Voting issues in the community: Sndbox Summer Camp Psychology – Task 1

This is the first task of the sndboxquest created by @anomadsoul and @guyfawkes4-20. In this opportunity the chosen topic is “Voting behaviour".

Introduction

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Anyone that knows about steem understands that the only way to reward the users for the content they create is by upvoting it (and when saying “reward”, this one time I mean only monetary rewards). There are of course, contests. and challenges that can offer prizes in the form of liquid tokens, but the Steem system requires the upvotes from users in order to work as its meant to be (issuing new tokens), in other words, upvotes are what moves the Steem community around, a simple click (and sometimes, perhaps most of the time, not even a real click) that literally has the power of changing people’s lives all over the world, but can also be used to make certain privileged users extremely wealthy by hoarding a huge amount of the new issued tokens.

Hoarding: When stockpiling objects or money provides a sense of safety, security, and relief of anxiety. | Source

When it comes to money people tend to be honest through their actions and not necessary their words, up to the point there might be cases in which people start doing things that are contradictory to their alleged values, just for the sake of earning money, it can become a sort of addiction that consists in doing whatever it takes to earn more and more, having an impossibly to satisfy need of forever increasing the amount of resources earned.

Money. So much of our lives is spent wanting it, needing it, earning it, spending it and then regretting what we did with it. | Source

In the case of Steem, we all know that the only means for this platform to succeed is to find a way in which the content of every user is rewarded accordingly, its a system in where everyone needs to win so the system can maintain itself, the only way to do that is to properly spread the votes in order to reach, or at least try to reach, every user that is able to create quality posts, the final results of this dynamic is having the creators to feel encouraged so they can keep putting hours everyday into their creations, and the dynamic keeps going and going, so hopefully one day Steem might become one of the best sites on the net to find good quality content.

If we all know this, why we don’t always act according to this realization?

What is happening with Steem and some voting issues?

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Since this is all a free system, every user is entitled to use their stake in the system however they want, nevertheless, it can be hard to explain why not every user is taking action towards the only dynamic that can make Steem communities thrive over time.

We need to have in mind that Steem as a social media site is still very small, and we will all benefit if this platform gained some popularity which would obviously mean an increase in the amount of total users and active users. If we are realistic we should know that if and when this happens and we have a huge influx of new users (a bigger influx than the ones we have had so far), the majority of these new users will come here on their own without any having previous contact with existing members, they won’t be able to invest in Steem by their own, nor be able to paid for bidbots for visibility (which sadly is becoming more common as time pass and its the reason why I chose this topic). None of that. They will need organic support by the whole community, support in the form of upvotes and of course in the form of interaction and engagement to ease their understanding of how this system works.

And here is where I think, we as a community might have some problems prioritizing short term gains over long term goals. A significant part of the active users don’t seem to be aware of this issue, or at least that’s what one could think by taking a look at their actions and what they do with the time they invest in here as well as more importantly what they do with their stake, even if the majority of us have complete understanding of everything that is being discussed here, there is a significant amount that apparently are moved by the greed of the moment, only looking to increase the amount of tokens they earn by any means without taking into consideration what is best for the community, or even taking actions that could objectively be considered harmful for the platform.

It can all come down to how truthful we are to our values and how honest we are with ourselves in our wish for this platform to become successful, and most importantly of all, how rational we are.

There was actually study applied to some students, that analyzed the mental patterns related to short term gains (in this case it would be hoarding as much tokens as possible) vs long term goals (in this case it would be the success of Steem as a social media platform), whose results were the following:

The study showed that decisions involving the possibility of immediate reward activated parts of the brain influenced heavily by neural systems associated with emotion. In contrast, all the decisions the students made -- whether short- or long-term -- activated brain systems that are associated with abstract reasoning.

Most important, when students had the choice of an immediate reward but chose the delayed option, the calculating regions of their brains were more strongly activated than their emotion systems. When they chose the immediate reward, the activity of the two areas was comparable, with a slight trend toward more activity in the emotion system.

