You will earn 33% less, but some believe that incentive will make a lot more people vote for your content which will make you more money than you currently earn today.
I asked my fellow co-owner of STEEM and fellow witness and stakeholder, @smooth to dumb down the salespitch for us, so here we go:
The Pitch
by: Smooth
Curation is broken. A too-large and increasing portion of the reward pool is going to self votes and paid votes that bear little to no relation to quality or value brought to Steem
As a dedicated quality contributor, this is hurting you.
By making a set of changes, including (but not limited to) changing from a 75/25 to a 50/50 allocation between posters and voters, we are attempting to shift the economic incentives away from this sort of self- and paid-voting and toward curating on the basis of a high quality, high value contributions as determined by a system better turned to measure stakeholder consensus (as opposed to unilaterally-decided self votes and/or paid votes)
As a dedicated quality contributor, this would likely benefit you.
Can we promise that the 33% decrease in gross rewards will be made up for by a combination of a) A larger share of rewards going to your quality contributions; and b) Growing the value of Steem thereby increasing the entire reward pool (including your share)? No! We can not guarantee this but we think it is a very plausible outcome.
We also believe that doing nothing and continuing the failure of its premiere feature (stakeholder/voter-allocated rewards used to promote growth) will likely result in Steem continuing to stagnate, and likely continuing to decline in value. Your rewards will decline with it.
End of Pitch
So, now that you have read the pitch as an opening page, what do you think, please write your pros/cons below.
Sincerely, in all friendliness.
@fyrstikken / @fyrst-witness
Stakeholder & Gatekeeper
NB: None of these eventual changes would happen until after HF21+ and SMTs. FYI.
This post is because of this post: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@cervantes/witness-consensus-status-to-fix-the-actual-steem-s-economic-flows-eng
I might upvote some of your comments for visibility, that does not mean that I agree or disagree with you, only to lift what I consider important comments from less important/trollish comments.
Hard No.
Great comment
Downvoted to counter the boomerang vote. The comment is solid, but it shouldn't be artificially boosted. @phoneinf
"Comments shouldn't be artificially boosted." how is it any different to posts be boosted? Everything is artificially already then. You can boost posts. You can not boost comments? How is it any different? You can already do it if you had more accounts. In the end someone boosted something for visibility.
I'm fine with this.
And here's my solution in case @lukestokes wants to come along and criticize me for offering nothing but objection again, even though this plan, in fact, deserves nothing but objection.
It did make me think about things more and come up with something better, I guess.
"Wants to come along and criticize me" sounds pretty negative. My intention is not get personal or criticize you or anyone in particular. My intention is to move things beyond complaints into solutions. Thanks for contributing ideas.
I don't find the UI curation scenario very plausible. UI beneficiaries have very questionable economics since they discourage the most successful posters from using them. DTube gets away with it (and a lot else) because it is subsidized by the large free stake from misterdelegation.
As a longer term approach I'm not seeing it as viable. A small UI tax aligned with UI operating costs and feature value add might work but not pulling out enough to meaningfully redistribute it.
So you don't think users will leave the whole system because they're giving up 50% but you think they will refuse to use a beneficiary-driven system because they're giving up 50%? How does that make any sense?
If there are actual users who actually want 50% and believe it will give them benefit, this gives them the opportunity. If there aren't, then forcing it on them is clearly a bad idea.
Because it is easy to use a different UI that does basically the same thing minus the 50%. You don't need to leave.
If 50% itself actually benefits users, then they will use it. Right? That's your entire argument on this whole topic.
No that's not really the entire argument. I would refer you back to the @kevinwong and @trafalgar posts. They lay out an argument in greater length and detail then we can sensibly do in comments. I've rehashed some of that in my replies but not all of it.
Let me try to summarize a different way. The goal has nothing to do with how much is paid to individual users and more a matter of system health. It is is to shift the incentives system-wide so that self-voting and vote selling are no longer economically incentivized. There are of course broader long-term goals that that, but that's a minimum starting point because as long as they are so strongly incentivized they result in a race to the bottom where none of your initiatives such as meta-curation, UI-based redistribution, etc. will work because as more and more of the reward pool is drawn away by those broken incentives it then becomes inaccessible to you (and everyone else). That's where we have been heading and the race to the bottom continues.
