Hot and Cold Coffee in one Cup
Everyone has preference. Some people like hot coffee, some like ice coffee, and some like both. But if one likes both hot and ice coffee, will lukewarm coffee satisfy him/her? It won't because it does not mean both but it just means neither hot nor cold.
Interestingly, we are able to find hot and cold sides in recent debates on curation rewards. For-content people view the current problem of Steemit is too many bots that generates voting noise and impede proper contents filtering mechanisms. They are more likely to contend removing curation rewards in order to drive away voting bots. Meanwhile, for-profit people argue that removing curation rewards will cut financial incentives and hence discourage holding Steem Power, resulting in a considerable price decrease. You may think one of sides is correct, but I would like to say both arguments are true and they have no problem at all. The real problem is lukewarm coffee, that is, these hot and cold coffee is mixed in one cup that is called curation rewards.
Two Motivations: For-profit and For-content Users
The goal of for-content people is to find good contents and more profit is lower-priority for them. Their main source of satisfaction is "psychic income". When they feel good contents are discovered, the authors are rewarded, and they are influential in that process, they will gain the non-financial income. For-content people consume contents and usually spend money. In active form, they give tips, and in passive form, they can give up potential profits. In Steemit, I believe they will continue voting even though there is no curation rewards.
On the other hand, for-profit people seek more earnings. In Steemit, their votes aim to gain higher curation rewards. A quality of contents is less important for them. Instead, finding high-paying is the most appropriate task for their purpose. They are not consumers but rather investors. If curation rewards are removed and no incentives are given with votes, they tend to give up voting and furthermore they may sell Steem Power.
Currently, curation in Steemit includes both consumption and production in a badly manner. Ideally, higher rewards should given to posts that provide greater satisfaction to contents consumers and add value to Steem. But now, higher rewards are also given to posts that provide greater financial benefits as curation rewards.
We Need Two Cups
Here, I would like to provide my simple suggestions to separate profit- and content-oriented motivations.
- Removing curation rewards
- Adding investor's reward
- Investor's rewards are only given to accounts whose voting power is not used in a period. So it can be called as "inactiveness reward". The distribution is proportional to Steem Power.
What will happen then? If one is purely chasing profit, he/she will choose to be inactive and earn investor's reward. If one doesn't care profits but wants to curate and reward authors, he/she will choose to vote while giving up financial benefits. Voting bots for profit will be stopped (unless the owner isn't too lazy to stop bots). Curators' influence will increase relatively. Investors still have financial incentives by the new kind of reward.
Summary (TL;DR)
- Current curation is mixture of motivations for financial benefits and for picking good contents.
- To satisfy both, we need to separate these two motivations.
- Adding financial incentives on "not curating" while removing incentives on "curation" can achieve this goal.
Edit
A modified version with remaining curation reward is posted
https://steemit.com/steem/@clayop/diversifying-curation-reward
So basically, you want to pay money to the people who contribute nothing (except their inactivity) but for the people who actually expend effort, you want the effort itself to be its own reward.
Why not go a step further. many people write because they enjoy writing and because they find the proccess of communicating with others to be rewarding. Why don't we pay people who want to make a money profit an investors incentive for not posting, and for the people who want to post, their remuneration can be the psychological reward of having written something good and shared it with the community.
Edit to add -- upvoted and resteemed for discussion though. Clayop is one of the good guys, and even though i don't agree with all of his ideas, i agree with the motivations behind them
I think you just solved Steemit's problems. They can eliminate incentives to do anything at all. They can create the coins through inflation, nobody can do any work, and magically, investors will show up and buy all the coins, making everybody rich!
Post HF17 steemit. Join the movement indeed.
It's revolutionary!
It's got electrolytes?
Very sad when you put it that way. Not much left to justify hanging around here if curation rewards walk the plank.
That's absolutely true, if you're a non-blogger. Basically, those who argue against curation rewards are saying that people who want to invest their money and simply upvote content provide no real value to the platform. They obviously miss the point that the people buying STEEM, powering up, and voting on posts are actually the ones providing the "money" that others are able to quickly cash out and realize as profits.
