Hi all,
You can see the experiment for yourself here but the short of is that there was a 24-hour proposition that gave each upvoter money relative to their steem dollar contribution. Believe it or not, for most of the experiment's lifetime you could contribute as little $0.01 steem dollars and make over $10 simply by upvoting the experiment's post. And yes, some participants ended up making even more.
But enough about that, I'm sure you want to know how it all went down so here we go.
| Steem as a platform, to me, has always been seen as a value exchange market. Think about it: When you, the user, find something you like in the steem market there's a good chance you will give something in return for it. That's what got me thinking about what value types people might appreciate. Yes, written content & photography are a nice way to create value, but was there another way? |
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 | Didn't take all but two seconds before my cavemind lobe went, Money! all peoples love money! soo why couldn't that work? It was in that moment that I found myself setting sail to an experiment that would test the very limits of steem's market value-type tolerances (a mouthful, I know). |
So if I was going to do this I was going to do this right and I was going to do this big. I hired a very reputable Litecoin developer & escrow trust agent  through Bitrated.com and paid him extra for his troubles because we both knew this was not going to be a normal escrow transaction. I paid him the 1 bitcoin ($570) in advance and off on our way we went. |  |
| The post went up and the experiment was live. Upvotes started coming in and the response was overwhelmingly positive for the first 20 hours or so. Most people I reached out to about the experiment were quite happy, grateful individuals that wondered what luck has dawned upon them. Others simply enjoyed analyzing the concept. Then what, you might ask, happened after that 20-hour mark? oh boy. There's no easy way to say this but I ticked off the wrong person, by all things, through offering them an opportunity to explore an offering for free money. Before you knew it, it was as if I kicked a hornet's nest and the alarm was set off to bring in the downvote brigade. And boy did they come marching in. |  |
Suddenly I got called a scammer, the post got downvoted into oblivion as if it were a scammy plague, and in the end, all of the pending earnings absolutely zeroed out. Gee, after all that hard work my heart just sank to the floor. I swear, all it took was one refresh to see it go from gaining momentum to nothing. That story, unfortunately, did not have a happy ending. But this one might, so what did we learn?
Personally, I feel we are closer than ever before to civilized creative freedom, but yet, we still have so much work to do. I like to believe no system is perfect, especially in their nascent stages but it is always noble to strive to become one. Here's what the data feels:
Bots to varying extents can still succeed at damaging posts and their comments. Take a look at the.bot, fuck.off, the.whale, cheetah18, cheetah19, cheetah20, cheetah21, cheetah22, cheetah23, cheetah24, cheetah25, and a few more less obvious shticks.
86% of the downvotes came in within the same 1-hour span, most of which were actually a minute apart. Keep in mind that by that point the post has reached over 100 upvotes and many comments of support onchain and offchain with only 1 downvote.
There is still somewhat of a brigade mentality here that was evident in a few of the downvoters. The most evident indication was how some of those that I spoke to screamed scam but when asked didn't even realize the proposition was secured by an escrow despite it being clearly declared in the title.
Charts, because I love charts:
Finally and most importantly I believe that when you have an established proof of likeness by a portion of the community, who enjoy something legal that others in the system might not, the system should weigh the votes of the many more heavily than the votes of a few whales who can end up doing a lot of harm even if they have the best intentions in heart. Whatever the medium of value, especially in our ever-increasing digital age, where new forms of digital value are emerging every day beyond the traditional sets (video/audio/images/text), that medium deserves to have the future that the majority of those who enjoyed the contents of that post wished it to have.
but fuck me, what do I know?
:P
Thanks all for the wonderful trip, I think we have a beautiful journey to share and I can't wait to see it all unfold. Peace.
p.s. Yes, despite it all we sent the money to everyone who participated. You can see for yourself Here
p.s.s Before some start exclaiming "but buying upvotes is against the rules!" I have to take a moment and clarify that (A) although treading some fine lines I technically didn't directly purchase upvotes for a specific price, I incentivized them on-platform and more importantly (B) there intentionally aren't any site rules, platform rules, or any other kind of rule list. A quick google search for steemit rules and steem rules will show you the same. I read the whitepaper and from what I understood the design has intents but no rules, which is very important to distinguish.