Mildly downvoted since I agree with wolf about boomerang. The comment itself is good argumentation even if I disagree with the conclusion.
Is this a rule or what? A stake holder boosted something, someone put capital behind something for more visibility. You can already do this in other ways with posts already. I can take the same comment and boost it in a post. How would that be any different? I didn't boost any crazy comment but a rational clear comment. If it's not allowed to boost comments. Why is it then allowed from the promotion service?
Not a rule just an opinion. That's the nature of voting systems, people can disagree peacefully. Let the votes fall and carry on.
Yeah thx for a response. I'm just testing the network :-)
I would say capital is a very good indicator to see real opinions and real proof of care. That a message can get empowered with capital is true freedom. Since someone is investing more weight behind something. Empower a message shows it's more important than ROI or Money return. I have seen more of your comments and think you have a very nice balanced look on things which is nice! I feel too many come to conclusions too fast ...
Keep it up :D
Thank you for the kind words. Nice chatting.
Did you observe that @therealwolf could have downvoted to match the Boomerang vote but instead left a remnant approximately equal to his own upvote? I had assumed this was intentional.
No big deal either way really, but it seems like if that was his intent it's worth respecting.
I didn't pay that close attention. I applied a small downvote to express my opinion that messing with comments using paid votes is stupid.
Well, we've found some common ground at least.
Upvoted to counter the downvotes.
This post has received a 14.61 % upvote from @boomerang.
Also. remember app fee's are not being included in anyones talks about this. You will have even less than what you think you will be getting. Applications with image and video hosting won't be free. No fee's no media.
So how this works is.
Edited: Curators gets cut first, then you share the rest with apps. So the content creators will get even less.
yeah thats lame!!
As a content creator I can easily understand that reliable long term storage of Terrabytes per day and fast bandwith is a cost factor. Pay the bills first and then distribute the rest to author and curators. That sounds logic and fair. But to distribute fifty:fifty author::curator doesn´t make any sense. It would not only clearly lower the quality of posts, but also lower the number of outstanding posts dramatically.
I might be mistaken but I was under the impression that curators get the cut first, followed by the App and then the content creator.
Yeah sorry, a bit of a mix-up. So curators would win over content creators so it's not really 50/50. Because content creators have to share with apps.
As someone who was initially drawn to SteemIt by the promise of 'infinite rewards from paid upvotes,' and then taken down a notch or two by downvotes from actual people on the site - I've learned the lesson that SteemIt shouldn't be taken for granted as a money mill, but instead the reward ratios should somehow be reworked so that the 15% apparent rewards on paid votes become nil or negative.
I'd also learned that renting SP and botting out my account as an automatic voter doesn't help the bottom line and proves to be a negative sum game, so I'd assume other people that get excited about 'free money' will be happy to play with paid votes - and we see this constantly, time and again on 'trending' and 'hot,' whereas there are less people renting SP because it's a 0-sum or negative-sum game.
Two cents!
If we're going to discuss taking rewards from content creators from the Reward Pool and giving it to curators, then there should be a discussion about implementing a system for different sorts of curation types.
A binary upvote system that makes someone a curator is also the issue that makes the curation system weighted by the upvote-bot issue, which is why this discussion is being had to begin with.
There are different aspects to curation, which is ultimately determining whether something is quality content or not. Here's a non-exhaustive list in no particular order of importance of the curation process :
The point of this list is to show that humans, not bots, are much more involved in the process of curation, and the specialization of that curation should be rewarded by the work put in.
Perhaps an unofficial position, or a curation reward breakdown process which people can get those specialized positions for the work they put in to earn those curation rewards. Maybe positions like Curation-Witnesses.
At this point, I'm just spitting out suggestions. So the curation isn't so binary: if you upvote you get rewards. If you don't upvote you don't get rewards.
