I think curation rewards have to stay. It's a kind of labor and it should be rewarded. Sure at some point some algorithm can use conditional preference networks to generate recommendations but that takes a long time to learn what to recommend and often it's not perfect. A human based evolutionary computation is what we have now and curation deserves reward.
I prefer we keep curation rewards whether human or bot collect the reward. It may be possible to improve voting but a less than perfect mechanism design is still better than no mechanism design. Curation rewards for a slightly flawed algorithm is still better than no curation rewards. Finally we probably should wait until the network is bigger so there is a larger sample to work with before determining to make any decision as extreme as this.
Some thoughts,
Do we know the public sentiment? A few people have decided that the curation system with bandwagon voting is having a negative impact on the functioning of Steemit but how does the negative impact express itself in a way which can be measured? Are we likely to see less growth in content producers in the short or long term if bandwagon voting remains? Do bots really have a negative effect in the long term if the population is big enough so that there are a diversity of bots and whales? It could be that under the current conditions the mechanism design for curation voting is not good for the current demographics but what happens when there are 100,000 users with bot swarms and whales?
Personally I think if the bots swarm and there are whales but it's diverse enough that it could offer a level of predictability so it's not completely random but also be not so predictable that people everywhere can game the patterns. In essence there could be many different patterns for bots which can be encouraged. In generally I just don't have any clear information as to the current effects or predictive statistics so I can't make heavy decision. I request more information on usage data or at least some kind of possible projections, a hypothesis, etc.
Perhaps a better compromise is to reduce the allocation to curation to until the potential for abuse is better understood.
Reducing curation rewards without changing the algorithm will not change the behaviour of voters. There will still be the bandwagon voting behaviour.
Agree. It will also further favor bots.
Right now the highest Weighting goes to the first Upvoter and diminishes from there. If possible place a random element in the code that randomly shuffles the weighting allocation so that the the element of uncertainty is introduced for all votes received by the post. Then even a late post may earn a high weight and a early vote a low weight. Therefore voting rewards becomes less predictable and curators are less able to "game the system"
OOP' s I see liondani proposed a similar thing in the later comments
That would incentivize to spend your votes on the 20 most valued posts
Couldn't the people with 40+ accounts have all 40+ accounts upvote post and game the system that way?
Anything that is weighted or chosen by "accounts" rather Steem Power is broken IMO. You could choose randomly but weighted by SP (so 2x SP would give 2x the chance of being chosen), although doing anything "randomly" on a blockchain is problematic.
My proposal is to give equal weight to all votes for some reasonable period of time (one minute, five minutes, whatever) which makes it possible to at least read the post before voting on it without being penalized for doing so. By rewarding specifically the first even if that occurs in seconds you strongly favor bots. Later votes would continue to have declining weight to reward those who first recognize the value of a post as well as (though by less) those who later endorse the earlier votes.
@liondani. There is nothing to prevent voting after the 1-5 minute period, even 12-24 hours later, and it should still be rewarded. It just should no longer receive the "early voter" bonus that is intended to reward those who find new unrecognized posts. Once a post has already started to receive votes, it is no longer unrecognized. My proposal is just to stop rewarding the very first post (or a few of the first) by enormously more than those who vote just a few second later. There is very little value there.
A reasonable time ok BUT RANDOM.... else the bots will vote exactly after 1, 5 minutes or 10.... they will not care if a minority of users voted before them....
And I don't agree 1 and 5 minutes is reasonable in a 24 hour period... I find more reasonable 1-2 hours before the original voting power kicks-in. We want average users to have the opportunity to get better rewarded ... And average users are not logged in 24 hours a day to take advantage of 1 and 5 minutes windows... I mean average users will have a bigger selection and will vote with less pressure if they have more time to read the content before voting....
Look what happens now, we upvote most of posts because we read a nice title (because we are in hurry off course) and then we read the underlying content :)
That sounds better. If you strip away curation rewards, what is the incentive to spend time on the site? How will topics be curated? Whales will just sit on their stashes and not use them to better the project. People will get lazy also. It will just be like Reddit, etc. Some compromise would be far better.
That could work. I request more study and more data so we can know what the effects are.
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Astute point about not really knowing the effect. Most of the bot voting we've seen is for authors who actually make good posts. That generally speaking adds value and is not necessarily a negative. The fact that someone made a post that was deliberately designed to game the bots does not mean there is an overall problem.