Why does reducing the proof of brain consensus mechanism from a crowd to a few people warrant applause?
The fact that there are so many delegators implies there are potentially many instances of PoB validators cough lazy rent seekers coughwhich will statistically make the outcome of consensus fairer than if the power was pooled together and elected via few persons as we still have here.
Step in the right direction but middlemen still need to be cut out. Proof of Brain doesn't function as intended when the voting demographic is more centralised.
Curation is better than vote selling.
Manual curation is (arguably) better than auto vote sniping, at least for the health of the platform.
High concentration of stake based voting in the hands of a few curators, even if voting honestly, could result in a skewed representation of content discovery and rewards that doesn't align perfectly well with what would have happened had everyone's vote weighted equally. This is the problem of bad taste.
Vote selling/circle jerking/self voting are instances of content indifferent voting behavior
Content indifferent voting is far worse than the problem of bad taste!
I wish the number one problem we need to help solve is the problem of bad taste. But that's a luxury problem not even close to content indifferent voting in terms of the harm it causes.
So going curation for a bid bot is a huge step in the right direction. That's basically as big a win as you can realistically get around here.
In our last exchange, you mentioned that if we're not abusing the system, then why should other people get to?
That's a very good point and I stand by that.
If you wish to idle and not participate in curation, then you should get the 2.25% interest on SP. Not the greatly inflated (I assume) close to but below honest curator levels of return for doing zilch.
Problems of bad taste concern me just as much as content indifferent behaviour because aside from not being mutually exclusive behaviours, I believe that in a completely honest acting platform of people, I would much rather the forces of economic incentive drive censorship resistance and not centralisation.
Censorship can be thought of as :
1-(posts and authors that are considered for curation)
Where 1 represents all posts and authors.
By concentrating more and more voting power on a non trustless subjective and un-transparent process of curation, meanwhile creating cushy "curator" jobs in the process, we are pushing more and more people off potential honest rewards whilst funding a largely for profit (but arguably less value adding) operation.
I don't support that.
Funny you're bringing up centralizing of voting power.
This is also not true, anyone is welcome to join our discord and check out how the curation process of OCD happens. We even anonymize nominations so the inner curation is not biased on whoever curated it.
Not sure why I'm bothering explaining this to you, you're just dramatic cause the endless cash cow of guaranteed daily rewards ended when ocdb broke off the voting ring due to the new EIP.
Please take every opportunity you can get to make noise though, sure gets you more engagement than all your posts did in the last year.
The entire curation experience will always rely on one's subjective opinion. If it's at least honest, I'm happy.
I don't think the problem of bad taste is anywhere near as bad as content indifferent voting. Suppose you have 100 people effectively doing the curating platform wide. Chances are the overall result would be far better than if the system just sold votes to the highest bidder (or in some failed case here, pay the highest bidder the most to promote). Of course there a chance that 70 of the 100 curators are all nut jobs with terrible taste, but the probability of that is next to nothing. And it would probably take that many nut jobs to end up with something as bad as when bid botting completely dominates trending.
I guess if it makes you feel any better, it's much hard curating competitively if you have a lot of SP under management than if you only had a smaller stake. In other words, you can likely do better if you curated yourself strategically than if you handed your SP to a team and paid a fee. Also, as more curation projects pop up, competition over fees and performance will play a part too. There are a lot of factors that can improve the curation process over time platform wide.
I don't think it's really feasible to ask passive investors to settle for next to nothing and not allow them to delegate to curation projects. Remember, they were getting almost 100% of voting rewards delegating to bid bots (before free downvotes were a thing). Now they're getting a lot less.
Overall, even if you truly believed that concentrated stake curation is just a terrible as vote selling (which doesn't make much sense), at least now they're only getting 50% of the voting rewards rather than splitting 100% of the voting rewards between the delegator, bid bot owner and vote buyer. So overall, purely economically, it's a big win.
Of course these days bid bot returns shouldn't expect to be seeing high returns any more, with the threat of downvotes.
I don't want to see false prophets. But that is all I'm seeing. You can't pick and choose which aspects of proof of brain suit the platform for you and which that don't. If we are to work honestly with the system as designed, then we must stick to proof of brain in all its purpose which include socialising the allocation of rewards, providing incentive for honest authors to have the best edge of getting organically discovered by as many stake holders as possible.
Rent seeking delegators don't care about the cause, only the largest acceptable return that society deems morally sound. Right now, it seems like a huge loss compared to the 100% (or close to) return they enjoyed before, but it is still far too high for basically doing nothing. And as long as there is over allocation of resources to that endeavour, there will be (as we have here) people quick to gobble up that "opportunity".
The problem at the end of the day is that morally culpable or not, the end result is still that it undermines proof of brain which is what you advocated so strongly and now I advocate so strongly.
You can't force stakeholders to personally cast each vote at the individual level.
But we would much prefer it if their stake is used for honest voting rather than vote selling.
And that's exactly what we're getting now with OCDB.
All that stake that use to be used for content indifferent vote selling is now being used to pass value to content creators according to the subjective appraisal of their content.
They use to do a lot of damage, now they're doing a lot of good. It's a huge win for the platform.
This
Curation projects are, to me, inevitable anyway. Humans have a natural tendency to centralize. Historically; family -->tribe-->village -->city -->nation --> blocs of nations (the EU) and people now speak of world governments.
Internet did the same thing, where the vast majority of internet use is centralised around a few company's apps.
Simply put - because it's easier. I see curation groups as representatives for people who support that given cause. Much like an MP or something.
Whether or not you think this is a positive or negative thing, it's gonna happen regardless
Nobody disagree with that, But nobody goes clamoring when when a new vote seller is born.
This is centralization.