Building a decentralized economic platform that uses voting to distribute funds is extremely challenging. On the one hand everyone wants to “vote selfishly” to give themselves the most reward possible, on the other hand large stake holders want to vote in a manner that maximizes the value of the currency.
The solution employed by Steem uses the principle that individuals acting alone shouldn’t have much power, but the more people that work together the more power they have collectively. In other words, two people voting together is more than twice as powerful as either voting alone.
The end result is a system that is working relatively well at today’s scale. The challenge Steem faces now is that large stakeholders, aka whales, have enough stake to unilaterally allocate far more than even the largest group of smaller users.
This means that whales need to spread their votes across 1000 times as much content as normal users or refrain from voting all together. Allocation of rewards will be highly concentrated among those the whales give attention to, but the attention of whales is finite. The finite limits of whale attention limits the scalability of reward distribution.
Existing Solutions
Some savvy whales, such as @smooth, are actively hiring people to process content and vote on their behalf. This is a very involved process and ultimately limited to a few people able to operate bots, manage teams, and check up on people.
Even with everything @smooth is doing, there is only so much content that his team of curators can process.
Bad Voters
Not all voters are good voters, and this applies to whales too. Sometimes accounts can go rogue, get hacked, or otherwise start acting in ways that harm the wider community. When a small stakeholder goes bad the system can safely ignore their votes and hide their posts with a reputation score, but when a whale goes bad things are not so easy.
Scalable Voting
What we need is a scalable solution for managing distributed authority over the printing presses and deciding which content is most worthy to be promoted. The root of all authority must be derived from stakeholder Steem Power or Sybil attacks will quickly undermine the algorithm.
In the late 90’s Google faced a similar problem with websites. They invented an algorithm that could rank web pages by using links as votes. This algorithm worked extremely well until SEO hackers learned how to game the system using what is essentially a Sybil attack.
Google gave every page one vote that it could divide among every page it linked to. The algorithm would the use these votes to identify the highest authority, quality, most visited, or most popular pages.
Delegated Voting via Account Rank
If you view each account as having 1 web page per unit of Steem Power controlled by that account, and you let each account link to other accounts that they trust to allocate funds and curate content then the result is a massively recursive delegated voting system. Allowing links to have positive and negative weights means that everyone has the power to contribute to filtering the “good” people from the “bad” people.
So long as there are many more “good” people than “bad” people, the bad actors are quickly neutralized by having more negative links than positive links.
This system is immune to the Sybil attack faced by Google’s PageRank algorithm because the supply of “pages” is restricted by the available Steem Power.
Account Rank on a Blockchain
The page rank algorithm is a computationally intensive iterative process that is normally performed by large clusters of computers using massively parallel map-reduce algorithms. A blockchain is required to reach consensus quickly and is ultimately single threaded because every transaction has the potential to impact the consensus state relevant to every transaction after it.
In order to efficiently implement Account Rank on a blockchain we must first place an upper limit on the largest possible blocking calculation. The computation complexity of calculating the Account Rank of an individual account grows linearly with the number of links (votes) an account gives or receives.
Fortunately, we know that there is a natural limit to the number of people someone can maintain stable relationships with. This is known as Dunbar’s number. By studying social group size in primates Dunbar was able to conclude that at most 150 stable relationships. Beyond this size more restrictive social rules are required.
We can use this information to naturally limit the number of trust-links allowed among accounts to something that ordinary people are actually capable of.
Once we have limited the number of links it is simply a matter of spreading the calculation over time and prioritizing calculations that will effect the biggest changes. So long as the rate at which links can change is slower than the rate at which the algorithm can reach equilibrium then on average the network will remain close enough to equilibrium to accomplish the desired goal.
Alternative to Witness Voting
Using the Account Rank algorithm we could replace and eliminate the overhead associated with tracking and tallying witness votes. Instead the witnesses would be the top accounts by Account Rank that didn’t opt out of being a witness. Each account is currently allowed 30 witness votes, this memory could be repurposed to serve the Account Rank algorithm. Likewise, every time an account’s Steem Power changes all 30 witness votes are updated. These calculations could be replaced with Account Rank propagation calculations.
Over all this would increase user engagement in voting for peers and provide a more liquid and representative ranking of user trust and reputation within the network while adding only a small amount of additional overhead and simplifying witness selection.
Each user would simply add their 30 most trusted curators (aka friends) to their account and the Account Rank algorithm will automatically distribute influence among the friends. This would result in trust flowing outward from whales and down to more people who currently don’t have much voice or curation power.
More people acting with more power due to delegated trust lines automatically rebalanced by Account Rank means that rewards can be distributed more fairly because there are more people with power and attention to process posts.
Negative weights would allow the network to quickly remove voting influence from accounts that earn a reputation for bad behavior. This is something the current Steem algorithms require a voting bot war that generates unwanted collateral damage.
Conclusion
With careful implementation and planning, it should be possible to upgrade Steem to have a far more liquid, democratic, and secure web of trust. This web of trust can then more reliably be used to allocate rewards in the best interest of the whole platform while scaling to handle millions of people.
Note - this idea is presented for discussion purposes only and does not represent a commitment to implement at this point in time. There may be unresolved technical challenges to realizing this algorithm.
side note: Google got rid of pagerank.
Upvoted for relevance. I don't know the history here, but before undertaking to emulate something it should be clearly understand what challenges it has encountered in a possibly-similar adversarial environment, what replaced it, and why.
+1 Ditto why I had upvoted. Although @dantheman mentioned it in the blog, I upvoted this comment for the same reason you did, that we shouldn't readily think SP solves all the reasons Google abandoned it.
Probably a bit late, but pagerank still exists but it's not public anymore. This is why people use third party metrics to measure a page value.
I was going to write an article on improving the curation rewards, following yesterday's post about my curation experience, but I think I'll just post this here instead.
This is indeed a great idea - I was thinking along these lines anyway, having a "Curator's Reputation". Your Account Rank implementation sounds good to me. Will the ranks be influenced by the Steem Power of the voters? I.e. If I get 30 votes from whales versus 30 votes from minnows, will be Account Rank be 1000x more? I understand that this will distribute influence away from the whales, but my question is, to what magnitude?
An issue that remains to be addressed is great content from new / unknown authors and most importantly, niche subjects. This Account Rank system further undermines that. I spend a lot of time curating, and I upvote many gems which are often far more eloquent and engaging than most posts on the Trending page. Over time I have noticed this is usually from new authors and niche subjects. I don't even mean niche, really - common topics like science or gaming. If the community has to grow, there must be a large diversity of topics. This is what Reddit does so well - there's a sub for everything!
I don't know how this could be accomplished, but one way would be offering lesser curation rewards for tags and authors that are popular. Today, it's easy to see which posts are Trending material. Posts from known authors about Steemit are pretty much guaranteed to be on the Trending page. As @condra pointed out, people vote for them to cash in curation rewards. The post may well be good content - but they are often over-inflated. I don't think these deserve much in the way of curation rewards.
I would even go one step further and penalize author rewards for these trending tags. We see people make posts about Steemit simply because that's the most popular, rather than subjects they truly believe in. The platform is foregoing diversity.
Today, the Reddit user who partakes in the r/gaming sub is going to come to Steemit and find no content whatsoever. In the long term, it would be r/jujitsu or r/NASA. Steemit NEEDS diversity to thrive.
Just some thoughts there to consider.
People are voting on "sure shots" for the sake of curation rewards.
It's like going to bet on a horse race, but the favourite, who has won the last 5 races, has the same long odds as the outsiders. Naturally, you bet on the favourite.
Something needs to be tweaked to encourage people to actually vote for what they like, rather than voting based on the "form" of the author.
As far as I'm concerned, this is one of the most pressing issues on the platform right now because the current paradigm is so extremely polarising. It causes a feedback loop at the top of the foodchain.
No, people are voting on "sure shots" because they don't understand the curation rewards.
This post is a great example. 94% of the curation rewards are going to Dan. At the current post value of about $2000, that leaves approximately $30 curation rewards total for everyone else, with the earliest high-SP voters getting most of that. The later voters are getting virtually nothing to literally nothing (I believe many will indeed round down to zero and not be paid at all). If you voted for this post hoping to get curation rewards, you wasted your vote.
While the details may differ, all of the high payout posts are essentially the same. The author and early voters get almost all of the reward; people voting later and who are the ones boosting the rewards to the stratosphere are getting little to no curation rewards in return.
There is often a lot of piling to a relatively small number of posts, I'll agree with that. But the reason is not the curation rewards, it is something else.
Would it not be useful to have two upvoting options? One for rewards and one for "likes"?
