Programming Diary #38: Balancing crypto and attention economies to maximize STEEM's value

Summary

Today's programming diary post describes my recent programming activity in three focus areas. These are the Steem Curation Extension, the Thoth project, and the conceptual description of a Steem Ledger Index Protocol (SLIP).

For the Steem Curation Extension, thanks to feedback from @o1eh and @michelangelo3, the extension was updated to highlight /promoted posts for non-English languages and to be compatible with Chromium-based browsers on Linux. The new version, 0.5.1-beta, has been submitted for review in the Chrome Web Store.

For Thoth, a "white list" of authors was added. This addition completes a full "proof of concept" of my original vision for the application. It is now possible for teams of authors and investors to try to use Thoth for a competitive edge against the previous generation of voting services. The fundamental idea continues to be that audience + rewards is more valuable than rewards alone.

The SLIP protocol was described in an interview session with the Gemini LLM, and it describes a way that an all-purpose indexed database could be established by using sequential data on-chain, and decentralized indexers.

In the reflections section, imagining a relationship like this,

crypto value of STEEM + attention value of STEEM == TOTAL value of STEEM,

the post reviews currently active proposals for their impact on crypto and attention economies. It also discusses the importance of links in the attention economy.

Background

If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

If there is one section of the Steem Whitepaper that every Steemizen should read, I think it is this the one, Value is in the Links.

The Internet would lose the vast majority of its value if all links among content were removed. It is the relationship among web pages that allows Google to identify the best apple pie recipe among the 16 million results. Without the links the only information Google would have is word frequency.

Links can take many forms and have adapted over time. Every time a user votes on content in a social network they add a connection between themselves and the content. This in turn links the consumer to the producer through the content. The more connections a network has the more valuable the information becomes. It is the relative and intentional connectedness of information that gives it value.

A social network can maximize the value extracted from a set of content by maximizing the quantity and quality of connections. Curating content is expensive and time consuming while being near impossible for computers to perform in the absence of links. Steem rewards users who are among the first to find and identify new content.

By incentivising (sic) curation the Steem network is able to use automated algorithms to extract the most valuable information from a massive amount of content.

Bottom line: Creating content is only the beginning.

In the attention economy, an important and often neglected job of authors, developers, and curators, is to find ways to create links that maximize value. As the white paper notes, one form of link is the vote, but links take other forms, too. This can include mentions, links to/from other Internet platforms, and links between Steem posts. For example, studies have found that blog authors who link out more to other blogs generally also receive more incoming links.

If the links are not optimized, then value is being lost. We talk a lot about content quality, but (aside from SEO), we don't talk much about links.

Much of my project focus, including Thoth and the Steem Curation Extension is about finding ways to create valuable links in the Steem attention-sphere.

Activity Descriptions

Steem Curation Extension

Language expansion

@o1eh posted about content promotion (another form of link creation 😉), and I noticed that the Steem Curation Extension had highlighted the /promoted posts in the screen capture as orange, not blue - as I expected. We were able to conclude that the issue was in the language. When @o1eh switched from Ukrainian to English, the coloring was correct.

So, I went through the condenser github and got all the relevant strings in all available languages, and I added them to the Steem Curation Extension. I believe it is now highlighting correctly for all available languages.

Fix for Linux

@michelangelo3 let me know that the extension was failing to install because of a case mismatch in the manifest.json file. This surprised me, because I had never seen a failure like this. It turned out that it was related to the operating system. On Windows (where I tested), the file naming is case insensitive, but on Linux it is case sensitive. So, I set up a minimal Linux test environment using WSL (which is now Open Source, by the way...) and I fixed the file.

New version uploaded for review

After making those changes, I installed it for a week for testing, then packaged it up as version 0.5.1-beta and submitted it to the Chrome Web Store. It is now pending review.

Thoth

I have continued to test screening and AI curation with Thoth. The main changes in this iteration were the following:

1. I moved the AI prompts into files so that a Thoth operator can customize their LLM prompts without needing to modify the code;
2. I added an author whitelist so that authors and delegators can join together as teams and use Thoth to compete against the content-indifferent generation of voting services.

Additionally, I am continuing to run it daily from the @thoth.test account so that I can try to identify where changes are needed in screening and/or AI prompting.

As mentioned in the introduction, the ability to reward teams that are comprised of specific authors and investor/delegators (barely) completes my initial vision for the project. Investors get passive rewards, and authors have an incentive to produce content of lasting value. There's a lot of room for improvement, but I'd say that the proof of concept is complete. Here are the criteria that I specified above:

Phase 1: Use AI and other automation to find interesting active content, post about it, and deliver beneficiary rewards to the authors (and continually refine it to drive towards finding the best content).
Phase 2: Use something like PPS to deliver (passive - no posting needed) beneficiary rewards to delegators who want to support this "attractive" content.
Phase 3: Discover exemplary content that has already paid out and deliver beneficiary rewards to those authors, too - indefinitely extending the payout lifetime of a Steem post.

