Steem pyramid scheme revealed

[iamnotback]

Umm, what do you have against introverts dude?

Nothing when they don't judge me while hiding themselves from the type of exposure that they judge. And I didn't write I was against introverts did I? I wrote INTJ and ENTP are often incompatible because of the combination of judging combined with the asymmetrical potshotting from behind an introverted shield.

What you do have against that logical stance dude?

[iamnotback]

The voting and reward algorithm in Steem seems to me to have a fundamental flaw.

If they made voting rewards linear, then all SP holders could simply vote for their own posts and recover their share of the dilution of the money supply. The game theory would be there is no financial incentive to vote for posts of others (although there might be an incentive for minnows who value the site functionality more than the tiny bit of rewards they control).

So instead they made rewards quadratic and even time incentivized so that you have to risk your vote on a post that you can't be sure will gain you the most rewards (since you don't know which post all the other users will vote on until later, which is why the votes are time incentivized to vote early). That also had the hype benefit of creating posts with exaggerated $50,000 rewards due these non-linear amplification algorithms.

But the quadratic and time incentivization game theory highly favors whales who can collude since the remove the risks the algorithms intended to create yet the colluding whales can take all the non-linear reward amplifications. I am not saying whales are colluding now, but for example if the media moguls can obtain significant stake and then accumulate 100% of the tokens over time by this game theory strategy thus controlling ranking of content on the site.

I believe the only solution to this is to let users control their own ranking algorithms (so whales can't predict rankings even if they collude on voting) and votes for computing rewards should always be linearly tallied. In other words, rankings need to be truly decentralized else the entire system is a clusterfuck back to centralized media control again. Meaning that if you only vote for yourself, you voting pattern make not align with like-mindedness with others thus you may have no influence on the ranking of your posts on the site, so you lose income from the votes of others. Meaning if you vote for yourself, you opt out of blogging.

Meaning I see no solution to the fact that it is impossible to incentivize whales to vote meaningfully and it is impossible to charge whales for the voting of minnows¹! Dan's communism fails.

I'll be reading over @theoretical's blogs to see if I have made any errors or incorrect assumptions. I'll update you if I find any.

¹ I do see one solution to this where whales are charged for voting but not allowed to vote but it can't work in the Dan's current design where STEEM are debased 50% yearly because obviously whales won't decide to hold STEEM.

I remember now that long ago (perhaps it was 2014) I already gone down this wild goose chase of voting from shared debasement and had realized it was fundamentally flawed and can't work.

Steemit is fucked. There is no way to fix this. Absolutely impossible. Fugetaboutit.

What they did was put the whales in control so they could over pay for blogs to generate the delusional to-da-moon groupthink.

I can't think of any way sure way to fix it. We might hope if we adopt my solution quoted above and make the forced voting small enough, that minnows will just vote their conscience (because it is a hassle otherwise perhaps), in that case maybe it works. But the whales will still opt out by voting themselves, so the minnows end up paying for all the blogging, which means it won't have sufficient funding. Power-law distribution rules.

If whales have a huge incentive to be restricted from voting (e.g. they don't have to hold for 2 years), then perhaps you can charge the debasement to them. But if the minnows are voting with the whales' share, then the minnows have more incentive to vote for themselves.

It just doesn't seem to work no matter how we design it.

Steemit's whales can justify throwing away money because they know otherwise they can't cash out. This is still a ponzi scheme and race to the exits before everyone realizes the voting system is totally dysfunctional. It will become more and more apparently over time.

They may be hoping they can get enough users into the system to begin some ecosystem work on microtransactions. Maybe the big lie in the voting algorithm is just a stopgap measure to onboard users. But I really can't see this group of developers ever succeeding because they seem to be always about fooling people.

Solid businesses are built on solid ethics.

[AlexGR]

Do users really want to put all their activity and text comments to friends on a public block chain?

At least on Facebook, I can decide who views my posts and stuff. Obviously the NSA can read it all, but I can still have some privacy from others if I want to.

Has anyone worked on how we could put it encrypted on a public block chain and limit readers to those whom we give a decryption yet, where each reader could have a different decryption key? So we could identify who is letting their reader keys escape into the public domain?

Browser extension probably that automatically decrypts the encoded text.

[iamnotback]

Do users really want to put all their activity and text comments to friends on a public block chain?

At least on Facebook, I can decide who views my posts and stuff. Obviously the NSA can read it all, but I can still have some privacy from others if I want to.