I am fully in favour of the 50/50 split. I am also hugely in favour of getting rid of bid bots. I think they create a system of laziness and excuses. People no longer need to be on the platform, they can just sell their votes and make a profit, I don't think it should be that easy. For the sake of the platform we need people here, interacting, socializing, creating and curating content. When I first joined last July it semmed like there was a ton of interaction going on. 16 months later it seems like everything has become automated and it stinks of stagnation. 50/50 split would be a great start to have people curate more, but there are also other things that need to be addressed.
and maybe also ad incentive for resteeming?
Boosting curation rewards also helps increase incentives for resteeming: Vote first then resteem. All of the votes that come from your followers add to your curation rewards. If the post goes viral your curation rewards could end up being huge (of course this latter scenario really needs a much bigger Steem user base, but we can dream right?)
agreed ;-) but I still think it would be a good sign to have a kind of resteem reward pool on top of the curration reward... you always get what you incentivise... ;-)
You are aware that even more people will do auto curate if you move it to 50%?
@tcpolymath look at this and let fyrst know your concerns. I’m tagging you both in each others posts because you are both questioning.
Thanks.
anytime, i hate to see smart people like myself feel down it makes me FUD and sad ...
It does nothing but incentify more people to delegate to bots.
You can't fix human laziness except with some strong stringent rules.
Heck, ill gladly delegate all my stakes to a bot if I see my rewards slashed by 33%, i currently get less than $2 for my posts except oracle-d posts.
I get peanuts from curation.
Netcoins contest showed that we have less than 10k people active on steemit, fix that, not this idea of giving more curation reward to whales and bidbots.
This is once again a case of steemit inc and witnesses totally in touch with the low users of this platform and why I think other platforms are watching and waiting to take over.
If a whale can get more rewards from his delegation to a bot, he will do so, rather that. Getting fewer rewards from self-votes.
The one thing yall need to do is have a roundtable discussion with the whales once in s while and speak on the growth of the platform, how to move forward and delegating their stakes.
This is now tilting towards centralization kinda..
I wouldn't mind profit sharing.. We already have curation rewards but that only really is lucrative for those with large SP holdings.
Would be an interesting project to have a bot that sends little thank you transfers for voting on a users post.. Hmmm.
Which likely ends up looking a lot like a higher curation percentage with more on-chain overhead for all those transfers. Golos had (or has, I'm not following it any more so I don't know) such a bot which implemented 50/50 (I think) curation in this way (I guess posters would need to prefund the bot or something) and became very widely used. Many curators would decline to vote on content that wasn't signed up with the bot, so many posters would use it (or not get votes).
Yes, the 50/50 bot on Golos is still operating, but is less popular now, because some more sofisticated services came.
The most powerful one, which has accumulated about 10 million Golos Power, allows you to send any amount of Golos or GbG to it along with the % of this amount you are willing to give to the services investors. The curation trail then votes with GP according to this data.
There's sort of auction, the trail votes for submissions with biggest % suggested for investors first. While people are saying that you have some chanse to get an upvote with 60% for curators in the middle of the night, the average figures are more like 85-90% for curators.
The most popular idea on Golos now is to embrace this system, allowing for authors individually to set any % for curators . There's an old and long Github issue about it.
https://github.com/GolosChain/golos/issues/324
Thank you for the update.
@smooth, that 50/50 communist bot on golos, I remember that one. I was running booster over there at the time with @inertia. What happened was that a small elite with a lot of stake became business unfriendly, so stakeholders with businesses on golos powered down, sold out and I do not think it has recovered since. For a more technical analysis of the whole golos meltdown, @inertia sure must have some fun observations. We did business there for many months, it was very educational. I hope we can share what we learned from Golos some day, so we do not repeat the mistake of becoming unfriendly to businesses.
our accounts on golos was coinbank and booster. If you want to see the blockchain or run simulations.
Hmm, right on, thanks for the share of info..
I'd not really considerd the overhead on the network.. Need to get back into considering all aspects of a design I guess before tossing out ideas.
I was in golos for a bit but have since then stopped using it as well.
You should make more to curate. Like it should it should be competitive with self upvoting we should make people want to full 100 percent upvote others instead of themselves. This is the stuff that is really broken with the platform, and it could be fixed
Shouldnt the first step be "becoming more effective at curation?"
before cutting author earnings?
