Wow. What a miracle during this bear market! Did you see those big, big numbers in your Steem wallet? Jokes and false hopes aside, recently I tried to visualize Steem's misaligned economic incentives just for the heck of it.
Not sure if I nailed it, but I'm not a professional illustrator. Did I just make it more confusing? Please do a better one if you get it. Check out stuff like Utility Maximization Problem, Strategic Dominance, and Nash Equilibrium to see that we have a self-sabotaging economy as our current equilibrium. Nothing is more costly than a dysfunctional platform. It is then of course, worth fixing. But it has been left unattended for more than a year now.
If it costs $12,000 to get some developers to work on the solution, will you chip-in? But why should the community contribute when the caretakers of this platform can't even make up their minds to do something about it, even after so long? Another case of misaligned economic incentives from all the early pre-mining and huge top witness salaries.
Steemit.com is now >3k web ranking instead of <1k. I know Steem is bigger than Steemit.com, but we have limited resources and we’re in a race to stay ahead of the curve. We can decentralize all we want into a million and one apps when we hit the big leagues.
The statement that Steem is more than just content and curation.. sure, I’d agree to the extent that Steem should also be useful enough to support applications that are not strictly about content and curation like the hosting of Steem Monster games or whatever other applications on the blockchain. Perfectly good use of Resource Credits.
Rewards distribution on Steem, however, should revolve around content and curation, hence the proposal to align economic incentives to this activity. Why are we conflating between rewarding both signal and noise? Those who are not particularly interested in these activities can delegate to curators. The notion that we shouldn’t force stakeholders to take part in something they don’t wanna is somewhat misleading, in my opinion.
Steem is a currency, it’s social, etc - there’s a game to be played. We want people to accumulate SP for more earnings and influence. Or they can delegate those away to fuel a curation economy.
Hypothetically, if we are to have a highly moderated channel where the best content/account curators recommend stuff for stakeholders to vote on (ie having perfect information on how to allocate rewards), will we be able to cooperate well enough to work together in spreading the votes to stake up invested accounts that bring value to the network? This is our litmus test. Will we?
Of course not. It wouldn't be good enough as Steem's economic incentives do not favor such a scenario. Content-indifferent voting behavior currently brings at least 4x returns compared to content-reflective voting behavior.
Any rational investors reading this or any previous posts would've already stayed the hell away.
Seriously, how can I honestly recommend people Steem at this point in time? The proposed changes still stands as described in here. I'm done talking about this and have better things to do and write about.
If you want to receive notifications for some of my stuff, please subscribe to my email listing at The Oasis. As always, thanks for reading.
Video source: The Economics Detective.
You can vote on your favorite witnesses here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses. I'm also running as one. If you trust in my choices for other witnesses, you can also set me as your voting proxy on that page.
You are right. The current system is probably 80% or so content indifferent because it is the most profitable way to act, which sucks. But I don't think 50/50 is the way to solve this mess.
As a content producer giving away roughly 42% of the rewards (I would get 50%+curation as the author) seems quite disappointing. Very disappointing to be honest.
But there are other ways to solve this better. I think this to be a much better solution than 50/50:
"Let them maximize their profit 100% guaranteed. Let stake be 'locked' up via a switch so that it cannot vote but automatically takes 10x 100% vote values from the pool each day at the 2.4 hr maximum rate. What this means is that those who choose to invest passively are silent investors with the percentage of the stake they lock away. They can unlock and use it as stake if they choose under normal rules but while locked, it has zero mobility."
@tarazkp proposed this in this post https://steemit.com/steem/@tarazkp/locking-stake-for-100-passive-income-improving-content-helping-apps
What this does is, that it introduces a more profitable way for silent investors. Bidbots, selfupvoting and autovoting random shit suddenly looks like a really bad deal. And ta-dah! shitposts will disappear from trending forever.
It just effectively reduces the rewards pool for the rest of the voters that will behave the same.
Pls explain to me how that reduces the reward pool? I bet you can't, because it does not reduce the reward pool at all. It just distributes the rewards a little different. You probably meant that voters will get less, but that is not because of a smaller reward pool.
The investor gets 100% of his vote.
The bidbots user still gets 85% of his vote.
The selfupvoter gets 75% of his vote.
Only curators lose a little. Investors gain a little, but the shitposts on trending disappear. The bidbots will likely disappear over time too, because why would freedom or any other big player delegate any longer?
Let’s say X, Y, Z goes into 100% passive staking, it’ll effectively reduce the rewards pool for the rest of the remaining voters.
"Let’s say X, Y, Z goes into 100% passive staking, it’ll effectively reduce the rewards pool for the rest of the remaining voters."
