Care to enlighten what you see which I don't  

I have no fucking idea what you have against the guy. He tried to launch a viral marketing campaign and wanted to reach a measily 500 supported. He was only able to get 30 with 142 upvotes on his first blog post about it.

Then after waiting a while and only reaching 60, he made another blog post and expressed his frustration and he also pondered if maybe Steemians have some disincentive to promote to new signups significantly.

Of course if he had studied the active users, he would realize he is asking for on the order of 3 - 5% response rate, but that isn't entirely unreasonable unless we assume most are Sybil accounts and in that case we really have a small circle-jerk thus far then.

Cryptography isn't my area of expertise...

I dont get the alure of Monero, sure it's a very popular coin and has a large community -- I accredit its current market cap due to the community surrounding it, not its utility. I'll explain why.

The primary point of anonymous transactions is to use it to buy 'things' you want to purchase anonymously. Depending on what you're purchasing or selling, the stakes may be incredibly high for getting caught, anonymity is absolute paramount.  If you simply want to 'wash' some coins for financial anonymity, well, bitcoin mixers suffice for most people's uses. However, if you're running a shop or ordering certain products that may not be legal in your country, you need extreme financial anonymity and an anonymous decentralized platform with end to end encrypted communications.  The currency is 1/3rd of the recipe for true protection. As far as I know, most of these coins only offer that 1/3rd portion, Dash, Monero, etc.

If a (dark net) marketplace doesn't support Monero, it's use is very limited. Sure you can use it to transact financial payments anonymously, but I don't know of any popular 'marketplaces' that support it. Even at that point you've still got to deal with pgp encryption (a hurdle for technically-inept people) of communication and use a centralized platform that suffers from DDOS attacks, exit scams, and the never ending cat and mouse game between the market owners and three letter agencies.

For these numerous reasons i'm more a fan of projects like ShadowCash, as they're going to combine the currency with an OpenBazaar-like p2p anonymous platform (run on tor and/or i2p) with encrypted messaging, etc., all done behind the scenes in a highly user-friendly manner.  At that point you have a truly useful anonymous currency with a decentralized anonymous marketplace and end to end encrypted messaging platform... now that is a powerful piece of software if you ask me.

As a side note I'm not a big fan of Dash either, masternodes are a potential weak point for anonymity.

Good point. Apparently another impact of the rewards system, that authors are incentivized to write for maximum audience superficial upvotes instead of maximum relevance to their core following. I also tried to keep my blog posts short, because I know that is essential to attaining widest readership.

One could point out that terse content (the age of snapchat and swipes) is more popular. But I presume bloggers don't always make their most money by targeting the most superficial readers. I presume they target a lucrative demographic and sometimes a target demographic is attuned to in depth time consuming content. We will be become a society on only tweets and no more books?


Also I want to say that in spite of this flaw, Steem is going to generate a lot of hype and grow from here. The issues I am pointing out are medium-term problems. In near-term, I think it is likely more and more users will see the $$$ and give it a try. We are essentially onboarding everyone who had some affinity to cryptocurrency. Until that viral spread has peaked, we should see more upside to Steem's signups.

I am just sharing. I am laying out much of my thought process for peer review. It is not an attempt to dominate the discussion, rather it is an attempt to be open.


For example, the title was clickbait for the male who wants to know some secret about the why females are in the bar, i.e. expecting some hypergamy or PUA insight:

https://steemit.com/life/@sweetsssj/the-secrets-of-why-girls-go-to-the-bar

But it is only a blog post relevant to those (smaller coterie) who might want to visit China or know what bars are like in affluent China. But he was forced to make the title groupthink clickbait in order to get the upvotes he received.

If he had titled it, "Bar overlooking skyline in China" I bet he would have only earned a few hundred dollars at most, and perhaps a total flop.

I believe the site will turn more and more to game theory manipulation instead of relevance. Which is precisely my point. The quadratic weighing honeypot is too enticing to ignore and write for your followers instead. You don't bring your followers to Steem (unless they are cryptonerds), you extract from the demographics that Steem is drawing in due to hype.

The China content is also interesting to many cryptonerds and anarchists in spite of the misleading title, because we are all sort of idolizing China and Asia as the next big thing. Many nerds are probably dreaming of working and living in China.

Afaics, the diversity of the content is orthogonal to the cognition that to earn significantly, you must cater to the demographics that are already on Steem. Meaning it is possible to find diverse topics that are judged to have a high value by Steem's current demographics, but this is normally because it is judged that the content is new and thus widens the appeal to potential readership. But a serious blogger isn't interested in always being new, because they can't be. They are interesting in being rewarded for being expert in a coterie. But coteries are a negative economically on Steem because of quadratic weighting. You actively want to avoid forming a coterie.

Realize that the reward pool is partitioned by quadratic weighing, so the larger your vote count, then quadratically more of the pie you get.

Serious bloggers are not stupid. They will eventually figure out the economics of Steem is parasitic on coteries. Articles will be written about this. It can't be hidden.

Expect me to home in on the most salient issues. That is one of my vocations.

If it gets stuck in a crypto demographic then I agree it will fail.

However, I'm not sure that the push toward what you call groupthink (and I call raw popularity) will reinforce this or overcome it. If people join who are not cryptonerds, then the content that appeals both to those inside and outside the crypto ghetto will do the best. Content that appeals to smaller groups will in some sense subsidize the content that appeals to the broadest audience. Perhaps it is a reasonable cost to pay such rent to gain the network benefits of sharing a widely-popular platform as a small niche that most people don't care about. Or perhaps you are right and niche interest groups won't stay at all.

Follows won't improve that much for discovering new content outside of the people you already follow.

Reading this I thought there may be a word that could represent this functionality better than "upvote"

What do you think about using the word "magnetize"?

People want to express their reaction to content. If we conflate their opinion of agreement with the relevance of the content for their attention, then we don't have an attention relevance metric rather some Frankenstein. I may disagree with a blog post and be compelled to express it with a quick click, but it may not mean I want to hide that content from my future attention. Without an accurate relevance algorithm, we will encourage groupthink, because attention (i.e. ranking) drives votes and rewards.

As well, upvoting needs to be different than liking the argument of a blog post:


I think thinking every post needs a poll (e.g. Agree/Disagree) in addition to an upvoting button for relevance. The upvoting button should be "I want to read more content of this quality, topic, and readership coterie".

None of these are currently anonymous.

They have identity-obscuring features, which are nice, but all of them currently fall embarrassingly short of expectations. Not to say that effort hasn't been well spent, just that if you expect an 'anonymous' currency today, it's not on that list, or any list you could make right at this point.

That said, some on that list are capable of being "truly anonymous", some day, provided they are backed by a community that's willing to comply with a regular hard fork.

This of course requires both having a community and active development.

Oh, I'm pretty sure the Larimers and their associates are getting their cut.

https://steemit.com/poetry/@generalizethis/carvaggio-s-last-plea

Oh, MatTheCat is posting in the altcoin section now.

Has anyone notified Mark Lyford about this new revolution in smut 2.0 technology?  He's gonna be mighty upset if the Larimers didn't invite him to Steem like they did to Bitsnares.