Healthy society maintains good balance between greed and selfishness and need for social interaction between its members.
A post Anarchy is a Cool Idea…But can it Actually Work? from @buggedout is good example how decentralized Steemit could and should work.
I think that this quote from my comment on his post describe his point quite accurate:
Two extremes govern our behavior. On one side is greed and selfishness and on the other the need to be social and connected. In my opinion anarchy is equilibrium of this two extremes.
Let me elaborate the matter a little more in detail:
Anarchy is defined as a state of two extremes. On one side is complete disorder of society and denying of any governmental and hierarchical structures and on the other side is a state of self regulating mechanisms organizing society.
The first state causes chaos, disorder and violence, which is further exploited by dominant individuals presenting themselves as a savers of society and demanding power for themselves which lead to dictatorships.
Second state leads to the freedom limited only by rules achieved by consensus among all members of society. A common social norms provide rich interaction among people and propels this kind of society to higher and higher levels of social development states.
And what have self upvoting in common with anarchic properties of Steemit community?
Self upvoting is a tool for promoting selfishness and suddenly everyone mind only about propelling himself higher on the social state ladder, accumulating more and more wealth in form of Steem power and SBD. Greed deeply implanted in our nature is only helping accelerate this disjunctive exponential process where richer become more rich and very small percentage of all Steemians by legal rules of this platform, literally are milking reward pool.
Many from this minority are witnesses and are responsible to securing block production of Steem blockchain. which is crucial for existence of a blockchain holding all data produced by us, participants in producing content. Voting for witnesses is based on amount of Steem power each account or user have (and they have it a lot), so they can vote for themselves and stay in power indefinitely.
Our trust is put in hands of greediest and most selfish group of people and this fact is a good reason for complete derail of Steemit and Steem blockchain.
Solution of this unbalance between greed, selfishness and social interaction is providing a new mechanism to counterweight self upvoting or just abandon self upvoting, to encourage users into greater social interaction and restore a balance on the platform again.
This post is a continuation of my earlier thoughts about self upvoting started in my post Upvote Myself no More few months ago.
You are invited to present your views on this matter in comments and you are very welcome to do this.