Steem Basic Income
Steem Basic Income is a social experiment to bring a voluntary crowd-funded basic income to as many Steemians as possible. Members join by sponsoring others into the program. Steem Basic Income is delivered through regular upvotes to member content.
Let's Have a Talk
Yesterday in our update, we wrote the following:
We are exploring the possibility of phasing out the upvoting bonuses, as this 'vote for vote' aspect of our program has been increasingly criticized in the new Steem environment. It was introduced to help us build a sustainable SP base and is ancillary to our overall objectives, so we are willing to let it go if doing so will protect our members. If you have a strong opinion either way, please let us know in the comments section to help inform our final decision.
Today we discovered this post where we responded and then resteemed. Here is most of our response, verbatim.
Is SBI 'Old Steem'?
The way #steembasicincome works is if you send one still and say an account name, both of you will get 1 share. You can also get 1 share for every 2 Steem you delegate. The more shares you have the faster your 'subscription balance' increases. This is the balance that is used to give you votes. Also, if you upvote their comments and any of their 10 or so accounts, you can increase your balance by more than 100% of your vote.
We think of this as three separate value streams. While they aggregate into the total votes people receive, each stream has its own particular rules. In approaching this discussion, I would like to handle each stream separately.
- If you send 1 STEEM and specify an account name, you each get 1 unit.
This is the original mechanism that has never been changed since SBI launched almost 2 years ago. This was designed explicitly to be an account-level curation. You sponsor an account for 1 STEEM worth of lifetime upvotes. In doing so, you essentially receive 50% curation (you also get 1 STEEM present value of lifetime upvotes). This feature attracts very minimal abuse because the time to ROI is very long. It's the mechanism that contest uses, and that results in SBI supporting many valuable causes and accounts. We still believe this model is net-positive for Steem, and we don't plan to change it.
- You can also get 1 share for every 2 Steem you delegate.
There are pros and cons to this. It has been normal throughout Steem history for services to offer various levels of rewards to members that delegate. Delegation also allows members to support (and be supported by) Steem Basic Income without having to send liquid STEEM and trust us to keep delivering upvotes. While we have built a good track record of reliability, it's important to keep an open channel that allows members to support and benefit from our project without having to send liquid STEEM after initial enrollment.
Delegation is also a common way for whale accounts to get consistent large upvotes. We are considering making adjustments to the calculations to decrease the benefits of delegation some. My preference here would be for members to earn a fair return on delegation, while allowing it to skew toward supporting smaller accounts instead of whales. This is already happening organically because of the role our curation returns play in delegation rewards. If we decide more needs to be done after addressing upvoting bonuses, then we will.
- Also, if you upvote their comments and any of their 10 or so accounts, you can increase your balance by more than 100% of your vote.
This is the area that is our biggest concern, and the area we want to address. This was introduced to help us build a sustainable SP base and to help other programs do the same. Before HF21, there was very little abuse here (although not zero), and the small abuse that we saw was usually addressed quickly by our blacklists. (We have followed @steemcleaners and @buildawhale blacklists automatically since our automation was released. This is covered in our FAQ.)
Since HF22, many large accounts have shifted from bid-bots to vote-swapping services. This has upset the balance of abuse, and my own concerns about our voting trends have risen exponentially. In many cases, the accounts we vote are not bad enough for blacklisting, but not good enough to justify the votes that our upvoting rewards are returning to them.
We would like to phase out upvoting bonuses completely over a period of 10 to 12 weeks.
We believe there is a role for stake-based rewards within the overall content-oriented curation schema, but we do not believe that having stake should be the sole determinant of who gets rewarded.
SBI's native sponsoring system was designed so that members could 'crowdsource' support, stacking it to that point where it would be equivalent to whale-level support... an internal patreon-like model that offers greater stability and reduced risk of subscriber-flight.
Since we do actively support thousands of accounts and over 1500 accounts benefit from our upvoting rewards, we do not think it appropriate to turn the model on a dime and cancel upvoting rewards without opening discussion with our members.
While many other programs were able to change quickly to 'manual' curation, they were able to do so because their systems were entirely transactional. They made no promises and, once each paid upvote was delivered, owed nothing more to their customers . We have instead built long-term relationships and a community of active supporters that use SBI as a tool to support their passion projects. It would be unethical for us to make major changes without public discussion and an attempt to build consensus.