There are different desires when I vote on something.
If other users understood better about how they are going to get paid for upvoting they would not pile on and inflate a post that doesn't warrant it. And if they had an option of showing their appreciation at least with a "thumbs up", they could feel like they are showing appreciation. Instead, some users are voting for things they like, but don't necessarily want to reward due to having no other fast option of showing their approval for a post.
If people could thumbs up any post they wanted to, the poster and others could at least have some indication that the post in question had some value and maybe is going in the right direction. Currently when a new user makes a post, I think most other users feel that since it will more likely be a wasted vote because it won't be voted on by a whale, they are reluctant to vote. They may like it, but they won't waste their vote on it.
Anyway, there may be good reasons why separate thumbs up and thumbs down button would be counter-productive or take something away from how the system currently rewards, but I can't think of it.
Any thoughts?
And I liked your comment as well. It was informative and ultimately should help users make better choices.
I have a similar idea how we could evolve the voting. here are my thoughts to it:
We should also think about improving voting:
I would suggest to allow 3 different kind of votes:
Important posts could be valued higher lets say 10x your voting power, but should be more limited then normal up-votes, lets say max 30 in the last 30 days.
This would also solve the problem, that many post get lot of payout, that simply link to a breaking news, like for example the post of the bitfinex hack. With this in place we could just make the post with the braking news more visible without giving an extra money for a post that is done in 10 seconds and would be more like a normal reddit / facebook like.
The same voting we could also do the opposite way:
The above is part of a bigger post where i tried to outline how we could evolve voting and some other current issues:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@arcurus/tagging-and-flagging-hidden-by-a-whale-how-to-evolve-further
Read your article and liked your ideas. Hopefully something similarly interesting is in the works.
Maybe? This raises some complicated issues like what does it mean if someone votes to reward but dislikes. Is this some sort of attack? One of the reasons Steem features posts with higher rewards in terms of visiblity is so people have the opportunity to scrutinize the post and rewards before payout, possibly downvoting if the reward is undeserved or outright abuse (for the same reason, when a post gets votes close to payout time, the time is extended). Perhaps disliking a post would make it less visbile, subverting this protection?
Of course there are many details that would have to be worked out with such an idea. I'm not saying it is a bad idea, just asking questions and thinking it is undeveloped and would need a lot more work to define and analyze before seriously considering it.
Here an suggestion to evolve the post visibility, what wecould do about the voting i posted bellow in the comment:
Fair visibility for all posts
Currently posts are not only rewarded exponentially, but also they get a lot more votes if they become visible on the trending page. So even with linear vote-counting, they are rewarded exponentially, because they attract more voters through being visible.
It would be much more fair if the posts which are displayed on the main site as default are drawn in a lottery like style. Every time you reload the page the displayed posts on the top site could be drawn through a lottery. The more votes they have already the higher the chance to be selected. This would give all participants a fair chance to be listed at the top and therefore attract more votes.
@arcurus I like that idea! It would prominently display some posts that haven't received a lot of voting interest yet, but might if featured. Good thinking.
@arcurus I also agree.
I think the scrutiny of high-value posts to identify subjectively undeserved rewards is an important part of curation that is very hard to get right and people fortunately/unfortunately have been erring on the side of caution.
I agree, vote should reward. If you don't feel it is worth the vote, you can comment. It promotes the posts visibility still and helps in a back end way. Flagging should have a tiered options as to reason (all with same penalty) but clarity as to why it was downvoted. Also, what would you think of whales using algo to designate small small amounts f voting power based on historical upvotes lining up with point of views per whale? I am sure there's logistics I have not realized or thought through as yet on that... but it's a thought
Agreed needs fleshing out and seeing what are the potential pitfalls.
I can see that being a viable option actually. There are posts that you can disagree with vehemently, but still feel that the person deserves a reward because their opinion can be just as valid as yours, but you don't agree with it. So you reward them for the effort and opinion while at the same time let them know that you don't automatically agree with it, JUST because you rewarded it.
I may be in the minority on feeling this way, but I've seen quite a few posts that I think should be rewarded, but I don't think they are my cup of tea and want to still give them support. Like there is some user, whose name I can't recall, that has some rather creative opinions and posts. They make me cringe at times, because it's not something that I like, but I think that others should be exposed to this users meanderings, so I would like to reward, and thumbs down. Considering the thumbs down is only an indicator of ones approval and doesn't need to affect visibility, I'm not sure how it can be gamed or thought of as an attack. If it were to affect visibility then there might be a problem. Hrmm, just thought of something else, but this comment is already too long.
I'll see if I can find more posts talking about the voting system and try to find an elegant and simple solution. Though, I really hate to be spending our time discussing something that isn't listened to by the devs or that is already being worked on by them. I'm not the guy out there that loves to talk about what player should be drafted as if they were a GM of a team. If we have no say, then we might as well go on our way.
Thanks for being out here in the wild so much sharing your ideas, Smooth. It's appreciated.
Its a good point and its interesting to follow the development of these tools. I would suggest that there are two separate ways of appreciation - a "vote" = Like and another "upvote" that is as present "Like+reward" - The flagg option likewize split in "Dislike" and "Downvote". This will allow for more detailed feedback from readers and followers. And again - the collection of power to whales is a really counter productive idea.
Since your idea is basically my idea, I approve, but
This isn't entirely the problem. Perhaps the weighting is too heavy, but I'm under the impression that an alteration to their vote power is in the works such that they can choose to give heavier or lighter weighting to their votes. We shall see. Sooner rather than later, I hope.
People not understanding the curation rewards is a very simple UI problem. It would be trivial to add an indicator by the upvote button that gives you information about what sort of reward might be possible for your vote. "Percentage of curation rewards remaining" or something like that. This would help people understand how curation rewards work. Their confusion is understandable for two reasons:
Agreed. It would seem that the devs have a habit of thinking everyone understands this system as well as they do. That isn't a slam, I think it is valid criticism and something that all of us are guilty of. Doctors are notorious for using jargon and talking over the heads of patients and this is something I know from first hand experience and takes constant concerted effort to improve.
Anyway, you make good points. We are in beta and I can only assume that the UI will get a dedicated team to deal with making it more new user friendly. If we are to get many new users here, and keep them, this will surely need to be addressed.
Lol, I can see you are not an experienced developer. No offense. But that would lead to all sorts of misunderstandings.
Haha, it's true - I'm not a developer.
But the opacity of the current interface is already leading to all sorts of misunderstandings. It's also leading to people "wasting" their votes on trending articles. I don't know, maybe that's the point.
What are the misunderstandings that would be so egregious?
@biophil, I am very very sleepy so this reply may not be so great. In short, the masses won't ever understand it, the cognitive load is too high. K.I.S.S.
People want to know that someone took the time to see their post. A simple view counter will let people know there was interest without giving a reward.
Yep, this is yet another thing that I've mentioned would be helpful for all users.
If 100 people see a post and 100 people upvote it, versus 10,000 seeing it and 100 people upvote it, that can tell you a lot.
Is there any downside of everyone being able to see how many "views" a post has? Can this then be gamed? Are views even saved in to the blockchain? I assume it's Steemit.com only.
Anyway, I can only imagine how much better the site will be a year from now with all the user input that we have at our disposal. Keep it up!
People like to show approval. There should be a LIKE flag and count as well as a vote flag and count. Steemers need to be educated further to understand the voting mechanism and reward but provided with the means to express approval. Both voting and approval could feed into the reputation algo. This may help to stem swarm voting, but does nothing to improve the rate and breadth of steem power distribution. The whales/dolphins need to gift/seed some stake rather than lend it....though how you accomplish that in a fair way, I don't know.
People upvote what they think is important. Most people are not often optimizing their curation rewards, including myself.
Our discussion of curation rewards is most for identifying vulnerabilities that can be gamed.
Nevertheless the curation reward incentive (or the misunderstanding of it) is apparently driving the initial stage of the groupthink where those who do try to optimize their curation rewards and frontrun whales try to get in early on voting for blog posts. Then this boosts visibility and thus boosting votes (helping to get the crucial whale attention thus somewhat self-fulfilling) from those who vote on what they think is important.
Also I think much of the groupthink has to do with an inherent groupthink in interests of those who are on the site and have significant voting power. Most of us are coming from affiliation with Bitcoin or in the same household with someone who was into Bitcoin.
I think we need actual surveys of users as to why they vote on things. To be honest, I can only use anecdotes and I think everyone else is pretty much doing the same.