It says a lot about a user or a platform that is willing to shaft the actual investors and reward those who have no incentive or need to invest. These suggestions/proposals are reckless, in my opinion. The platform is based on incentives for both creating and evaluating content. To advocate the elimination of rewards for either one - but especially on the investment side - demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding economics, the purpose of the platform's incentives, and how the platform actually functions...not to mention that they miss the actual causes of the problems that they presumably want to address.
And to make matters worse - these suggestions are being pushed by witnesses. This will certainly influence my witness voting, as will other issues, such as the willingness to accept hard fork proposals that I believe will be harmful for the platform.
Well said.
I couldn't agree more.
@ats-david for Governor of Steemit
@craig-grant
I'm not a tyrant, Craig!
Add advertisements to increase even further the investors incentives and you just invented Facebook!
Think reversely. Actually, the purpose is incentivising inactivity but charging opportunity costs for doing votes (exchanging with "psychic income"). And from other point of view, inactive users still hold Steem Power.
That's how the many other content systems work, so practically possible, and some authors already doing by declining rewards. But the difference is they are more likely to "create" contents while curators basically consume contents.
You may say finding good contents is also a hard work. Then, in the current system, does majority of voters put meaningful efforts to find good contents? Some may do but at least voting bots pursuing curation rewards don't.
Actually, no. Voters provide tiny fragments of information that are all gathered up and used in the curation process. If we discourage voting, we'll be left with passive readers who provide even less value than voters (if we're lucky).
Please tell us another example from economics where quality is improved by eliminating incentives or creating disincentives.
Voters should not be expected to work hard. Small rewards == small work. Maybe one voter is a stickler for grammar. Maybe another wants to support a particular category. Maybe another likes the color blue and the number 17. It's the aggregate of all those diverse and incomplete voting decisions that becomes the curated product. For better decisions, we need more voter diversity, not less.
Please tell us another example from technology, business, or social sciences where unassisted humans provide better quality than humans with tools.
This is yes and no, which is my point. Voters who don't read post, don't get any satisfactions, but just upvote provide any information about content itself. Their sign is mainly about payouts, e.g. if an author obtain high payouts repeatedly this type of voters are highly possible to upvote. I basically agree it has less financial incentives for other human voters. However, I expect their dissatisfaction from voting bots (e.g. concentration of votes on same authors) will be reduced and the overall they have more benefit.
My point is differentiating incentives into financial and psychic. However, if there's any way to enforce people to read posts to vote, I rather support it. Unfortunately, this is impossible on blockchain.
If you want to more understand my statement, please look at the number of votes and number of views on this post.
Imagine that I'm a fiction writer, and I want steemit to be a more welcoming place for other fiction writers, so I write a bot to upvote every post in the fiction category, whether I read it or not. Maybe I put in some basic checks for grammar and image files and length of article. Over time, I begin refining my bot to become more sophisticated about the content that it votes for. Even though I didn't read those articles, I still derive satisfaction from those votes. I'm also representing the views of some other group of non-voters, who would be attracted to the platform (if my votes prevail). It's the curation rewards that tell me (and steemit) how much of the community shares my interest (leaving aside the [n2] distortion). It's also the curation rewards that enable the whales (major longer-term stakeholders) to shape the platform content. Anyway, even if curation rewards didn't provide those services, shouldn't I get rewarded for my acts of representation?
And there is the crux of it. You don't like the way people are voting, so you want to force them to vote differently or stop voting. Even though, as @sigmajin already pointed out, the bandwagon voters don't actually influence rewards distribution anyway. And what are you going to do when you take away curation rewards and people continue to vote in ways that you don't like?
Those votes don't count. They're just here for the profit. ; -)
Edit: To put it simply, using this framework, your proposal might decrease Type-I voting errors, but it would do it at the cost of a huge increase in Type-II voting errors. IMO, that trade-off is contrary to the health of the platform.