To that end, we will cross-post this long-form response into tonight's update, with a link to your post.
One problem with downvoting to your hearts content is down vote revenge. Personally, I find it is the worst reason to downvote. It's even worse than downvoting because you disagree with someone's opinion.
We agree with this completely. We have never engaged in revenge downvotes, although we have sometimes been more aggressive in penalizing other forms of abuse when we receive revenge downvotes. We do sometimes mark accounts that downvote us to not receive upvotes anymore, but that's a separate response.
When we've been downvoted, we try to engage and discuss potential issues with that person. In most cases, they have at least decided that we are not harmful, or that we are less harmful than other potential downvote targets. In some cases they continue downvoting us and we let them do so without retaliation.
We have never penalized any member or cancelled their subscriptions for speaking out against SBI (though when people are publicly critical, they often request us to cancel their subscriptions or assign to somebody else). One reason we advocate a crowd-sourced basic income is because a 'universal' basic income is extremely vulnerable to political changes and censorship.
We also never downvote over disagreement with content.
The Proposal
We would like to reduce the Multiplier used for our upvote bonuses by 0.10 per week until it reduces to 0. Author rewards will continue to be part of our sustainability metrics. As the upvote bonuses gradually decrease, members can choose whether to withdraw their upvotes or continue to support our work 'organically' rather than for the rewards.
The gradual reduction period would give members plenty of time to realize the changes and stop voting if they don't want to support us organically. Depending on how the discussion goes over the next week, the first reduction will be applied in one week. Since upvote bonuses apply after posts pay out, that means everything we publish after this post could be after the first bonus reduction.
What do you think?
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Enrollment
To enroll in Steem Basic Income, or to increase the level of basic income that you receive, enrollment is pretty straightforward:
Just send 1 STEEM to @steembasicincome. Include the name of a Steemian to sponsor in the transaction memo (preceded by @). You and the person you sponsor will each receive 1 share in the program. You can sponsor any active Steemian (excluding yourself), it does not have to be a current member. Multiples of 1 STEEM are also fine (e.g. 5 STEEM with one name means 5 SBI for each of you).
Increasing your subscription level results in more frequent upvotes until you are being upvoted on every post. Then it results in larger upvotes instead.
Please check out our full transaction memo guidelines and let us know if you have any questions.
https://steemit.com/basicincome/@steembasicincome/transaction-memo-guidelines
The official currency for enrollment is STEEM. We accept SBD at our discretion but you do not receive extra value or any partial refund for paying in SBD instead of STEEM. If we choose to accept an SBD enrollment, we accept the entire amount. If we choose to reject it, we refund the entire amount and request you to send STEEM instead. Enrollments are processed automatically every 144 minutes.
Questions about Steem Basic Income?
Most questions are addressed in our FAQ or in these helpful resources. If you still have questions, ask in the comments section or join us in our discord server.
A reduction of the upvote bonus to 50% for the main sbi account (and to 0% of all the other sbi accounts) maybe could turn out to be good at the end I think 😊 It will still help the SBI project continue to grow by received upvotes and - I'm not sure if this assumption is correct 😔 - the SP not used for upvote rewards then could be used for a better ROI of the SBI standard units.
It even could make the SBI project more attractive because of a faster ROI for standard units (which is pretty long right now 😔). Anyway, the standard units were the original SBI idea at the beginning.
And I'm not sure if I'm right - but it could be that the reduction of the upvote rewards would be an advantage for all the small steem accounts getting returns by SBI standard units.
However, well done @josephsavage ☺️
You are fundamentally correct. Your knowledge of program mechanics seems to be a little better than you give yourself credit for.
😊 oh, thank you...
I'd say phasing it out would be for the best. Cheers to you for paying attention to community sentiment!
It's good to see this explanation and information publically... being a writer for SBI I like to be able to have sources for other's who might have questions or concerns, that I simply can't answer. This is a continued positive step forward, and one made with the usual transparency.
I would invite everyone to come to the @steembasicincome Discord, or just voice your opinions, ideas, and concerns here...
Thank you for this informative post...
I'm an idiot. And not that smart, so I'm going to do my best to understand the proposed changes...
The only thing effected would be bonuses people get for upvoting your content?