Has anyone worked on how we could put it encrypted on a public block chain and limit readers to those whom we give a decryption yet, where each reader could have a different decryption key? So we could identify who is letting their reader keys escape into the public domain?

Browser extension probably that automatically decrypts the encoded text.

You entirely miss the point. There is no way to protect the decryption key. It will end up publicized.

[AlexGR]

Ah, ok...

[Noojna]

I agree; knowing that 80% of the steem cryptocurrency was created or premined directly into the wallets of it's creators makes this currency sound very iffy...

[smooth]

@iamnotback

You are way overthinking it. Perhaps you are trying to fix the Internet and make sure that quality work gets rewarded, all of which is noble, but is almost entirely irrelevant to Steemit.

Steemit is a social media platform, and like all the other social media platforms it is not high art or journalism, but a platform for people to pass their time (consider how much of peoples' time has shifted from watching bad TV to social media), communicate (often without any lasting significance), have fun, show off, and generally do the things that most real people spend most of their time doing in this world. This will never change, regardless of technology or algorithms, because people basically don't change.

It will work fine for that. In doing so it will also introduce a large number of people to cryptocurrency, something they have never seen before in a reasonably usable way (if at all). Now there is a theory that most people have no use for cryptocurrency and if that theory is correct then that aspect of it will fall flat on its face, and probably the coin won't be worth much either (though the platform may still survive). On the other hand, it is possible that a large number of people from a wide swath of society with access to cryptocurrency, something we have never seen before, will find something interesting and perhaps unexpected to do with it. Or at least some subset of them will, a subset that wasn't being reached before. That might be enough.

The main obstacles are not that the incentives or game theory "aren't right" but more mundane things you have identified earlier such as the feature set of the platform (is it fun enough, can people get lost it it and pass the time, etc.), reliability of hosting (currently atrocious, and this is costing a lot in user growth), etc.

[Cast12]

So the "Steem is a scam" threads have started. LOL. It must be making some good progress

Exactly. The sock puppet party here doesn't warrant genuine responses. It is not worth my time. Jelly donuts for all. Just like ETH, you know you are doing something right when there are 100 sock puppets crying scam in 100 threads they create themselves.

What sock puppet(s)? The term's not supposed to be used like that(I'll give you a hint: The term means the exact opposite of what you typed.) Do tell me more.

[Dafar]

Umm, what do you have against introverts dude?

Nothing when they don't judge me while hiding themselves from the type of exposure that they judge. And I didn't write I was against introverts did I? I wrote INTJ and ENTP are often incompatible because of the combination of judging combined with the asymmetrical potshotting from behind an introverted shield.

What you do have against that logical stance dude?

You should be filtered out of my coterie and myself filtered out of yours. You go hang out with your INTJ types and I will go hang out with the extroverts who prefer production and discussion over judgemental impossible perfection.

Ok mr ENTP, you sound like you're awkward and cringeworthy in real life

[r0ach]

ranking system is a circle-jerk...

I entirely expect to not get upvotes. I will be surprised if I do.

The corporate world adopted political correctness to maximize potential revenue stream, and since Steem is run as a business, I suspect you would see the same thing here.  You already know who your target audience is going to be beforehand while distribution is in it's current state, so I know exactly if my post will be upvoted or not before even making it.  I did a test of that yesterday, making a post I knew would be unpopular on purpose.  

I already know most people in the Bitcoin spectrum love to tout the idea of anarchy as some type of super cool thing and the solution to all the world's problems, while I believe statism and anarchy have pretty much the same endgame.  You could even argue we already live in anarchy and the 500 people in the house, senate, and presidency are just an armed gang holding people hostage.

So, let's see what the test results are.  My post saying anarchy and statism is all the same difference:

https://steemit.com/anarchism/@r0achtheunsavory/anarchy-doesn-t-exist-it-s-the-equivalent-of-a-simpsons-parody

Some guy who is mostly citing other people talking about how cool and awesome anarchy is:

https://steemit.com/anarchy/@modprobe/response-sorry-libertarian-anarchists-capitalism-requires-government

And the guy who wrote the wildly more upvoted anarchy article responding to me:

[iamnotback]

Ok mr ENTP, you sound like you're awkward and cringeworthy in real life

That is what everyone thought some months ago until they saw my video linked in the Ethereum Paradox thread. Strange how the Internet creates mirages.

Readers believe what ever they are biased to feel.