That same X,Y,Z is already going to "passive staking" when people are selling their votes to bid bots. Not directly, but it's the same effect. But now they also mess up the purpose Steem originally had as Trending is filled by posts that were promoted... So I'd rather split these groups to two rather than forcing everyone to become passive staker
The fact that you can get your post to trending page by using upvote bots creates a real demand for steem. Since a lot of people buy steem just for that purpose. If it wasn't for that and the dapps build on steem why would you want to own it? Promoting a post the old fashioned way is not cost effective. Then you can better advertise on google adwords.
It does create demand for Steem and in my opinion it also decreases it. Our trending consists of only ads these days, rather than content people have personally deemed good after reading them. But I'm over this topic.
It will reduce the reward pool, because it will give everyone the free path to automatically get their revenue from it based on SP. Which will probably be more than those users selling their votes/delegating to bid-bots.
Now, I'm not saying that this is wrong - I'm actually in favour of implementing a system that separates investors, wanting to earn ROI on their investment automatically and users wanting to participate in the voting system.
But the implementation might need a bit more thinking.
So much talk of getting 100% rewards - has anybody ever tried getting over 100% of the blockchain rewards passively? The blockchain currently yields about 22% APR for an upvote, author-rewards are about 16%, the inflation rate is around 8.5%. Just look at isteemd.com for a sample.
(@therealwolf should treat that as a rhetorical question!)
There may be an argument that some investor-status SP could yield the inflation rate (or maybe half), but why would someone bother when they can earn more through existing passive means?
There is no incentive under the current system for people to vote up other people's content for curation rather than just self upvote. When you suggest raising the percent of a reward that goes to curators people act like you took the lords name in vain. Someone actually downvoted me for saying it not too long ago.
The best is "the numbers don't matter, people will game it eventually". This place is sometimes quite depressing.
Ah, I see you have reached the same feeling I had some 16 months ago about changing the ecosystem :-( I've been following these posts without comment for precisely the same reason. But (perhaps) the climate has changed.
If the Steem ecosystem is truly up for discussion then let's blast it fully open! The various tweaks will not, in my opinion, help much, if at all - they arise because of the unwillingness by the coders of the blockchain to see beyond the parameters they have set.
The problem of creating a functioning ecosystem with a native cryptocurrency is not trivial - and, from my research, has not been solved... by anybody!
The really deep problem is that real-life transactions are asymmetric. Any blockchain transaction, in a like-for-like ecosystem, that is asymmetric can be made symmetric by having one real person own two accounts. The mathematical problem is to retain the asymmetry in spite of this.
In answer to your quote, the originator is partially right. Perhaps I haven't seen it, but what is needed is a stress-test of your proposed changes; not just words, or people pretending they understanding news-headline economics, but some simulations, either by computer or a very small group of people role playing. The point is not to find the equilibrium, but how it can be gamed and corrupted - coz it will be, hence test for it.
This ended up longer than intended. I'll expand on some of this, perhaps ;-)
People will always try to game everything that can be gamed. You really think this only accounts to steem(it)? It says more about our human nature than blockchains.
point is, align the game or greed with the good of the network.
Do you really think increasing curation reward pool distribution back to 50% is the solution Kevin? I am not so sure. It might be better than what we have now, but we had that before and it came with it's own host of problems.
Still, what we currently have here is trash, and most people knew it would be since before it was implemented. All the issues with broken economics and vote buying were predicted correctly long ago. The economics need fixed, and in short order.
Any rational investors will stay the hell away already if they read any of these posts..
They are staying away. And have. Perhaps the top witnesses should demand changes? Or perhaps they are content just getting huge payouts.
One of them top witness quoted me $12,000 to hire devs to code the changes, with no guarantee that it'll get approved of course. I don't even know what to think about it.
Lol at that. The "top witnesses" are supposed to be the skilled coders who can help build steem right? Plus they are being handed shitloads of steem, perhaps use their boatloads of money to fix the fucking system. But they won't because so few here give one shit about anything other than themselves.
It shouldn't have to all fall on the shoulders of people like you Kevin. You shouldn't be one of the only ones talking sense.
Fascinated to learn this fact from you. Feels like someone is wiping someone else's arse.
whoa! Mind you, from when I looked at the code in the past, there isn't really an "economic engine" in there; affected code is scattered everywhere.
It won't solve everything, but it will give more incentives to stakeholders to actually vote on good content instead of playing only with themselves.
Dtube did an experiment, where they gave back a share of the curation rewards to voters and it incentivized me a lot to vote higher/more often on dtube posts instead of normal ones.
