Yes, I am still against EIP. I was ambivalent about 50/50 and downvotes, so if you count those as successes, great. But the curve has made many users' steem experiences much less enjoyable. You try to rephrase the idea of votes being worth a smaller amount - that they're still worth the same number of rshares, just those rshares are worth a smaller amount when applied to a post with fewer rshares, but people's understanding is still correct. You can say that you don't mind that it makes "self-votes" worth less and note what you think is the corner case of comments being worth less... but in the end, it boils down to: I am encouraged to upvote content I don't care about because the author regularly receives rewards at least approaching the threshold, and I am consequently discouraged from upvoting not only comments, but also posts I love because the author has no track record of receiving rewards above $4. In fact, prior to HF21 (now 22, I guess), nearly all of my votes went to content from users who I liked engaging with but who did not receive much notice from others... not because their content was bad, but because they, too, belonged to communities that didn't interest whales. These communities draw lots of people in, many devoted to building communities organically. The fact that they drew the attention of no whales is not a sign that they did not bring value to the blockchain. Just that their content wasn't targeted to whales.
We talk about mass adoption? That's who the masses are. Even if trending is doing well and bidbots are going idle, wherever those freed up rewards are headed, it isn't into the accounts of the rank and file.
Also, I dunno. I feel hard pressed to NOT use a bot. I never have before, but now, seeing my rewards (from real people who read my blog) get cut in half, makes me want to rescue some of their value for them and to use a bot. I tried it a couple times. It made me feel yucky. But I feel like I have to. I don't expect to get noticed by a whale. It's not my goal. I love the curies I've gotten in the past, but engaging with my growing community, hosting joyful joke-telling contests, and sharing fast fiction are the things I love. I don't mind if I only get appreciation from the folks who appreciate me, but I don't like that it is the wrong thing for them to spend their VP on now. That pains me, too.
Do you understand what the curve has done? Do you understand how this makes it harder to engage with new users and good content? Do you understand how this motivates people to just follow the crowd rather than embrace one's own quirky preferences?
It is very hard to be a happy non-whale, non-abuser in this ecosystem. Were I an abuser, I'd be perfectly happy botting up to just below the trending threshold. The return is better than before because so much is so far below the curve.
I agree with that the curve is awful. What's the purpose? Why dividing stake across multiple accounts should be discouraged at all? Reducing rewards to authors that almost never gets above $3 per post organically is not worth whatever the purpose is.
It is though. Mathematically it is literally going to increase every other payout, including the small ones. If there is enough taken off of those big milking payouts (and the experience of the last few days suggests this is very possible) then it can more than make up for the effect of the curve on the rank and file, or at a minimum reduce that effect greatly.
Your attitude is defeatist.
Firstly, I hope you're right. It hasn't happened yet. But in the next week or so we should see the impact. But it hasn't happened yet.
Secondly, defeatist? I'm here. I'm fighting for what I think would be a positive change. We disagree about the impact of the rewards curve. I'm fighting for it to be restored to linearity.
I understand that you disagree, but "defeatist" is the wrong word.
Maybe you aren't truly defeatist but just don't quite understand how downvoting works.
When rewards are removed from posts such as happened in a huge scale in the past week those rewards are redistributed to every other payout. Since the top posts are getting rekt by downvotes and the bid bots are complaining they aren't even getting vote buyers at all (because buyers are afraid of getting downvoted), then to say that it doesn't benefit the rank and file is simply incorrect. Certainly thousands, and possibly tens and thousand of STEEM have been redistributed to the rank and file. We've also seen at least one initiative promising to go after vote circles which will send even more rewards to the rank and file.
I'm frankly more concerned about what happens longer term and whether we will fall back into complacency once the novelty of slamming Trending and other milkers with downvotes wears off. In that case, it will stop helping the rank and file and we'll have to figure out what to do next. But for now it absolutely is helping the rank and file.
I suspect that it must be helping the middle earners and non-downvoted top earners mostly. I can only tell you what I've observed. In the weeks prior to HF21, I saw the people in my community (mainly freewriters) often had posts in the $0.30-$0.80 range. Those same users now generally have payouts in the $0.15-$0.60. Obviously there are many factors, but the overall truth of the matter is that, while I'm all for the downvoting of the top spam posts, the most vulnerable users are still seeing smaller payouts due to the curve.