Your framework borrowed from statistics is interesting, and thanks for your example. But please take my point: the issue is mixture of motivation. If you want to upvote every post in fiction tag, that's not because you want to maximize your curation reward but because you have some satisfaction from doing that.
@sigmajin's post is interesting too. But if no curation reward exist, the $160 might go to other posts by for-content curators. So they already meaningfully influence reward distribution, as well as voting counts.
The problems I perceive are, our filtration system for good contents are distorted by hybrid motivation. At least 500 bots (clues from votes on @steemvoter's posts. Maybe less but still hundreds I think) are round and casting votes for "profit", not for "quality of contents".
Yes, i understand it works both ways. Youre trying to get people to pay to vote. Now why would someone pay to vote?
One potential reason, as you pointed out, is the psychological reward. The warm peach fuzzy feeling that comes from supporting quality content.
Another potential reason (one which will, IMO, attract far more steem power) is that the money you can make by misusing your vote is greater than the money you are giving up through opportunity cost. Either because of kickbacks or because youre paying your guild payroll or whatever.
And i will point out once again that most of the whales voting for the worst content on steemit are, in fact, paying a non-trivial opportunity cost to do so. Disregarding this type of voter, and his maginified effect on the system after the honest voters are converted to investors, is just another canopener youre assuming.
Yes mostly the first point.
Second and third point seem remain with curation reward too. The magnitude can be different but we cannot tell it will be greater or smaller.
You hope.
The magnitude might be the same, but the effect will be magnified because youre taking the honest (but profit motivated) voters out of the system. That is to say, the bad fish might be the same sized fish, but theyll b e swimming around in a far smaller pond.
One possibility is stakes of sockpuppet voters are much greater than curators. But I think abusing the system will bring more stakes from the inactive to curation, especially for moderation (downvote abusers) because abusing consequently shrinks the pie so some investor on the edge are willing to give up incentives to prevent abuse.
Great post! It is definitely worth considering. I like the idea and would be in support of it.
The main arguments against it are going to be that we are paying people to do nothing, and there is a psychological disincentive to voting. Both could be argued to be bad for the platform.
As far as paying people to do nothing - personally I believe that having people who are only interested in making a profit not voting is adding value to the platform.
@smooth also brought up a great in regards to this type of plan which would be that the financial incentive is slightly higher than linear - so that there is actually a small incentive for users to keep their SP powered up under a single account vs. splitting it into multiple smaller accounts.
Wasn't my idea. Dan suggested it might be added later when the original incentive to not split up accounts (higher curation rewards) was removed.
Ah, ok. Thanks.
an upvote and coffee for this man!
The last hardfork took care of all price woes - so not to worry.
Oh, yeah. I completely forgot about that! Thanks for the reminder!
Interesting idea. I don't think it will pass though ;) Rewarding people to hold SP and not vote... while those who do don't get rewarded.... meh... doesn't seem right to me. But creative idea, I'll give you that. Maybe try another go at it but with feedback from the comments hehe.
What will be the annual return for the "investor rewards?" What are the estimated losses from users who will likely power down if the "investor rewards" cannot compete with the rewards from good curation? Why should users favor this plan if they cannot earn more than the (presumably) relatively low amount of return on their investment?
With a model that has no revenue and instead relies on "paying" users/investors through inflation of the currency, what purpose does payment serve for those not actively performing any "work" on the platform? (Currently, those who create content and those who discover/evaluate the content and allocate the daily pool are rewarded for their work. Both actions are vital to the platform and the latter incentivizes holding SP.) What value is added when users instead do nothing and the currency is inflated to pay them for doing nothing?
And I would also like to dispel this notion that more bots are a result of chasing curation rewards. That's actually not accurate. Automation increases when the human time element becomes too costly - or in other words, when the potential profit is too low to justify the time spent on curating. As curation rewards decline, less humans spend the same amount of time curating.