Nothing is broken. Life is competitive that's all. Either you have amazing content or you don't. Most people are not amazing content creators as it's an art form that takes a long time to master. The idea that something is broken is wrong. The Steem Blockchain code is working fine. Human nature will always be human nature.
What the fuck does that have to do with anything? The argument is its far more profitable to self upvote than it is to curate, so there is no incentive to curate. It doesn't have anything to do with quality of content.
How is someone coming here, upvoting 10 of their own comments and leaving better than them coming here and curating? You are really in a bubble to say the system isnt broken phone boy when the first question the media asked our glorious leader Ned was why does trending suck so much? Why does it suck? Because the system is broken and there is no incentive to upvote good content
You are wrong. The main ROI is in Trust and Relationships. Not the Token itself. I upvote and curate to leverage Trust and Relationships. Clearly that is the biggest leverage you can get.
Sounds reasonable. At this point I would be willing to try. It is getting boring investing so much time, energy and money only to watch my investment slowly trickle down in value.
I believe in Steem, but agree that something must be done.
Trickle down in value? Invest in people and trust and relationships. It will always appreciate in value.
Probably worth a try
I am for this change, I doubt it will happen, but yeah... I would love for those who engage and vote for my content to earn from it!!!
You sold me. The 50/50 idea is a great one that will increase engagement. This is a win win for all. Now how to get people to buy in on this idea? What's important is the upvotes should be spread across the active and engaged. There is a discrepancy between the high SPs and low SPs, so there should be more distribution of higher value votes to the lower SPs. This will help retain new users and grow the platform.
"This is a win win for all." This is wrong. This is taking value from original content creators and putting it in curators pockets. But most curation is being automated. So there is not even any eyes on that stuff. It will increase fakeness not engagement.
I disagree. If the 50/50 increases engagement and motivates more people who do not upvote to go out and upvote, then theoretically I might get new upvotes which will generate more rewards for me. If I get more, why would I mind giving half back? I do understand that this could increase fakeness which is something that we cannot deter on this platform. My point is higher SPs needs to cast more upvotes to lower SP members who show genuine engagement and activities to support the necessary growth of this platform.
No you won't get more. I see what you try to argue but first remember that 25% is being taken away from you already. So first you need to magically get a boost of 25-50% more curators. Which would never happen since curation is being automated.
And if some big person upvotes your quality work you will get less than before. So in general you as a creator will get way less. This is a power move which would make so big accounts and Stake holders would get even more. There would be no incentive to give upvotes. Since you know you will get 50% back so it's not an act of love anymore. It's 100% selfishness now.
I also see your point is higher accounts give more votes. But you will still almost get nothing of that slice since 50% would go back to them. So they don't need the content creator anymore. They can just focus on upvote their friends.
Why do you use your Reputation position to downvote others when the post is asking for people’s opinion on the subject?
Are you also downvoting people with a higher reputation than yours that disagree with your viewpoint?
Disagreement on rewards
I guess there will always be those.
Agree or Disagree is what makes this place great. We are all investors that wants this place to grow in value. People have real influence. It's what promotes a more healthy discussion.
Cause this guy is an idiot. Look at his statements above and thats all you need to know.
No it's not, it's being given back to the people who gave you the upvote in the first place. Classic ramblings of someone who has no idea what's going on.
I’m not a fan of flagging other than phishing, plagiarism, or blatant abuse of the rewards. Even still, I personally would not flag unless it was a phishing attempt. Everyone believes differently I guess.
True, 25% goes back to the curator or rewards pool, dependent on the timing of the upvotes.
A downvote is just a disagreement on rewards. But calling people out loud for idiots like @jasonshick likes to do that is just out to attack people personally. That is basically showing that you can't even handle to talk in a forum. That is not even trying to act with some decency.
You want to have a discussion with people then start by having a discussion, don't come by a post and flag it. Your immaturity is what started this whole thing.
Actions speak louder than words, you want to talk, then talk, but don't flag my comments and then expect a peaceful discussion, youre delusional. Keep me muted, your opinion isnt worth listening to
First thing you do is name call. Very mature. 5 year old level. I am talking about that 25% more would get taken away from you with 50/50 system. 75% is what you get now. 50% would be after. That will say 25% get's taken away from what you would have earned.
