Game Theory In Reward Based Social Media Platforms

in #game-theory7 years ago

Let's assume we have a group of 100 people in a social media website like Steemit. There is a pool of rewards where all 100 people can benefit. Like most cases in life (and based loosely on the pareto principle) 1-20 people will certainly hold 80% of the total value, while the rest will try to benefit from the rewards. To gain rewards the content must be endorsed by as many people as possible or by knowing one of the top20 whales.

Politicians, actors and in general famous people are in that position because many people relate to them. In other words, they produce content that most people can relate to and so they are rewarded for their popularity. For one though to achieve such a level, one has to be as generic as possible. It is no mystery that politicians and actors talk mostly in generic rhetorics that can be interpreted differently from different kinds of people. This is also why words like "love", "god", "peace", "freedom" and the like always offer a bonus for those speaking them. One simply can't go wrong with generic phraseology because the crowd will do the job for you. Humans have a unique ability to take something generic and transform it into something personal. The more specific and unique one is with their statements and ideas the least acceptance that person will have. Even if someone becomes popular for a unique idea the market soon floods the concept to make it generic and popular. This is what I call a "Zero-Sum Erosion".

You might be wondering by now what relationship could the first paragraph have with the second. For any author in a social media platform that is based on rewards, endorsement from as many people is key for success. In other words, the top authors will be either the ones with direct connections to the capital (whales) or those who choose to write sensationalist generic posts that appeal to the crowd. This is true for any social media website either that is Facebook or Steemit. This is how things go "viral".

If the game of a social media website is dependent on a given pool — where people gain mostly either by being the initial holders or writing generic posts — then ultimately the posts will get generic and repetitive enough. This is what the system desires after all. These are the rules of the game that all parties decided to take part. Again, this is also true in all social media websites. A zero sum erosion where some benefit slowly while others are drained slowly. This also leads ultimately to a tragedy of the commons scenario and the collapse of the system.

There is really no other cure to this inevitable "social cancer" other than new people coming in, offering their own capital and hoping that somehow themselves or others in their close community will generate enough generic content and capital to sustain them.

In traditional social media websites like Facebook, all the rewards end up to the owners of the website and users are only left with emotional rewards for being part of the community. In places like Steemit, where monetary rewards are distributed throughout the network, the focus changes from emotional rewards to financial. Still, the same rules apply since the human capital is rather flexible. What changes is the nature of rewards.

Emotions cannot be quantified like money. Fame in social media also cannot be quantified unless one has a monetary model running in the background. When people engage in places like Facebook a viral video provides unlimited emotional rewards to every single person that watches it, for free. This offers (almost) an eternal backbone from the bottom feeders that recycle generic content for the sake of recycling.

In places like Steemit, the financial rewards are very visible for those who produce, whom they know and how they relate to the community. In other words, if emotions could be quantified like money the users would not at all be so excited and quickly bail out (rather than slowly like they do now with Facebook or like they did before with myspace and hi5).

I tried to simplify this game theory model as much as possible in order to help people better understand where reward based social media platforms are headed. I am still not sure how humanity will progress when it comes to socialisation through rewards or if rewards are even relevant to human socialisation given our primitive — almost automatic — human nature.

We demand community acceptance. The more the better. This leads to the eradication of individuality for the sake of rewards, whether those are emotional or financial. I believe based on this model one can calculate the demise of a social media website based on the amount of generic content generation. When repetition becomes inevitable, value drops to zero because no one has nothing new to offer. That signals the end of an era. There is no salvaging this situation other than providing a lottery system where the "commons" can hope (falsely or not) that one day can be alleviated from their unimportant position in the system.

Perhaps this is how and why most people can go on in real life. More or less same wage, bills and opportunities and once in awhile they are offered the opportunity to join the higher ups. Everybody hates the system yet everyone takes part of it because most of it decided part of it. An allegory of the Hunger Games if you like.













Sort:  

Great post and interesting thoughts.

If a 'unique' item is posted, then that has the ability to shock or entertain and therefore go viral, thereby breaking the mass or same-same material

I also wonder about the need on FB and steem for people to be the entertainment, ie the content producers.

Surely an audience should out number the actors by a factor of 10:1 or maybe 100:1

Which implies that viewers are far more important to a platform (or a concert hall) than actors.

Which would also imply that as a collective the viewers should be rewarded (as a group) at least as equally as actors.

But irrespective of rewards, without a strong & growing base of viewers the platform is doomed.

This is a potentially fatal flaw in the current steem logic IMHO

Thing is, the content creators are rewarded way much more than the viewers. And the irony is in the fact that the content is mostly recycled content from the viewers.

I agree.
I hate seeing a repost of something from Youtube with nothing added re explanation or context, just a rehash. If the steem plan is to swallow up YT I'm sure a bulk import routine could be written. (I'm not talking about say a News piece that uses YT link as reference material etc.)