The researchers concluded that impulsive choices or preferences for short-term rewards result from the emotion-related parts of the brain winning out over the abstract-reasoning parts. | Source

Since everyone is not necessarily objective, and its completely normal to find people that are one way or another controlled by their emotions , its probably fair to say that the explanation behind some voting issues is emotionally driven.

The excitement we can felt when seeing those tokens roll on a daily basis might be powerful enough for some people to give in and take participation in a dynamic that they themselves know cannot be good in the long term for anyone on here, what good there is in having a lot of tokens if their value ends up being worthless? One might ask. That is a rational question in my opinion, a valid question giving the situation we have in Steem about the rapidly increasing allocation of SP which votes are up to sale.

But the emotionally driven people don’t ask themselves rational questions since these are uncomfortable because they can uncover difficult to justified actions in the eyes of the person committing them, so the easy options ends up being to simply ignore rationality, ignore the long term and enjoy the present benefits, and this can only continue for so long...

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A similar issue happens when accepting newer or smaller users and the willingness to upvote their content. Its understandable to have the tendency of only give support to established authors and people that we know because we already know their content is of good quality, but we must not forget the importance of new users and their integration for the long term success of this platform.

I remember reading a post from a user who has a reputation around 70 in which he said that he would love to block the comments of users with a reputation lower than 35 (if I remember correctly that was the number) if he could. There seem to be something that makes older users avoid interaction with newer ones, which is a huge mistake and could decrease the health of the community.

And there is actual proof of this, thanks to this analysis by @abh12345 , in which it is showed that when giving support, it usually happens between people with a similar reputation and probably a similar stake.

It could be that older users see new people with suspicion since they don’t know anything about the person and his/her legitimacy, it could also be that older users expect new ones to go through the typical hardships of the first few days and weeks in order to be recognized and “allowed” to interact with them.

But the result of this, is the proliferation of voting circles, that are almost impossible to access for new or smaller users, creating a kind of obstacle that can make it hard for people to be accepted.

Across individuals, societies, and even eras, humans consistently seek inclusion over exclusion, membership over isolation, and acceptance over rejection. | Source

Its imperative for older users to not leave newer ones behind nor ignore them, because they are the ones that can have the bigger impact when it comes to making everyone feel welcome, and therefore, making the community get bigger and better, if people aren’t properly integrated they will end up leaving and this place would never reach its full potential.

All of these issues are easy to understand, but not so easy to accept, and much less easy to act upon them, especially if people receive monetary rewards for ignoring this and forgetting about the importance of buiding up communities.

Conclusion

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Of course not everything is bad, and I feel its important to clear up that just as there are users whose actions don’t make anything towards improving the community, there are also amazing community builders and group of curators, such as @curie , @ocd , @steemstem , @sndbox among others that constantly work with the goal of strengthen the foundation of this platform, which is content creation and community engagement. We have people building up communities that are about encouraging people through interactions and workshops like @futurethinker with the @promo-mentors community, so there is certainly intelligent and rational individuals that think for the long term and act according to this.

Our emotional brain has a hard time imagining the future, even though our logical brain clearly sees the future consequences of our current actions... Our emotional brain wants to max out the credit card, order dessert and smoke a cigarette. Our logical brain knows we should save for retirement, go for a jog and quit smoking. | Source

The only way I can think of for stopping a behavior that can potentially damage the whole system is by fomenting the importance of looking for the long term and prioritizing it over short term gains.

This will require strong arguments, exposed in an easy to understand way, and of course, some discipline from everyone that is taking active participation in potentially destructive actions, discipline simply because its necessary in order to stop the exploitation of a system even if that same exploitation is highly profitable.

Let's not forget Steem wasn't build for people to paid so their content could be read, that's a current distortion of the beautiful and original idea behind Steem, the question we should ask ourselves is if the Steem communit is strong enough to resist this kind of behavior from a significant parts of its emotionally driven members?

What do you think? Is steemit a community of rational individuals or emotionally driven individuals?

Do you think the platform can survive in the long term if the trends towards bid bots continue?