Come by and flag some more of my stuff and name calling will just be the beginning. Stop it with your nonsense "disagreement on rewards" bullshit. You earn nothing on this platform without people upvoting your content. This platform is already in the gutter because of the disproportionate allocation of rewards, it's time for a change. You flagging peoples comments for no reason other than being a jackass is going to backfire. Keep it up
Flagging turns the platform hostile, I agree. Instead of trying to have a discussion @phoneinf starts flagging and expects people to be fine with it. He is exactly the problem with the platform
Thanks @fyrstikken, I think it's important to give this proposal as much visibility as possible. It is very important to get community feedback.
Below is what I said in the @cervantes post:
In addition to this I want to mention the broken SBD peg. I think SBD has stabilised around US$1 because of a theoretical price floor and not a successful peg. Even if the peg is fixed, I'm sure it's possible it could break again, so the next paragraph is still relevant
When the price of Steem and SBD was higher. Curation rewards were less than 25%. For example, if both Steem and SBD are worth $4 and post has a payout of $16. The content creator would receive approximately 6 SBD (16×0.75/2) and 1.5 SP (6/4). The curators, assuming everyone votes after 15 minutes, would receive 1 SP (4/4). The content creator would be rewarded approximately US$30 ($24 (6×4) from SBD and $6 (1.5×4) from Steem) and curators approximately US$4. In this example, curators receive about 12% and not 25% of the rewards. The proposed 50/50 would have a similar problem.
There are several ways this problem can be fixed, such as:
I apologise if this is a little off-topic but I believe the SBD peg will affect the success of the proposals discussed in the @cervantes post.
So just to summarise my position on the proposed changes to curation rewards. I am in favour of 50/50, if the SBD peg problem can be fixed and remain fixed.
Im not a big content creator and i have no horse in this race, but the people i do know, that are successful content creators will suffer greatly.
Im not going to repost all my thoughts on the proposal because theres a large thread on Trafalgar post about this. The first comment i made in the thread is currently on the top of the comment list, though i think it will soon be grayed out. no i did not pay for the comment upvote
Needless to say im completely against this and i think it will widen the gap even further between creators and whale curators. It will change absolutely no behavior and all that will be done is move the rewards from the pockets of the creators to the pockets of the large stake curators.
This proposal makes few assumptions:
This is false. Human behavior will not change regardless of the change. Lowered author potential actually demotivates curation and increases abundance of lower effort content creation in order to offset the loss in earning potential per post..
The earning potential was mostly based on large stake holder long term curation so what does actually change? Individual curators are ineffective as is. All youre doing is increasing their earning potential without them having to increase effectivness in any way, by punishing authors.
All we need to do is keep this system going and create a strong middle class, not widen the gap. Organic earning potential is currently completely based on a few curation communites like dtube, curie, OCD etc. and a few individual curators. They cannot cover the demand for votes that will stem from de-incentivizing bot use.
Now consider what that might do?
The most important thing is token distribution: "Will there be proper curation from large accounts that are currently passive after this change to offset the loss in author rewards? And can that increase token distribution?"
Im a definite "No" on that.
There are other ways to fix the content placement issue.
No sleep till SMT's so we can get on with whatever comes after them. This is a distraction, that takes our focus off already late goals.
Or...
We reject SMTs and get on with fixing existing, longstanding issues that actual investors want to see corrected.
That’s my preference. But I’m not STINC and SMTs aren’t my wet dream.
Yep
Totally agree SirCork.
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I think it's not bad.
Hi,
I actually believe it makes a lot of sense and would help the community a lot. There is just one thing that concerns me:
How to attract voting on high quality content? I mean one outcome could also be that people are happy with their 50% share and just upvote randomly each day everything on the front page without any consideration for the posts content or quality.
I’ve been seeing lots of posts proposing a change to the author reward curve and the author/curator balance but nobody seems to want to talk about the curation square root reward curve.
Curiously, folks with lots of stake seem to be the ones talking about 50/50, I’ve yet to see any redfish or minnows arguing for it.
