To quote wikipedia (HEEL @cheetah), a Tragedy of The Commons is defined as follows:
The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory of a situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting that resource through their collective action.
It has been my experience over the past few weeks that Steemit is descending quite rapidly into a situation where the above definition is being applied almost verbatim.
There are a few major topics I want to touch on today. Unfortunately I do not have much in the way of solutions, but I want to raise questions so that the community can openly engage in discussion with their opinions as well. I fight actively for, and am invested in, the future of steemit (I pay for @cheetah bot to run), so I hope we can garner some improvements as a result of this post.
Curation, Voting, and Flagging Strategies
As independent actors, we are all trying to maximize our own rewards here at steemit. We are acting as individuals, rather than as a community. I am guilty of this myself, having toyed with a curation strategy (bot) to use my vote power to improve my own Steem Power (according to @trogdor I am doing fairly well too.), and this means using my vote power selfishly, rather than using my vote power on something that I enjoyed reading. Perhaps curation rewards should stop after a post is trending, reducing the pile-on effect?
The problem is that this incentivizes the individual, not the community as a whole. When all users start doing this, voting on a "sure shot", we only further centralize the reward pool on a small minority, and leave minnows with little reward for their efforts.
Unfortunately, I, like you all, are witnessing firsthand the effect that this selfish voting imparts. Our famous actors are becoming more famous, to the point where the few who realize have begun using their fame to promote lists of hidden gems and featured authors. But they still gain the steem power, getting fatter and fatter.
Furthermore, using a flag on low-quality posts is disincentivized due to the threat of retaliatory flagging across all posts. I am a victim of this constantly and am used to it, but for most minnows they do not have the power or reputation to risk this possibility. In this regard, the action of self-interest is to avoid calling out spam, plagiarism, or scams, an instead focus only on the self and their own posts or rewards. @liondani suggested anonymous flagging, which may solve this issue, but potentially may lead to anonymous abuse, so I do not have an answer to that either. The question of flagging has become larger and larger, on the use cases and accountability of using flags, as well.
To quote @tuck-fheman:
It appears that Steem has become all about flagging, downvoting and opposing instead of the original idea of upvoting for rewards. :(
What is Fair?
A second issue is fairness, and the distribution of reward from the reward pool. I have strong opinions on content, enough to continuously butt heads with several whales (no names -- no need to brigade).
The fact is that whales have the ability to make a post trend instantly. This can be a good thing or a bad thing -- given a benevolent whale, a really strong minnow post can be put into the spotlight despite the user not having a large following. But if the quality of the post is low, we run into a very distinct issue: users view the front page as a metric to gauge successfulness of their own posts. Then it becomes a case of "monkey see, monkey do", where the average user, seeing plagiarism, copy paste, and low-quality posts on the front page, contemplates their risk to reward of each and every blog post.
Why would someone spend hours on a quality post, when they can spit out 4 low quality posts a day on multiple accounts, and randomly get chosen by a whale?
When a whale upvotes a low-quality post, and causes it to trend, it only further incentivizes this in the future. However, curation rewards are given mostly to the whale anyways, so they have selfish reasons to NOT remove their vote (and use vote power), and keep the resulting curation reward, contributing to the tragedy of the commons.
What is Right?
As one of the head combatants of abuse and plagiarism over the past weeks, I have had many discussions and many arguments over the direction of content on Steemit. While I believe that copy paste is a waste of my time, again, many users disagree, and mine and others' combative nature against what we feel is abuse has been more vigilante actions than anything else.
Personally, I feel that Steemit should NOT be a news aggregation source, unless the provider of the information IS a news source. In this case, I believe people who copy paste articles that are not their own, whether or not it contains a source, should NOT be encouraged. This is equivalent to the difference in a reddit post or facebook status. Do you copy paste the article to reddit? NO! You just have a link and promote (and provide) discussion. Do you make your facebook status a full article? NO! You just have a link and promote (and provide) discussion.
We can do so much better than that; Steemit is something new and original. Lets be original too.
But what is RIGHT? If the answer were unclear, that would be one thing, however there currently is no answer as far as I am aware. Neither @dan nor @ned have made a public stance on official or unofficial set of rules for the content on steemit.com. Also, note that I am saying steemit.com here, not the blockchain steem. I think in the future there can and perhaps should be avenues on the steem blockchain that can be independent from the company and website, but that is off this topic.
Are reposts okay? Is copy paste okay? What is right?
I don't actually know.
But what I do know, is that everyone is acting independently on what they feel is right. And this independent selfishness is again contributing to the tragedy of the commons.
Transparency of Leadership
Here's another topic that I am likely to recieve a lot of hate for bringing up, but I feel the need for this to be discussed. This likely will ruin my chances as a back up witness, as this will not put me on the good side of some of the whales/employees but I feel that this needs to be said.
There is an issue in the transparency of leadership and witness activities, as well as the development towards the future of steemit.
If you don't believe me, I have a few examples. Lets start with the latest witnesses exposed edition, here.
There are a few issues that come to mind to start. Not all witnesses felt the need to respond, or were discussing stuff not explicitly steemit related. Why is this? This is not an issue with the witnesses themselves, but more with the transparency of actions -- the witnesses do A LOT of work, and they do not have the time or willpower to justify all their actions. Their updates are only a small part of the picture: they do a lot behind the scenes.
Behind. The. Scenes. That is the issue.
Furthermore, there is a private slack that only the witnesses and employees are invited to. Who is invited to these discussions? It does not appear to be a community decision.
Why are back up witnesses not invited to the private slack? Do they have no say? Is it only the bitshares witnesses, whom are very similar to the steemit witnesses, that are invited? I don't actually know -- it is not transparent.
As a second example, I will start with an issue that has arisen just today. If you are aware of the history of bot wars on steemit, you are also probably aware of @williambanks and myself continuously in (reasonable/gentleman's) debate.
But what do you know, we are on the same page today.
There is an open issue on the steemit github here.
This issue is less than a day old and already is one of the most discussed issues. The code has already been implemented and is on track to be included in the next hardfork. There has also been a MASSIVE discussion on this in steemit.chat, and we have been debating the potential issues that this change could impart.
There is already a very forward response to the issue here, and while I think the tone of the post is a bit exaggerated, it shows that there are people already speaking out on the potential for censorship of users.
Could this be another case of acting in what only one believes in, contributing to the tragedy of the commons?
To Be Clear...
This post is meant to incite discussion, on the following points (summarized):
- How can we prevent the tragedy of the commons by inciting communal behaviour rather than selfish behaviour?
- What is right, or fair, and are there (unofficial) rules to steemit?
- How can we improve transparency with the witnesses and leadership?
I hope to use what voice I have as "the cheetah bot creator" to get some some attention on these matters. As I am a believer in Steemit (I'm not powering down), I hope we can discuss and solve these issues, so let's try and be civil in the comment sections, and think of strategies to improve the current situation.