My Observation: Does Steemit Encourage Quality Content?
I’ve been on Steemit for about a week now, so I thought I would share my observations on the platform so far. One of my observations was regarding the incentive function on the Steemit platform and if it did in fact encourage users to post high quality content. Feel free to comment below offering your own perspective and highlighting things that I may not have considered.
The Steemit Incentive Function
The Steemit platform is an innovative project to say the least. It combines the social media elements of posting, upvoting and commenting etc, with a monetary reward system (for the purposes of this post, I will be focusing solely on how the monetary reward system interacts with posting). If you upload content, you are rewarded monetarily. Thus it follows that, in theory, this will encourage a user to keep posting content, or adding value to the community (via their posts), as the Steem white paper more accurately indicates. So in essence, this is the incentive function of Steemit. It is first necessary to define what the phrase ‘added value’ actually means, the reason for doing this will become apparent later on in the post. The Cambridge Dictionary defines added value as 'an improvement or addition to something that makes it worth more'. When we take that definition in the context of Steemit, we can take it to mean a post that is of value to the person reading it. This addition of value can manifest itself in different forms, for example, the post gave you more information about a topic, or it made you laugh etc. Now let’s look at the notion of adding value in the context of having a subscriber base (aka the amount of followers a user may have).
Added Value & A Subscriber Base
From what we have gathered so far, we can see that the biggest users on Steemit have managed to accrue a plethora of users that believe that the posts being made by the them is adding value to their person. And as a result of that belief, the user posting the content is rewarded monetarily by the collective upvotes of their subscriber base.
The Problem
If one accepts that the incentive function is designed to encourage the addition of value, as the Steem white paper suggests, then the discussion ends there. However, there is another word often used to describe the incentive function of the Steemit platform, and that word is ‘quality’. The Oxford English Dictionary defines quality as being 'the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind'. When we contextualise this definition in the Steemit platform, one can, like myself, compare posts between two different users and come to a conclusion as to which one is of a higher quality. We can use our own ideas and previous experiences on what we think constitutes a high quality post and determine if a post meets that standard. When we take this definition of quality, we can immediately see that there is a potential of breakdown in the incentive function of the Steemit platform. This breakdown can be attributed to a user’s subscriber base. Initially, a user is monetarily rewarded for their high quality content, as they should be, they will likely amass a big subscriber base as more users also deem their content to be of a high quality. However, as they achieve a certain number in their subscriber base and their monetary income, there exists, a disincentive to continue to post high quality content. Due to their large subscriber base, the user at this point, likely knows that, a post of a low quality is likely to gain them a certain level of monetary income that they would be satisfied with. So why put in the extra effort to make the post that bit better? Because of this, there is a danger that the incentive function can become, not an incentive to encourage high quality posts, but an incentive to build as many followers as possible.
Added Value v Quality
It is important to stress that the problem I highlighted in the preceding paragraph is very much dependent on how you view the incentive function. If you believe that the incentive function is designed to add value to the person reading the post, then the incentive function is obviously performing as intended, as one does not need to make a comparison to other posts and determine its relative quality. If a user's content provides you with value, then you will remain subscribed to them. However, if we adopt the view that the incentive function is designed to encourage high quality posts, then the bar is much higher. We are allowed to compare between posts and see for ourselves the difference in quality. From this, we can rank the quality of posts and determine if they are of a high quality or not and deserve to be monetarily rewarded as handsomely as they have been. If they have, then, as my preceding paragraph indicated, this may be due to the distorted incentive function that flows from what one defines as ‘quality’.
Conclusion
To answer the question, it very much depends on how you perceive the incentive function. I personally believe that the incentive function is there to encourage the posting of high quality content. Thus, I am worried about the implications that flow from it. However, I must note that, even from this perspective, one has to acknowledge that the incentive function performs very well in the early stages of a user’s posting career. It is what comes in the latter stages that gives some, including myself, a cause to pause and reflect on the architecture of the Steemit platform.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Call To Action
I hope you enjoyed reading my thoughts on the Steemit platform. As you can probably tell, thinking critically about everything is really important to me, so I would like to encourage you all to do the same in your day to day lives. Really engage and think about why things are a certain way and if there are better alternatives to it. I haven’t come across many posts that really try and tackle some interesting/difficult topics of discussion. It would be great to see more of that and really try and start some sort of movement on Steemit!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sources
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please feel free to tell me your thoughts on the matter and if you enjoyed the article then give it an upvote! I'll be posting even more articles that will hopefully challenge your thinking on a variety of issues, so follow me @Bisade to make sure you don't miss out :)