Nothing else changes? Sorry for being a little slow. I blame the weather :)
That's the only change we are proposing. The core units/sponsoring mechanism is still working as intended with a minimum of abusive behavior around it.
I have to admit. I don't like how this whole hf22 thing is slowly going.
It feels like that some abusers and whales are now enforcing more or less rules on every system around them.
I get that we should do something against the abuse of that system, which I already have mentioned months ago. The comment voting was too much even back then.
But also reducing the rewards from voting for the one post from the main account to 50%? That's a little bit too much.
I'm pretty sure that 1 vote won't be enough for the abusers, because they are relying on the 10 votes/day sheme. But 1 vote paid back 100% into the system for the normal casual posting user seems like a good way to balance both.
The whole sustainability part and an incentive for the users to upvote SBI (And push it with that to the top over and over again for visibility and promotion for the program which is great. Always.)
I've been thinking a lot about this trade-off over the last few days. It's a bit more development, but I was thinking 100% match up to the our minimum upvote level and 50% above that. Most small accounts have upvotes lower than 0.02, so would not be limited at all. It does increase the risk of multi-account abuse, though.
I would even go higher with that system, like up to a specific SP amount which is necessary to be classified as something else than plankton.
But I don't see any reason for that system to be under abuse. Using multiple accounts to farm that is totally overkill. They need to get those accounts, setting up those upvotes and then posting at least stuff which is "good" enough not to be downvoted while staying under the radar. I don't think that this is possible in a reasonable scale.
On another note: This basically frees up (almost) 50% of those rewards.
How about pushing that flat distribution again? I would love to see that sbi provides a basic income for every participant in sbi. Driving this whole discussion to a good end for everybody (at least for unitholders.)
I'm pretty sure they don't like the standard units, but a basic support level for every account? That can't be bad.
Regular SBI units are effectively account-level curation, and not many have voiced serious objections.
Thanks for your response and the Resteem.
I think you should phase it out on any SBI comments and sbi2~10 posts as you mentioned, but leave it for the main.
However, I think for the main account's posts it should be left at 2:1 ie 10cent vote = 5cents towards the balance. The voters get back a little more from curation anyway.
I remember reading a post from @holger80 awhile ago about how he set up his auto vote program to vote for SBI's accounts whenever his VP reaches 100% to prevent it from going to waste. So I still see a purpose for this and it will give people a chance to get out 1 a day.
It would definitely prevent abuse, but still give people somewhat of a reason to vote for you.
I agree that's a fair compromise. We already have comments and 2-10 set as a separate dial in our configurations, so it's easy to tune them to 0 while only tuning the main account to 50%.
Using upvotes as VP overflow was part of the reason we offered rewards on all posts/comments. The potential for abuse was always there, but the incidence rate was very low until HF21.
Good to know it wouldn't be difficult from a back end perspective. I haven't heard many say it would be unfair and it wouldn't be too difficult to change if people did have a problen with it.
I don't think anyone had a serious problem with vote trading before hf21, except for a few people who still have other priorities at the moment. Also, there were much better ways of abusive rewards back then, and SBI has always been of limited size compared to whales, so SBI abuse wouldn't have made sense for the large and visible accounts.
I think that 50% on all main level posts is a fair compromise. This helps support the sustainability by growing the secondary accounts directly and they only post like once a week or less anyways. it's a really small amount of rewards at 50% that we are talking about, but it helps keep the program strong.
A side note, I'd love for a few larger account holders to start a new account without telling anyone this is what they are doing. They can use all their knowledge of steem, but none of their contacts to try and grow their account. After 3 months share with everyone how much effort they put in and the results of that effort. Then be honest how much of their success was due to knowledge of the platform. Even with this knowledge I think most would be shocked at how hard it really is to start off.
Programs like SBI are really helpful in keeping smaller accounts active and growing. Gut it and we will really have issues around here IMO.
#sbi-skip
Even Josephbagreed it wouldn't be difficult to do. I don't know of anyone who is against that compromise. It will still allow whales to maximize sbi votes, but your next suggestion is intriguing.
I feel I would do better if I started a new account too. The best example is justineh. If you already know how to use Steem, it's a huge advantage. Also your real networks can easily handle a change of account name.
Doing it blind with changing other sns like discord too could work to fool people a little longer, but I guess your main idea is starting with less SP.