[smooth]

Let's see if I can earn any money telling the truth on Steemit:

https://steemit.com/steem/@anonymint/lies-about-steem-and-steemit

Please consider upvoting me if you appreciate my effort. Lots effort has gone into this detailed analysis.

I hope @smooth upvotes me so he can show he was not overly biased by his large stake and thus showing the authorities he was not participating in misleading any investors. I would hope other whales have the similar conscience and rationality.

Of course I don't expect it to be upvoted.

I appreciate your effort and I upvoted you. It doesn't mean I agree with you. I support meaningful debate and giving different points of view due consideration.

I would have done so earlier but my time on the forum is limited and by the time I come back these threads have moved far enough that I don't see the older posts.

[iamnotback]

@iamnotback

You are way overthinking it. Perhaps you are trying to fix the Internet and make sure that quality work gets rewarded, all of which is noble, but is almost entirely irrelevant to Steemit.

Steemit is a social media platform, and like all the other social media platforms it is not high art or journalism, but a platform for people to pass their time (consider how much of peoples' time has shifted from watching bad TV to social media), communicate (often without any lasting significance), have fun, show off, and generally do the things that most real people spend most of their time doing in this world. This will never change, regardless of technology or algorithms, because people basically don't change.

It will work fine for that. In doing so it will also introduce a large number of people to cryptocurrency, something they have never seen before in a reasonably usable way (if at all). Now there is a theory that most people have no use for cryptocurrency and if that theory is correct then that aspect of it will fall flat on its face, and probably the coin won't be worth much either (though the platform may still survive). On the other hand, it is possible that a large number of people from a wide swath of society with access to cryptocurrency, something we have never seen before, will find something interesting and perhaps unexpected to do with it. Or at least some subset of them will, a subset that wasn't being reached before. That might be enough.

The main obstacles are not that the incentives or game theory "aren't right" but more mundane things you have identified earlier such as the feature set of the platform (is it fun enough, can people get lost it it and pass the time, etc.), reliability of hosting (currently atrocious, and this is costing a lot in user growth), etc.

You are missing my point I think, which is that a circle-jerk doesn't bring in a new demographic.

Any way, I might see a solution (to bringing in a new demographic), but afaics it isn't voting. Voting will be an insoluble circle-jerk and stay mired in the same demographic mud.

The cryptocurrency folks can't escape their own circle-jerk. They can't see outside their delusion. That is why mom doesn't join.

I appreciate your effort and I upvoted you. It doesn't mean I agree with you. I support meaningful debate and giving different points of view due consideration.

I would have done so earlier but my time on the forum is limited and by the time I come back these threads have moved far enough that I don't see the older posts.

I almost feel guilty now. Because it is better to not fight what can't be changed. But something good came out of that I think.

I am done with writing on Steem, because I can't change it from within. I would only write there again if I felt like kissing ass to try to make some money, but I am sure I already pissed off enough whales that I will be a persona non grata there from now on.

[smooth]

That is why mom doesn't join.

I personally know >1 "moms" who have joined and are actively participating. I didn't push them to it, but I mentioned it and they decided on their own to sign up (my interest is more in seeing whether they are interested than trying to sell it). Many more are apparent on the site.

The voting circle jerk as you put it may put them off and cause them to lose interesting, but my bet would be on bad hosting and the limited feature set being bigger issues.

[iamnotback]

That is why mom doesn't join.

I personally know >1 "moms" who have joined and are actively participating. I didn't push them to it, but I mentioned it and they decided on their own to sign up (my interest is more in seeing whether they are interested than trying to sell it). Many more are apparent on the site.

The voting circle jerk as you put it may put them off and cause them to lose interesting, but my bet would be on bad hosting and the limited feature set being bigger issues.

I've only seen 1 mom out of 32.000 that have joined. How many have you seen?

Of course you'll get the occasional mom who is close enough to the groupthink.

The circle-jerk won't put the deluded off soon. It has to end like the DAO. The deluded fight reality to the end.

People are going to try hard because they really want a blockchain social network to work. They will exert effort beyond reason, especially while they can continue to pretend to print money out-of-thin-air.

When most everyone is powering up, it is possible to print money out-of-thin-air. Because very few are selling so the price is supported. Also apparently have enough deluded investors or speculators to keep that tiny float up. Insiders might even be manipulating the price on the exchanges.

Good for me if they can keep the price up.

I see they had a 1% visitor rate from coinmarketcap banner ads, which is reasonably good. Demographic is coming significantly from our existing blocknerd zone.