The dollarvigilante "joke" post is a prime example. 800 or so upvotes isn't because they thought it was a valuable post. It wasn't that funny, it wasn't that informative. It would be nice to know what so many thought was worthy of upvotes. Were some upvoting in protest of the downvotes? Fanboism? We are all guessing on these matters.
Anyway, thanks for your comments. I've seen you around for awhile and enjoy your input.
That but I think more that the way he responded with some degree of willingness to change and also how he better explained his background and admitted some of his mistakes. There was some (modicum of) humility. Thus he gamed some sympathy vote for the @berniesanders downvote. Community likes to see progress. That was likely considered important progress and upbeat.
But what if I just want to give you a reward without expecting anything in return?
@smooth thanks for taking the time to reply..
I agree, people wrongly think they can get worthwhile curation rewards from late votes on big posts. But I stand by my assertion that people are betting rather than voting ("genuine content mining")..
I've written more about it here..
I feel that their should be rewards for people that are early to upvote content that becomes very successful. (This may be in place, but it is not been a concrete fact in my mind). This will keep people checking the new feed instead of only what is trending.
And while I love the feed of people I follow, at the same time when I'm looking at all my favorite posters, I am not discovering new people. This would frustrate me if I was in their shoes. Not everyone is incredibly creative, but everyone has the ability to make interesting content about something they enjoy.
Rewarding people for looking in the new feed should be encouraged. And also for new users there is almost no reward for curating. I don't know how to fix that, but it should be addressed.
Also the first #introduceyourself post should have its own feed and rewards increased to encourage people when they start out. Even giving just a higher percentage to the poster and a smaller amount to the curators would be ok. Like 85% to the poster for their first post in a certain tag and then back to normal for others.
The more new people can be engaged and have contests and things where they feel they are being heard, the better. If steemit doesn't keep up the userbase it will not be as successful as it could be.
That is exactly how the system operates right now. People who find posts already in trending and then vote for them get little to no curation rewards.
I think everyone should get equal part of the rewards whatever time the upvote is given within the first payout time frame. It is better to read an article in full before deciding if you will upvote. Rather than following the whales and upvoting blindly
right...thks u
What's holding back the user base is the current log in system. I have friends and family who are following my blog and now have an account but simply can't log in. The only people I know logging in successfully are techys. I don't know the solution for this but here is a suggestion
I agree with you. I don't know if it is the only thing or the primary thing holding back user growth, but It is quite user-unfriendly. Nevertheless we've gained 2000 daily active users, almost a 50% increase, in the past 3-5 days. So the growth is there, still.
I think the other thing holding some users back is the way the system forces you to upload pictures to a service and then add the image into the post.
I think steemit would be a great place for some older people to share their wisdom (grandparents, great grandparents), but it is unlikely many will be able to figure out how to post images and videos and format the content.
A site like facebook has a more intuitive feel and allows drag and drop and simple copy and paste of url's into a post.
A text editor like microsoft word that would allow you to work on multiple stories at the same time would be a great addition to steemit. Being able to drag and drop videos, picture, and gifs and make a variety of text formatting easy from italics to bold to headlines etc.
Most people are already familiar with word or writing emails, so I think tapping into the older generations with an ease of use functionality would bring some new ideas to steemit.
I'd love to see an old motherly or fatherly wise whale or shark embraced by the community and given a platform for their thoughtful "shark/whale song"
My sister joined, then left because she didn't like the login system.
When it expands to mobile being anle to use fingerprint would make it easier..... pc...... not so much
@bendjmiller222 definitely agree with your first statement. That's generally how I go about reading posts. I go to the new section of whatever topic I'm interested in and vote on articles I enjoy. I tend to be one of the first few people upvoting because of that and 98% of the time those posts don't trend and my curation is little, but I rather read stuff I enjoy. Beneath it all majority of people will cash $$$s though. Just how society is wired.
Yes and that is another thing about steemit I like. Not everyone wants to make large sums of money or treat it as a job. You may simply enjoy reading articles and making a little money commenting or posting pictures you've taken.
Steemit is one of the few places I know where the people at the top are not consumed with greed. I don't see @ned and @dan looking for ways to cut back rewards and pad their own pocket. They are building wealth by allowing others to become successful and may take a pay cut to do so. But can anyone honestly tell me they would rather have Zuckerberg running steemit than @ned and @dan?
All Your Base Belong to Zuckerberg
I agree with the goal and reason why we need it, but the algorithm you suggest (which is in place) does not accomplish the goal and appears to incentivize the opposite result of a circlejerk groupthink as @condra above as well I explained.
I believe you are actually supporting a feature which is destroying what you want.
It is a situation that definitely has a complex solution needed @anonymint. I'm not steadfast in any position and great ideas can flow from people with multiple points of view, so the more people that weigh in the better.
I wish I had an easy answer, but I believe it will take some trial and error putting together this solution. But keep up the good conversation. I really value everyone's opinion as long as they are adding insight to the comments beyond throwaway comments like "Great post!" Those do nothing in my mind except make me leery about following them.
Comments are just as valuable as content and should be treated with the same respect and thought when possible. Not only does it engage others, but it shows you actually took the time to read the bloggers content instead of simply upvoting and making a quick comment hoping a whale will feel generous that day.
In response to @anonymint: if I'm not mistaken, steemit related posts are declining as a percentage of total posts. And whale holdings are also declining as a percentage of total steem/steem power. So I think we're moving in the right direction -- toward having a more diversified platform on multiple levels.
Could things be tweaked and refined? Of course, but I think it's a far stretch to say the reward for early voting (of content that becomes popular) defeats the purpose, let alone "destroys what you want", as you so dramatically put it.
That trend reversed:
https://steemit.com/stats/@liberosist/steem-power-distribution-trends-august-update-the-re-distribution-skips-down
One thing that can be tweaked is to change attitudes which currently discourage downvoting.
Downvoting plays an essential role in setting the right incentives and we just had a vivid illustration of this with the @berniesanders / @dollarvigilante incident. Many people voted for the "sure shot" of @dollarvitilante's post, and that worked great until @berniesanders (and some other whales) decided to downvote it.
Then everyone's curation rewards were wiped out in an flash, and, from the point of view of rewards, their votes were wasted.
Next time (or perhaps it will take a few more of these late downvotes), perhaps people will consider more carefully just what it is they think is a "sure" shot.
There are a lot of heated opinions on this. I've read a lot of people say that you shouldn't downvote unless it is a major violation like spamming or threatening someone, etc. Others look at it as you do, and just a different way of assigning value to posts.
One worry I have is retaliation. If I downvote someone's post, then I'm worried that they will start going out of their way to downvote all of mine. It could turn into a downvote war.
"Can't we all just get along?"
In any system with people there will be conflicts. You have to decide whether you want to let others exploit a platform that has value to you and do nothing to avoid retaliation, or if you are willing to take a stand. People will of course make different decisions.
I didn't and wouldn't say it is just a different way of assigning value, but when people are voting in a parasitic manner by piling on "sure things" without sufficient regard for quality nor consideration of the good of the platform that is also a form of abuse, and downvoting/flagging is exactly the way to control it.
The new reputation system makes it even harder to do what you are suggesting. Let's say someone writes an 'average' post, and a ton of people upvote it because it is trending and they want to get a good curation bonus. Then a person with high SP comes along and decides it is too high because everyone was colluding. It wasn't a bad post or anything - it is just overvalued. If they flag/downvote that person's post to lower the amount it gets paid, that person's reputation is affected too. Most likely the person who wrote the post didn't do anything intentionally wrong or bad to make the excessive upvotes happen. Yet their reputation score is penalized by the person who downvoted/flagged their content.
@timcliff All those upvotes (assuming the voters had positive reputation which is usually the case) increased the reputation. The later downvote reduce the reputation, reversing the effect of the upvotes. As long as the downvotes aren't extreme and overwhelming (which usually only happens in the case of serious abuse), reputation will usually be only slightly affected or even increase a little if the payout is merely reduced and not driven all the way to zero and beyond (which would be a waste of vote power by the downvoters).
@smooth I agree with @timcliff. You are trying to fix a disease by ingesting more of the parasite. Pouring more of the wrong to try to make it right.
Conflicts are a sign of a system that is not designed to be harmonious. I am entirely against your propensity (when given the role to do so) to want to top-down manage discussions and forums. I am ENTP. Seems you might have some J in there?
There will be blowback from judging. Remember Matthew 7. Instead let's figure out a way for every coterie to have their own rankings and preferences. One-size-fits-all are always power vacuums that we must fight over.
I have a good example for you. I came across @acassity spam posting a link to his content in a ton of posts. It was done in a way that was completely irrelevant and off-topic. I downvoted him, and he retaliated by going to my blog and downvoting posts of mine.
