Prelude of Thanks and Acknowledgement

Yesterday I wrote my first blog on steemit.com and was very surprised by the kind and generous reception I received for lambasting the management of the platform.

I even won a prize, thanks to the generosity of the good folk of Discord. A special acknowledgement to a guy called @instructor2121. I know he has a real name because he was a very human and ‘Social Media’ kind of guy. I am yet to ascertain the value of this prize. It does not really matter – I felt warmly welcomed. @krnel, @paradise-found and @bitcoinparadise were equally generous in their welcomes, as were several others. Four times my offering was reposted – resteemed I think you call it.

My sincere thanks to those people (and the ones I have not mentioned) for being very humane and warm!

To the bees and the ants

Steemit.com is, in name, a social media platform. It promises that you “will come for the rewards and stay for the community”.

Social Media implies some semblance of Social Behaviour. There is, from the observer’s perspective, a great deal of social ‘activity’. There are thousands of blogs posted and votes for these posts being cast and comments being written beneath the posts and it is a busy, busy hive of activity!

What appears to be unappreciated to the casual observer is the structure which supports and directs the workflow generated by this great hive of activity and how and where the fruits of the labour being carried out by the collective are stored and consumed.

The data available to all shows quite clearly that 95-98% of the revenue available in the ‘Rewards Pool’ as it is termed, is distributed to less than 5% of the community.

One of the reasons for the ghastly performance of the platform which I outlined yesterday is the management structure. There is none. No matter how much of an anarchist you might be (I have much admiration for the Anarchic ideology), order is still required in at least some measure.

In steemit.com there is order, though it is not as one might expect.

There are two society structures to which one can draw an immediate parallel: these are found in the natural world: ants and bees.

A colony of ants exists solely for the service of the Queen Ant; likewise, drones and worker bees only have function directed towards the feeding and care for the Queen Bee and her reproduction of more bees. This is the order of life without going into the complexities of either ant colonies, or bee hives.

Within steemit there are mechanical ants and bees patrolling the corridors of the nest or hive, ensuring that the nectar is directed back up for the benefit of the Queen.

The truly committed human worker will self-justify that by working away and doing the basics well there will be a day in the future which beckons and promises life as a ‘whale’.

This is a wholesome and worthy attitude. The downfall in the argument being self-imposed in blind seduction is that, with equal or greater measure to their progressive steps forward, so are those positions of power moving further away and up the scale.

For every morsel earned by the worthy worker, there is a Queen Bee earning several thousand times the amount of morsels. There are quite a few Queen Bees in this particular hive; all of them are hungry, some may say avaricious.

So, the ocean is there to be seen. It all echoes of The Myth of Tantalus, who was made to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches. Whenever he reached for the fruit, the branches raised his intended meal from his grasp. Whenever he bent down to get a drink, the water receded before he could get any.

Equally, the predicament of steemians brings to mind Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, the allegorical tale of a man forced to roll a bolder up a hill, only to see it roll back down upon reaching the summit.

I am not suggesting that one’s morsels will follow the rock down the hill, just highlighting the futility.

There is a lesson in all the futility for the ‘whales’ who are probably too busy oiling the cogs on their algorithmic, robotic machines. When there is criticism about, one can always judge the calibre of the person or people being criticised by their preparedness to stand and engage.

The story of ostriches sticking their heads in the sand is, of course, untrue, though there seem to be a few whale snout prints in the sand.

The lesson to the ‘whales’ is that ‘Social Media' is not an activity typical of bees or ants. The principal participants ….

... are human!

One immediate suggestion is to produce a weekly summary of all the revenue generated and show its application: Author Rewards by Account, Curation Rewards by Account, Allocation to Administration, R&D, Investor Rewards (Dividend/Interest Payments), Allocation to Head Office – the whole lot - it is supposed to be transparent, is it not?