re: Social Layers & Reward Pools - Let's Talk About It

Greetings #Hivers,

this post is a reply to Hive account@theycallmedan's video:

Intro

As you might know, I've been quite vocally arguing against the global rewards pool recently (even some months before):

I know that my message came over as provocative, triggering some people - and while that was my plan to get people to talk about the subject, I'm grateful for this learning experience and I'm thriving to be more chill & diplomatic in my actions.

Who am i?

Before I get into my response to dan, let me give you a little bit more background about myself, so you might understand why I see & say things the way I do.

Coming to #Steem/it initially in 2017 as a young man in search of adventure & potentially also success, I quickly became "entangled" into the blockchain and its community. There were multiple times where I was close to leaving, even nearly getting bullied off the platform for misplacing a vote at one point, but something in me kept me here.

It also helped that the #Steem ecosystem gave my "creative/disruptive" brain something to hold-onto while developing my skills & knowledge as a developer, entrepreneur & human. Which is what I'm always going to be grateful for.

Now, jumping to the 2/3 quarter of 2020, an important year where #Hive became finally fully decentralized, I've reached a point, where my stake in the platform is big enough so that I have a massive desire & incentive to see it (and the community) grow and thrive.

But not only that: I also see #Hive as a valuable technology/platform. Which is why I'm utilizing it in my next project (the best I've ever done - coming soon™ ).

However (and this is important), building/utilizing Hive is something that requires optimism in regards to the future of it. Imagine building on a blockchain that won't scale ... 🤣

Which is a big reason why I'm vehemently pushing for changes which I see #Hive thriving with, with the perspective of a developer, entrepreneur & stakeholder. I'm of course also looking at things with the eyes of a content-creator or community member, but those are of a lower priority for me.

re: dan

First of all, Hive account@theycallmedan is a great guy, who I very much respect. Now, his opinion in the video was logical and I'm actually agreeing with much of it.

Hive - A big World!

Dan's analogy of communities on Hive having their "own neighborhood" is great. I decided to take it a step further and increase it by changing "neighborhoods" to countries, as I want different #Hive communities to be able to develop themselves completely independent, and neighborhoods in cities always have some contact area.

In that sense, #Hive is a big world, where everyone in it is sharing the love & appreciation for the fundamental world (Hive) while having their own country; and the own community living in it.

As in the real world, some parts of the HiveWorld might develop better than others, depending on the incentive structures, leadership, and the people that are attracted to it. We can already see some of it happening through HiveEngine-tribes (LeoFinance, etc).

But most importantly: there would be no real reason for fights within this world. If you prefer 10x free downvotes, there will be a country for it, where you can downvote the shit out of each other, without having to worry about a snowflake such as myself 😜

Which also brings me to the next point

Flat curation, no curve, 1 free downvote per day

I agree with all of this, but I don't think we should do this on the main-chain. The problem with it is simply time & security-concerns due to hard-forks.

It takes far too long to reiterate through changes, and we need to see them in action - in the real world, in order to determine if they work.

We could also have multiple experiments at the same time with SMTs, and the SMTs with the best parameters would "theoretically" come out on top.

The problem I see though is that AFAIK the current implementation of SMTs doesn't allow for changes afterwards, so a new SMT had to be created, which isn't perfect UX IMO. I hope we can work on this and make sure that SMTs are as good as they should be.

Making it easier to do something with your Hivepower

Dan also mentioned multiple times that it should be easier for investors to use their Hivepower; i.e. delegating, renting, etc - and I agree.

But, when I think about holding Hivepower within a project, then I don't necessarily want to deal with upvoting, as owning more and more Hivepower requires more and more due-diligence about what and where it's used on. Then delegating it out really is not an option.

Especially if the project has its own SMT with its own parameters (maybe it doesn't have any downvotes, so they wouldn't implement any downvote logic for the main-token integration). All of this creates too much complexity in my opinion. Let's have a simple & clear inflation based system for the main-token.

Getting on Binance & Crypto.com staking

While dan didn't talk about this, I do want to mention that it would be good for HIVE to be available on platforms such as binance & crypto.com for staking/lending. But I don't see this happening within a global rewards pool with downvotes and all this jazz.

If you were Binance, would you want to deal with other whales wanting to punish your investment and downvoting/countering your votes? I wouldn't.

Outro

I could talk about this forever, but I think I wrote down the most important points. Basically, it will take until we have SMTs to remove the global rewards pool if we want to do that. But I honestly believe it would be a step in the right direction.

Thanks for reading!

Wolf