When I see 4 meta posts in a row for quick buck I will flag indeed and I care not if someone will pursue me and maybe even destroy my account. If people afraid to express true opinions the system is flowed.
Don't have down voting. You down vote by not voting at all.
Missing a few sure shots isn't going to stop people looking for them. The problem is there is too much incentive to look for them and ignore anything that from the outside looks like it won't take off...
Does voting on a post and voting on a comment use the same amount of voting power? And are the curation rewards on comments too? I realized that I did not know for sure.
They are treated the same.
Except they aren't because gambling on comments instead of blog posts is only done by a math retard, because comments (except maybe in rare circumstances) never can get the same voting potential as blog posts.
That's a shame. Because I like to use my votes as "approval" rather than "investment". But I'm not making anything on curating anyway so why bother trying make money curating? Better just to use it to show approval.
@jonno-katz if you aren't making anything from curation (and this is the case if your SP is small, say <1000), then you might as well do exactly what you are doing. Vote for purposes of approval to increases rewards authors you think should be rewarded more and exert a small influence on the type of content you want to see. It seems to me you are doing it exactly right.
@anonymint your comment is oversimplified. Remember, early votes are worth lot more than late votes. Most blog posts you encounter are already heavily voted, and late votes on even posts with high rewards are still virtually (if not literally) worthless. Most comment posts have 0-1 votes. Opportunity is not always at the location with the brightest spotlight on it.
@anonymint Wouldn't you receive a higher amount of curation from voting on a comment with $100 and being an early voter, than on a blog post that receives thousands of dollars when you have relatively little steem power.
I see the value of both, but curation for minnows is very rarely more than $.001 so it is important for them to make themselves known as one who makes valuable comments and blog posts before than can really dive into curation.
It is my belief that users should vote on content they like, and not just gamble on an article without reading it in hopes that it will make a lot of money regardless of how well it was done.
That's not an accusation to anyone, as everyone's vote can be used as they wish, but I think the more steem power you earn, the more you see that what you vote on can influence the entire platform of steemit and steer the ship in a way to benefit the maximum amount of users.
I was referring to seeking out posts to vote early versus betting on comments which don't even receive an upvote 50% of the time. I haven't done the precise computation, but I can't imagine it ever pays to focus on curation rewards from comments because they most often receive 0 votes and those which have more than 1 vote are rare and even rarer are ones upvoted by whale. The odds for comments have to orders-of-magnitude worse than seeking out blogs.
Thank you during this time.
Now, my Reputation in steemd is displayed as "Reputation 21,630,279,218,817".
Than the Reputation in Steemd acquaintances, is a high score. However, it is in Steemit "5".
Why is that?
The I'll try it has a post not good what?
What's left is the influence of the previous Down Vote?
How do I me?
@smooth, downvoting won't really discourage gambling for "sure" shots, because otherwise the ROI on curation is mostly not worth anyone's time relative to the SP they have at stake. The only way to entirely remove the gambling groupthink calculation is to radically reduce or eliminate the curation rewards, which is what I would suggest.
As I explained to @bendjmiller222 in a comment on this page, removing the early incentive (in lieu of removing curation rewards) would just cause everyone to vote for the most voted posts after the fact.
The problem with current incentives to upvote is just how many people are playing the game. As long as everybody else is playing, the game seems worthwhile as the rewards are higher.
I wouldn't suggest removing the curation rewards completely, but the stake taken from the original post could be changed so that instead of 25% of the total, curators receive a limited amount. That probably wouldn't eliminate the incentive to upvote, but you might find less people voting this way if there seems to be less people playing the game.
Currently the hole system is designed to generate exorbitant payouts.
Instead of downvoting exorbitant payouts, wouldn't it be better design the system so that it does not create these exorbitant payouts?
Right now the curation reward makes no sense at all. It just leads to upvote the same stuff from the same known people. This then makes the post trending which leads to even more votes.
What do we have to change?
I would suggest to drop the curation reward completely. If people understand that its their money they distribute they will take care for what to spent. Another solution would be to limit the curation reward per person per time period.
Second: Making the payout more linear would also reduce this over pay effect and on top of that would make the system much more simple and easy to understand. On top of that payouts could then be done instantly with every vote. Through steems blockchain transparency Self-voting could be easily detected and accounts flagged.
Third: Using a lottery like display of posts as default display option. The more votes the more chance to be chosen. A comment could also be counted as a vote with the users voting power.
If we implement these three changes the current self made over pay problem would most likely be solved.
I don't think the "$ value of a post" should be visible until payout time. Let it be a mystery.
Instead, we have people scanning values of posts, and soon as a post is at $50 or $100, all of a sudden everyone starts upvoting the post so they have a better chance at making money as a curator.
That's the current problem with steemit. Even if these values are in the blockchain, we don't need to make the problem worse via the gui by showing the dollar value of a post before payout.
You can't hide that data. It is on a public blockchain. You'll just incentivize someone to make a tool which can display the computation.
Umm, I suppose you didn't read the next part:
You must seem to think that 99% of people "use tools". They don't. Most people are lazy, or just take things at face value.
Right now, I bet you only 20% of people even use steemd.com to look at data IF - that..
So, I repeat:
Even if these values are in the blockchain, we don't need to make the problem worse via the gui by showing the dollar value of a post before payout.
It's kind of weird. I knew someone would come along and point out it is on a public blockchain, so I even acknowledged the fact they are on a blockchain, my suggest was strictly for the GUI. (..and of course tools can supplement steemit).
::face palm::
I think I'm just going to go sit down and let someone else point out the obvious again.
Sorry if the facts offended you. Users will demand to see the $ amounts. The GUI will meet demand.
But that is still distributing wealth and if the post hit $100 it probably caught the eye of someone who found it helpful and everyone else upvoting is ok by me. It encourages new people especially. It does have its drawbacks, but I like the system as it is now and would be disappointed if it were removed.
That's a great idea. Make the earnings invisible until after one month.
Maybe some sort of algorithm that says if you vote XX or more and your posts were XX % successful, you get a bit extra? As to spread out the votes but in a sort of way where everyone gets to vote on more widespread content, as opposed to the "sure thing" votes that tend to be cast. Also I think more content discovery methods would help ALOT. We are walled in right now to a list of hashtags and need something more intuitive... IMO.
I think you should get more curation rewards for voting something that is not expected to do well but does( value investing in my field) For instance if a poster averages 5c a post and then nails it , the curation rewards should be higher for the value of post above 5c ( or Lower if under 5c) This encourages posters to read, consider if this is really good and not just reward posters with good track record. Maybe it's a 25% bonus or penalty for voters in first 30minutes on all value above the average. The later voters would be he source of this reward.
Although this idea seems really great at the surface, it has deep Sybil attack vulnerabilities and be gamed to destroy the system.
This is why non-experts are not allowed to design the system. But thanks for sharing your idea any way. Open source is that maybe via enough sharing of ideas, we can happenstance on a winning one.
I like that idea, because you are using the same amount of voting % whether you are voting on a new posters content, or a veterans content.
What would you think about each day having some sort of "bonus" vote carrying a bit more weight. Maybe 3 a day that would give you a higher curation reward. I don't know if that is feasible, but I think it would be something interesting to explore.
Without the early incentive, you'll just vote for all the most successful posts late.
We agree, but no one knows how to fix that. Not Facebook, not Reddit, not Twitter, etc.. It is an industry wide unsolved problem.
I completely agree. While incentive only exists for voting for predicted popular posts, actual quality content will continue and increase to fall by the wayside. Right now posts are considered valuable by vote volume and SBD, and posts with low readership are disregarded, despite whether 100% of the few people who did read it thought it was a quality piece. Currently 'successful' posts are not a true reflection of quality, and the current system makes it extremely difficult for anyone else to rise up. @condra, I read your post yesterday and actually wrote a post with a possible solution. https://steemit.com/steemit/@rhi-marie/freeing-minnows-caught-in-the-net-a-proposal-to-propel-quality-content
I've also been concerned about good quality posts getting bypassed simply because of vote value and SBD.
I wrote a post about a new feature "The Whale Feed", check it out. Unfortunately not a lot of people saw it, because ironically, without the whale feed, I got missed. :) Look at it here
Agree there is no economic nor recognition incentive to form communities, rather only to cater to the groupthink.
Post views can be attacked. A vote which costs nothing can also be attacked. Those are non-solutions.
I think I have a solution which involves not voting, but I am not quite ready yet to present it, as I am still analysing it.
