In conjunction with the Steem Proposal System (SPS), there is consideration of the Steem Economic Improvement Proposal (EIP) for the next hard fork. You can read my thoughts on the SPS here: Thoughts on the Steem Proposal System.
Economic Improvement Proposal (EIP)
The latest proposal for changing reward-based protocols is something that I have mostly supported for over two years. These changes are by no means the cure-all for the problems we have with social and economic behavior on the Steem blockchain, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Some are claiming that these protocols were meant to resolve the issues with bid bots. I think they are mistaken. All of these changes were proposed – or had been in the original design – long before the first bid bot existed. These protocols are not “the bid bot fix,” although they may impact the use and effects of bid bots, just as they may affect other user behavior.
These are the proposed changes and my brief thoughts on each:
1 - Linear rewards to a “convergent linear rewards curve.”
Absolutely YES to this change. This type of curve has been the proposed solution to the voting algorithm since before Hard Fork 19 was designed with linear rewards that very few people even wanted prior to it being misleadingly billed as the “equality” hard fork.
I’ve said this countless times before – just as a superlinear algorithm (n2) was too steep, linear was too flat. It was an extreme overcorrection and has resulted in far too much damage to the economic and social aspects of this platform (along with other protocol changes made around the same time). Returning to anything more than linear is a fantastic move and I wholeheartedly support this change.
2 - Author-Curation rewards from 75/25 to 50/50.
I have been calling for curation rewards to revert back to 50/50 for well over two years. To me, this change is a no-brainer and – in my opinion – can be even further pushed into the favor of curators.
For anyone who has followed my proposals and critiques for the past two and a half years, this will sound like me beating a dead horse, but...the much larger audience and untapped market, by far, is content consumers – the people who will be simply reading and voting on content. This ought to be who we are targeting for rewards distribution and for the small/incremental purchases of STEEM. Offering a larger pool of rewards for those people evaluating and ranking content should entice more people to participate (and invest) for those purposes.
3 - Separate downvote pool.
I have little faith that this will have much of an impact overall. I’m indifferent to this but will certainly test it out myself if it’s implemented.
As I stated recently in a comment about this protocol:
Most users aren't avoiding downvotes because it costs them voting power and they get no rewards. They avoid it because they have been browbeaten into believing that downvotes are bad for the system and that those who downvote are somehow "evil." The culture here has never been great for honest curation and painting downvotes and downvoters as "toxic," "negative," or even comparing the downvotes to rape is absolutely ridiculous and more harmful to the platform than the actual votes cast.
I fully support the first two protocol changes, not because they might affect bid bot use, but because they are simply good changes for the blockchain and for long-term token utility/demand. A separate downvote pool will likely have little effect on the ecosystem overall, but I wouldn’t mind being wrong about that. It’s not a change that I believe is worth fighting for, so whether or not it’s included in the EIP makes no difference to me.
Additional thoughts on current protocols and bid bots
For everyone who believes that bid bots are causing most of our problems, let me remind you that they only exist today because of protocols that were changed in the first half of 2017. There are three protocols that have allowed bid bots to exist as they are today, to make operating these bots very lucrative, and to make using these bots practically risk-free...or actually profitable, in most cases.
What are those three protocols?
1. Linear rewards
2. Delegation
3. Daily voting target of 10
How have these three protocols impacted the system?
Linear rewards has made it relatively simple to calculate estimated vote values. This allows buyers and sellers of votes to find “fair value” and offer virtually risk-free “promotion” of posts. Prior to linear rewards, vote values could only be loosely estimated on a post-by-post basis.
Delegation has allowed for non-invested users to simply lease STEEM Power and then use it to charge fees and agnostically upvote content. These tokens acquired from the fees can then be instantly sold on the market. Those renting out their SP are also paid with liquid tokens that can be instantly sold on the market. Also – prior to delegation – users/stakeholders assumed all of their own risk when attempting to buy and/or sell votes.
Reducing the daily vote target from 40 to 10 has allowed users (and the bid bot owners) to have a significantly higher per-vote value that can move posts up on the “hot” or “trending” pages rather quickly. This makes renting larger amounts of stake more attractive for bot owners and it makes buying their votes more attractive for bot users.
If bid bots were only able to give a maximum of 25% of their current vote value, if the vote values were too unpredictable under a non-linear system, and if bot owners actually had to own the SP required to operate an attractive bid bot, we likely would not see many bid bots, if any at all. Even if only two of the above protocols were reverted, we would likely see a considerable reduction of bid bots and their influence.
Whether you believe bid bots are a good or bad thing, I’m fairly certain that these causes and effects are accurate.
I also believe that changing the voting algorithm from linear back to non-linear will impact bid bot use – I just don’t believe that’s why non-linear is needed. Changing curation rewards back to 50/50 will likely have a minimal impact on bot use, but could have a considerably larger impact on STEEM demand and powering it up. How that STEEM and STEEM Power is used will likely determine where we go from here – as a blockchain, as investors, and as content creators and consumers.