So, the answer is not to eliminate curation rewards in order to increase the quality of curating. You're likely to just get less overall curation and probably a lower quality. Not to mention less investment in SP from people who believe that they can beat the fixed returns from an "investor reward." Most of those users will likely power down, which, in turn, will likely result in less demand for STEEM and a lower price for the currency.
The answer isn't to eliminate incentives. I really don't know why this is being touted as a viable option. Numerous users have already stated what they would do if curation rewards are eliminated. Yet so many people still believe the exact opposite will happen. Why is that?
@ats-david I think you are correct. How does this proposal address the problem of getting new users and retaining them? It doesn't. What I think it is a power play to reduce the influence of the whales.
My opinion is that most users don't post, therefore curation is the only way for them to try and make some money. Then run into the round-down in payout. Zero payout. If you give me some model that allows a decent chance for new users to make a little money that will go a long way to acquiring and keeping users.
It switches incentives from voting to locking SP and giving up being infliential. The APR varies by the ratio between curators and investors.
Is there no starting point for the APR? A best guess?
Rough calculation (possibly wrong): if 50% of current voters become the investor class and the curation rewards becomes investor's reward, 2.5%. If we want to keep the similar reward level, we need to double it (author : investor = 6 : 4)
So, you really expect people to not curate so that they can earn 2.5% instead of the 10-30% that can be achieved now through curation?
It would help if you stated what these different percentages represent.
Current curation reward level I used is about 3%.
9.5% * 75% * 20% (data from steemdb) * 100%/50% (24h active stake percentage)
I'm for fixing the disparity first, and nothing else.
How can we measure things if we change many things at once?
@sigmajin debunked the bots mining curation myth.
https://steemit.com/voting/@sigmajin/its-all-about-the-benjamins-or-is-it
Without curation awards why would I hold sp?
^yeah, this too. Personally, i do not believe that curation rewards are the problem. RIght now, much of the problem is whales voting for their "curation employees" in order to use the author rewards as their personal payroll service. And these whales, who imo are 99% of the problem, would still have incentive to continue voting up garbage. The ones who would have incentive not to vote are the ones who are actually down voting it and/or upvoting other (quality) content.
Instead of flopping around stirring up tsunamis they could just refrain from voting and the disparity issue diminishes.
I still think raising the bottom without punishing the top is the way to make this more palatable, but I don't know if the math can do that.
It can't and one of sigmajin's previous posts gives numbers. The easy intuitive explanation is that one big downvote on a top-ranked post raises the rewards on hundreds of lower ranked posts (if the traffic on the site were larger it would be even more). It simply isn't possible or practical to vote on all those hundreds of posts instead, even if the effectiveness of the vote power were the same, which it isn't.
So, it's a new curve that curbs the top and raises the bottom?
The bottom definitely needs raised, unless folks like me can see a cup of coffee a week, they will never stick it out to get better known, and/or better at blogging.
Granted this issue has little impact on the eventual monetary aspects of steem.
I hope you vote against institutionalizing the guilds, it is not better to hide the influence being shared across a number of accounts, imo.
Better would be to stop being so heavy handed in the daily management of what the minnows are up to.
The community knows what it likes and doesn't need 'gems' picked out for it.
Picking winners and losers isn't helping the community find it's level, either.
Abuse is still a good reason to get a whale involved.
Thanks for all you do/have done for us,....
This is satire, right?
We're not that lucky, unfortunately.
:(
Look, I'm not sure that I think curation rewards are necessary, and I've said as much in the past. But let's think carefully about what you're suggesting: What you've proposed is that Steem pays people not to vote.
Don't you realize that this creates an opportunity cost every time someone decides to vote? It means that you're charging people to vote. Every time I find a post I like, I'll quite literally have to decide whether or not to pay to vote for it. And somehow you think this won't create perverse incentives?
I do. But your statement is not always true. For instance, some people and voting bots have much lower cost since they don't read, don't evaluate, but only following preset rules.
The main idea is psychic income can exceed the costs, and those who have greater psychic income will vote. Psychic income comes with consuming contents and it may lead more interaction between authors and readers.