The incentive structure is all about appealing to the delusion with the content that is written. There is no economic incentive to organize around different communities than the to-da-moon blockchains for everything delusion.

Didn't you know that blockchains will cure cancer, bring Jesus back before 2025, and render driverless cars deprecated. The blockchain is a solution for everything. We just have to find a way to make it happen. We must.

Note Steemit is accumulating numerous copyright violations. I've read it is $150 per infraction in potential liability.

[smooth]

That is why mom doesn't join.

I personally know >1 "moms" who have joined and are actively participating. I didn't push them to it, but I mentioned it and they decided on their own to sign up (my interest is more in seeing whether they are interested than trying to sell it). Many more are apparent on the site.

The voting circle jerk as you put it may put them off and cause them to lose interesting, but my bet would be on bad hosting and the limited feature set being bigger issues.

I've only seen 1 mom out of 32.000 that have joined. How many have you seen?

Way more than 1. I don't have time to search for links but maybe someone else wants to find some.

Of course you'll get the occasional mom who is close enough to the groupthink.

As far as I can tell the moms on the site know next to nothing about any of the blockchain and incentive stuff you call groupthink. That is certainly true of the ones I know personally. They just think it is a cool idea and fun. Whether it holds attention longer term I don't know.

[iamnotback]

As far as I can tell the moms on the site know next to nothing about any of the blockchain and incentive stuff you call groupthink. That is certainly true of the ones I know personally. They just think it is a cool idea and fun. Whether it holds attention longer term I don't know.

What is a cool idea? What specifically do they think is cool about blogging on Steemit that they couldn't do any where else before?

Edit: I am doing a search on 'mom' (and 'mother') and I am only finding young blocknerd females who happen to be mothers.

9 cents:

https://steemit.com/life/@rufia/attractive-pussy-is-looking-for-upvotes

5 cents:

https://steemit.com/life/@fonzerrellie/me-my-chemical-imbalance-and-marijuana-my-journey-original-content

[smooth]

As far as I can tell the moms on the site know next to nothing about any of the blockchain and incentive stuff you call groupthink. That is certainly true of the ones I know personally. They just think it is a cool idea and fun. Whether it holds attention longer term I don't know.

What is a cool idea? What specifically do they think is cool about blogging on Steemit that they couldn't do any where else before?

They like the idea of people voting giving rewards rather than just voting to vote. They don't really know or care about the algorithms. If they get $1 or even less on a comment they're pretty happy with it. They don't expect to make as much as the big winners on the front page are are not disappointed that they don't (but perhaps they do secretly hope to get there someday, and maybe that is indeed part of the draw).

I don't vote on their stuff in case you are wondering because my goal is not to give away free money to people I know. I'd rather see how their perceptions evolve without interference.

[iamnotback]

As far as I can tell the moms on the site know next to nothing about any of the blockchain and incentive stuff you call groupthink. That is certainly true of the ones I know personally. They just think it is a cool idea and fun. Whether it holds attention longer term I don't know.

What is a cool idea? What specifically do they think is cool about blogging on Steemit that they couldn't do any where else before?

They like the idea of people voting giving rewards rather than just voting to vote. They don't really know or care about the algorithms. If they get $1 or even less on a comment they're pretty happy with it. They don't expect to make as much as the big winners on the front page are are not disappointed that they don't (but perhaps they do secretly hope to get there someday, and maybe that is indeed part of the draw).

I don't vote on their stuff in case you are wondering because my goal is not to give away free money to people I know. I'd rather see how their perceptions evolve without interference.

They think they are giving away money for free. Printing money out-of-thin-air but they don't think of it that way. They just see all those illiquid STEEM POWER valued in $$$$$$ (which is possible only because almost no one is cashing out and instead are powering up, except the probably the whales). And they think maybe some of that karma will come back to them. They think everyone on Steem is so happy something better than their actual lives or other Internet sites. And then the reality will kick them in the ass and they will learn a truism of life.


India lady trying to earn some money for her kids (husband is electrical engineer so likely a blocknerd):

https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@aramialovely66/mother-of-2-kids-on-steemit

I think this mother has abandoned and oh my she transferred money into Steem (a victim):

https://steemit.com/@danielaonsteem

Introduced by her blocknerd bf:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@travelista/hello-steemit-i-am-edith-travel-and-lifestyle-enthusiast-and-recently-steemit-fan

It most always the same story. It is so redundant already.

[ErnieRox]

sounds like every other shietcoin out there lol