It doesn't hurt to brainstorm. I look forward to seeing your solution
I agree. With the people I am following I started to think. "Maybe I should follow the people who are on the auto upvote list for some of the whales and then when they post I can camp out on the Feed and upvote those people right away." And then I was like.... wait a minute. That just gets away from actually looking at what I want to look at and voting on content that I like. It is a very tough problem to solve.
I will admit to doing this on many posts, and I'm sure others have done the same. I upvoted this post. Why? Because I know that hundreds of other people will be upvoting on it soon, and my early vote will give me a better curation bonus than the other posts I could vote on instead.
Does this post deserve my upvote? Yes - I think this is a very important change being discusses, and I am really happy that @dantheman and the Steemit team are giving it so much thought.
Would the amount that got added to this post make a bigger deal if it got distributed to some awesome minnow who just spent the past 6 hours creating the best post of their lives? Yes!
There are a lot of other posts out there though that have really good content too, and they are only getting a few cents per post.
Thank you Tim for being honest. This was the right time and place to let them know. I know a lot of people are voting up high $ value posts, because you know its going to be worth something rather than voting a post stuck at 10 cents or 15 cents. :)
Agreed! And some great content creators may only try three or four articles that took days to make if their reward is only $1.00 This post obviously needed to trend so that it would be weighed in heavily and commented on so a best solution can be implemented
I agree totally with you, voting and curating should be reassessed, I have noticed several irregularities; it's more like a "postcode" lottery where they are more concerned in the rewards instead of the content. Not very democratic or is it?!?!
The whole scenario is quite a conundrum, therefore I think it will take something extraordinary to remedy it!! Ultimately, we are still in the early stages of steem; we must encourage and nurture it like an infant, eventually it will find its own way?!!!
Your analogy to horse racing is interesting and I then agree that's how behaviors are being somewhat condition in this manner at present.
I agree. Why invent yet another complicated voting process to game the system when you should just vote on the things you find valuable.
Someone will just come up with some way to game your new system you've made and the cycle won't end.
Because as I explained in great detail, straightforward linear weighting can also be gamed to degenerate outcome.
Non-experts commenting on suggested algorithms involving game theory is kind of amusing. I don't mean that as an insult, but I hope you guys realize that if we gave the keys to you, the system would burn down to the ground.
You need to really broaden your analysis when entertaining game theory. The attack vectors come from complex scenarios you would not intuitively think of.
I think if you look at a site like google it is more difficult to game than a site like reditt. Granted they are two different beasts, but the more features that limit the amount of abuse of the system the better. If it doesn't work, it can always be returned to the way it was before.
Agreed, I explain it as discouraging organic engagement.
Agreed it is overwhelming any incentives to form diverse communities, which I explained in more detail at my above linked comment post.
Well said. I agree with you! Now you almost have to be lucky to be noticed. (Some) people don't bother find interesting articles because they can get curation rewards from popular authors' posts. :)
[Edit] Based on some of the other comments that are starting to get posted, I think I am starting to understand this. Is it basically that someone with a high amount of SP can designate a certain number of people to 'share' in their Steem Power, so the weight of those people's votes is more than what they would have with their own SP?
[Edit2] If you have time to give an example of how this would play out with an actual post and people voting, it would really help clarify things!
One thought is we should probably make this vote power sharing separate from 'following'. There are a lot of people I like to follow because they produce good content, but if I were to designate someone to share in my SP voting power, I would probably select different people.
But as I pointed out in my longest comment post, this reduces concentration of votes, thus opening a potential vulnerability to those who will (collude to) form voting pacts (coalitions) to game the rewards for their maximum benefit.
@dantheman I like you are recognizing the shortcomings of the current system (which is already darn impressive) and are willing to consider changing things for a more strategically valuable and sustainable system. I do have some concerns with the model you propose, but also have some ideas which may be worthy to evaluate.
The model you are recommending will create a distributed tree for whales to empower others to share in the distribution of rewards. The biggest and most un-resolvable problem will be in the inherent structure it will establish, which will be reinforced by expected self-serving behaviors. Not all will fall into this pit, but the system will definitely support it.
This model, as I think your describe it, basically sets in motion the creation of dynasty's, where the whale/Emperor empowers a second class who will always be loyal and the wealth will continue to remain mostly within these selective circles as the acts of self-interest will continue without barriers. In fact, in a worst case scenario, can you imagine a situation where whales connect to other whales and the power distribution remains very flat and within a relatively small group. There is no real motivation to vote outside the elite community as part of this system thus propagating classes with a great divide. I think in this system, the poor will continue to struggle for the outlaying scraps.
If the goals of change are:
If these are the goals you are working towards, I think I might have an structure which will achieve these while making Steemit more extensible, user-friendly, and sustainable over time with respect to handling more content in a better organized and curated manner.
It boils down to using the current factors you already have (SP, Reputation, Vote Power), which don't need to fundamentally change in any way. The key will be using SP like 'mass', Vote Power like 'speed' and Reputation like 'direction' to create a model where Vectors are aligning to good content. Such model does allow minnows to pool for a collective vote which rivals whales, but at a cost of limiting the number of votes. A set of swim-lanes become a forcing function for better dispersion among the topic categories. Upvotes tie to reputation of categories which then power the weighting of down-votes.
...Okay, I will hold there without getting into the details or mechanics. If you are interested I can create a separate post and elaborate. I think it is doable without cratering the system or forcing a major redesign. Let me know if you find my ramblings interesting and I can create a presentation, video, something, to outline the changes I have drawn sloppily on my whiteboard.
Pics or the whiteboard didn't happen.
Yes, I didn't take a picture of it as, well, it is just plain messy. I have lots of different thing co-mingled, but it makes sense to me. I can clean it up, put it in a powerpoint presentation if people are interested. For right now I will sleep on it and see if I can poke holes in what I am thinking.
Honestly, I didn't think anyone would read my post. It makes sense to my eyes as I was scribbling in 4 colors. I was just doing it as an intellectual exercise then writing it up to get it out of my head. Speak up if anyone wants to see my ideas. I think I can hit all those goals I stated, but peer review is really the litmus test.
I'm about to start scanning and posting some of my concepts. What the hell? Maybe it could help spur ideas elsewhere or bootstrap a project totally.
I have drafted a more detailed proposal based on my ideas here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@mrosenquist/steemit-proposal-for-developer-and-community-evaluation
Take a look and let me know
I am not sure if it is the biggest vulnerability, as I explained another one in my comments, but I agree this could be a degenerate outcome. Afaics, we would incentivize a top-down rigid structure, which I also mentioned in my longish comment post.
Btw, I didn't upvote for your algorithm suggestion, which sounds to me like probably not correct.
In all fairness, I have yet to outline the application of any algorithm. I was just validating the goals and limiting parameters to the problem (technical, behavioral, and process). If you really want to know how I think the system can be modified to attain all the goals I stated (assumed), let me know. I can produce a strategic framework for review.
...and don't worry about not upvoting. Only vote for things you respect or agree with. :)
I did upvote. I just meant my upvote was for the part I responded to. Thanks.
I am definitely in favor of this. The specifics can be hashed out with @dana-edwards and others who are experts at algorithms. I see the negative polarizing effects of whale votes vs. minnow votes as becoming more exacerbated in the short-term and long-term. When 360 minnow votes equals $123, I think there is a real problem. As always, I am impressed that your team is working towards a solution. Did you see your whale carriage i built? It might be a little hard to swallow for you, but I was curious if you did see it.......
So many possible games and vulnerabilities are opened with something like this. I'm not saying it isn't worth thinking about and doing, just that it needs to be designed and tested very carefully before allowing it to affect either content/curation payout or witness scheduling.
For example, the last time I was thinking about designs for curation delegation I got overwhelmed by how the design needed to be sophisticated enough to prevent games that allowed a user with a certain amount of Steem Power have multiple times more influence than what their SP would normally give them simply by sequentially changing their delegation of curation influence to their various sockpuppet accounts over time and allowing those "unique" sockpuppets to all cast their unique votes on the attacker's own posts which would give them very nice rewards. I'm sure the Account Rank algorithm will need to be designed very very carefully to avoid games like that as well.
Regarding the computational cost. At first glance it does seem like it would be very heavy to do something like this. But also, I don't agree that it necessarily has to be broken up into chunks that can be completed in less than a block interval. If you allow the Account Rank weight/reputation changes/effects due to operations on the blockchain to be sufficiently delayed, you no longer are limited to single threaded computation. Those calculations can be done in parallel with normal block production, and the outcomes of those calculations are then expected by the consensus protocol to be incorporated into the database state at some fixed number of blocks later.