Steem has an opportunity to turn media on its head and part of that is valuing readers as much or more then publishers (unlike current newspapers / social media etc)

A 50:50 is a good start. IMHO
but down the track I think readers should maybe yet 80 or 90% or the rewards.
Do we really want a blockchain full of "i did / ate this yesterday info"?
Is that stuff "valuable"? ie would I leave it for my grandkids?
If you played a great tune, or wrote a great artistic work that will go down in history as a "work of art" then that has "value" IMHO. Worth of 100's of people paying to look / watch etc.

So authors earn by producing and sharing in volume.
Readers earn by reading/providing time to review & provide opinion.

maybe I'm barking up wrong tree?
Time will tell!

I completely agree with you. While not entirely your point (rewarding "creators" and readers differently) you point out something I've noticed about steemit. I find much more enjoyment on a platform such as reddit than on steemit and I believe that the reason for that is in the comments.

On reddit, if one has something to say about a certain subject, one just goes to the comments and points it out. I've not been seeing that much on steemit, mainly (I suppose) because comments do not give as much money. The comments are usually the most interesting part of a reddit "discussion". Sadly that does not seem to exist here, atleast not to the extent I wanted.

I agree, the comments are the "discussion" of the original concept / idea.
And to me they hold value.
I don't profess to understand the details re "rewards", what I have seen are stats in regards to 50% of new users leaving. If 50% of new customers in my business didn't hang around, after I'd spent time & energy attracting them.... I would want to know why.
My 'guess' on that is the reward scheme is currently incorrectly focused to support platform growth (eg 400K -> 4m or 40m sort of growth) but maybe that is not the steemit plan? I don't know :-)

Indeed. Just like different authors take existing information and they modify the exact same content by synonyms and include their personal opinions. And voila,... New book edition/volume...

Concerning your post: Deep thinking and I appreciate this. I rarely see these type of people.

Notice that everything is a pyramid scheme. All organizations/insitutions...
The system we live in is a pyramid/ponzi scheme. That's why we at the bottom work endlessly and often with no result and the ones on top just have to sit and wait to get it.

Very interesting

I suspect that popularity, number of votes, etc. is not just a function of genericity of content, but also of the size of a poster's wallet. The richer posters will attract a bigger following because of the ever present hero-worshipping and the follower's perceived chance of getting some votes/money in return for being a sycophant.

Also, the chance of being accepted into a circle jerk is a function of wallet size ("who you know" depending on how rich you are).

I think these two effects reinforce and speed up the process you describe, as they work towards concentrating rewards towards the already well-off and widen the gap between them and the "commons", while at the same time making the content they produce irrelevant to their income.

But then again, maybe I'm just complicating your model for nothing 8-).

Totally agree. Pretty much this is what I was saying, but with extra steps.

This is life. Who gets the most attention gets everything. You might spend 4 hours writing and earn 5 likes, Lebron James post the photo of his breakfast and get 5000 likes.

pretty much this. I am just outlining the pointlessness of the whole scheme

Really interesting article. To be honest, I don't think steemit will evolve to a social medium.. more to a blog website where the best bloggers earn the most. But they still need to interact with their readers since they are the ones who support them with real money..

I don't think Steemit will remain a blog site. Maybe it will evolve into a close community where people create and exchange content. The monetary reward will die out.

But i don't think most politicians/actors get to their position by speaking generic stuff, simply because in a crowded market you will get 0 attention if you speak generic stuff.

In fact most of these people start out with incredibly specific, often very reactionary content that appeals to a very small but incredibly loyal demographic. The ones that do make it big are able to successfully dilute their content as their following grows, until it becomes very generic.

So just because the whales do it doesn't mean you should.

I disagree. Religions for example are much similar to one another and so the political parties. The difference is that through their generic philosophy they have one single aspect that is niche whether that is reincarnation, paradise or something in between.

Religions are similar today, after thousands of years of existence. That doesn't mean that they were similar when they began. In the ancient world, the question of "what happens after death" was a very important one, and there were so many opinions floating around. So early religions were anything but generic

If you were to start a new religion today, you would definitely have to have something unique. Nobody is going to pay attention to your religion if you regurgitate what the others have been saying for thousands of years.

This is interesting.

You are spot on with your analysis. This is a very well written post.

Interesante post. Una idea bien expresada.

What you call zero-sum erosion is so notorious on YouTube and steemit, luckily for youtube some new people bring a better, more intellectual, content like Vsauce or 3Blue1Brown. I hope there will be a wave of new and better bloggers for steem.

It will become a necessity or else they will become obsolete.

Will they? There's enough shitty creators on youtube with massive followings. I very much doubt that shitty creators will die out on steemit.

This is well written and explains how our need for validation and group acceptance can really limit us to only resonating with popular and crowd accepted concepts.

This problem is at the root of our environmental challenges and our mental health issues, both of which are growing exponentially as they feed into each other.

What use, intelligence if we use to justify existing bias?
What use emotion if it interferes with perception?
What use knowledge if we are lost in our heads while the real action continues around us?

The world of our senses, awaits those brave enough to let go of their opinions, those who still understand their environment and their own biology enough to trust it.