The downvote pool could have a significant impact. However, I don’t think it will be used as much as its proponents believe it will be. The culture here simply does not allow for proper post ranking, of which downvoting is an integral part.
There are so many things to fix, but so little time and support for fixing them. With the EIP, at least things appear to have a chance of moving in the right direction. It isn’t the cure. There’s more work to be done.
Witnesses and other stakeholders will need to seriously consider that many of the changes made in 2017 were not good for the ecosystem and that some of the popular but bad protocols need to be rolled back. I won’t hold my breath for that though, as many of them likely still refuse to acknowledge that major problems even exist...or they just don’t care. There probably isn’t much time left for stubbornness and indifference. The technology continues to evolve and competition continues to emerge. Eventually, one or more of those competitors will win the crowd.
We’ve tried Ned’s way. It isn’t working.
We’ve given our top witnesses a chance to lead. They haven’t led.
We even tried involving the larger Steem community in creating a community-based “foundation.” They mostly didn’t show up – including the very people trying to organize the effort.
There are still some of us here trying to get reasonable people to listen to reasonable plans and proposals. The problem is – there appears to be few reasonable people left. Unfortunately, some of us may end up going down with the ship, but nobody can say that we didn’t try to save it.
Agree? Disagree? Indifferent? Tell me what you think!
VOTE FOR ME FOR STEEM WITNESS!
Delegations break the accountability and stake principle and, over time, skew the distribution even further. Some have put them to good use, but overall, the effects have been terrible.
I don't think anything in the EIP will help those who are just plodding along trying to make money with content; the accounts that are used to making money with money will simply adjust their algorithms and continue as before without even considering curating more or better. Outside of Steem(it), nobody has a clue what we're on about, so no effect there.
Having said that: there are only opinions on all this, no facts or useful theories that predict well, so let's just try and see what happens.
Yeah, I remember writing about that a year or so ago. It made no sense to me that you would create a DPoS blockchain, then essentially make that stake/influence transferable and usable to/for non-stakeholders. What did they expect the outcome would be? Certainly not more responsibility and accountability.
Not directly, no. Indirectly through the increased value of STEEM, perhaps. That's the hope with increased incentives for holding SP and possibly reducing the influence of bid bots and the visibility of their "promoted" (and mostly terrible) content. But we'll see what happens.
To be fair - not many on this platform have a clue either.
There is no rollback.
The proposed EIP changes is just a case of chasing our tail. Increasing curation rewards will do little. Bid bots will also get more curation rewards and the self-voting whales will collect in curation instead of author rewards. A lot of people bid-bot to save face and not to make money. To my knowledge, the only people making on bid-bots are the owners.
Vote buying is going nowhere and is even more prevalent on conventional social media. People talk about shadow-banning but on traditional platforms, EVERYONE is shadow-aded. It is pay to be seen out there or don't get seen at all and don't even see those you follow. Outside of the trending and hot page, that is not the case here, even with bid-bots.
There is no getting around bid-bots. They will simply go off-platform like with all other social media. Ever heard of click-farms? Do you really think potus and the kardashians have all those likes authentically? They don't.
That doesn't mean we can't make things better but shuffling around the same number of eggs in the same basket is not going to do it. We have to reward the behavior we actually want to see.
My suggestions. Please see my response to another post from earlier. today.
#teamsteem
ENGAGEMENT!
Wrote about this a few days ago, sadly in spanish
A great critic. Is @ats-witness your witness account?
Yes, indeed!
I'm going for indifferent now.
It is not up for debate if the proposals get implemented. It is only a question of when.
It is a good post nevertheless :)
Posted using Partiko Android
On point one, isn't convergent linear simply a curve that's less than linear at the start gradually converging back to linear? The way you mention it above is as if it goes slightly superlinear? After it converges it will still be too flat, if you get me?
And I think the downvotes will actually be good because personally I actually want to flag spam more but it costs me so I don't do as much as I would like.
Probably a misstatement, but it's not less than linear - it's morehere. than linear. It starts on a superlinear curve, and then "converges" toward linearity as rshares increase. Hopefully, the number of rshares needed before it converges to linear will be high enough to not make it pointless. Here's a brief explanation of the curve from @vandeberg - the full post can be found
We have decided to call this a convergent linear rewards curve, because as the number of rshares increases, this curve converges on linearity and behaves more and more like a linear rewards curve. The specific curve it behaves like can be derived by calculating the limit at infinity. In the case of this curve, it behaves like the curve f(n) = 10n. We can tune how quickly the curve converges to the equivalent linear rewards curve by changing the coefficient of the denominator term.
Yeah, I think some people will use more downvotes, but the vast majority of users will simply not bother, just as they do now. But like I said - I would love to be wrong.
Good post. When is the next hf though?
