RE: Untangling the Gordian Knot that is Steem Ethics
You misapprehend self interest, confusing profiteering with investment. Investing for capital gains depends on self interest, but not only for investors. The operators of business seek investment to improve the conduct of their business, and their self interest dovetails with that of investors intent on capital gains, who inject capital into the business by purchasing the underlying investment vehicle, such as stock or bonds, and seek to enable the business conducted to compensate them for their investment by increasing the value of the stock, or paying the interest on the bonds.
Steem does not facilitate this mutual cooperative benefit, simply extracting the value of the content created and using substantial holdings of the underlying investment vehicle to manipulate rewards as allowed by specific code. That code is not human nature. It is a mechanism that can be different, and potentiate self interest to be cooperative and mutally beneficial, rather than parasitic and extractive.
The devs were not experienced investors, and simply chose the easiest route to ROI, despite that being contrary to capital gains, which are far more productive of ROI over time.
Well, I had to break out the dictionary because you said I'm confusing profiteering with investment. According to merriam-webster.com.
investment = the outlay of money usually for income or profit
profiteering = the act or activity of making an unreasonable profit on the sale of essential goods especially during times of emergency
The investment in the steem is the outlay of the money for profit. Whether or not these profits are unreasonable I don't really know? They might look unreasonable to small stake holders. But the more SP or money you have the greater the potential to earn with it, even if it's with curation alone. Just look at millionaires today, they put money in the bank and can skim off the interest at the end of the year and live off of that. I mean that's how the system is designed. Steem is similar, the more steem you have the more you can draw from the pool. I'm not saying it's right or good or bad, but that's how they made it. Just imagine if they called the APY at the bank a reward pool and all bank customers got to see who got the most rewards? They'd get angry at the wealthy for taking all the rewards. The bank might change the rules to spread it out equally and then the wealthy would simply close their accounts and find a more lucrative place to put their capital.
I appreciate you being forthright in seeking factual understanding. However, I have clearly indicated how I contrast the two terms in practice. Outfits like Bain Capital that buy a controlling interest in a stock corporation and then proceed to sell off it's assets to profit are profiteers, and those like Berkshire Hathaway that acquire stocks to build the companies and profit by the gain in price of the stock are investors.
The business model of profiteers, extracting the working capital of a business, is contrary to capital gains.
Regardless of ethical considerations, doing so is destructive of the underlying investment vehicle. It reduces the prices of stocks, and in our case, the price of Steem, by destroying the ability of the company to produce. The history of Steem reveals that destruction, and I but point out that the reason for that destruction is demonstrable and has long been understood in financial circles.
Stake weighting extracting rewards prevents content from delivering value to creators and Steem. It's the equivalent of selling the presses, forges, and real property of a business. It's not building the business, but taking that value as profit using stake weighting, just as KK&R does. Stake can be used to build, which I call investment, and has been driven by capital gains to create the blessings of civilization we enjoy today, or to simply part out such as the hard work of others has built up, as we observe has been done to Steem.
Profiteering destroys, investment builds.
I see what you mean, and I am not suggesting that bid bots help to bring content value to the platform, it might in rare cases make valuable posts more highlighted, but, that kind of business is amoral concerning the quality of posts boosted. I’ve seen some of these bot enterprises use blacklists for users who boost low-quality content, at the very least that is a good thing.
An additional aspect worthy of consideration outside the realm of the social media marketplace and the value of said content is the market value of the crypto itself. Regardless of how people use steem, by HODLing as opposed to selling, one is helping to keep the price of the steem to dollar ratio in the black. Whereas if overnight these systems come to a halt, you may see them sell-off because their business is no longer profitable. And most of these folks are not interested in content creation or curation so what else would keep them invested in the coin? In that case, the value of steem will suffer.
So yeah, I know where you are coming from concerning the quality of content, but we also want to consider the value of the currency. If STINC wanted to discourage bid-botting, they should have nixed the trending page altogether. Most posts on trending are not organic, even if they were, with unequal SP it is still not organic, only means that some people’s opinions are more important than others.
I’m waiting with bated breath to watch how events play out. The schadenfreude will be real. When all is said and done, market planning and controlling never works out well. I’m not against a utopian market either, it’s just that I know these things always backfire and result in dystopia. For me, the similarity is someone who is throwing water on a grease fire in slow motion. I expect a rise in the klepto culture of self-righteous downvoters who think they are saving the blockchain by looking down on their noses at the quality of their neighbor’s content.
In cultures where people eat the rich. When that kind of thing becomes trendy, and we have eaten the rich, then the bar for whatever is rich lowers. And that class of “rich” is eaten, and the bar gets lowered again. With each free meal, the mob gets hungrier and hungrier until the appetites are insatiable and they become “superiorly entitled” to well, in the case of the blockchain, other people’s stake, steem power, or how it’s used.
Whatever this whole blockchain social media thing is, it feels more like a social-psychological experiment and we are the rats experiencing it first-hand. I’d rather see it fail online than in IRL, as the stakes are much higher IRL, even though, when you add value to it in the form of currency... it makes it quasi-real life, just on a smaller scale depending on the size of one’s stake.
Regardless of how it plays out, I think we can both agree it will be a shit show. There are some, and I’m guessing you might find yourself in this camp who think the curation changes will cause an unjust enrichment through the simple act of curation alone, and although it’s not something I’ve put too much thought into, I can see that argument.
However, not much one can do about that aspect after the code has changed. They keep fiddling around trying to change the rules and make it “perfect,” starting to doubt anything like that will ever be possible, it doesn’t, however, stop people from trying to manifest a utopia.
I think they have not undertaken to potentiate capital gains, but to enable profiteering, and continue to perfect profiteering, expecting capital gains to result.
This is not a recipe for encouraging capital gains and investment. Only looking at problems based on foundational principles enables solid foundations to support structures. The encouragement of stake weighting as a means of extracting rewards from the pool is a flaw in the foundation that prevents support for certain structures, and those enabling capital gains in particular.
There are relatively trivially simple mechanisms that can prevent profiteering that can be written in the code. They are not because profiteering is intentionally the foundation of Steem.