RE: Who is Best Suited to Manage a Community and Make Decisions?
First, I have a few questions.
Am I correct in concluding you are frustrated with one-share-one-vote?
I’m curious about the use of the word disenfranchising. If we are operating under one-share-one-vote, where is the marginalization under one-share-one-vote?
Why waste time on something that isn't working right? So they leave for greener pastures and more fairness in how things work.
What would that be?
STEEM governance is stake-based. If Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to use his Bitcoin stake to force the community to implement BIP62, he’s out of luck. Under Bitcoin governance, it’s up to the miners to decide.
But if Steemit, Inc. wanted to force the community to implement a hardfork (to fix an exploit, for example), they could, though they usually choose not to, preferring cryptographically verifiable consensus.
Under the Bitcoin governance, the people with the most stake are impotent unless they also have the hashing power. Under DPOS (delegated proof of stake), actual progress can be made to improve the platform.
DPOS can even allow for line-item-veto on certain controversial changes, as we’ve seen. It’ flexible. It really is the best governance model. It may create frustration, but it’s nowhere near a failure in any way.
Power and quantity of shares means nothing. 1 share = 1 vote gives all the power to those who have the most shares.
Steemit.com is not just a company/corporation of Steemit Inc, or a blockchain Steem. Steemit.com is a community that makes it work or fails.
Do you want to run it like a corporate centralization of power, or a community?
If you want things to stay centralized in the power and decision making of those who have the most shares ok, but that won't succeed for a decentralized vision of society that I see Dan having the vision to make in the long term.
Anything but the place where things aren't right = greener pastures. All anyone has to do is remove themselves from an undesirable situation where they don't need to deal with it, and that becomes a "greener" pasture for them. There doesn't need to be another option as you seem to be implying.
Code was created for a certain effect. If the effect desired is not manifestable given current code, it can be changed.
Shareholders and the wealthy don't decide how things function within an organization and daily operations. That's what employees know how to do, and are in charge of making work. The corporate model is not a community model. A choice has to be made of which success you want. Disenfranchise the community by keeping them disempowered in hope the shareholders know what they are doing and can manage the community (not working), or actually give the community the self-determination to organize how the community works and create something themselves that will be built on a solid foundation of common-unity decentralized empowerment to each individual and not centralized concentration of power to rule over and decide for everyone.
Make the community aspect work, and then you get success and the money comes in. If the workers are disempowered then they community isn't intrinsically motivated to thrive for success of the overall organization. Everyone is just in it for themselves. Get out of the corporate mindset.
I agree it's far too early to label the current model a failure. It seems to me that stake is continuing to be distributed and while it will take a long time to achieve more balance, we need to work more toward achieving that end within the current framework rather than constantly changing the rules.
When I look at the accounts of a handful of the most controversial whales, I see them making very little rewards proportional to their current stake. They do not take exorbitant sums from the author and curation rewards pools and some are actively powering down. As the rewards pool is distributed each day, their stake is getting more and more diluted, lessening their influence on the platform.
Dolphins and minnows who are active writers and curators are consistently outperforming their current level of stake, thereby growing their influence on the platform.
What is slowing this process is that most smaller participants are not using what influence they do have to good effect. I see many accounts doing very little curating, thus abdicating that power and slowing the distribution of Steem across the user base. Perhaps Steemit needs to look to integrate an autovoting system directly into the site and educate new users on it. It could even simplify such tasks as delegating a certain percentage of voting rights each day to a particular tag category so that users can simplify the task of supporting the communities they are interested in. Trails and delegating votes to manual curators do the same essential task, but how many minnows use these? Simple, straightforward, integrated solutions for exercising voting stake would be great. The witness voting system is already a model. Applied to curation voting rights, with a clear interface and documentation, we could really start seeing the platform properly rewarding the will of the stakeholders each day, organically distributing Steem into the future.
I've also long encouraged showing the "minnow math" and integrating smaller payouts into the UI. Busy does calculate out to a third decimal place and while it's not much, it is more encouraging to see a vote move a post by a couple tenths of a cent rather than not see it move at all. New user retention and activity may be greatly improved by such a simple change, as people can literally see that their actions are not worthless.
User participation is first and foremost. I'm always 100% Steem power, and voting. That's the basis of the grassroots movement we need to distribute the stake to a wider world.