A Series About My Experiences On Steemit, What They Do Better And What Minds.com Can Lern From That (V)

Slowly I am getting to and end in this series. I think that I have found and pointed to most of the surface issues that are hindering Minds from getting having more success and a higher stickiness for user. But I still have a few suggestions. Here they are:

1. Avoid a poisonous atmosphere among developers

Every corporation, NGO and friends circle has its own mentality. Usually, this evolves on its own and is driven by both the circumstances and the characters involved. Here on Minds, it really looks like there is an excellent atmosphere, especially since the boss Bill @ottman is very comunicative and seems to act as a guidance for both the corporate part, the development and the internal (and external) mentality. He seems not to be out for confrontation, but in fact looks for better solutions. This is extremely important and sets the stage for both the employees and the user base. Of course I don't have any insight into what is hapenning behind the scenes, but usually you get hints about that in the grapevine. But nothing on that front, so far.

On Steemit it was the exact opposite, as I outlined it a bit in the first part of this series. The perhaps biggest problem is the lack of communication and direction from Steemit Inc., which is the owner of the Steemit front-end and controlls all the trademarks of the Steem blockchain. While the blockchain itself is controlled by the witnesses (=users who run servers for the blockchain for money), Steemit Inc. controls the general direction with its stakes in the trademarks and the still most important front-end of the platform.

The lack of communication leads to a lot of frustration among users, because the platform does have its problems and for example not even new forks are in any way announced. The only way, you get to know about it is bei either folling witnesses and developers in chats (boring) or you experience errors and slow loading times on the site for two days. If that happens, they are forking the system. "Forking" btw is another word for "updating".

As the grapevine goes, at Steemit Inc. they are busy rolling out SMTs (= Smart Media Tokens), which are designed that you can create your own coin based on the Steem blockchain. The advantage is that you can entirely use the Steem blockchain for that and don't have to run much of an infrastructure of your own. I think the plans by Minds with using an EOS20(?) coin goes into the same direction. Anyway, this SMT project seems to be consuming so much time that @ned, (co-)founder and owner of Steemit doesn't have time to take care of his community.

This gap gets filled by others and these others are very rich users (rich in the sense of Steem currency rich), who do as they please. They have massive power over the selection of witnesses, for whom you can vote as user, but since the power of your vote depends on how Steem-rich you are, it boils down to the top 0.1% to make the real witness deals. Just like in real life. A problem that arose with this gap being filled with rich users is not that it happened. This can be very fruitfull, because after all, when you are Steem-rich, you have a major interest in the success of the platform.

But somehow the mentality among the upper-class got tilted to anti-social, which is why I call them a pack of wolves. I don't know how it happened or when, but it is known that because of the behavior of some big stake holders, @dan, the second co-founder left Steemit at one point and set up his own project EOS. Without Ned or anyone else of the developers doing anything to check the power of this wolve pack, they simply rage on and drive away users and potential investors.

Another consequence is that a main junction of the Steemit environment is simply inexistent. It is the one where the main stake-holders, the Steemit Inc. developers and the witnesses meet. They all are system-relevant and it is them who drive the development and the direction of the Steem blockchain and its applications as a whole. The fact that this isn't a thing - for example regular chat meetings once per month with all present to talk about important issues - is quite telling.

The relationship on the level below is much better. Steemit lives from the initiative of developers, who on their own initiative built applications for the blockchain to improve the user experience. There is some communication between important users and them and also between witnesses and them. This is important and good. (Although, I have witnessed some nastiness there as well.)

No matter how good the relationship is between these developers and the the general mood at the user base, as long as this top-level junction is inexistent and as long as there is no sufficient and constructive communication from the side of the owners, there cannot be success in the long-run.

The morals here is to keep it going like right now, Mr @ottman, and prevent users (or developers) from getting too important who you don't trust or who show a hazardous behavior. Because, the more important an unhinged user with personal issues has, the more this user will use his power in a destructive way.

2. Don't privatize the boosting option

Articles on Steemit are displayed by their first tag. When looking at the content of a specific tag, you will find several ways of sorting them. "New", "Hot", "Trending" and as special case "Promoted". New as selection is obivous and the trending one can be ignored (it exists because of the fact that Steemit has two currencies). Hot and trending are more or less the same. Both of them show articles that have reveived a lot of valuable upvotes. Hot are the ones who gained quickly and trending are the ones that have overall the biggest upvotes during the last week or so.

