" or "something for nothing?" And — tobuild on your "bread" analogy, there are a LOT of people who feel they should be paid for bringing "moldy bread" to the table... I happen to disagree!

One of the interesting aspects of one of the very early "reward-users-for-content" sites (early 2000's) was an intelligent algorithm that lowered the impact of what you might call "outlier upvotes." In other words, if a piece of content was generally rated 5/10 and somebody suddenly cast a 10/10 vote, that vote would be "discounted" because it was out of alignment with general opinion, subjective as that might be. Not disallowed, just reduced impact. And if someone consistently "overvoted," their "influence power" was gradually discounted, as well, as a "penalty" for trying to game the system.

Not sure how/if that could be made relevant here, but your post brought it to mind.

=^..^=

0
0
0.000
6 comments
avatar

The outlier model would be interesting, but also potentially irrelevant on a stake based system (perhaps). For examplem if you have a million Steem and look for content that will increase the value of your Steem directly (whatever that might be), there might be a host of people with 10 Steem who just don't care and would rather rank a meme a 10 than what actually could add value to the platform.

In some ways, what we are trying to avoid is the making of the Homer car for content:

I think this happens through niche content markets where the truly interested amateurs and professionals can rank content with a discerning eye, rather than the every man and his dog approach having a say on all content.

I don't go to my hairdresser for heart surgery, nor a surgeon to paint my portrait. When it comes to content evaluation, while we can all be critical, it doesn't mean we have the actual knowledge to critique.

Side note: I cut my own hair.

0
0
0.000
Reply
avatar

Good point about niches; I'm already a fan of SCOT tribes because they are helping in terms of creating interest groups and making content discovery a little easier.

I'll be interesting to see how SMTs/Hives impact the Steemosphere; I'm hoping a healthy level of granularity ensues... not too "generic" and not so specific that we end up with a bunch of semi-stale tribes with 7 members, because they are too tightly defined. I suppose we can but hope that the user base the natural intelligence needed to figure it out.

=^..^=

0
0
0.000
Reply
avatar

I think there will be communities that could have many thousands, others that have very few members in a very tight niche. As long as they are valuable to the users, it doesn't matter much.

0
0
0.000
Reply