I don't think there's anything wrong with that assessment. It seems to be pretty much completely accurate.

Personally, I see it as one of the few places I can use proper Markdown to write blog posts and turn out a relatively nice looking product with minimal focus on the actual format, with the additional advantages of there being a somewhat interesting funny money scorekeeping system and a very much largely untapped but growing set of people who are interested in reading about some of the things that I enjoy writing about.

And that's it. I'm not a blockchain cultist, I don't expect to be changing the world, I have no expectation of earning any kind of real money that I can actually spend on something that I want, I'm not obsessed with cryptocurrency in general or STEEM in specific, I don't take the place to seriously, I don't expect Steemit to be the next great social networking breakthrough, I don't believe that the STEEM that I'm sitting on is going to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars one day…

I just don't believe any of those things.

If anything, my main investiture is that I *wish* it was a better game. I *wish* that it was designed to such that it would do largely what it's commonly sold as doing.

That someone can get 6% of the rewards pool by engaging in spam-y behaviors that make perfect sense for them to do? Especially in context with @paulag's [recent analysis which suggested that a good chunk of the flagging behavior on the platform, even assuming it was legitimate 100%, was only returning 6% of the reward pool back in the top?](https://steemit.com/steemit/@paulag/refilling-the-rewards-pool-for-better-or-for-worse)

Mechanically, it's just another case of ["we know what you are, now we're just haggling about the price."](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/07/haggling/)

The more I learn, the harder it becomes to take the platform seriously and the harder it becomes to take the irrational cheerleaders seriously.

I fully admit that I would like to take it more seriously than I do – but then things like this come up.

The usual reply to these concerns is, "well – it's still in beta." Which I would be happy to accept if anyone actually treated it like that was the case. Including the developers.

But that's not what we see.

And that's a shame.

> I didn't mean to suggest that this is the way Steem should be - I'm merely pointing out that this is how it exists as of today. The sheer amount of drama sucks and it's driving people away from the platform, just like the unadulterated PVP of old did in the first generation of MMOs. I tried to make that clear, that even despite my enjoyment of the that thrill, it wasn't what was best for the game and changes to the system were required.

Groovy, then we're on the same page. It was the fact that you are not in favor of that as a desirable state of affairs that was perhaps not communicated as clearly as you would have liked that was throwing me off. My fault, I'll own that.

(Though it does bring to mind a gedanken in which some sort of "profit earning" blockchain construct exists in the deliberately competitively FPS mode, where every verb interacting with the nouns in the system is inherently aggressive or clannish… But then I think I've just reinvented Bitcoin, and that's no good.)

> What's helped me though is at least realizing what the current system is, accepting that, and then moving on to look for ways to improve it. The community isn't going to change it's behavior for the better, the system itself needs to change it's rules and enforce a specific behavior. But in the mean time, this is what we've got.

Like the good [Bartle Explorer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_types) I am, I've just been searching the platform, walking to and fro in the Earth, seeking whom I may devour. The platform does not make it easy. The one thing that you want to be, without question, easy to do in a social media network is discovery of content. It comes very close to "you had one job." Steemit really fails at that job. Badly, really.

I discover most of the new content that I'm interested in on Steemit through a carefully minimized set of keyword matches running on @GINAbot. This is the base, most simple, most trivial operation that one can expect in a social media platform – and it's having to be done off-platform with the delivery of those notifications being done off-platform.

Why?

It's easy (in a relative sense) to come up with ideas which would improve the mechanics of this system to better reflect what we are told the intentions for the system are. I'm just not sure that what we're being told is actually what is being intended; there is a significant trust gap and I have no idea how to bridge that.

> That said, I'd like to note that all social interactions, and all institutions are essentially, well, games.

We of [House Tytalus](http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/House_Tytalus) would like to formally applaud your enlightenment and extend an invitation to become a Consors forthwith. ;)

> When the system actually works worse in its stated goal the more successful it is in terms of audience?

This is exactly one of the big issues that I have been concerned with but haven't had the right approach to combat.

You are correct – Steemit and the STEEM blockchain represent a system which is self-defeating. If the idea is to reward creators in a very direct way, and incentivize investors to come to the platform and put their money into it, which then increases the amount which creators are incentivized themselves – well, it is the very definition of a pyramid scheme, right?

The amount of money injected into the system via inflation every week is fixed. That pool is not getting bigger. As far as I know, there is no plan for that pool to get bigger because it would require an increase in inflation.

As such, there is no way to allocate more value to an individual sector or creator – no matter what percentage of the population is interested in doing so. In fact, looking at the numbers, unless it's one of the top 40 people holding more than 90% of STEEM on the platform – nothing that we can do will make a significant dent in how those resources are allocated.

The #BI group looked at some stuff recently trying to figure out how much of the reward pool was redirected back into the top by the activities of Bernie and @steemcleaners, and the rough estimate was – assuming all of those acts were virtuous – it ended up pouring 6% of the value in a single week back into the top of the reward pool.

6%. All of the work, all of the effort, all of the VP which could've been going to upvote content which people actually wanted and would like – ended up making a difference to the total reward pool of 6%.

For people who aren't in the upper echelon, that's an extra few cents – maybe. For real minnows and plankton, which I probably still count as, it's not even that. It's not quite rounding error.

Between the issues with scalability and the questions about how much influence you can actually have over the experience at a personal level – Steemit has some real problems.

Like you, I'm basically using it to help incentivize myself to write longer pieces and get that work in front of people. I could be doing it anywhere, including Medium, where they have a reward system which actually pays in a real fiat currency I could buy a hamburger with. For the moment, I'm doing it here – because this is more amusing.

But I, like all the other creators on this platform, could be gone tomorrow and lose effectively nothing.

Maybe changes will be made. That would be nice to see.

Breath holding is not advised.

I'm pretty sure I did not sign up to find myself in the middle of a war zone, with petty warlords leaving a trail of down voted bodies across the landscape, tearing down the edifices that others have erected because they could.

I'm pretty sure I didn't make this place like that.

I'm also pretty sure that I didn't make it a place where spamming is trivial and profitable, marginal content was rewarded as much as that which takes significant effort, and someone else is always looking over your shoulder trying to decide if you have "earned too much" on something.

I am almost dead certain that I didn't make it that way.

When I look for wisdom, I usually like it to reflect the actual experience. If it doesn't – it's just words. Maybe it's words that make you feel good, but they don't have any meaning.

This place is a petri dish, I'll give you that, but the cultures within don't reflect the desires of most of those who are standing around the edge. The cultures are from the most virulent and active infections that got to the dish first.

Maybe you could make penicillin from them, but if you're looking for something valuable, you're far better off looking around the edges of the dish for almost overlooked samples and ignore the mess in the middle.