One of the reasons we created Steem was to address all of the issues BitShares learned about funding. Among these lessons:
- only long-term committed users can vote (VESTS).
- it should be more profitable to be committed than to stay liquid.
- funding work should be easy with a small minority.
- spending should be mandatory, the only decision is what to spend on.
- millions of people should be able to receive funding, not just a few high-profile uses
- funding should be done "after the fact" not in advance
Steem probably has more hard lessons to learn, but hopefully it is a better foundation than prior DAOs.
This is the only one I disagree with. Why should spending be mandatory? Once a service captures a niche it should focus less on growth/features and more on efficiency.
(aside: I upvoted your post but see a red downvote?? is my vote on the blockchain up or down?)
In the case of Steem, there is a constant need for new content because old content decays in value very quickly. Here we assume that new content is worth 10% of the market cap per year.
(aside: that issue will be fixed soon, don't worry it counted as an upvote).
Sure, content is a cost of business for Steem, but I interpreted it like you were promoting forced R&D spending.
Which could still work if you see Amazon as a prime example...
Should have been an upvote...
I wonder what infernal pitch the criticisms about early adopter advantage will reach in a few years time. There is so little incentive to liquidate and so much to be gained, on paper at least, to stay vested. I have a feeling we will see enormous STEEM wealth differences between the very earliest adopters (anyone reading this close to the time I post it) and late adopters (those who come in a few years' time).
What these future critics won't be able to fathom is that the early adopters would have been long term holders by that time. Moreover, the critic's best move would be to vest immediately so that they could become the long term holders of the future.
Fortunately steem-voting is prediction-market style; but even here we can easily envision a loop of steem investor collective upvoting itself to the detriment of the ideal target-group(s).
This issue was addressed in the white paper. An investor collective successful in attempting to game rewards for themselves would cost them more in terms of capital loss than they would gain from payouts. If you assume they gamed it to earn 100% of all rewards, the price would fall by at least 10% and they would be locked into vesting STEEM unable to escape.
There are enough good people around to downvote that kind of attack that it is unlikely to ever be an issue.
Bad wording on my part. I didn't mean it as an attack vector. The active invested parties are currently deciding what people see when they enter Steem. They upvote based partly on what they think the other Steem investors will vote for (short term), what they think is objectively good content (long term), and what their own personal bias/tastes are (irrationality). The short term bias is obvious, and it might even help Steem at this stage to focus on internal issues, but eventually what investors are voting for will have to reflect what steem users are interested in, and it's not clear exactly how this will happen. What investors in Steem think is objectively good content is also something that will reflect their own bias, e.g. they might think content is "dumb" when in fact it may be suited for an ideal steem target group. Over time the people holding Steem will be the ones making the most accurate judgements about upvotes for the current investor group, not necessarily for the ideal target group. The plans of giving everyone a vote is probably going to help a lot with this problem, there may be many other fruitful ways to deal with it as well.
Love this ...glad to be part of a new idea!