I have been steeming only for 10 days now but I read a lot of posts on the fairness of the distribution of STEEM. And I agree with some of the people who feel that abuse is possible just by owning a lot of STEEM.
So I thought: Maybe the solution could be to give a cooperative structure to STEEM .
Current system
As you can read in the Whitepaper the Steem community has been built on a system of ownership (liquid and vesting) and debt. This is translated in STEEM, STEEM POWER and STEEM DOLLARS. One of the main functions of STEEM can be compared to being a shareholder of the Steem community. This means that people with more Steem have more power in the system.
In the Whitepaper (p.6) it is written as follows:
>Steem operates on the basis of one-STEEM, one-vote. Under this model, individuals who have contributed the most to the platform, as measured by their account balance, have the most influence over how contributions are scored. Furthermore, Steem only allows members to vote with STEEM when it is committed to a multi-year vesting schedule. Under this model, members have a financial incentive to vote in a way that maximises the long term value of their STEEM.
Is this system the best if we want good content?
My concern is that the value of STEEM and profits that can be made by investing only in the currency will become the main goal of the Steem community. The content on steemit will only be a side-effect that is made in function of the value of STEEM.
When I look at the posts on Steemit I already see the downside of the one STEEM =on vote system: investors who are not interested in qualitative content can post anything and take large profits of the system. The community now is lucky because a large group of Whales are not here just for the profit, they actually care about good content. But this will change overtime.
You might argue that the slow process of powering down STEEM POWER helps focusing on content, but I don’t see the link. This only makes that investors will be in it for at least 2 years. But I don’t see any guarantee in the content being better. You can easily join the Steemit community and not add anything of any value.
To me it’s ok if people see STEEM only as an investment. But they should not get profits from the creation of content. In other words: If you hold STEEM POWER you should not be making more profit than a STEEM holder, unless the guy who holds the STEEM POWER makes popular posts or is curating in a correct way.
CO-OP structure
So I thought, can’t we turn that around? What is qualitative content is the goal and the value of STEEM is just a nice side-effect?
And can we use the cooperative structure for this? Because a cooperative company has another approach:
one member = one vote.
This means that owning a lot does not give you extra power. In many cooperatives the people who work for the company and sometimes also the client own a share, which gives them a vote.
Now this is not very new to Ned and Dan. They even mention it in the Whitepaper:
>Existing platforms operate on a one-user, one-vote principle. This creates an environment where rankings can be manipulated by sybil attacks and the service providers must pro-actively identify and block abusers. People already attempt to manipulate the Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter scoring algorithms when the only reward is web traffic or censorship. The fundamental unit of account on the Steem platform is STEEM, a crypto currency token.
So the reason why there is no cooperative structure is because of safety issues. And this is completely understandable. But the idea of having a community that is primarily focused on qualitative content is also lost. The question is if on the long term STEEM wil have a advantage on other crytro currencies. If it's about money, it can just be Bitcoin. The content is essential to STEEM to justify its existence.
So the question for me is: How can we verify members?
Verified Members
The ease of becoming a steemer is one the reasons why the community is growing so fast. But the way I see it we pay a price for it. Since we are not verified, we cannot be trusted. So our upvote is worth nothing unless we hold STEEM. But is that the correct way to treat the members?
Upvote power relative to level of verification
What if we make a member verification of different levels, and use the level of verification as the powerlevel of your upvote? People with full identity would have full power. Others will have lower to no upvoting power at all.