Distributing influence over curation (i.e. deciding how content/curation rewards are paid out to various post) is very different than distributing influence over selecting block producers. The people I would trust to do a good job reliably operating a node (or even the people I would trust to select the people running the nodes) are not the same people I think produce good content on Steem nor are they the same people I trust to curate good content. And for that matter none of these people are necessarily the same people who I think are just the most trustworthy individuals period (in a web-of-trust sense). I want more separation of power / roles, not less.
Atleast we have wonderful people like @Smooth doing great things as you stated though, possibly creating more whales is the solution or mass amounts of dolphins? I think you guys can figure it out. I'm here for the long haul either way! My 10k Steem Power will be put to good use! Hopefully an algorithm will work but mainly I think it relies on the community to pull their weight.
That's the magic of what is being proposed here: a community-powered algorithm :).
Yup, great to see clever solutions proposed for the problems that people have been complaining about recently.
@thedashguy "With great power comes great responsibility." And I believe you see the long term plan the same way as I do. Your votes are very important and you have the power to make new people's content more visible that may not otherwise be very visible.
Helping out minnows is what will really bring the value. Begging for votes from the whales actually hurts steemit. Because it encourages others to beg instead of using energy to create something original.
People that see what steemit has the potential to become are those that I hope will be successful and continue to help the community. I'm glad we are on the same page @thedashguy
I would appreciate your help @bendjmiller222, because I know that with this I can learn a lot of things especially to improve my writing.
To be honest I am not a "great" writer in the sense of making all of my tenses and views perfect. What I would suggest writing is about something you absolutely love or an incredibly hard time you are going through or made your way through and the impact it had on your life.
Nobody can claim you are trying to copy someone else's work/style when you make a post completely unique about you.
Write as passionately and raw as you can. Like the blockchain, people here also value transparency and can easily see through BS created that is just trying to play on a current trend.
Writing mistakes are forgiven by writing from your heart. There aren't grammar nazi's here (yet), but if you have an article you wrote and want me to proof id be happy to give a little feedback that you could decide on whether to implement or not.
yeah @bendjmiller222 is right @thedashguy, if you can help people like me get noticed it would be very great but if you don't like my content, it's alright.
Way to guilt me into upvoting you... well played sir.
Im not sir, I understand that if my content don't deserve to be voted it's alright, as long as I'm learning.
Well since you said something about pity voting... Just kidding lol.
We all start at the bottom and those who help us out are very valuable. The people who helped me most when I first came to steemit are both very successful writers and took the time to invest in me. So paying it forward should come naturally regardless of whether the person that need help is a whale or minnow.
Thank you sir @bendjmiller222 I will continue to post content everyday because I just felt that writing makes me more aware of what is going on around me.
That's a great idea. Writing really expands your mind. It takes you from being just a consumer to being a producer.
Creating content is extremely valuable and if you need any help or ideas and wish to pursue this with extreme passion, I will be happy to help if I can. Feel free to comment on a post of mine or connect on steemit chat. I have the same username there.
His intentions may be sincere, but the footprint of using his whale voting power can't be good in any case (even if he dilutes it by delegating it) as I have explained in my other comment posts. It isn't his fault per se. It is the fault of the design.
This can be implemented directly with followers. When you follow someone, you give them a portion of your voting power, creating a directional, weighted network. You could then limit the total number of followers a person can pick. The problem I foresee is whales forming communities. This is an extremely common and naturally occurring phenomenon called a "rich club" (see work by Bullmore and Sporns, e.g. this and this).
Using a page-rank like algorithm would only exacerbate the problem of whales having disproportionate influence. Even though well meaning, it's unlikely for the big whales to know many of the thousands of very minor accounts. Many of the whales have relationships with each other already, so it would be unrealistic to expect them not to want to follow each other, and for the ones they follow to reciprocate, forming well-connected sub-networks containing >99% of the voting power.
This is quite interesting @geoffrey (GOT reference?) I like the idea of followers sharing voting power, but wonder if that might possibly make a situation like on Instagram where people beg for follows and likes. (whether or not this is good or bad I guess depends on who you talk to).
I feel that from the data I have seen, the wealth of the whales is being distributed to more quality users and creating solid dolphins. But yes, while the whales are all very helpful and honest (from my experience).
Money can corrupt people and one sperm whale could sleep with a humback's wife (whale relations haha) and cause a huge rift in the ocean. A whale war would divide and devalue what steemit is striving for. So you have a great point that keeping a checks and balances system in place to prevent abuse of power is very important.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but I think having following separate from who you share your SP with is important. The people I follow because they produce good content are not necessarily the same people I would want curating content on my behalf.
That's a really good point I honestly did not think of.
Exactly the same thing what I was thinking. I follow people because they are good writers or otherwise interesting, not because I trust them.
True I have also pointed that out in the past that I may not have the same interests in all categories as people I follow. And as well, as you point out, I might value my follows as content producers, but maybe not as curators.
What if we introduce the DOUBLE STEEM POWER ?
Let the user's have a double steem power VOTING IMPACT when they...
DON'T HAVE POWERED DOWN !!!
Could we get some sort of visualization or modeling please?
As I'm seeing it, you're saying for groups of ~150 forming 'collective voting blocs' ?
I could see how that could be highly effective at distributing rewards more equitably AND encouraging social interaction and positive behavior from all market participants.
Sounds like something worth trying...
Good article
So far I am enjoying the feed feature, it already uped my user engagement, the account ranking is great as well.
I love the idea of implementing what google has done. It's still hard to wrap my mind around the entire concept, but I understand that basically the most helpful content moves to the top, which is why when you search for content on google the most popular and helpful content rises to the top and less helpful content gets put farther down.
Google sells ad space though so there is a major difference, since a company can buy a top spot with money that may or may not be any good. I actually have an idea to ad advertisers to steemit without being intrusive. Something new users could really benefit from. Proposal to Bring Non Intrusive Ads To Steemit
I think the newer system you have just wrote about will allow scalability. I still wonder how new user content will be found when steemit content comes in as fast as a redditt or twitter. The "New Feed" would almost need to be real time, but that is a problem that can be addressed as needed.
The problem with flagging right now I talked with @smooth and a few other heavily vested users and would love for you to take a look at the possibility of changing part of the way flags/downvotes are current;y done to make sure those who downvote are made to give a reason as to why to prevent "flag spam" or downvoting for just disagreement or jealousy. New Content Flagging System With Feedback.
While most people beg whales for votes, I told @smooth I care more about his opinion right now than his upvote, becasue I know that these two proposals may add a lot of value.
Excited to see all the changes that roll out @dantheman. Keep up the good work. It does not go unappreciated.
Love the graphic too! And your username makes me sing this song every time in my head. (18 seconds in)
Love the graphic. Spot on.
I read your post on the flagging system with feedback. Great idea!
Thanks @timcliff I think a lot of people would benefit from weighing in on it. I want views that are similar to my own as well as polar opposite. From new minnows to whales that support my idea all the way across the spectrum to those who like the system already and would hate to see it change.
A discussion and consensus will hopefully allow a system that will be approved by the most people possible, and there is always the ability to roll back the system if people absolutely hate it.
Being in beta, lots of new features will roll out, but unlike facebook, we have a voice and a the developers and @ned and @dan have a vested interest in our collective opinion. They want people to enjoy being here and continuing to create content with high quality.
I really enjoy how the developers and highly vested users are not hiding behind the scenes and are active in the community and respond to questions from many people regardless of status.
Its unfortunate and perplexing to see a proposal for further centralization to solve the problems of a site already laboring under the burden of too much centralization.
We all have to accept the fact that MONEY is one of the top incentive/reason of many Steemit activities, like POSTING, CURATING, VOTING.
Below that, comes the other nobler motives of LEARNING, SHARING KNOWLEDGE, HELPING, etc.
So while, we may have the noble motives, the tendency of the greater number of Steemit users, is to look for posts that will give them MORE MONEY. We all know how that money happens with the current setup.
But keep in mind that the accounts which can put real money on a POST are controlled BY PEOPLE too, no matter if they be BOTS or a team of curators, they are essentially and ultimately influenced by the same motives that affect everyone else. THESE ARE:
Which means WE ALL ARE attracted and LEANING to do the same things!
So as long as the FUNDS to be gained by a POST comes ONLY from VOTES of the users (regardless whether they be rich or not) the ultimate result will be the same. Because MORE NUMBER OF VOTES does not necessarily result in HIGH PAYOUT, people will still vote the posts that WILL GIVE THEM MONEY.