I agree with that for sure. The current curation reward likely just isn't sufficient to facilitate actual curation. That said, we did have 50% in the past, and it DID result in much smaller rewards for content creators. So while it may solve a curation problem in part, it opens up a new issue.
Yeah I noticed, it was a (IMO) really good idea and certainly had to have incentivised voting on DTube's content.
Many people give the reasoning of authors investing more time into creating content, than curators, thus they receive the higher share. But it's not only about that.
Curators are also, most of the time, stakeholders. Meaning: it's not only the direct work done that is being rewarded, but the actual faith of holding a lot of money as Steem.
80$ vote-value doesn't sound much, but it requires 3,000,000 Steempower currently. Which was nearly 30 million dollars at high-time.
So I believe, by giving stakeholders a bigger share of the pie by default, more are incentivized to give back to others. Because without stakeholders taking the risk of having their investment lose a tremendous amount of value (as right now) - Steem would be worth much less.
"giving stakeholders a bigger share of the pie by default, more are incentivized to give back to others."
How do you feel about the proposition where stakeholders could choose to get maximum available rewards without doing anything or use their stake normally like now?
Wouldn't that separate those who just want maximum value from their investment and those who actually want to shape up this ecosystem with their stake to two different groups and let both do their thing?
Currently the first group is messing up the work of the second and making the system inefficient when it comes to actually rewarding good content.
Do you agree?
Why should those who do nothing, get the same as those who make the effort to curate content?
Good question, you do realize that at the moment those who do nothing (passive vote selling) are getting way more than those who actually curate? It's hurting the platform, yet this behavior continues.
I think I explained the situation well enough here: https://steemit.com/steem/@igster/re-therealwolf-re-justtryme90-re-therealwolf-re-justtryme90-re-kevinwong-lambos-beaches-and-mansions-20181122t170947977z But if that's not the case, I can try and make it more clearer
"That said, we did have 50% in the past, and it DID result in much smaller rewards for content creators. "
We already have plenty of content creators, what we need is the best ones to be found and rewarded. For that we need actual curation to happen. Perhaps then we'd slowly start get people to visit Steem to see content and actually view it as a place where quality content can be found easily from Trending.
If Steem would work as intended, this ecosystem would be far larger, and content creators would be getting far more rewards than they are now or ever have before in here. However, we'll never reach that with the way this system is currently working, it's not working at all rather. We need curation to happen, or else every good author will leave anyways since they aren't being found and rewarded like they're supposed to.
Please consider long term effects, there's a lot of moving parts here and if we only consider the immediate effect to only one part of the ecosystem, we'll fail always in the long run.
I am not arguing against any of that, its just more than likely that the problem can not be addressed by one simple change :)
It probably won't fix the problem all together, but there are other propositions that could work well with it. I've mentioned one of them in my comments in this post as well.
What we have back then and what we have now which one is better?
Many other changes were made besides just the reduction of the curation pool to 25% instead of 50%. The worst change IMO was going to a pure linear relationship between SP and vote strength. It partially solved the issue of small holders feeling like they had no effect on post rewards but opened up pandoras box for vote buying to become the most profitable use of stake.
The answer to your question is neither was better. Both what we used to have and what we have now suck for their own reasons. Figuring out the way forward (which is what kevin is trying to do here) to a better solution is needed. We have plenty of examples from the past of what doesn't work. Lets learn from it.
Youve now mentioned two problems: curation and reward curve. 50% and n^1.3 has been proposed. Yet everyone prefects to sit back and not do anything about a system that's had proven before any reasonable doubt to be a shitfest.
I'm not in favor of doing nothing. Id like to see us try to change things, and iterate more frequently until we arrive at an actual workable economic situation. The status quo is broken.
"Seriously though, how can I honestly recommend people Steem at this point in time?"
Couldn't agree more.
I wonder what kind of mental gymnastics are required to think that bidbots are good for this ecosystem? Of course the answer is just money but I like the different spins people try to hide the plain truth with. Must be taxing.
How long until people stop being foolish and promoting their posts to zero audience with zero real social interaction? Perhaps that'll be wake up call that's needed, when only the bag holders are left wondering why we're not gaining any traction.
Sad to see Steem in such a state, where everyone is "good" no matter what happens in the background and everyone knows why, but because some profit madly from this mess it is allowed to continue.
How do we get rid of bid-bots though? Thats the real question.
Whales can enforce any rules here with flags, it's been done before, for example one whale forced everyone to adopt a rule where too old posts couldn't be promoted through flagging. We have all the tools available but those with biggest stake would need to do something with them. sadly bid bots are the easiest route for passive income here but I and many are saying it's killing adoption and making people leave.
It's the whales that delegate to and own these bid bots though! And the kind of people who buy their way to whale-sized stakes aren't likely to have the best intentions for the platform.