Minimal versions of each of those items have been implemented (much faster than I had expected).

Due to the 8 beneficiary soft limit on each post, Thoth is currently limited to a total of 6 authors + delegators per post, so teams would be limited in size, but rewards can be distributed fairly and the use of multiple posts per day would mean that teams can be somewhat larger than this per-post limit.

The SLIP protocol

I already wrote about this, here, so I don't have much to add. The fundamental idea is that the Steem blockchain can be used as a free database, but a naive implementation would require the use of sequential data, which can be very slow.

The SLIP protocol describes a general format that can make use of external indices for direct access to any sort of sequential data on the blockchain. This could make the blockchain's free custom_json transactions useful for any number of different applications.

@danmaruschak then pointed out that even the indices might be moved on-chain through the use of editable posts.

This exercise also marks my first excursion into this "vibe coding" methodology.

Next up

Hopefully, I'm done with the Steem Curation Extension for a while. I have many ideas for improvement, but it's not a priority right now, unless new problems crop up.

For Thoth, I plan to continue working on improving the screening and prompting. I'll be working on implementing screening for new parameters such as account age, number of active followers, and feed reach, along with anything else that catches my attention.

Reflections

Attention economy vs. Crypto economy

As discussed in the Introduction section, I believe that Steem's value has a crypto economy component and an attention economy component. To maximize the value of Steem, both of those components need to be maximized. Historically, it seems to me that developers have largely focused on the crypto economy while neglecting the attention economy.

Let's take a look at Steem's currently funded projects:

Description	Crypto Economy	Attention Economy
Funding a centralized wallet (@dao.reserve) from STEEM DAO (@steem.dao) to cover the costs of developing Steemit	TBD	TBD
Echelon - A Fully Decentralized Sidechain for Steem	Yes	No
Cryptid Hunter – STEEM Blockchain-Based TCG P2E Game Migration Proposal	No	Yes
Steem Wallet: Advanced Upgrades & Features	Yes	No
Modernise steemit.com Interface	No	Yes
Fix Steem Build - Definitely Not An Easy Task	Yes	No

That's actually more balanced then I had expected. 3 projects focusing on the crypto economy, 2 building for the attention economy, and one with the potential to impact either or both.

Personally, though, I'd argue for an 80/20 split in favor of the attention economy (for now). Steem was an innovative cryptocurrency technology when it came out in 2016, but now it has fallen behind in some ways. With current attention-levels, large amounts of catch-up investment are not really justified (IMO).

Instead, we need to capitalize on Steem's still (largely) unique features - free transactions, custom_json operations, on-chain social media publication, and the reward mechanism in order to reclaim attention. When attention levels grow, then catch-up crypto investment can be justified and funded.

This is not to say that current crypto-focused projects should stop, just that we need to fund proportionately more attention-focused projects.

Which leads to "links" - prerequisites to attention building.

Reflections on links (aka bridges, connections, relationships)

As noted in previous posts, more than 99.9% of Steem's content is hidden before the payout horizon. For every 1,0000 posts on the blockchain, roughly 998 have already paid out. To the crypto economy, that is dead weight. To the attention economy, though, it's hidden value.

For as long as I've been here, authors have asked for lifetime payouts on their articles. Now, with Thoth we see how it's possible. To me, this is the top priority for link value - find that hidden value, bring attention to it, and get rewards to the authors who created it. Of course, there are also many other link-building mechanisms that should be explored by authors and rewarded by curators. Here are some examples:

1. Of course, there are standard SEO practices.
2. Reply-articles: authors reply to other Steem articles or content elsewhere on the Internet, and (IMPORTANT) engage with the original creator. For example, for my recent post, Interlune's Moonshot: Unlocking the Moon's abundant resources to satisfy needs on Earth, I didn't just summarize content from Twitter. I also tweeted about it and mentioned the video-owner in the tweet.
3. Steem articles should have HTML/markdown links to relevant external resources. The more the better. Researching and editing to create relevant links is time consuming, so curators should recognize when it's done well.
4. @steem-atlas is a great effort in this regard, because it has the potential for creating links in the real world, not just online.

There is a chain of command here. In order to build the attention economy, authors need to see the blockchain as more than just a reward harvesting mechanism, but it doesn't start with authors. Investors need to train the curators, and curators need to train the authors.

Conclusion

This post covers several areas of focus from my recent development efforts. This includes updates to the Steem Curation Extension, progress on the Thoth project, and a new conceptual description of the Steem Ledger Index Protocol (SLIP).

In reflections, the post talks about optimizing Steem's "attention economy" in addition to its "crypto economy." The article makes the case that maximizing Steem's value requires balancing investments between improving the underlying cryptocurrency technology and building features that drive user engagement and content discoverability.

The reflections section also argues for the importance of links and relationships in the attention economy. Strategies like encouraging SEO best practices, encouraging reply-article interactions, and incentivizing the creation of external content references are proposed as possible ways to unlock the hidden value in Steem's existing content store.

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Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

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^{Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.}

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