Wow. What a miracle during this bear market! Did you see those big, big numbers in your Steem wallet? Jokes and false hopes aside, recently I tried to visualize Steem's misaligned economic incentives just for the heck of it.
Not sure if I nailed it, but I'm not a professional illustrator. Did I just make it more confusing? Please do a better one if you get it. Check out stuff like Utility Maximization Problem, Strategic Dominance, and Nash Equilibrium to see that we have a self-sabotaging economy as our current equilibrium. Nothing is more costly than a dysfunctional platform. It is then of course, worth fixing. But it has been left unattended for more than a year now.
If it costs $12,000 to get some developers to work on the solution, will you chip-in? But why should the community contribute when the caretakers of this platform can't even make up their minds to do something about it, even after so long? Another case of misaligned economic incentives from all the early pre-mining and huge top witness salaries.
Steemit.com is now >3k web ranking instead of <1k. I know Steem is bigger than Steemit.com, but we have limited resources and we’re in a race to stay ahead of the curve. We can decentralize all we want into a million and one apps when we hit the big leagues.
The statement that Steem is more than just content and curation.. sure, I’d agree to the extent that Steem should also be useful enough to support applications that are not strictly about content and curation like the hosting of Steem Monster games or whatever other applications on the blockchain. Perfectly good use of Resource Credits.
Rewards distribution on Steem, however, should revolve around content and curation, hence the proposal to align economic incentives to this activity. Why are we conflating between rewarding both signal and noise? Those who are not particularly interested in these activities can delegate to curators. The notion that we shouldn’t force stakeholders to take part in something they don’t wanna is somewhat misleading, in my opinion.
Steem is a currency, it’s social, etc - there’s a game to be played. We want people to accumulate SP for more earnings and influence. Or they can delegate those away to fuel a curation economy.
Hypothetically, if we are to have a highly moderated channel where the best content/account curators recommend stuff for stakeholders to vote on (ie having perfect information on how to allocate rewards), will we be able to cooperate well enough to work together in spreading the votes to stake up invested accounts that bring value to the network? This is our litmus test. Will we?
Of course not. It wouldn't be good enough as Steem's economic incentives do not favor such a scenario. Content-indifferent voting behavior currently brings at least 4x returns compared to content-reflective voting behavior.
Any rational investors reading this or any previous posts would've already stayed the hell away.
Seriously, how can I honestly recommend people Steem at this point in time? The proposed changes still stands as described in here. I'm done talking about this and have better things to do and write about.
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Video source: The Economics Detective.
You can vote on your favorite witnesses here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses. I'm also running as one. If you trust in my choices for other witnesses, you can also set me as your voting proxy on that page.