I get that those rewards are being redistributed, but there just isn't enough to negate the effect of the curve (and because of the curve, more of that value is going to the next highest tier of payouts). But maybe eventually there will be.
Anyways, kudos to everyone for doing the downvoting! I hope that, indeed, no one loses interest and furthermore that everyone ups their curation game even more to reward the users not only who have the "best" posts, but also those who have posts that appeal to users who aren't likely to be whales.
Middle earners are rank-and-file, almost by definition. The very lowest earners are at an extreme, just like the highest. But the way the math works out, downvotes help everyone proportionately. If middle earners gain, say 20%, then low earners gain the same 20% (but smaller absolute amount of course).
Also, I never said it was completely negating the curve, but the downvotes do help. The curve exists to serve a purpose. Punishing responsible low-earning users isn't the intent at all, but is an unavoidable side effect. By downvoting a lot of abuse, some of that undesired side-effect can at least be offset, which is a good thing. Without the massive downvoting, the low rewards at the bottom would be even lower. So, yes, I would say it is helping.
Upping curation game will hopefully happen too, but it will take longer. People need to organize curation initiatives, etc. Just slamming the obvious milkers and other abusers with downvotes is faster and easier.
Looks like we have a similar understanding, but different priorities. That's fine as long as we get there before too long.
But I would add that I'd like to see numbers. I've been asking for numbers since the announcement of EIP in HF21 and haven't seen them. It's too late for those to matter now, I guess (though I'd still like them... what percentage of the rewards pool was going to abuse?) The new numbers I'd like to see are:
Are middle earners rank and file? Which is to say, do most top level posts earn $4-10? Or is that actually still a part of the top echelon? Is the freewrite community an outlier, or are we the norm? I think we're the norm, but it's hard to know, but if we are, there must be a lot of regular users out there who are getting $0.20/post. To me, if that's more than 50% of the crowd, that's the rank and file.
I know it's not the intent, and I know the purpose, but is the cure worse than the disease? ATM, I'd say yes, especially considering that we didn't try the EIP without the curve first, which is what I'd like to see. Boy howdy.
I'm glad the downvotes help. They'd help even more in a linear reward curve. But sure, more curation. I'd even love to see a whale make a whitelist of "responsible low-earning users" to give those $0.20 upvotes that get them back to where they were. That'd go a long way to ameliorating the unavoidable side effect.
We didn't try EIP without the curve because our best available analysis and the consensus view of stakeholders, witnesses, and the developers is that it wouldn't work. (This does not mean 100% that it wouldn't work. but we have only a certain number and frequency of shots at this so we have to just use our best judgment to choose shots and take them.)
The limited amount of free voting power and the fact that there isn't any known way to compensate downvoters means that relying too much on downvoters doing a lot of hard work is a very dodgy proposition. The more obvious, more concentrated milking and abuse in Trending and voting circles is one thing. Digging through tens of thousands (and potentially more than that if incentives change) of tiny milking payouts is something else. The curve takes the place of someone needing to comb through and enormous number of low-payout posts and individually decide which are milking and which are not. That it is a broad brush is the unintended side effect, but, unfortunately, we simply don't know of a better way.
As far as giving low-earning voters blanket free upvotes simply for existing, I'm not in generally favor of that. It falls within the scope of curation to decide what rewards are appropriate and to a large extent that is independent of whatever rewards might have been previously (under a very broken system that, broadly speaking, was widely viewed by stakeholders, witnesses, and developers as a failure that was contributing to Steem's decline and not its success, though this does not mean that every single payout under the previous system was bad; that certainly was not the case).
As I said earlier, increased curation is still ramping up and will likely take some time. Most probably some low earning users will be picked up by increased curation (including increased votes that may be given because rewards are considered deserved by the curators and the curve requires it) and some will not, which is how this is supposed to work.
Most abusers already do that prior to the change. Only the egomaniacs loved to see their own faces on the front page day in and day out.
And this change provides that much more incentive to do so. I think we'll see people who didn't do it prior to 21 engaging in more bidbot usage. People who were paragons of Steem good behavior.
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Well, it's up to them to figure out the 20 Steem ordeal so they actually make a ROI.