This makes it sound incredibly horrible. Besides, at this point the conversation drifts to "Uh, yeah, that sounds like in the Black Mirror episode..."

Sure. You're absolutely correct. And if you want to be honest with yourself and me – we both have to say, "yes, it's incredibly horrible."

This is why I have so many posts and comments which talk about the authoritarian impulse of assuming quality by largest mass applause. That's what the assumption which underlies Steemit as a reward architecture is all about. It doesn't care about what you like, or what I like, it only cares about what the most people like. And it divvies up rewards accordingly.

Though I prefer to point to the Orville episode rather than the Black Mirror episode because I find BM to be a fine descriptor of the kind of writing I find in that show.

Still, I'm quite amazed by the platform and how simply rewarding people with some tokens can lead to incredibly complex behavior and engagement (myself included). Sure, there's tons and tons (aaand tons) of crap, but also incredibly interesting and sophisticated stuff, take the SteemStem ecosystem, for example.

But this isn't new information. People have been pointing out that rewarding people for producing something that they like is a system that generally gets you more of what you like. Classically, it's been referred to as "free-market capitalism" and is largely responsible for the decrease of poverty worldwide from near omnipresent 60 years ago to actually quite rare today.

I find it interesting that so many people involved in cryptocurrencies are very hard fiscal liberals who just don't seem to have ever been exposed to the dynamics of how everyday economics around them actually function. It's fascinating. It's like driving slow by a bunch of kids on the side of the road poking at a discarded tire and wondering how it came to be there, and assuming that they are the first ones to have ever discovered round things made out of rubber. It's amazing.

Sturgeon's Law holds true of all things. 90% of everything is crap. It doesn't matter what motivates the creation, 90% of everything is crap.

People self defining communities and creating to serve a purpose and interest within those communities? That at least provides the most opportunity for things not to be crap. Being rewarded for things which are the kind of crap other people like, that provides the most opportunity for things not to be crap.

Like I said, these are not new ideas. They have nothing to do with cryptocurrencies or Steemit as a platform. We know these are true things. We've observed these true things. It's just that the people who generally talk about steem and blockchain technology don't seem to have even had a basic education in understanding how games work, how people interact with other people, how creators make things and why.

It's like they're touring an alien world and everything is new, but in reality they've been dropped out the back of a truck in Paducah, Kentucky, and there boggling at how everyday people live in rural areas.

I never have a real idea how seriously to take them, because in my experience I've never really met people who have so little knowledge and experience of life. It's really impressive.