As I have suggested before IN THIS POST A part of a post's pay-out yield should come from a common SYSTEM WIDE fund, a portion of which which would be given to posts that can become POPULAR (getting many votes of legitimate steemit users) no MATTER if those accounts that voted GOT MUCH STEEM POWER OR NOT.
This is the only way to give a MORE balanced distribution of STEEM. If not, what ever algorithm is used in the future without a system wide fund to really reward REALLY POPULAR GOOD CONTENT. We will end up voting where there is MONEY TO BE HAD.
So, I firmly believe a SYSTEM WIDE PAYOUT FUND is the best solution at this moment. Although you can also OPT to change the pay-out algo, this fund should always be one of the things to be INCLUDED in the implementation.
I feel skeptical about using Dunbar's number as a standard for online interactions.
It was originally observed in connection with things like nomadic tribes and sections of the Roman military. There's a study that shows that it may be applicable to online social networks, but if we purposely use it to limit ourselves when creating new types of social network, then that choice affects the network's growth. It could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
How do we know what network size is selected for by "natural" evolution in social network structures that haven't been conceived of before?
I haven't done that much research on this yet. Just a thought.
I think all the concepts seem great! Steem Power/Stake is the main defense against sybil it seems. Essentially the system would allow larger stakeholders to delegate voting power. I do wonder if there is a more organic way of delegating that power. From a UX perspective, selecting 30 curators is an extra action that may be asking a lot of users. Perhaps a simple method to evenly distribute voting power on the blockchain to users you 'follow' may work? If you follow 50 you give 1/50 power to each. If 1000 you give 1/1000th... It may minimize the extensive recursive calculations?
TL;DR: Use curation voting as a proxy for trust. This eliminates explicit trust-voting, and leverages the solid engagement we already have with curation voting.
Something like this proposal sounds like the right way to go. Here's my thought: requiring people to pick 30 people they know and vote for them sounds like a recipe for people to get "stuck" in positions that they shouldn't be in. We've seen this over and over again in Bitshares where a witness needs to be voted out, but the only way to do it is for whales to coordinate. Why don't you make the voting implicit? We already have active voting on the network in the form of people voting for articles. It should be possible to leverage that voting activity to build an account-rank.
Here's a flippant, poorly-thought-out implementation:
It doesn't sound computationally intensive; there aren't any matrix inverses or anything like you have in page-rank. You'd have to check if the algorithm converges and all that.
I think this is a good concept and democratic for everything, yeah supports fully with this post, thanks @dantheman
Hello dantheman!!!
Steemit is enabling trust between strangers.
This is a system that relies on kindness and trust, which also makes it very
delicate and vulnerable.
The reputation attached to your name should allow this trust between users evolve into a decentralized marketplace. I wrote about that the day the reputation system came out so I'm excited to see who will make the best GUI to bring an ebay like system to the masses. Buying and selling on Steemit.
On the topic of bad voters, I just wrote a post about a Python program I wrote for hunting bots, based on how they upvote with interesting results: Hunting bots with Python.
I'm not sure why there is more value in voting early than late. A vote should always count equally whether you are early or late but within the time frame. Spread of curation rewards should just be on vote and steem power and maybe web of trust. We are human after all. We have real life time constraints like sleeping eating work etc, so if I vote early or late for the dollar vigilante's latest post as long as it it before payout surely it is the same mindset that I liked the post equally whenever the post is created or caught by me. The mindset that early adopters get the most money seems unfair and undemocratic. The general public don't want to be watching their feeds like a hawk making sure they vote as early as possible. Am I right?
Also some excellent content demands careful reading and multiple reads as well as more time to digest before you can even think about upvoting. You don't want people to vote first then read to get their curation rewards. Or if they upvote first then read and discover their favourite writer has written some horseshit they would then have to remove their upvote. It's kind of not methodical or a good flow of how people operate in the real world.
Because otherwise everyone would just vote late on the most voted posts, so as to participated in the maximum curator rewards since rewards are the square of the total votes.
I see your point there but don't we want to share with everyone who likes the same things as us equally? Sure there will be a lot of sheep/minnows following, but that is good for the masses and keeps them included. If the minnows think that their vote doesn't count then they will think their vote is not worthwhile and won't vote for anything.
You are conflating equal in time and equal in voting power. But both forms of equal weighting would be destroyed by game theoretic attacks. Click the link I provided for more detail. Yeah we'd like to achieve some of the attributes you are thinking, but the problem are the attack vulnerabilities.
There will always be attack vunerabililties, for example if we have all minnows and whales camping out at @kimkardashian feed then the early upvoters get the most rewards (SP weighted) whereas I would prefer to lump all the upvoters together (SP weighted of course) so that they can share the rewards equally (SP weighted of course) . Whatever time they upvote shouldn't matter because they all like the selfies she has uploaded equally. If I was not a KK fan (which i'm not) I could camp out at her feed and upvote all her selfies and get some steem. Others could also do this and then it would seem she has more followers than she really has. Just a thought, it might be a good idea to try out different ways while the platform is in beta, including WoT weightings also.
I didn't quite get the technical part of this post so i am going to give my suggestion as a lay man:
What do you think about an algorithm which calculates the 'voting influence' of any person, on the basis of his Reputation Score, SP, Followers and the number of upvotes on all of his previous posts. All these metrics could be weighted as per their importance.
Reasons for this suggestion:
Say, a good content creator doesn't have a lot of SP, but since his content is good and he gets a lot of upvotes and followers and reputation score, he should have a say in what other content is good enough. A great content creator can also be a great content curator.
These are just suggestions that I thought as I was writing this. Anyways, I am here for the long run and I am sure that the whole team will do the right thing. They are some of the smartest people I have seen. :)
@dantheman, from what I gather from your post, the proposition is to essentially ASK the largest current stakeholders to CHOOSE 30 "friends". Each of those 30 people then receive a share of that stakeholder's influence, and chose 30 "friends" of their own, trickling the influence down exponentially. If I am understanding this correctly, doesn't this leave the possibility of "mutual" friendships allowing for networks of the most powerful people to share each others influence, leaving the rest of us out of the loop? A mandatory percentage of friends within a certain "Vests bracket" could help diversify the influence. I.E. you must have 3 friends with a SP value of less than 500, 3 less than 10000 etc...Otherwise I see the influence staying roughly where it is now, with whales sharing influence with other valuable accounts.
Nice to see the team is thinking about solutions and striving for a representative and happy culture here on Steemit.
Thanks for breaking this down. I had a difficult time understanding the theory, but your explanation made it very clear to me :)
No problem. I don't get the whole post, but, I think I am close. I guess the influence doesn't really "trickle down". It would be more of an "equalisation" in an attempt to make a swarm of minnows voting power closer to that of a whale.
I don't think your suggestions will do anything to improve the collusion vulnerability. People can split their equity into multiple accounts.
Hmm. What if you randomly generated half the accounts that shared the influence of the the whale account? And what if the randomly selected accounts were still set to be in a mandatory vest bracket? The mandatory accounts could be reassigned every year. Do you think that could work?
Whales have a duty similar to the forefathers of a nation at this young point in it's development.
And the forefathers fucked that up pretty good too.
Hi @dantheman, maybe you can gift me 1 minute of you time, i´m thinking that something go wrong after the update with my reputation before the update i had 5 and with the new system i´m just 2, i ask several times but everyone think i´m fuding or something, please if you can chek i make a post about it https://steemit.com/reputation/@oecp85/i-think-i-was-hurt-by-the-upgrade-of-steemit-please-help-me-to-recover-my-rep i just want to know if i really deserve this reputation.
Maybe a system that shows the reputation on each post would be benefitial so you could see the exact point when your reputation took a nosedive and if the whales can confirm that the reputation system change caused it, it would be easier to fix problems like this in the future.
Yes, maybe i´m just overeacting and the solution is just create a new account, but i don´t want to create a new account i use this nick for all my networks. someone told me this :
"Here's where it is.
https://steemd.com/steem-help/@oecp85/re-liberosist-mind-your-votes-an-investigation-and-guide-to-maximizing-your-curation-rewards-20160729t151659123z
Looks like you might have been mistaken for a bot. You can visit #steemitabuse-appeals on steemit.chat for help."
Great read with some interesting points. As a newbie to Steemit, I am eager to see how it continues to grow and mature.
Great explanation! @dantheman, what people need to understand is that we have a brilliant project ahead of us and those who as me are early adopters need to continue contributing to its growth, speading the powerful potential behind this platform but also using it wisely in a way that we can all benefit from it and when I say benefit, I don't mean it as a monetary matter is more about learning and discovering what your hidden passions are!
Greetings from Colombia!