Since the value of your upvote on Steemit depends on the Steem you have in the system, you can push up an article higher in the listings when you already received a lot of valuable upvotes that translated into big payouts. This means, the system is massively biased towards Steem-rich users. A trick that has evolved from this is that you can buy upvotes from rich users, respectively from bots they are running. Bots simply count as users and their owners transferred their wealth to them. If you as small user want to get to the top, you can take what little you have in Steem and transfer it to such a bot and in return, you get an upvote.

https://steemit.com/funflowers/@doodlebear/and-again-the-real-reward-pool-rapists-are-not-haejin-and-sweetsssj-but-nextgencrypto-and-his-likes

On paper, this upvote is much greater than the money you've paid in the first place, although there are signs that the bottom-line is negative for you. The bot bank on the other hand wins big with that business. But after all, you get your content to the top. This creates several problems. One of them is that the supposed "proof-of-brain" idea behind the Steem blockchain gets nullified (because it's not users with a brain giving your post relevance, but the creator himself with his wallet), and another one is that it keeps the vast majority of users small and makes the big users bigger.

While you could call this "capitalism at its best", you can also argue that a Social Media platform is not a complex open economy, but a closed one with limited complexity. Therefore there are system-immanent reasons why the meriocratic aspect of capitalism doesn't work. There's a good chance, that Steemit ends up with an allmighty oligarchy ruling over the reward pool, while there are thousands of small users who can't get by. This leads them to leave and since the value of blockchain based currencies is mainly driven by the number of users, this development can lead to the implosion of the platforms value (and its underlying blockchain).

Minds should therefore make sure that the boosing never gets into private hands - or at least not into bot hands. There could be a situation Minds, where important users start selling their upvotes and they possibly do that cheaper than the system allows it to be. Not necessarily to get into the top lists, this seems not to be a thing here, but to maximize the mutual share of the reward pool. Minds-rich users get the certainty for a payout by accepting payments and Minds-poor users receive the possibility of getting a higher share of the reward pool than what they have paid for. Sort of an arbitrage.

This kind of actitivity itself must not necessarily be hazardous, because users have only a limited time. But the institutionalizing with the usage of automated bots would be, since they can run 24/7. That's why Minds must develop ways of keeping the business either monopolized or at least make sure that such a market would only be driven by human users without computerized tools.

3. The nightmare of Minds as a playground for bots

On Steemit, bots play a major role. There are plenty of spam bots which just post junk comments like "nice post" in hopes of getting an upvote and other bot farms that only mutually upvote each other. Other bots post comments if there are certain keywords in articles and some bots give advice to new users, or they are automats collecting and providing content of certain kinds. The most prominent usage for bots is the sale of upvotes as described in the previous post. Overall, some of the activities are positive, some are controversial and some are damaging.

While impart the damage can be controlled with extra mechanisms, I guess that about 1/3 of the content creators are bots and remain undetected. This is way too much and the problem is that it is too cheap to set them up. It costs you maybe 10 minutes and costs you only a small amount of money. Then the bot can run 24/7 and bring back in the money and time spent. Running bots will quite likely always be profitable and so their share will grow without a limit and with that, their share of the reward pool will grow without a limit.

At one point - without significant changes - this will lead to the complete take-over of Steemit by bots, because real content creators are making too little money, which will cause them to go elsewhere. The Steem coin would therefore turn into a cryptocurrency (and not just a blockchain based one), because the "mining" which is the "creation of content" will be done by computer scripts. There won't be any difference anymore to official cryptos.

I don't know how you can prevent this, but Minds must keep an eye on this when transitioning the system to a blockchain. Perhaps this stupid "select 3 images" or the "you are not a bot" checkbox could help keeping bot farmers away from a take-over. Or maybe it can (also) be done on the level of the duration between content related activities. On Steemit, you have to wait 4 seconds between upvotes and 20 seconds between posting articles or comments. A normal user reading content needs at least 5 minutes to read an article, not to speak of writing one and perhaps one minute to read or write a comment. There is no rational reason why these 4 seconds should not be 40 seconds and the 20 seconds 2 minutes.

On Steemit, the choice has been made to be a bot-friendly place, but Minds can still prevent this and with the experience from Steemit, I can tell you: Real content creators and real upvotes are a much better reward than artificial ones.

In short, these were the suggestions of today:

1. Avoid a poisonous atmosphere among developers

2. Don't privatize the boosting option

3. The nightmare of Minds as a playground for bots

More to come tomorrow.

To the last post of the series.