They haven't coded it yet so I think it is still a while away
They haven't coded
It yet so I think it is
Still a while away
- meesterboom
I'm a bot. I detect haiku.
nice haiku
The fact that it will be breaking the author reward to 50/50 does not make sense to me.
The fact that I'm getting paid to shitpost does not make sense to me. No other sites pay me to shitpost.
Lol, yeah, heh, yeah,....
I would not change anything but put more emphasis on the marketing side. That’s my opinion
Posted using Partiko iOS
I think the flags will bring in a lot more risk for buyers, and while the bidbots in theory could get more, they need buyers that won't get flagged into loss territory so they can keep buying. This means that they will likely lower the bids to suit but then they need more buyers and posts, to vote on and they would likely get flagged a bit too. At some point, it will close the gap toward curation offering a more stable ROI than selling.
Speculation, but I think that if people flag well enough, the randomization of rewards is much like what you talk about with the unpredictable vote values.
At the very least, I think the changes are going to force a lot of reconsideration by pretty much all maximizer users and, will likely result in a lot more interaction, some of it will be very drama-filled.
What's social media without plenty of drama? We need to be a hell of a lot more dramatic around here if we want to go "mainstream." Let's get to work!
Fair call ;)
The vast majority of steem stakeholders and witnesses don't care about improving the economic system because it's working in their favor, they are making tons of steem a day and they are the major bears responsible for sinking consistently the price of steem since the end of 2017.
That summarizes the whole story, the majority of the demand is coming from minnows and new users who don't understand the ecosystem very well. The current ecosystem reminds me of a political dictatorship, the whales control the ecosystem and as long as it gives them profit they don't care about the others. Finally I do like your insights and I can't agree more, change is indeed a must!Wau. You made ten bucks. What a waste of your time.
Yeah, probably. :(
You can travel to Tinbukstu!
Yeah, I did the math and $10 divided by eleventy gabillion words = should have just posted another Poopfinity.
I would, but the main character died.
I think you're over thinking it, bidbots and large investors will find a way to leverage their downvoting power efficiently and that alone will clean the house and concentrate rewards to chain beneficial initiatives.
Going to 50% curation reward will simply require much more downvotes to counter the circlejerks stacking votes on feel good content.
Vote buying won't go away with a simply more complex curved curve. Vote buying is not easily monetizable while it should be, so much so that all vote buyers eventually compete for near 0% profit as some have content they actually want to promote at a cost, some have content that will attract downvote or organic upvotes. If votes sellers are so obvious to detect they can be removed from UI views, or downvoted in a systematic manner.
I'd be interested to get on a discord call to discuss these things with you.
BTW I fully agree with your take on SPS finding
In the three years that I've been here, coordinated and systematic downvoting of sub-par content has rarely ever been a thing. On the few occasions that this has occurred, the whining and crying from the user base was so loud and vilifying was so strong that the downvoters mostly became disgusted and stopped caring altogether.
As I said already - unless the culture changes regarding how downvotes are perceived by the user base, I wouldn't expect a lot more of it to occur, even from those with large enough stake to not care about being targets of retaliation. The crying will likely reach record heights, because now users will actually be losing money on their vote-buying, instead of "losing money" by simply having their rewards reduced.
I'm not sure it would require much more downvoting. With the voting curve changes, I think it'll likely be a wash. Besides - the more larger accounts that downvote, the bigger effect they'll have when the algorithm is near the linear end of the "convergent" curve.
If anything, I would think that posts that are both heavily upvoted and downvoted will likely reach a generally lower equilibrium point than under pure linear like we have now. And author rewards would certainly be lower.
Oh, of course not. People who want to buy and sell votes will find a way to do it under any system we have. It's just the amount of buying and selling and how lucrative it is for the parties involved (at the expense of the rest of the community) that's a problem.
I would like "the bidbot problem" to be handled more by the interfaces as well. There are better ways to promote content on your website that is lucrative for the website owner, its users, and any potential investors. By not even bothering to address this, interface/website owners are completely missing out on revenue and improved content discovery/ranking.
I would love it if just one interface actually did things right around here. But at this point, I'm not very hopeful.
A call might be possible sometime soon, but I'm always available to text chat whenever you can: ats-david [ats-witness]#1997
I agree with 1 & 2 and I'm also filled with hope for 3...
I do believe we need a lot more downvoting on the platform, making a few of those "free" should help legitimize them as an integral part of the curation mechanism.
I don't think bid-bots or bot votes in general are the core problem, they can be used legitimately, in the end it's those users who use bid-bots daily purely for ROI with bare minimum effort in content production that drive the problem.
An increased risk of catching flags (and losing ROI) would hopefully put a dent into this content-agnostic reward farming behavior and decrease the demand for paid votes at the same time?!
I think you are right, but on the wrong premise...
This has not been a content driven platform for at least 2 years now.
Today the blogging part is a farming tool thanks to bidbots and a marketing tool for dApps and other derivatives of the money making crew.
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I've always wanted to know what David sounded like ... OMG you're a woman!!!???
This explains so much!