Haha ¡Right On! Elementary my dear @preparedwombat!!
Yeah! I wonder why? };) ?¿?
Target the whole damn current reward pool to content creators. Create a separate pool for curators but they have to accumulate some sort of special points during a period of time depending on their performance in order to take their cut from this pool, let's say weekly or each 15 days.
Now, this is an interesting and great idea!!
Yeah! automatize that!! You 50/50 mofos. 😈
yo could you upvote my shit pls? just for visibility and see if some big ass witness takes my idea into account
Yeah mate! I truly believe 'that' would be even a better idea to enhance the visibility of great proposals that the biggies are reluctant to see.
But I'm afraid 'that' also would only work if my almighty rickety upvote at 100% of my VP would worth more than the fucking $0.01 cents that with this I could promote, impulse and kick you and your idea up in this very instant.
However, for someone who freely offers me to kick their sorry ass till the heights of Olympus to be seen and heard by the deities that live up there. It will always be a great pleasure for me to please him to the max.
my hero, just because of your generosity i won't kill myself today
Great post sir,i like it your post i appreciate your valuable post thanks for sharing this beautiful blog
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Helping others should come from the heart and never expect in return. That’s my motto in life
You are right.
If the curaration were more profitable than selling votes it would be a big step in the right direction.
This would mean less income per vote but much more incentive to vote.
I think it's a great idea and I'm in it!
It's not a great idea. It would promote more fakeness. People would only upvote to leech on the value.
It's not a bad concept really? Can be worthwhile
As I mentioned earlier. I think It's worth a shot.
This model would attract more curators that will engage with your content, which lead to more followers and that euqals more reward in a long term solution.
You are wrong. Engage with your content would be no need anymore. As people can just circle vote their friends and get fat curation. This means less rewards for original content creators. And more to automated curation.
I concur, the long-run looks more promising with 50/50. I think more people will buy Steem as well as to cash in on these more favourable rewards.
Høres ut som en fantastisk ting! Synes at ting fungerer dårlig slik som det er nå
As a content creator I think it is worth a try. Maybe a test period to see if it improves curation and reduces the use of bots.
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I think many dedicated quality contributors (definition ?) use paid bot votes themselves and I have nothing against it. Put some cash in steem/your hobby and make your money work for you.
I was on the fence but @tcpolymath and @sirknight offer great reasons to not go thorough with it and their reasoning seems sound to me.
We should be focusing on user attraction and retention and getting less rewards probably won't sound appealing towards new users.
This change to me seems like a silly attempt to try to increase steem price, just like that burn initiative that was active a while ago or maybe it still is, haven't checked in a while.
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I would like to have that. I think most people are not content-creator. And the fact that the majority of the reward goes to the author makes people do shit post to try to earn something. If more rewards go to curation, people would spend less time creating shit post and more reading and finding good content.
People usually say that if the author reward decreases, it will make Steemit less attractive. But we can advertise Steemit in a different way by saying that you can earn money by reading content and giving likes instead of creating something.
I came here because I like to create sometimes and I've always had some blogs but the majority of people won't come here because they don't want to create anything.
I really like these ideas and the reasoning behind them. Nice pitch @smooth.
Also:
It's great that you are not making any promises. Human behaviour can be difficult to predict. Though most of the time it tends to gravitate towards the greatest rewards. Few people curate because the current rewards are not sufficient to entice that behaviour. Will 50/50 plus other tweaks to the ecosystem make that happen? I feel hopeful.
I have only one comment to this already nonsense. How will any of this matter if there would be 1 million active Steemians instead of 50,000?
How much curation/author rewards would anyone receive from the Steem reward pool?
Changing the reward system is a false issue which only divides, wastes time and energies debating it.
Seeing beyond immediate issues and past Hivemind/Communities, SMTs and larger adoption is what everyone should do and how to make those count and happen, is what should matter, not adding a tiny percent more rewards now before it's too late.
Just saying...
Congratulations @fyrstikken!
Your post was mentioned in the Steemit Hit Parade in the following category:
depends on probably worth. And You should make more to curate.
great post share
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