In my new post, I suggested other numbers (not zero curation reward!)
https://steemit.com/steem/@clayop/diversifying-curation-reward
You forgot fake coffee. Lots of plagiarized coffee posts lately.
It sounds like an interesting experiment. One of the joys of cryptocurrency is that we can change the rules for a week and see how it works out, and go back if it doesn't.
I think the curation rewards are an interesting aspect of Steemit, and that feature adds a certain something that is lacking in other social media forms. But they might not be working as intended.
I like the idea of rewarding inactive users but why get rid of curation rewards.
If you vote you lose inactive rewards
Basically, it's differentiating financial and psychic incentives. If you value the former more, you can give up voting (you are investing in Steem Power, so you are still taking risks). If you value the latter more, you can be a curator.
Steem or Esteem that's the question.Or to Be or To Have?.
Upvoted for a thoughtful suggestion that stimulates discussion. I would need to think about it more and understand the pros and cons better. Most of all, I am not convinced that the perceived problem here demands such a radical solution. Remaining open-minded...
The thing about posts, though... There is no evidence that they are actually worth anything. What is the point of bending over backwards to reward "content" when there is no reason to believe that such content benefits existing stakeholders?
I would argue that we have definitive proof that the content on the platform is entirely irrelevant. An individual post adds no value to the platform. The price has consistently fallen, regardless of what's posted. New investment is lacking, regardless of what's posted. Users are powering down, regardless of what's posted. Users receive plenty of upvotes, regardless of what they post. The content doesn't matter.
Investors want to see an active, growing, human user base. They want to know how that user base can be monetized. And then they want to see revenue streams and how they will be able to achieve ROI. None of that depends on someone's essay on metaphysics, their pizzagate conspiracy, or their picture of grandma's sick dog. All that matters is growth, revenue, and ROI.
So, how do we achieve the growth when anyone who doesn't want to be a blogger or commenter is considered "not valuable" and removed from the rewards equation? Blogging platforms are not sustained by only bloggers. And they appear to be a dying business model anyway. The readers and voters need to be incentivized in a system with incentives. They are the larger and more important demographic for growth and revenue (especially advertisements). To deny them rewards is to likely forego the possibility of increasing the site's value.
A perpetual giveaway to users with no incentive or need to invest isn't a sustainable model. It will fail.
If we get rid of curation rewards, the curation bots will stop right away. But I didn't get why need to add inactive rewards to punish the engaging crowd?
By the way weighting by SP means most reward will go to the company and the devs.
Resteemed for more discussions.
That's one of the practical problem I think too. It would be better there's any other way to decline it.
A concern about removing curation reward is that it discourages holding SP. I think I can suggest other balanced point with actual numbers soon.
burn companys SP like synereo(?)
Why will they stay on steemit and not going back to other social media?
I disagree with this logic....
First, voting is not the only thing giving them rewards. One still can write posts and get rewarded. Second, it can be possible to maintain curation rewards, but my point is considering different people with different level of psychic income can help to divide mixed incentives.
What would make you to power up... "now"? (with what change?)
It gives more incentives when you just "lock" Steem Power. Currently, the system enforces rational SP holders to profit-maximizng vote while content-driven votes have relatively less importance. If one wants just profit, why don't we give it to them for holding SP and if one wants influence, why don't we give more influence to them?
What about activity rewards that get contributed towards SP holders? @dantheman mentioned in past a mixture of author/curator/activity rewards....
I am 100% sure that it won't work. Bots to meet the criteria will come and generating meaningless activities (that is noise to the platform) You may remember that wang comment every post, which already meet activity reward conditions. But no one thinks wang is an active community member.
@clayop
@dan had a nice approach that didn't was welcomed in past... Maybe the community is now mature enough to give it a try...
https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/overhaul-of-curation-rewards
What is activity reward?
I think you mistake differences in the time horizon of curators' expectation of rewards for for the type of reward (psychic vs. income).
