An engaging read as always. I love your broad spectrum and analytical mind :)
I even ended up searchif for a drama definition. Drama - any situation or series of events having vivid, emotional, conflicting, or striking interest or results.
It is impossible (or should i add probably to every statement i make, since i am quite far away from deterministic viewpoint of nature) to have a community without differences of views and opinions. Maybe chaos theory may come at play here, where slight deviations in electromagnetic impulses in the brain add up to huge differences in final expressed beliefs, i don't know that :)
But i tend to believe that in any incentive based ecosystem timeline outcome would be similar in all bubbles as long as incentive rules stay exactly the same. Any little deviation however might cause butterfly effect and result in huge behavior changes no matter how small that change is. Let's say removing initial pre-mined supply of steem from the game.
And some habits lead to better outcomes than others in certain time frames. You just either wait for yours to come (it might never do) or try to react and adjust if that's what you want to do. But frustration and anger will never get you attention, rather a rejection.
And still, human mind and interaction has many layers. Bad content from a user with high influence might get much more visibility and attention than great content from a user with little influence. Again, it all depends on the set of rules ecosystem exists in.
Yup, and I don't think this will ever be escaped. A bit like watching the people in charge on the TV, spouting absolute garbage to millions.
I agree. TV has a certain set of incentive rules in ecosystem. First of all it's a business, so cheaper content with the same add sales = more profit to shareholders. Then it's a political tool. More stupid audience will consume crap content better and at the same time will be easier manipulated.
Regarding, steem/hive. Now it is viable to interact with a content of a creator with more influence and expect positive feedback loop (upvote back). Hiding his wallet from UI and making it additional effort to go to BC explorer and see his balance would help quite a bit. I get why it was made easily visible to everybody initially. To promote stacking, increase demand.
It is obvious that guy driving a Ferrari on a street would attract more attention than a guy driving i don't know, Peugeot ( i drive Peugeot so i know for sure lol). And guy saying "Hi bitches" from a Ferrari would still get more positive feedback than a guy yelling "Hi ladies" from a Peugeot (that is also a tested fact as i used to ride a convertible Porshe in the past and was a complete asshole with women).
That's just the way we are hardwired. Want instant behavior change on voting patterns? Hide freaking wallet from the UI for everybody to see. So simple, so yet worth to experiment with. On the other hand, it would definitely result in powering down and dumping some of stake on the market tanking the price. But if you want better quality content and fair reward distribution that could be a simple first step.
Re: Hidden wallets. I was looking for a post I remember from a whale account, but found this one instead.
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@onyemacourage/why-the-wallet-and-transaction-history-on-steemit-should-be-private
As noted in the comments, it's not just the wallet that would need to be hidden, and with tools like an explorer / steem/hive world, much would have to be done to try to hide the numbers.
I do think engagement patterns would change somewhat, but staking has long been put forward as the way to gain influence and suspect we are unlikely to see any attempts to hide wallet/post values anytime soon.
Thanks for taking your time. As everywhere in our lives, set rules affect the game outcome. I get why it works for staking. totally legit, but on the other hand it affects voting which in turn affects content creation, that affects adoption and then has impact on price action that would affect staking.
Simply put, you can not have rules working one way and then ethics telling to act differently. It might work on some participants but the bias is still set by the rules. I personally believe that better content and bigger adoption would have much greater upwards price action than artificial inflation through staking that i believe is not viable long term. And it's gonna fork and fork and fork until some timeline with will eventually hit the sweet spot and get the adoption.
And i was not suggesting, hiding transaction or stake information totally, just moving it from UI where it would make time inefficient to go look, search ( and most less tech savy users would not even bother) and then vote more on higher stake hodlers.
Also, content discovery based on payouts is totally inefficient, it only means that big stake holders opinion is always right and they tell what good content is which would sound ok, but does not work because of financial incentive mechanics present.
I am still running a small boostrap photography community and kind of encountered the same problem, where guys with more time and followers on the platform, would gain the momentum and their content would be more popular because of that initial boost since people tend to get social acceptance and like content that has been liked many times before (call it mass endorsement if you like). What we did, we simply hid number of likes before other users voted so his/her decision is not influenced by how many users already liked the image and it had a huge improvement on overall quality of content showing on popular or trending pages.
And i am not against what steem was or hive is or what the next fork will be until the best solution has been found. I just want to say that voting patterns are still currently not about the quality of the content but the size of the stake.
And it is very easily to prove. Just power down any mediocre content account from 50k to 200 k and you will see what drastic change of engagement it will be.
There are some exceptions however where excellent content is produced by accounts with high stakes. But they are exception from the rule that is prevailing today and usually used as an example in the argument :)
The bottom line is what you want: to positively influence upwards price action through demand in short term or better overall content quality and engagement through bigger adoption.
Preaching ethics will only go so far. System rules set the outcome of the game.
This might make a significant change, as long as it doesn't then get used by a few as a massive piggybank :D
It will, but it will be short-lived and will require a constant stream of new audience members - who will eventually move on.
Yeah... i meant healthy attention based on interest. Anger based attention just raises awareness which is not exactly the same as attention i guess? But yeah, English is not my native so i might have tangled in delicacies of the language :)
Nah, I understood, what you meant. I guess "attention is attention" but the outcomes of getting it might differ greatly. :)
Oh i totally agree with that :)