There are a couple of strategies being employed on Steemit that would be considered foul play. Whether it's buying votes for garbage content, or buying delegation and then upvoting your own content (most of the time it is garbage as well).
We already had a proposal from blocktrades about increasing profitability (rather just making curating profitable at all) for curators by reducing the author rewards from the currenty "75/15" (in reality more like 85/15) to an equal 50/50. 50% to Authors, 50% to Curators.
I think it is a drastic change but still a good one and here's the reason why.
- Steemit is like a game. It has economic incentives which must reach an equilibrium to make gamification an enjoyable experience such that it encourages more and more user participation.
- Like every game, there is a certain balance that must be reached in order not to sway too much advantage in any particular actor's favour. If you've played games like Starcraft, then you know that the balance between the 3 races have taken Blizzard nearly a decade to perfect and I believe Steemit will require the same kind of time compounded by the fact that new "gameplay" elements are to be added.
- Drastic changes set the boundaries or limits. In order to understand the effects of something, we often have to examine what happens at the extremes. Like with the no whale voting experiment which lead to linear rewards, extreme measures must be taken to see the dynamics which emerge as a result. If the results then swing too much in the other direction, then atleast we have a scale (with limits) which we can move between.
That's all well and good for blockchain protocol changes to reduce incentives for self voting, but what about vote buying?
I've been thinking a lot about this element of Steemit and I'm still not sure that it is necessarily a completely negative aspect of the system. And these are the reasons.
- Facebook, Instagram etc. are centralised corporations which derive value from the attention they command of all the users on the platform. You can advertise, boost, or make sponsored posts on these platforms by paying a certain mount of money to purchase a slice of the attention. Facebook/Instagram stand to gain from this transaction, but not if the sponsored post or boosted content is inherently damaging to their brand. This is why you can't just purchase sponsored or boosted posts on absolutely anything. There is still moderation. This is to protect this service from becoming a detriment to their product overall. So here's the main point.
What if you wanted to boost your content or promote it on Steemit?
Just imagine if the visibility of posts was not attached to a monetary value. Suddenly, spending money to boost the visibility of your posts is absolutely fine right?
People who wish to boost their content without vote buying only have two options.
Spend millions of dollars buying SP, locking it up for 4 months, then upvoting themselves whilst taking slack from the community for upvoting themselves and "abusing the reward pool"
Spend a lot of time building a following and organically reaching more visibility by contenting with the attention pool of the site as a whole.
These two options are unrealistic and make the entry barrier for people wishing to gain more visibility (and yes, as the platform has more and more users, attention and visibility could actually eclipse the goal of making more money on a post) almost completely out of reach. This is not good especially given that they are more than likely willing to spend money to promote themselves else where and by giving them no opportunity to do so on Steemit, they don't want to play the game.
The ecosystem for vote buying
So here is where vote buying could actually work. But there are some big assumptions. Let me try to explain.
Buying votes is one way that a small time, non-whale, non-existing influencer can try to bid their way into having some attention. It is an exemplary use case of the attention economy actually, to input money to gain attention.
The problem is, if the content is below par, and the user can essentially break even (or even profit a tiny bit), they will continue to utilise the way with least opportunity cost to promote their articles. In-fact, it can be argued that they have no interest in promoting their articles at all and are just trying to skim a bit of profit off the top.
The reason they can do this is that the vote buying process is mostly automated and they are guaranteed a vote regardless. But remember, facebook is a centralised entity which will screen and moderate the boosted and sponsored posts to check that it is not damaging to their service and brand. Well, Steemit actually has that ability too, except the power is not in a single entity, all SP holders are stake holders of the platform, and thus theoretically should act in the best interest of the platform.
This means, if each post is screened for suitability, and not just "horseshit one line comments", then there is decentralised governance of the attention economy right here on steemit. Those with power, enable those with the intent to get visibility and a slice of the attention pool on the platform to achieve that through decentralised vote buying.
The supplier of the vote, carries their proportional responsibility to upvote content that does not damage the brand of Steemit because the larger their stake, the more they stand to lose as the price depreciates from continued support of sub-par content.
TLDR;
- Other social media websites offer their version of vote buying. Facebook has boosts, instagram has sponsored posts.
- The posts are moderated by the websites themselves before being accepted for promotion. This protects their brand and service.
- Steemit currently does not give people with small budgets to promote themselves many options to gain a slice of the attention and visibility.
- As more attention is added to the attention pool (more users on the platform), more people will want to bid for a slice of that attention. Vote buying supplies this demand. Instead of Steemit Inc taking money for upvoting content, any SP stake holder can take money and thus it is a decentralised way of providing promoted posts. Whales and by definition more incentivised to act responsibility as their net value of their stake increases or decreases the most with their actions.
- Vote buying is not inherently bad, infact, it is possibly a very lucrative model in the future for all SP stakeholders. It just requires moderation.