For example, I curate for the @gardening-trail and the @foraging-trail with the SteemTrail effort. I curate and upvote posts that I know will not give me a lot of curation rewards, i.e., the most immediate rewards. But my curation, along with leaving comments on almost every post that I upvote for the trails, is geared to long-term rewards.
How? By creating community around shared interests. New folks on Steemit have a clear path to connecting with other people. Steemit regulars have topics that they can come back to. And it is a hook to getting new users onto Steemit, whether they want to be authors, commenters, or just readers banging out those upvotes without even knowing what they really are.
I don't do all that for the short-term income through curation rewards. I don't do it for psychic rewards. I do it for the long-term growth in users, the value of Steem, and thus, my own long-term income.
I am 100% sure that your curation creates real value for Steem, both in the short- and long-run. Instead of debating theoretical things, I would like to use an example in your trail:
https://steemit.com/fruit/@tangmo/ma-yom-or-star-gooseberry-one-of-popular-fruits-of-thailand
This post has 9 views and 109 votes, and several dollars (probably from the guild). If 9 people or somewhat more, say 15 people, read the post, where does the rest of 90+ votes come from? Do they ever comment? Do they read? Do their vote based on the post itself?
In your case, all the answer is "yes". You read the post, commented on it, upvoted because you think it's valuable. But I think other 90+ votes answer all "no". They don't add value through votes, but just add some meaningless noise in terms of content curation (not profit game), dilute real curator's influence. I really want to see you become more influential.
This is what I am saying, and please see my revised version (link is added in the end of this post)
The 90+ votes are there because that is how the SteemTrail process adds the earnings value to the post -- by pooling their collective vote power. It doesn't dilute my curation influence, it amplifies it.
In tracking whether the foraging and gardening trails are working to build community (long-term value), I do not track the votes for individual posts, like the one you mentioned. Instead, I look at collections of posts. Here is what I said in my last report, covering 27 posts over the past 30 days:
For an arcane topic like Foraging, during the slow winter season, I think one post per day is pretty good. And it is a unique set of posts unlike posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Medium, Wordpress blogs, or YouTube. They make Steemit a unique place.
Thanks for the link to your new post. I read it several times over and I am not sure that I get your points there. It sounds like you now think that curators that seem to you to not care about short-term income are now not the problem. Instead you are now proposing to shift 3-10% of author rewards to investors.
Only regarding to this post. Assuming bots consists 50% of voting power cast, they actually dilute human voter's power by 50%
It's good thing. How do you identify a post meets foraging or gardening trail? Only by tag or by author? Probably you read and decide, and your effort adds value.
They are already getting 3% (on average) rewards via curation. But by their best cost-benefit maximizing strategy, they don't want to spend time and effort, which actually contribute this "content" platform. Investors reward is a lure to separate for-profit users and to protect real curators from money-driven powers.
If there's any way to prevent profit-driven votes (no reading, no evaluation), like CAPTCHA, it would be the best option. But this is blockchain... it's impossible as far as I know.
Thanks for your kind words of encouragement. And your offer of SP delegation. I will take you up on that after HF17, if you still want to consider it then. I've enjoyed including some posts from the Korean community on the @foraging-trail, like from @bontonstory. Thanks for the discussion. I got a lot out of this.
Kr also has real farmer @jejujinfarm. She's growing tangerines and some other plants. I just knew @bostonstory is there. Thanks!
I see your point about dilution in total, rather than for a single post. I do think that your cost-benefit has to consider opportunity costs, too, though. I know I reduce my total income by curating rather than writing more articles, especially since my SP is not enough to earn very much curation rewards. So I am not necessarily a rational actor. And with people being able to interact directly with the blockchain, it is more difficult to set up some kinds of systems, like you point out!
NO! IMHO you are the most rational actor in the long-run. You are making the pie bigger, while other seemingly rational actors are just eating up the pie.
Although gardening is not my cup of tea, I really value your work, and my movements aims to support devotional guys like you. I am also supporting and building Korean community, so most of my power is used for it. But if you need more Steem Power, I can consider to delegate some after HF17 :)