How reward contaminates user behavior in steemit?

Abstract

A reward is used in many systems to incentivize people to participate. However, people often exploit such reward system with unintended behavior to get more rewards. Like Pareto's principle, inequality of wealth occurs frequently. Steemit is a blockchain-based social network that encourages people to participate through reward system. In this paper, we show that the reward system in Steemit can lead to problems such as unintended motivation and wealth inequality. First, we apply game theory and data analysis to verify whether current reward system motivate people to vote for good posts. We show that the optimal response strategy in the Steemit system is to vote 30 minutes after the post-creation. We also observe such pattern among Steemit participants through data analysis. Besides, we observe patterns in which a bot is involved in voting. These results show that Steemit's reward system leads people to maximize their rewards rather than vote for good posts. In addition, the reward system in Steemit shows the rich get richer effect. More precisely, we observe that the top 5% of voters take 95% of the voter reward. In conclusion, Steemit's reward system is not achieving its own goals. These problems are remained as a future work.