Spectrumecons 2018 Year in Review (Part 1)

Happy New Year Everyone,

I am excited about what the New Year has to offer. It is going to be a year of many changes for me.

I am breaking my ‘2018 Year in Review’ into two parts. In Part 1, I will be focusing on my content. I will provide a recap of what I have done in 2018. To finish up, I will briefly summarise, the content that I expect to be posting in 2019. In Part 2, I will briefly talk about my year in general as well as what I have planned for 2019. I hope you enjoy the posts.

2018 Content

I had a busy year writing about economics and running contests. I normally write my economic posts as part of a series. This is because many of the topics that I write about are very content heavy and cannot adequately be expressed in one post. Even breaking content into several subtopics resulted in several long posts. My longer running series included game theory, market structure, Steem economics, basic concepts, and cruelty-free economics. For many of my series, I have written posts and videos (admittedly, my videos have fallen behind as of late). For the first half of 2018, many of my posts were contests. These contests included puzzle contests, meme contests, an economics challenge series, and the buying and selling game.

Contests

At the start of the year, I was running several contests. I continued my puzzle contests, which I started in 2017. The puzzle contests normally contained four puzzles. The first entrant to get all four puzzles correct won the weekly prize, which was normally 5 SBD (it was 10 SBD for a few contests). If I did not get a winner, the prize money would roll over to the following week’s contest. All participating entries also received an upvote.

I ran a few meme contests. I think I only ended up running two or three in 2018. As part of the meme contests, I would post four photographs for contestants to create memes. I allowed up to 4 entries per a person. I would upvote the first two entries. The prize money was normally 5 SBD. These contests were very popular. I got over a hundred entries for every contest. I would post all entries and let the Steemians determine the winning meme. Each contest received, in total, over a hundred votes. At first it may appear, that the contests were a great success but there were several problems.

Upvoting so many entries was a drain on my Voting Power.
People copied and sometimes changed their entries.
People voted based on friendship or nationality rather than best meme; this resulted in just a few memes receiving a very large percentage of the votes.
The money raised from upvotes barely covered the costs. Almost all the participants had very little Steem and/or Voting Power.
Considering the high number of participants, organising the voting and results was very time consuming.

Sadly, I ended the meme contests in March 2018 due to the above mentioned problems.

Six Week Challenge Series

At the end of March to the beginning of May, I ran my 6-week economics challenge series. This challenge series marked my biggest giveaway to date. In most of my challenges, I was giving away as much as 25 SBD. This prize money was awarded for first place, second place and one winner selected by myself. Raising money from contestant upvotes was not going to cover the cost of prizes. I spoke with @sweetsssj a couple of months prior to the series. She agreed to upvote the contest posts so that I could fund the prizes. Overall, the challenge series was quite successful. I was even able to make a small profit.

I let the Steemians vote for the winning entry as I did with the meme contests. The challenge series only had a few entrants, as the tasks were quite complex and required separate posts. This made it easier for me to setup voting. Sadly, the same issues regarding voting occurred again. People voted based on friendship or nationality rather than quality of entry. I changed some of the rounds so that the prize money given out by myself was higher than those that depended on voting. One of the challenges was a buying and selling game. This challenge did not require voting as the results were instead calculated by a spreadsheet. I turned the buying and selling game into a series of contests.

Buying and Selling Game

Around the middle of 2018, I started the buying and selling game contest. This contest was a more basic version of the buying and selling game that I introduced in the 6-week challenge series. The game did not have the problem of vote rigging or any potential bias from my own opinion. The model I created calculated the results using random numbers generated using a triangle distribution. The participants were informed of the parameters of the distribution, which were maximum, minimum, and mode. The contests were reasonably popular, but unfortunately, I could not keep the contests going as the posts could not generate a sufficient payout to cover the 5 SBD prize.

Since wrapping up the contests, I have powered up my Steem quite substantially. Once the price of Steem increases sufficiently, I will be able to reintroduce the contests. I would like to be able to include a second place prize as well. It would be easier if I could attract a sponsor. I am willing to offer a beneficiary reward to a sponsor as I have outlined in my post ’Looking for sponsor for ‘Buying and Selling Game’ contest and YouTube versions of results’.

Economics

It was a big year for my written economic posts. As mentioned at the beginning of this post. I put together, in some cases continued, some long series such as game theory, market structure, Steem economics, basic concepts, and cruelty-free economics. I also added to existing series such as ‘darkside of economics’ as well as created posts that compiled my work for easy reference. In today’s post, I will not discuss all of the series but instead, I fill focus on what I consider the more significant series of the year.