Seems a good idea. Just one mention: We must see how those 30 friends that are chosen, given the fact that whales have quite some influence on minnows already. Because of many reasons, this election of 30 people may go, again, in the favor of a few. I'm sure we can find a solution for it.
I believe that it's a multipart solution:
Increasing steemit's audience size
Increasing the number of people with SP
Encouraging niches to blossom
"Even with everything @smooth is doing, there is only so much content that his team of curators can process."
What prevents that other whales follow @smooth example? Back in late 90's Google also was using the dmoz.org directory to weight their results and the dmoz.org directory was/is human made with thousands of editors (curators).
They did, but eventually it evolved into an automated (?) system. Do we know, by the way, to what extent Google still uses non-automated input in its rankings?
I support the idea of trying to make the system support collaboration between curators in a native manner. It would make my life a lot easier. But it has to be done in a way that doesn't cause more problems then it solves, and that is always a huge risk in making these sorts of changes.
excuse me ... i just wanted to say ... I'm 55 yrs old ... i have seen so much BS come and go ... this conversation, well is why I came here .. Fucking great minds working together to create solutions is to me the spice of life ... i am learning so damn much every minute it really gives me faith in humanity again ! i could care less about getting paid to contribute, it is what i learn here is what i love. I am NOT a writer, i'm a learner .. to me that is why steemit is so awesome ... I have read the classics .. this NeoThought is what rocks the world .. I am so proud of ALL of you ! I really mean that guys ! .. umm cough, cough ...excuse me, continue PLZ !
Shouldn't that outcome possibly be instructive.
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Page Rank for blockchains! This must be the first place such a concept has been made, and it is this type of thinking that will continue to improve the Steemit platform. Most people will probably agree that something needs to change with the algorithm. This sounds like a grand idea.
After thinking about it more, I think the 30 friends would have to chosen at random. A person could roll for their 30 companions once a day. The friend generator would need to use a formula that mixes in people with a diverse set rep and SP.
Would have to weight it so the lower you SP the higher the probability of picking someone with a larger SP. And the same in revers, the higher SP the less likely you get someone with higher SP.
I guess I struggle to see what you mean. Like if you have more than 30 friends the system would randomly select 30 each day?
Because people would keep trying until they got alot of people with high SP in their 30 list.
Good point @pheonike because if someone who has little power & rep join to 30 more of the same level, still the result is low. Following you
I'm having a hard time understanding this concept (like I do with most things relating to Steemit haha), but could this not just result in 'cliques' forming? Currently I feel like minnows band together largely as one and then whales band together, in regards to who they communicate with regularly and where votes are allocated (of course there are exceptions). Wouldn't this mean when users select their '30', groups with high influence will form, and so will groups with low influence - because that's who they know? Wouldn't this be a similar version to what we have now? And wouldn't that make it just as hard for minnows to rise through the ranks? Correct me if I'm wrong.
So do let me know if I misunderstand, but the TL; DR would boil down to people being able to 'pass out' their curation power to other people, hence increasing the sie of their 'net' for content that might otherwise go unnoticed.
How does that inherently differ from the current setup where high value holders (whales) will trickle down their voting power naturally through uplifting content creators with their upvotes?
The 'optimum' solution for such a future implementation would be to get on the good side of as many 'vote sharing swarms' as you could, to give you optimum uplifting through votes that you and your could redirect, and through the newly created 'shared voting power' system. Quadratic trickle down economics, if you will.
If it's intended as a way to accelerate the creation of social connections and the value inherent in those, while also speeding up the widening of the curation net, then I think it's a solid first draft, but I'm not sure how it tackles the problems people might see in the system as a whole. I think those are mostly interface based or time limited in nature(and they've been getting along well, the feed system is cool!).
Yes with an addendum, which is that I believe it relies on the social graph of users as assigned by their 30 reliable curator votes. I don't believe it is simply users passing out their vote power.
You probably understand more how the system behind google works to promote content to the top based on weight and how helpful it is. I know I watched a documentary that explained it kind of like a soccer game where more "klout" was given to star players. Maybe it makes more sense to you. I usually understand something like this after a few rereads.
And while having multiple users look through content for whales like @smooth is doing may not work scaled up to a million people, having ten people looking through content and finding hidden gems is far better than one. But I agree I like your idea @spookypooky. What's your background for work?
I fear that we might be over complicating things. I don't mind the power that whales have; I believed they earned it and can use it as they see fit.
My problem is with the power that flagging has to take money away from those who have earned it.
I have said in another comment that I think flagging should be used only for grievous crimes against other individuals or to point out improperly tagged posts.
I think downvoting should not take away any money that was given to the post, but should make it less visible or cause it not to trend as fast.
I fear people are using flags or downvoting purely as retaliatory measures or as a means of bullying. Bullying with the power to take your income should be avoided. That's what government does.
In conclusion, I think flagging and downvoting should play a role in reputation and post visibility, but have nothing to do with earnings that were voluntarily given. Witnesses should be involved in checking that flags are being given appropriately and should be compensated for their role.
P.S. When it comes to this proposal:
I think it should be an opt-in process. I don't think inaction should be considered consent.
Flagging doesn't take money away from people that have earned it, that is like saying that voting for a political opponent takes victory away from the current winner. Nothing is earned until the ballot box closes.
@dantheman I have been advocating for changes to the curation system to improve scalability and $STEEM value. I think your ideas regarding page rank for users are genius. The best part is it creates a pseudo WOT (web-of-trust) without all the legwork. I would appreciate it immensely if you gave your opinion of my current curation reward proposal on my blog. many thanks @pjheinz
Well, there you have it. The bus was at the stop for about two seconds, and the driver pretty much just open and shut the door before taking off.
"Building a decentralized economic platform that uses voting to distribute funds is extremely challenging. On the one hand everyone wants to “vote selfishly” to give themselves the most reward possible, on the other hand large stake holders want to vote in a manner that maximizes the value of the currency.
The solution employed by Steem uses the principle that individuals acting alone shouldn’t have much power, but the more people that work together the more power they have collectively. In other words, two people voting together is more than twice as powerful as either voting alone.
The end result is a system that is working relatively well at today’s scale. The challenge Steem faces now is that large stakeholders, aka whales, have enough stake to unilaterally allocate far more than even the largest group of smaller users.
This means that whales need to spread their votes across 1000 times as much content as normal users or refrain from voting all together. Allocation of rewards will be highly concentrated among those the whales give attention to, but the attention of whales is finite. The finite limits of whale attention limits the scalability of reward distribution."
they are just being the bobble head...they shouldn't be ignored or left out.
AFAIK, this concept was first implemented by Google and known as Author Rank...
Details: https://blog.retargeter.com/strategy-2/google-author-rank-what-you-need-to-know
There is also a research by Microsoft, that may come handy - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/counts/pubs/TopicalAuthoritiesWSDM11.pdf
That was a long read, but I actually understood it. Good job @dan - PS: Most of this techno-geek-speak today goes right over my head after more or less missing the whole crypto craze the last 10 years.
He lost me a few times lol I had to re-read like 3 sections to make sure I was understanding it right...
Good! so I'm not the only one! :)
a small typo: 3rd paragraph under Scalable Voting: "The algorithm would then use these votes to identify..." btw, love and welcome this idea.
very logical and clear everything is written.
if you understand this :)
A lot to take in. Trying to wrap my around how this keep whales from colluding.
You're right, Steem will go through some of the same problems Google did and they will have to deal with how to handle it.
I've been doing SEO and the problem, as you also elude to, is that what works or what is allowed right now is somewhat unofficially "sanctioned" by Steem because they're not blocking it. People will use any and all allowed tactics to increase Steem Power and their earnings until the hole is plugged.
What should ultimately prevail is great content. Rules and stops should be put in place to make sure that great content always rises to the top.
And maybe it can be done better than how Google is doing it! :-)
Truly what will make or break steemit along with the quality of the community.
When you wake up every day do you think "I would like to rock the world with my thoughts and make what seems impossible possible?" I understand perfectly what you're saying, you're saying this blockchain is also a functional and scalable web of trust.
For those who are uninitiated in webs of trust and the like, they are basically a way of assigning a trustworthiness score, in automatic, auditable way. This way, the web of trust can be verified in the case a large account goes bad, and average users can delegate their voting in helpful ways.
Dan, you attack only the highest value problems, eh?
;)
I had to follow you, because you have the type of knowledge I can learn from and you obviously have some experience / background in the technological blockchain breakthrough that is steemit. Will be reading your blog now @faddat
I have added an introduction post about it in Chinese: https://steemit.com/cn/@feelapi/dan-vote , I think this will bring more people to discuss the new algorithms.