You've put a tremendous amount of effort into this post and it deserves to endure as a pinnacle of scholarship!
Funny, your description of different barter practices made me think of the book The Gift by Lewis Hyde, which despite the way it is advertised on the cover is really more of an economics treatise. And then you mentioned gifting economies in the first comment.
Which is kind of what we've got going on here with Steemit, isn't it? Our voting power builds up throughout the day and then we build value and community by exchanging it freely with those we admire.
Excellent effert ... nicely put.
mmmhmm! I'll check that out, Thanks Winston!
Hahaha! It's true!! It has a lot of parallels to gift economy. You want to know a secret?
When I think of Steemit as gift economy, I feel super happy about it, but sometimes my brain gets knocked into the rut of thinking about it as "What am I getting from it?" And thats usually when I feel kinda crappy about it all, and critical...I try to keep things in the first place, but you know...every day is different.
There's a balance.
I came here thinking, "I'm just going to write the best I can and enjoy reading a bunch of interesting people."
Within a day I was like, "Only 10 votes on my post? What am I doing wrong?"
I think as long as we can keep our focus on giving, and treat the (wildly inconsistent) payouts as an occasional gift, we'll do okay.
Yeah!!! That is totally the deal isn't it. It's all about the frame of reference.