Game Theory

In 2018, I did quite a bit of work relating to game theory. I wrote posts about most of the main and basic concepts. I also discussed the application of game theory using a few real world examples. I looked at how game theory is currently applied on the Steem platform. I looked at how game theory is used in the real world for both good and bad. I even discussed some of my own theories and the relevance of these theories to the real world.

Market Structure

I completed both a written and video series relating to market structure. Market structure is a very important area of economics as it shapes both demand and supply for goods and services. The type of market structure determines if the buyer or the seller has greater control over price and quantity. Market structures need to be clearly understood to enable a comprehensive appreciate of demand and supply.

Steem Economics

I have used the term Steem economics for all of my posts that relate to the operating and functioning of the Steem ecosystem. In this series, I have covered many aspects of the Steem ecosystem. I have looked at rewards distribution and the rewards pool. I have written several posts about bid-bots. I recently completed a subseries, which investigated some of the current problems with the Steem ecosystem. In the final post of that series, I offered a combination of workable solutions.

Cruelty-free economics

I did not add that much to my cruelty economics series in 2018 but I feel the contributions are still worth mentioning. I completed the five areas of abuse very early in the year. I also wrote about the Melbourne Cup. However, my biggest contribution to the series was more of an indirect one. I looked at valuing time (quality). I even designed a model that could be used to determine the optimal use of time to maximise utility.

Mainstream economics typically looks at maximising utility or welfare through consumption of goods and services. I am investigating maximising utility and welfare based on the usage of time. Buying goods and services can add value to time but only for as long as they can be enjoyed. For example, you could buy a fancy car but you rarely use it, as you are overseas 10 months of the year. In regards to looking at value in terms of time, the car adds less value to your time than if you had more time to use or enjoy the car. Valuing quality of time could/should be considered a topic in its own right. However, it provides an important contribution to cruelty-free economics, as it can be applied to how time is experienced by both humans and other animals.

Other areas I have worked on in 2018

I have also put together a few other types of posts not directly related to economics. Such posts include updates and announcements. I have posted about my holidays and vacations. Recently, I have been posting my activity through actifit. I post on actift once or twice a week. I normally post on days I am most active or have done some different activities. Actifit is an interesting app that records activity through the mobile phone app or Fitbit. I have recently received a Fitbit as a gift, which is a great way to use actifit. Even on days I do not post, I still aim to reach the minimum activity count of 5,000. Actifit is really cool, I would recommend it to anyone.

Where I could have done more

Even though I had a busy year creating content, there are areas where I wish I could have done more. I have not made as many videos as I would have liked. I like to support my written posts with videos but I have several posts that I have yet to follow up on with a video version. I also did not do as much on my Cruelty-free economics as I would have hoped. Instead, I spent a lot more time on Steem economics, which I considered more of a priority considering the events happening on Steem in 2018. I would have also loved to continue my contests but a combination of less activity on Steem as well as insufficient post payout made them no longer feasible. Most of what I could not complete in 2018, I will work on in 2018.

Videos

As I mentioned in the previous section, I have fallen behind with my videos. Creating videos was a little more complicated than I expected. I created most of my videos on Dtube and YouTube. I created my buying and selling game results videos on DLive. Unfortunately, DLive decided to leave Steem and work off another blockchain. This was quite disheartening for me as I was intending to make most of my videos on DLive. I then intended to use DTube for all my videos. Unfortunately, I found that their business model and operations did not work not well with my content. My main problems related to deleting older videos as well as lack of curation of content by DTube. Most of my videos remain relevant after the 7-day window. I still have some hope DTube can improve, watch my video ’BYE BYE DTUBE’ for a more detail explanation of my problems with the app.

Plans for 2019

In 2019, I plan to continue with my cruelty-free series. I will be writing more posts about how my content complements, links and feeds into each other. These posts will be particularly important, as the bigger picture is not immediately apparent from just reading or watching my content in isolation. I will also write more about macroeconomics. There are many important macroeconomic topics that I have yet to cover.

I will also be making many more videos. At the moment, I still plan on using YouTube, I may switch back to DTube if they can improve their operations. DTube has a good community, which is possibly the biggest positive for them. I may use DTube for my results posts when I bring back my Buying and Selling game.

I will also post about my adventures during the year as well. I expect 2019 to be a very eventful year for me, so I will take the time to document my activities. I will also take the time to share some of my experiences from 2018, which have not made it into my posts yet.

This brings me to end of Part 1. Part 2 is now available. Thank you for taking the time to read this post. Have a happy New Year.

If you want to read any of my other posts, you can click on the links below. These links will lead you to posts containing my collection of works. These posts will be updated frequently.