Curation groups like curie have made all the difference in the world for me, and I am very, very grateful to them. So, I guess the more help they get, the more the platform as a whole will benefit. In a way, they are trying to find gems among all the massive amounts of posts published each day. So I'm thinking in the direction of arranging things so there is much less low-quality posting to begin with. How do we achieve that?
Firstly, with the coming of Communities, there will hopefully be so much less content within a given group. So the people in that group will find it easy to go through all the posts and vote on the ones they consider worthy. Like on most forums. But, if there is excessive posting from people who are looking to just make money without contributing to the purpose of the group, and it becomes difficult to go through all the new daily posts, there could be moderation or various other arrangements. (Not to be confused with a lot of on-topic, beneficial posts being made each day, which could be solved by creating subcommunities within the given community.)
Secondly, SMTs suggest some very intriguing possibilities. If we see the Steem blockchain as a very rudimentary socio-economic system, then from my understanding SMTs will allow each community to create its own socio-economic system by altering the parameters of the parent one (hopefully, without having to create their own cryptocurrency). There isn't any one correct model that all the people have to operate under (like it is with current countries and governments). It's more like - make it flexible and people will hopefully (but not necessarily) find a model that works in the context of their group and its purpose. One thing I really like about this is that the rules of the game (parameters of the system) are written in computer code, not in legal language like today.
So we have a very good starting point. Then, in order for a community to be successful in fulfilling its purpose, I would suggest they do the following:
- Define success metrics. This is how the people can know if they are making progress or not. For example, a success metric could be the number of successfully executed projects within the community. See what the number is, then make a change and see if the number is higher next month. Whatever metrics make sense for the given community.
- Start experimenting with the parameters of the system. One idea I have is to turn the post rewards the other way around - 25% for the author and 75% for the curators. Not everybody wants to be a content creator (especially writing blog posts) - why not given them the opportunity to make a buck by just curating? My hypothesis is that this will significantly reduce the number of daily posts, leaving much less competition for the remaining posts - so the ones that contribute to the community or the whole platform will still get rewarded well. By tracking the success metrics, a sweet spot for author/curation percentage split can be found for a given community. Another experiment: remove the 7-day limitation on payouts. Really high-quality content is good even after years. I hypothesize that this will lead to authors putting up less, but more high-quality stuff. Stories, books, music records, games, software products, (scientific papers?), etc. will thus bring money to their creators all the time, removing the tension for the creators to continuously post new stuff. I see this as paramount for the future of the Steem blockchain's model, but I realize that doing these experiments on the whole platform (rather than only within a given community) may have many negative retroactions.
What do you think? Do you see things in a similar way, or differently?
Good thoughts on the success metrics. One of the easiest metrics would probably be from capital generated and distributed in a community. How would you define a metric for altruism by the way?
Communities will almost certainly make curation better as there'll be moderators and more focused pile to work on. I'm pretty sure the devs are delaying the release of the communities feature for a reason. I think there are a lot of good community suggestions that are being considered like what you've mentioned for SMTs and rewards pool parameters.
Wrote something about communities and UI/UX yesterday that relates to what you're talking about, with some inspiration from @thevenusproject. Would love your thoughts on it: https://steemit.com/asksteemit/@kevinwong/how-would-you-map-out-steem-s-community-in-an-organizational-ui-ux
I wouldn't try to measure altruism. I would try to set up a system and measure the performance of that system. The social sciences often try to measure people and their "qualities" and it gets very, very difficulty and messy. I see the way forward as building a system and measuring how it performs. Then tweaking it continuously.
A community can have projects. If somebody wanted to know about the community, they would look at the projects pursued by its members. If the goals of the projects are directed towards meeting human needs, then it would be clear to people what that community is about. And they could call the community altruistic, humanitarian or any other word they prefer to use. At the end of the day, it's the goals that matter - and those goals have to be measurable so the people can know if they are meeting them or not.
For example, if I initiated a project about creating a new website on the Steem blockchain, one with educational materials that enables people to both learn and make money, some goals of my project might be to have people successfully complete sections of the content, keep them coming back and going through more and more advanced materials, etc., etc.