Hi fellow Steemians!
I am using this platform since September ´17 and it has been a steep learning curve. I jumped right into it, without really understanding the mechanisms that steer it. It has been an awesome ride so far but my early enthusiasm got confronted with reality.
For all of you who are not up to date, there is a huge dispute going on over the last months between two users. Of course, I am talking about @haejin and @berniesanders.
To break it down quickly, @haejin is accused of raping the reward pool, gaining massive percentages every single day, upvoting his own content whilst @berniesanders runs one of the biggest upvote bots on Steemit and lost all of its reputation due to his "flagging-war" against @haejin.
The topic is highly controversial and splitting steemit into two camps. People are constantly arguing about what should be done and what is legitimate and what is not.
So, if Steemit offers these kinds of abusive backdoors, why shouldn´t you use them?
I think that the problem is neither @haejin or @berniesanders, these accounts and their methods/strategy are the symptoms of the working mechanisms of Steemit itself.
To me, Steemit is what I would call a Anarcho-Capitalistic-Platform, it favours self-ownership, private property and free markets.
Anarcho-capitalists hold that, in the absence of statute (law by centralized decrees and legislation), society tends to contractually self-regulate and civilize through the discipline of the free market
This is what we are seeing right now and what is one of the very exciting aspects of Steemit. The community is trying to solve this problem itself. People notice something is odd and are trying to find a solution for it.
So what are the problems?
- quality content is not getting the exposure it deserves
- people tend to upvote posts from whales because they are interested in curation rewards
- the flagging system is a mess
- too high rewards for crappy content
What is the solution? The community itself.
Steemit has one of the most engaging and sophisticated communitys that I have seen. We should be happy about the problems which are popping up right now. Steemit is still in its infancy and the sooner we are confronted with those problems, the better. If people see, that Steemit can solve those problems efficiently, this platform will rise far beyond what we see today.
Look at other platforms and copy their biggest strengths. Think about the ads on Facebook and how we could implement this on Steemit to rise its value. Look at the freedom of expression and access to information which Akasha aims to provide. And have a really close look at the Sola project (which almost has double the users of Steemit), their approach on randomness and content distribution is just working really well. Make every second post I see a random post by people who deserve attention?
I am in.
Steemit is such an innovative platform, the worst thing that can happen now is stagnation. Try new things out, fail and learn from it. I definitely see the potential to go big.
What do you think? Communicate, engage!
