Lex Tenebris on Steemit SMT

as I can't resteem comments

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That seems a fair response, but I have some issues with it and with choices that had been made along the way.

But in order to make content rewarding work even better, different communities and organizations need to be able to determine for themselves what is valuable and what is not. In order to do this, they need their own token which symbolizes their unique subjective valuations. Another benefit of this is that the added experimentation can help inform the base token and layer.

That's lovely, but it didn't take two years and the planned implementation of SMTs to do any of that. If there was a real call for and interest in promoting content creation and distribution in ways that have been proven to be successful, what we needed was Communities implemented in a way which was transparent and usable on the blockchain. Simply providing the tools for user self organization and proper curation would have sufficed, taken only a few months, and been long done by now.

Moreover, I find it interesting that there is suddenly a recognition that "organizations need to be able to determine for themselves what is valuable and what is not" in light of the fact that the entirety of the Steem blockchain and its reward mechanism is based on the top-down assumption that the more people who "think something deserves reward", weighted by stake, is better than any small number of people deciding where that allocation should go. This particular change in policy and vision represents a much larger pivot than anyone is actually going to talk about because it's an essential repudiation of the underlying expectation of Proof of Brain on the Steem blockchain.

I don't expect that discussion to happen.

An SMT can be used to solve any of the problems people have been claiming blockchain can be used to solve, but which are limited by long/variable transaction times and transaction fees.

Which, according to the traditional in-house propaganda of Steemit, don't exist as problems here. After all, Steem itself has been promoted as a blockchain with extremely short transaction times and zero transaction fees. If the blockchain as a whole hasn't been sufficiently valued because of those traits, why should a cavalcade of alt.coins based on the blockchain be considered any more valuable? There's a little bit of Three Card Monte going on in this description. It is entirely upbeat without actually supporting a reason for it to be.

If an SMT can be used to solve any of the problems people had been claiming blockchain can be used to solve, then Steem itself can be used to solve any of the problems people have been claiming blockchain can be used to solve ? and you are stuck explaining why that hasn't happened.

In short, I wouldn't say that the role of content sharing and rewarding is in any way diminishing. In fact, it will be getting a huge upgrade. But at the same time the role of Steem as a financial layer that can add tremendous value to the global economy is increasing as well. Since this wasn't something Steem was used for in the past, the delta is larger.

I would be a lot more sanguine about taking this at face value if I hadn't already lived through the last couple of hard forks, both of which made things much, much harder and much, much worse for content creators ? deliberately so, to judge from the discussion around and between developers and witnesses regarding the motivations for the changes that happened. The role of content sharing and rewarding has been being deliberately cut, and if you need one shining example, look at the rewards for curation versus creation that we are now dealing with. The creators hardest hit are the ones down at the bottom who are spending their time creating content and thus don't have time to sift through the vast rafts of crap that it takes to do what is considered curation on the platform.

This is very much a case of "don't tell me that it's raining."

How is any of this, outside of hollow corporate speak, supposed to be an improvement for "the role of Steem is a financial layer that can add tremendous value to the global economy" in any way? The actual infrastructure is the same. You might could make a good argument that the time spent pulling the server apart into smaller pieces which can run in RAM was a good investment of time, and I might even agree with that. However, all of this jazz hands around SMTs and how they are supposed to improve the situation for anyone, especially communities, is bad performance art.

Ultimately, as it stands, SMTs are one more time sink for people who have extra funds to buy their own custom coin name and attach it to a forum. With that comes a vast amount of "no one actually understands how coins are supposed to work, what they are supposed to really do, and how interaction will occur, and ultimately the only impact will be moving stake between big stakeholders."

SMTs needed to be decoupled from the idea of Communities two years ago, when it might have made a difference for creators and consumers to be able to find each other and thus mutually make content creation and content consumption rewarding at a real level. Now they, like Tribes, just look like one more way for whales to play whale games and skim a bit of money off the top on the back of creators.

And that's a terrible shame.

The really funny thing is as much as I disagreed with Utopian.io in terms of public policy and sometimes even underlying philosophy, from a technical point of view I thought that the way they were able to break out their own community, with its own technical infrastructure, present a filtered view of the blockchain, and manage what ultimately was real curation of content was the most promising thing in that field that we've seen. And then, rather than have that approach taken up by Steemit as a way forward to build actual Communities, it got burnt to the ground.

That is a real problem and it's one that has been very long-standing.

Whoopee, we can make alt.coins on the Steem blockchain, catching up to Ethereum of several years ago. And it's done them so much good.

From the perspective of creators on the platform, things are not looking better. The real problems that they have been fighting with continue to get ignored and if they are seen, hand waved away as unimportant while the platform continues to forget that no commodity has a value unless it's backed with something that people want.

If the goal of #newSteem is to fully fall into understanding that what people really want to pay for is getting votes and rewards for voting and not creating content that people like and want, let's just say that outfront. Let's be honest. It will make the whole process much less painful. If the goal is to actually provide value that people can find, consume, and reward ? then let's do that, and stop laying a smokescreen.

Over the years, I have been alternately impressed and horrified by the technical acumen of those who are working on the Steem blockchain in an official capacity. But I have more consistently been horrified at their inability to understand and commit to the policy the system is supposed to implement. From the obsession with "don't cash out!" which essentially just means that creators shouldn't actually get use out of the funds that they receive to the absolute obsession with avoiding anything like what has been proven to be a functional and useful structure for social media platforms over the last decade, the overall movement has been worse than disenchanting or alienating ? it's been self sabotaging.

That appears to be continuing.

I get it, you would like a bunch of people with disposable income to drop some of it into the gaping morass of value that is the Steem blockchain, which painfully squandered its value in relation to other cryptocommodities by deliberately ignoring the one thing that gave it a backed value ? creator content. So because you drove away the majority of creators who didn't want to just create things for a single audience on a single topic, you want to move on to selling votes and alt.coins as the New Hope. I don't want it, but I get it.

If Steem itself did not act as a financial layer that brought tremendous value to the global economy, splintering it with SMTs will not make it more valuable or viable. If the technology it brought to the table didn't get leveraged, it's not going to. SMTs do not change the essential problem of cryptocommodities in general and Steem in particular ? that they need something to sell in order to be worth trading.

Perhaps you think SMTs will create a channel through which you can sell Communities ? while ignoring the fact that the competition has moved on without you and done it for free. If I can pay to create a Community and still be stuck with reward distribution as it is done on the Steem blockchain within that Community, how in the world am I supposed to compete with the fact that there are actual free-to-create Communities out there where people can share content of common interest, free of the ridiculous overhead of trying to understand Steem blockchain mana/RC/upvote pool/downvote pool/vote percent/etc./etc.? I can't even provide the convenient lie of "there's a chance you will make big bucks, or even moderate bucks that you can spend on a regular basis."

Because it just ain't so. In large part because of decisions made by core Steemit Inc. developers about how the blockchain works.

I appreciate the fact that you've taken the time to reply to me, but I wish that you had taken the time to actually reply to the issue I pointed out.

This is a bad place to be, and I mean that on multiple levels. SMTs aren't going to change that and that's a terrible shame.