Sunday Musings: Does Steemit have Kids Running with Scissors? No, WHALES running with FLAGS!

Seems it's part and parcel of any community that there are going to be disputes and arguments from time to time. After all, we each bring to the table our own impressions and experiences -- call them opinions, ambitions, or our inner moral compass, or our sense of right and wrong, or whatever.

I guess that's probably just called "Growing Pains."

Steemit's Growing Pains

I have mostly remained an observer during the recent "Flag Wars" or whatever you want to call it.

After all, I'm pretty much a newbie to Steemit-- perhaps one step above "protoplankton," to use the popular ocean metaphors of Steem World. That said, I was inspired in part by a post by @dan-atstarlite which suggested the strongest asset of the community is our opinion, provided we also assume we are wrong... AND the fact that I suddenly found myself an actual participant in the "festivities" when one of my own posts was downvoted for being overvalued, I feel compelled to share a few words.

Let me say up front that I harbor absolutely no ill will towards @smooth for downvoting my post the other day... it wasn't all that brilliant, anyway. Had it been "War & Peace" I would possibly have pitched a fit. But it wasn't.

It's easy to get all caught up in our own stories... but the fact that some of the Whales think it is necessary to downvote content they see as overvalued isn't even about them, it suggests that the system isn't really working.

Or does it? 

Is Steemit "Broken?"

What does "working" even mean, in this context?

Which leads me to the broader question of what exactly it is we want Steemit to be? And to become? If there's no real consensus on what this place is trying to be, then it's all but impossible to tell whether or not things are "working." 

I briefly entertained the idea of a "community wide writing exercise" in which everybody would get to sit down and think about-- at length-- and then write about what Steemit truly IS and MEANS, in their mind, followed by their impression of how we build a lasting community... and everybody tags their story with the same tag. 

My point being, we'd get a huge range of responses... developers, bloggers, artists, blockchainiacs would all have very distinct opinions.

Here's another thing: This current "flag war" (or whatever you want to call it) with "Whales" disagreeing about the best path forward, is not a new thing!

Let's Travel Back, Waaaaay Back...

Please humor me, as I dial back the clock to 1999... when I became part of a fledgling project named "Epinions." What was unique (at the time) about it was that it was built around user generated content (product reviews), used "peer curation" to sort content in such a way that the "best" would be featured, and the "worst" would sink into oblivion. Oh... and the whole project was centered around the fact that contributors were rewarded (in cash) for their contributions to the community, through a system of revenue sharing.

Furthermore, in the earliest going, contributors actually got paid THIRTY CENTS per page view, if you can imagine! And, of course, there were a few of the very earliest web savvy members who ended up getting paid $6,000, $8,000 even $10,000+ per month for "writing reviews on the Internet."

"Oh. My. God! They are SO overpaid!" went the argument.

Sound vaguely familiar?

97% Death Rate: A Legacy of Failures

According to the old archive files on my writing backup drive (because I never throw anything away!), it seems that I have been part of approximately SIXTY web projects that started as "great ideas" with the common theme of being community content driven, often peer curated and involved some form of rewards or revenue sharing. Of those sixty, all but two screwed the pooch in one way or another. 

And these weren't just "Bob With A Server In His Garage" projects, but big time companies with tens of millions in venture funding, Wall Street backing and interviews on prime time TV. 

Keep in mind this doesn't even include the ones I looked at and went "This is obviously bogus!" on first sight.

Superficially, they all failed for any number of reasons from outdated interfaces, to security problems, to dodgy business models, to ill-conceived upgrades, to member attrition, to simply running out of money, to outright fraud and beyond.

Humans are a Bunch of Greedy Pigs!

The one thing they ALL had in common on a deeper level was the gross underestimate of the sheer destructive power of human greed when there's a reward involved. 

Please read that sentence again and commit it to memory! 

Regardless of which side of the Whale Wars you may be on, or supporting, the above is possibly the most important thing to keep in mind at all times.

Now, what makes Steemit unique is that it's blockchain based. And instead of a central company being "owner," we're all stakeholders, in a sense. Decentralization. 

That's nice.

Decentralization does not exempt us from dealing with the selfish sides of human nature. Human nature does NOT run on the blockchain... so we actually do know what we're dealing with, there, at least in a limited sense.

And we do have to deal with human nature, because here's the rub:

Even though there's much talk of bots, and voting bots, and algorithms, and hardforks and code, bottom line is that communities are created and built by people, not by tech. Bots don't "read" posts, they don't "agree" or "disagree" with them, they don't "like" them, and they can't tell if a post has that je ne sais qois that separates the brilliant from the mediocre.

So NOW What?

Before we can deploy tech to fix our troubles, we first have to identify the issues at a core human level. And if we don't do that, there won't be a long term Steemit... at least not as a vibrant and thriving social community that has a life of its own that endures beyond startup excitement.

From where I am sitting, that has to start with focusing on what it takes-- in human terms-- to build a community... and then worrying about how to deploy the tech in support of that. I know the Whales of Steemit-- in spite of their differences-- probably don't want the whole thing to go down the tubes, including their stakes. But that's going to require serious examination of our own motives (for everyone)... not just reactive and occasionally arbitrary retributions and playing tit-for-tat with barbs and flags.

For ALL of us. Not just for the person getting flagged.

And that would be a shame...