The Great Stake Debate - Chime in

This is a reply to @solar's post here.

Lots to unpack here, I'll just try to start from the beginning.

What is the value of a the steem vote other than a way to distribute inflation on the platform? The idea behind proof of brain is that it could be used to simultaneously reward users for publishing content on steem, as well as be used as a sorting algorithm. There is no need to linger on the fact that proof of brain (PoB) has failed as an algorithm for sorting content, self voting, and vote buying have made this obsolete from the beginning. PoB still works as a rudimentary bidding system for what content should be rewarded on the platform. However because of the unequal weight of flagging to voting, and the very soft cultural rules around the use of this feature, steem more or less is a free for all with how votes are used.

I agree that PoB has failed as a sorting system and I think the best solution to this that I've heard proposed was by @tarazkp. Essentially creating a new state of putting aside STEEM to earn the equivalent of the 10 upvotes that the biggest self voters are doing anyway.
This way it would take them out of the equation for content quality sorting while also drastically reducing the voting strength of bidbots, since most are powered by delegations from whales. This would drastically improve Trending, and give people more realistic expectations when they join the site, while also making Steem attractive to investors as a good passive income option.

So steem is a competitive market in this way. As far as how voting power is used If you are looking to increase your stake in the network all you need to do is position your votes in a way that pays you a better percentage of inflation:stake. Inflation hoarding means For selfish individuals self voting or vote buying. For businesses it may be a bit more nuanced, can be a bit more beneficial to users like traditional markets, a steem vote can be a way to attract users to submit specific types of content. Making this profitable and beating inflation on the network is a bit more complicated, but this is the state of dApps we are looking forward to in the current steem system - businesses competing to make their votes the most profitable, or use them to make other parts of their business profitable.

So one of the ideas that really drew me to cryptocurrency in general was the idea that there were two ways to get involved, to "work" your way in, or to buy your way in, and in regard I feel like Steem is one of the best blockchains out there. I disagree that if you want to increase your stake all you need to do is position your votes in a way that will earn you more stake. That is only true if you already have capital to invest. A plankton upvoting themselves won't increase their stake by any substantial value this way, but what one can do is "work" their way up to a larger stake.
This is by no means and it shouldn't be easy. It's competitive, as it should be. There are definitely users on the platform who have earned thousands to tens of thousands of STEEM all through producing content. @nonameslefttouse is probably one of the most notable examples.

Businesses looking for delegations to help grow their business is also another use case of stake and with all of these(and this will be a recurring theme in this reply) I don't find much use in subscribing them subjective descriptors like good/bad because the number one feature from cryptocurrency and blockchain technology that excites me is...

Freedom.

I don't see a users stake as some sort of device to help the community. That is definitely something it CAN be used for and if that's what someone wants to use it for, great! But their stake is not something that was gifted to them, it's something they either earned or bought, including the power that comes along with it and the inflationary rewards, it's theirs. If they want to use it to help others, it's theirs, if they want to use it to self vote, that's up to them, if the want to use it to help fund dapps, again it's all up to them.

Always use your votes like you are paying out of pocket!
When you make a vote, you are adding to a bid in releasing funds from the rewards pool. If you aren't exercising your vote you are being subjected to the maximum amount of inflation. When you don't use your vote, others in essence get to soak up your unused voting power to drain the rewards pool how they choose. This is why self voting is such a negative force on the system, the users which are exercising their voting right to gain power over you.

Here are how the most selfish actors on steem think about the reward system:
For a second let's forget about voting rewards (which are an important part of this system for sure)
in a simplified sense your minimum inflation state is if you are maxing out with self votes. The maximum voting power you could achieve through time is if you only voted for your self.
If you use your vote to reward a blog post you like, or an artist you are inspired by, this spreads a bit of your maximum voting power to them forever! Make sure that they are worth it when you vote!

I think that it's important that every one understands this as the basic mechanism behind voting. This can be used to build better communities, we might just be missing a few checks and balances so that voters will spend their vote on others.

OK, so anyone who has been fed capitalist propaganda since a young age will tell you that 'competition drives innovation!' but clearly you can see the problem here. Overtime the users who take the maximum self votes are skimming power away from those who actually use steem the way it was intended.

So I feel like you're projecting your values(virtuous as they may be) onto the actual functionality. The core functionality doesn't have a value or moral identity. It is that holding x amount of SP will reward you y STEEM in inflation and grant you z voting power. That's all. Everything else is up to individual interpretation. You're right in that not voting is basically allowing everyone else to use it as it remains in the reward pool(macro level) and this becomes more and more of a waste the larger your stake. It makes sense then that the largest accounts employ means of not wasting that stake. It is also a problem of energy and time. Realistically if you're a whale you wouldn't have time to spread that stake around even if you wanted to. I think this is why tools like https://wise.vote/ are really valuable because they give those with really large accounts a good option to be able to utilize their large stake in a way that uses it to it's full potential, while also using it to help the community. There need to be even more tools like this because otherwise a whale could never have enough time or energy to use their stake to help the community anyway, so the path of least resistance and the most individual profit is to self vote or delegate.

The more options there are that are profitable, but also good for the community the better. IMO this is a better way of looking at this rather than demonizing people that don't use their stake the way that you feel they should.

Now strange as it may seem, my values for how I "should" use my stake are actually largely in line with yours. I try to find a balance in how I use my stake. I upvote all my own posts, but I only post once maybe twice a day, I have people that I manually curate, and I also do some auto curation so that I'm always voting. If someone new comes along and I like them I vote for them. I vote on what I want basically. I want to use my stake to help grow my account, but I also want to help grow the accounts of people in my community so that we can all grow together.

I think where we have the greatest departure in values is that I don't think that what I think is the best use of my stake should be THE way people use stake. It's the way I want to use it, it's up to everyone to decide how they want to use their stake, some may want to passively invest, some may want to help app devs, some may want to be trolls. Obviously some of these I like more than others, but the thing I like the most is that everyone has the freedom to do with it what they will.

If some sort of codified law was implemented FORCING people to use their stake in ANY way, I think that would be the nail in the coffin for Steem.

Also this is a break in what I was talking about but I want to bring it up before I end this. This idea that there are whales that do nothing or don't add value to the platform.

If you are a whale and have over 500k powered up STEEM, that in and of itself is EXTREMELY valuable. You don't necessarily need to do anything else other than hold a huge investment in STEEM to be doing something valuable. That is where a large portion of the value of the coin comes from, whales holding it. If more whales were holding SP that would be a net positive for the system, even if all they did was self vote.

Now if you're a whale and holding a huge amount of SP AND you are active in the community, or building tools and dapps, and curating etc, by anyone's standard you are the better whale, but this idea that there are people consuming without giving anything back is not accurate IMO.

I think this is too long for a comment so I'm just going to make it a post, I know you ultimately want to spark a discussion, so hopefully this will help with that. :)