The Quality War: The Fight Over STEEM's Future [part I]

tl;dr

• Competitors are coming, who will compete with Steem in regards to the quality of content
• The current Algorithms aren't enough
• But there are things we can do to help Steem come out on TOP

"TITS AND TRAVEL"?

If we look at Steemit in isolation, there is no reason why one type of content or another should dominate the frontpage. After all the content is upvoted by the community and the community defines what is good content.

But Steemit does not exist in isolation from the rest of the interwebs. Quality is not only defined by the community as it exists today, but also by all the other possible members of the community.

These are people who are not yet convinced that Steem is the best platform for social interaction on the whole internet.

But why, you ask, would anyone, if told about Steem, not see the ingenious simplicity of real rewards paid out for providing real value?

WHY QUALITY DOES MATTER

Steem is cool. The community is fun. Steemit.com is slick.

BUT! Currently Steem is not only cool but GREAT, because: ITS THE ONLY ONE!

This seems to have gone largely overlooked in the discussion.

Everyone who knows anything about the crypto-currency space will have to admit: for every possible variation of altchains, there are any number of projects trying to bring them to market. The Steem blockchain is no exception!

Once competitors enter the arena, there will be competition.

And competition will focus on the QUALITY OF THE EXPERIENCE that the different communities (=> now as brands) provide.

The STEEM brand will need to compete with OTHER brands for the TOP position.

COMPETITORS

Altsteems are coming. It might not be for a month, it might not be for 3 months, but by the end of the year there will be several competitors to Steem. Why? Because Steem is a success!

• Part of it will be people who start from scratch and want to copy Steem

• Part of it will be people who had something similar planned (a new social network, a new crypto-currency) and slightly alter their plans to mimic Steem

• Part of it will be people who have been working on the exact same thing (e.g. AKASHA (which is based on Ethereum))

Competitors are coming, and it is in the interest of STEEM to be READY.

If you want the STEEM currency to keep rising, we need to deal with the quality problem. WITHOUT GETTING DEFENSIVE about it. WITHOUT ALL THE DRAMA. Just deal with it.

WHAT ABOUT STEEM'S ALGORITHMS

Thanks to @dan and the team at Cryptonomix, Steem is a very well designed product. It gets so many things right, which is why it is enjoying the success it is, and will continue to keep growing very very rapidly.

But it is this rapid growth that poses a challenge. The current algorithms are alright for this starting phase, but they have several weak points. These are problems that Steem only faces because it is so successful. We could call them growing pains.

1. The division into tags is too weak. Since most everyone will multi-tag to gain exposure, posts in a certain tag don't necessarily have much to do with that tag. The more new posters join Steem, the more confusion this will lead to.
2. Whales have a disproportionate effect on what gets seen. It's true that some people are much more invested in this project than others, and yes they do deserve special rewards, but the curation process is currently very biased by who owns how much currency. This is an attention-economy, and what I pay attention to shouldn't totally be determined by other people's wealth. I want to pay attention to what interests me, personally, and people who share my interests!
3. Because whales have a disproportionate effect, and because whales profit more from supporting popular posts, a lot of potentially great posts are getting lost in the mass of posts. Again this only gets worse with more people. Whales have limited attention spans, and they are too small a group to comb through everything themselves. But posts that some whales do not see often get lost completely.
4. The moderation tools are lacking. It is currently way too difficult and inefficient to even try to moderate Steem, e.g. via flagging. I am not talking about moderation-as-censorship. I am talking about moderating spam, plagiarism, outright scams etc. There need to be efficient mechanisms to do this, and incentives for moderators to do the work.

WHAT ABOUT THE FIRST MOVER ADVANTAGE

Unfortunately for Steem there is little lock-in and few network effects as far as Steem's current value proposition is concerned.

Yes! it offers great value for content creators! But, so will it's competitors. That on its own is not going to cut it.

People who generate quality content will try out any and ALL of these new networks to see if they are rewarded there.

These are Creators who produce exclusive content on a daily to weekly basis, so they can try out different networks without much opportunity cost. Therefore they will not be locked in to Steem.

Trailblazing pioneers are not always guaranteed to stay on top of progress.

Sometimes they are overtaken by better competitors, the same way Google overtook Altavista, and Facebook overtook MySpace.

WHAT CAN WE DO TO HELP STEEM WIN?

I would like to hear from everyone what do you think we could or should do? I will combine everyone's best ideas (and my own) into my part II post.

This way no good ideas will get lost in the comments section, as sometimes happens.

Note that what is important for a solution is that it is ACTIONABLE. That means that there are concrete steps we can take as a community to make them happen. Try to keep this in mind.

But all thoughts are welcome here. If you don't know how to implement your suggestion, I will try hard to figure out what steps we could take to make it happen.

Some ideas may require changes to the core code, many others are possible without that (or possible by writing new additional code to fill out the ever growing Steem ecosystem).

Please let me know what you think.

#steemit #steem #cryptocurrency #moderation