The networks have the real value and newSteem involes much less direct trade offs. It would give persistant abusers a chance to see their real rewards. I imagine a few already have real accounts anyway.
What means upvoting bonuses ?
If participants disagree with fundamental changes, can they then return their shares?
I see many changes here (Steemit) at the moment and I cannot agree with all of them.
What is going to happen at SBI? Are these changes just a beginning?
Since upvoting bonuses are a bonus for upvoting, they don't affect the core economic logic for regular subscription units very much. We would consider it to be an immaterial change that does not trigger the refund option.
That said, the total composition of upvotes received varies from account to account, and some with a high percentage coming from upvoting bonuses might be refunded on their subscription units.
Thanks for the quick answer. Everything okay. At the moment here is a lot of anxiety so my question.
This means that SBI will continue as before and that was important to me. So far SBI has done a great job, thank you.
It's a shame that quality posts can't just stand up on their own legs without having to make it happen.
From day 1 this has always been for members to assist each other, phasing out old ideas moving toward new may be a better option.
Thanks for clarification and thoughts to move forward.
First let me say @steembasicincome / @josephsavage, I appreciate the integrity with which you have approached writing this post. Specifically, wanting to hear from your members, before forging ahead with any changes to your program’s offerings to us.
My response to your proposal is pretty simple. While I have no problem with it, as written, from my perspective it is missing some vitally important information. Specifically, since this aspect of your program was implemented (at least as I understand it …) to “shore up” the need for improving the sustainability of SBI, what will the impact be on sustainability if this aspect of the program is discontinued? Perhaps somewhere the impact of this aspect of your program on its overall sustainability has been reported on, but I am unaware of it.
I can assume the answer is you would hope your program’s members would continue to upvote your posts, expecting nothing in return. Understood, but … It is hard to imagine you would have implemented this to begin with, had not the need to incentivize your members in some manner been present. Anyway, rather than make any assumptions, I would prefer to hear a direct response on any concerns about the projected impact to the program’s sustainability, should this proposal be carried out.
While not directly related to this point of this post, I have a question on the broader issue of the impact of “New Steem” on your program, since that is what has "gotten the ball rolling" in the first place. Have you given any consideration to building a downvote mechanism? Overall, the program’s ”SP power” is considerable and your member’s presumably have a share of this controversial post HF
21/ 22 feature of our Steem blockchain as well.Thanks in advance for your response!
#sbi-skip
Thank you for expressing your thoughts and questions on the matter. We have looked at the expected impact on our sustainability metrics. Since HF22, author rewards contribute <20% to our sustainability, and a significant portion of that comes from our top 10 upvoters. Since those are in part motivated by upvoting bonuses, we expect to lose at least half of our author rewards from this change.
However... those ten accounts are typically upvoted at 100% across most or all of our voting accounts, and we earn below average curation on those upvotes. We expect to make back most (if not all) of our sustainability 'losses' from the change in improved curation rewards. In addition, many of our upvoters are likely to continue, especially if we only cut to 50% instead of 0%. The ratio of votes received to bonuses rewarded will improve and hopefully offset any remaining sustainability impact.
There are some unknown elements, but we hope that our sustainability metrics will actually improve from this change, even though our total rewards may decline some.
With regards to downvoting... we have done a few manual downvotes here and there and have put some thought into a more broadly automated solution. However... we think that automated downvotes can be extremely problematic (worse for Steem than bid-bots and other behaviors that they target). We would like to find some quality downvote trails to follow, but most have a little different perspective on what constitutes abuse.
Thank you for your in depth response @sbi-booster / ?...? 🙂. This ...
... is certainly encouraging to hear, as a preliminary projection. We will look forward to hearing how this unfolds, as you have many supporters hopeful of seeing the SBI program not only survive, but thrive going forward.
On downvoting, while I understand how "sensitive" and problematic their use can be, nonetheless I believe there is too much at stake to avoid utilizing the significant SP power the SBI program wields, for the benefit of our Steem blockchain. I hope to hear more on this topic.
#sbi-skip
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All @sbi-booster responses are written by @josephsavage :)
We agree about the responsibilities of stake, which is why we have done some manual downvoting already (and plan to do more) but have not configured any automated downvoting.
Okay, thank you @josephsavage! 🙂
#sbi-skip
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