Attention seekers and dishonest speakers: Ideas to incentivise good?

We live in an economy driven by attention where every available medium and surface is designed to draw the eyes and focus the mind on its consumption. It is no wonder people have trouble discovering meaning in their lives as what they have concluded is that something is not worth doing unless someone sees you doing it. Of course, what they do attempt to hide is all of the hypocrisy that passes their lips.

Social media of course magnifies attention seeking behaviours as it is the perfect medium to curate life's view and only show what a person wants to signal and the cover of single direction of the keyboard supports even more.

Reality is of course very different and can be in direct conflict with each post but, what does that matter when there are likes, hearts, stars and upvotes on the line? Introduce real-world value into the system and it increases the behaviours a magnitude again.

What is interesting is how many people support such behaviours, people talk of what is poor behaviours yet those that act as such are continually amongst the highest rewarded or, the least punished for their behaviours. Incentives are powerful things and everyone acts upon them and when incentives encourage bad behaviour, it is only natural bad behaviour reigns.

A study with three year old children done a few years ago indicated that incentivising sharing behaviours actually led to them being less likely to share in the future. This is no surprise to me really as rewarding it adds payment and that creates an environment of entitlement and expectation.

But here lays the issue as poor behaviour is incentivised and because there is a high return, people are willing to engage in it.

@krnel set me a bit of a challenge on a post the other day and I do not think I am up to the task but I am thinking to try to work out a solution.

The question was on how to incentive good behaviours.

How is that to be done? In real life, or on Steem, any examples to visualize how to go about it? Thanks.

I am not sure exactly where to start so I will throw some ideas out into the ether and see what responses come back. Perhaps people have better ideas than I or, perhaps that spark of creativity will ignite something as I find it so often does.

Curation itself is a way to incentivise the discovery of quality content providers but unfortunately, selling votes abd self-voting provides a higher return. If the curation percentage is higher, this is a disincentive for the content producers and may lead to lower quality.

For me, this means that the bidbots and vote selling needs to be disincentived to bring it in line with the incentives of acting well (real curation).

This is of course not the only bad behaviour here.

Vote trading amongst some of the largest accounts either through a spoken deal or implied deal runs rampant also. Essentially it is just cronyism from people who claim to be anarchists. They are replicating the very system they denounce although there would be claims that it is part of the rule book of free markets. But again, it is not free as there is little freedom for consequence to balance the scales, the deck is stacked.

Others may be link dropping and using their votes and content to pander to the hierarchy or the large app votes. For example, look at the Dtube trending pages and see how many mention Dtube in the title. Should they be rewarded for pandering and flattery? Well, I can't say but, it is incentivised as long as the pandering comes from someone considered of high enough status to support.

This is the asymmetry, when good behaviours are incentivised they are generally incentivised via a right thing to do feeling return whereas poor behaviours are provided with material gains. Which wins is relatively easy to see in this world.

Now, these are just some behaviours here on the Steem blockchain but I have said before that it is a micro ecosystem that represents the larger world. We can see the same types of things playing out in the real world, the one that seems to be doing a fair bit of failing at the moment when it comes to economic policy and the closing of gaps in real standards of living.

So, before I sit down and really get into this, I will open @krnel's question to my follower list.

In regards to the Incentivising of good

How is that to be done? In real life, or on Steem, any examples to visualize how to go about it? Thanks.

What I like about Steem is that we have a chance to openly play around with these ideas and potentially even test them in an environment that gives clear feedback. It really is a wonderful opportunity to play. Even if things don't get trialled.

Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]

@krnel writes some interesting posts and is probably worth having a look at for a follow.