RE: @ura-soul Witness Application - Creator of SteemOcean.com

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RE: @ura-soul Witness Application - Creator of SteemOcean.com

kafkanarchy84 in #witness-category • 7 years ago

One thing I would like to make sure of, is that there is nothing in your philosophy or leanings against the original stake-weighted voting system here on Steemit. Many say it is "unfair" not understanding what stake-weighted voting is. Basically, I loved reading this post and your life story, and you've got my vote. As long as their are no Communisitic ("redistribution") leanings, I am super excited to have you as a witness.

I hope that won't be seen as a strange reservation/comment. it certainly is not personal. Just wondering.

7 years ago in #witness-category by kafkanarchy84

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ura-soul 7 years ago (edited)

Great, thanks for your support! :)

Before I say anything else, I just want to make clear that I support FREE WILL and real balance - so regardless of the political ideology that some of my ideas might be associated with in any particular observer's mind, the reality is that if any idea/policy results in overpowering people and preventing them meeting their needs then I don't support it. Given that communism typically has involved huge overpowering of people and destruction of much of Earth's greatness, I could never support communism. I also don't intend to decouple Steem Power from vote weighting.

I do have some problems with capitalism as it stands, since I can't fail to notice that nearly all of the world's wealth is in the hands of a tiny minority - while other people die of hunger - this too is out of balance and needs to be corrected.

If I were going to slot the infinite potential that I am into a political box it could only be something like 'voluntaryist' ;)

When I first used Steemit I did not like it much because I realised it can easily be taken over by groups and individuals who have the most money on Earth (and I also got paid almost nothing for my first 100 posts). I have seen more than one excellent social network be completely (and deliberately) destroyed by certain corporations who took them over (such as Cisco taking over and then totally failing to maintain tribe.net). For this reason I am interested in making choices that can ensure a level playing field within the community, so that everyone with a voice can be heard when they have important messages to share with us.

A level playing field though, does not mean 'everyone gets paid the same' or 'ignore Steem Power levels when voting' - for me it is more about making sure there is a balance so that we neither have a dictatorship/oligarchy (where too much power is concentrated in too few hands) and also we don't have a situation where everyone gets almost the same amount regardless of the quality of their input.

Essentially, good ideas and 'proof of brain' must not be shut out because people with giant wallets want to come and distract us with worthless noise. Given that 'proof of brain' is the design idea within Stemit, to me this all makes perfect sense. The tricky part is ensuring that all needs are met - just as in the wider society - so big investors get their returns, but everyone else doesn't get depressed seeing 1 minute posts with a cat photo getting $200 payouts, while heart felt, world changing and powerful posts that took hours get hundreds of votes and a payout of a few cents.

Steemit already includes in it's algorithms a certain amount of built-in wealth redistribution - although I don't have any data on the details of how it is playing out. At present, if I were going to look at ways of improving the balance in the community in these areas, I would first focus on making sure that good content is easy to find by helping curators curate better and making searching and categorising posts more effective. In other words, I would look to optimise the website functionality to empower everyone in useful ways before I even thought about changing the payout dynamics.

For reference, I have no intention at all at present to push for any changes to payout dynamics. As far as I am aware, witnesses mainly just get to accept or reject packages of changes, as opposed to being able to fully design and implement significant changes of specific types according to their own ideas. Apparently, this is something that could be improved upon since it has generally resulted in witnesses just accepting whatever they are given as a package because they like some parts, but then end up accepting things they don't like too. This is exactly how modern governments trick us into accepting crappy policies - they tag on poor ideas onto legislation that is mostly acceptable. I'm not saying that there is anything malicious occurring in the the choices that are going into the changes that make it into the hardfork proposals, but I am saying that it would be ideal for witnesses to be able to vote in a more granular way - so as to accept or reject specific changes - rather than just big bundles of changes that are stuck together..

I'm sure that was a longer reply than you expected there. lol. It's a big subject though and one that I regularly get judged inaccurately about when I talk about these subjects in anarchist groups.. For somer reason people are obsessed by the capitalism/communist conflict and often totally refuse to consider that anarchy can operate on it's own terms. ;)

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kafkanarchy84 7 years ago

Thanks. I appreciate the thorough explanation. I think if the market wants to see cats and pay 200 dollars a post to do so, then so be it. I cannot and do not favor synthetic change as far as the market is concerned, for better of for worse, as the market corrects itself, in the absence of intervention, and in the case of the 200-dollar cats overtaking the place, the market would either get sick of it, and demand for new, quality posts would arise...or the market would leave, and the site would die, which is a disincentive for all investors.

Anyway, I can support you as a witness as long as the bedrock is non-intervention in the sense that cat pictures are not put under attack in the interest of "fairness." :)

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ura-soul 7 years ago

You are welcome. I just noticed that I mis-typed a paragraph in there which i have corrected now:

I do have some problems with capitalism as it stands, since I can't fail to notice that nearly all of the world's wealth is in the hands of a tiny minority - while other people die of hunger - this too is out of balance and needs to be corrected.

on the subject of the diamond cat problem:

in the case of the 200-dollar cats overtaking the place, the market would either get sick of it, and demand for new, quality posts would arise...or the market would leave, and the site would die, which is a disincentive for all investors.

The problem I am pointing to is not an issue where the market (steemit users) really DO want to see such things, but to the problem where those with the most money simply post any old crap and vote each other up on it just to drain the post payout pool. From a strictly 'financial only' approach, it makes sense for them to do that, but it is also anti-social and against the entire design of steemit which is intended to provide a space for 'proof of brain' to be the deciding factor (according to the whitepaper etc.). The market could die in such a situation and, indeed, I know of many people who left steemit never to return because of this exact problem (which was worse in the past than it is today). Some of those who do these things really don't care about whether the market dies or not and it is quite possible that some of them specifically want the market to die - what if Marc Zuckerberg suddenly decides to swamp Steemit with pictures of things no-one wants to see and they full up the trending list? Great for him, not great for Steemit.

It takes some kind of action to prevent what many would see as abuses of the system and generally it appears to be possible for the community to take action through posts and organisation against these problems and to stop them to some extent - so if that kind of action is appropriate then that's what I might help out with - rather than attempting to support some kind of code change. I have already done that with craig grant, for example, after it was exposed that he works directly with African scammers to get his 'magic money', with which he then bought steem with and drained the payout pool. He is now much quieter here.

In the face of unfairness it is not unfair to take action to restore balance - the key here is 'balance' though and balance means 'no part or aspect is being overpowered'. True balance is a rare thing so far on this planet, but when it is found it is the best of all things! <3

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ura-soul 7 years ago

You are welcome. I just noticed that I mis-typed a paragraph in there which i have corrected now:

I do have some problems with capitalism as it stands, since I can't fail to notice that nearly all of the world's wealth is in the hands of a tiny minority - while other people die of hunger - this too is out of balance and needs to be corrected.

on the subject of the diamond cat problem:

in the case of the 200-dollar cats overtaking the place, the market would either get sick of it, and demand for new, quality posts would arise...or the market would leave, and the site would die, which is a disincentive for all investors.

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