True and that's the problem. Biggest shareholders and their mindset where short term profits trump over everything else.
If I had to say, it’s whales using misusing their power to serve their greed. Bidbots have actually killed this platform off, back in the days it used to be fun meeting new people online and seeing people work hard to create good content, it would inspire us to do the same, lately no one cares at and they just are hungry for votes.
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Yes, that's all true.
Why should minnows, dolphins and those who yet aren't even Steemians care when the biggest shareholders don't? Lately I've been doing zero curation, it's just not worth it.
Greetings, great Kevinwong
Well cool this idea of yours. I confess that I am a little sad and very worried about this fall of the steem and the criptomoedas in general. I'm afraid to just fall from now on and never rise again, causing bitcoin and steem not to attain good values anymore. I hope I'm very wrong !!
Thank you and good evening!
Clear as water man! Good I'm not the only one thinking this way.
Every time I have to talk to investors and show them my $0.06 Vote I pray to don't be laughing at me when they ask for how much time I have been doing things on the Blockchain.
When I was at SF we talk about this with so many Steemians, and believe me that a lot, I mean a lot are thinking in the same way. Specially promoters like me that are leaving Fiat to make thing IRL.
I keep believing this will change in some moment, but also I see that so many people are frustrated and tired. Because it seems that here is not an end to reach the beloved Proof of Work, Brain or whatever..seems it never ends and we keep on making...we keep.
Resteemed as it shoulds!
Peace V!
Creative and humorous strategy to restore investors confidence. Happy Thanksgiving! They should have done this for April's Fools Day! I'm off to look for an empty rooftop to park my new private jet XD
It’s finally fun to Steem blog again and get all into mining mode
It was so nice to see you again in Krakow
🥰
Haha. Same mamasitta. Know anyone who got chicken pox after Steemfest3? I got 2 weeks after returning from krakow, which coincides with the incubation period of the infection.. lol.
Never changed 😂 when everybody leaves I am back on that block! You must be kidding about chickenpox! That’s gilaaaaaa! Crazy! Hope you are well again
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oops.
love that diagram with the 80/20 and 50/50. Very well explained. Thank you.
Thanks! Now, if the devs are convinced enough to do something about it.. but it's been too long.
Your model sounds very valid to me. Iam behind it
I cannot waste time posting as a harmless post of mine about running an aquaponics setup in klang got resteemed by a witness that has beef with an angry whale. So I'm caught in the crossfire as a completely innocent bystander and member of TM. This guy has sworn to kill me slowly! I had delusions of grandeur in assisting my ngo work in Malaysia via the steem community but now I'm dead in the water without protection. Also @kevinwong I think we r neighbors I live in taman selatan and know mutual friends of yours. I resisted calling on you until now as I'm desperate. Please help
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Hi, I hope you got it settled? Sorry, I'm still going through some viral infection and has been for the past week, still can't think all that clearly. Anyway, I usually advise to just keep it cool with the flagging stuff as it's the only way to steer clear of it over time. Chill with another account first if it persists in the meantime :) it's not worth all the rage etc.
Hey, thx for getting back to me. Sorry to hear you're not feeling well. So far I seem to have managed to maneuver through the drama successfully. Your advice is sound and I'm sure experience has been the greatest teacher in regards to how to deal with such absurdity on the blockchain. I myself was chill at first but then began to see how some people here were attempting to manipulate me which through me into hulk smash mode. I did lash out at one of the core TM members but believe we have amended that and at the time I saw no way out of my situation so was on a mission to create an awareness of how dangerous what was happening to me is for the entire ecosystem. I honestly wasn't expecting help as that would start a revolution and I know strategy and patience is essential for success. If I'd received a message like this as opposed to the first one I got things would've played out much more amicably. I also went annoyed a dapp discord that has TM members on support just because I admittedly can be more than difficult when not taken seriously. Why should anyone take a plankton they don't know seriously I think has now been answered and perhaps has opened some eyes as to what community actual means. Did I go about in a respectful manner not at all and for that I vehemently apologize but I was in the midst of battle and all alone, as well as completely innocent. Anyway I hope u get rest and feel better and can hopefully let it be known I'm not some gwailou binatang from klangsterdam.
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@kevinwong, Yes, we can see the big jackpot numbers in our Wallets and we know that it's a glitch but why not imagine it as real for the motivation and to find the pleasant essence to face this Bear Market. And in my opinion too 50/50 Author and Curation rewards will be effective for sure, but yes, nothing is permanent solution and we have to come up with new changes and developments time to time. Let's hope and go for the best.
Wishing you an great day and stay blessed. 🙂
Nicely put. The longer I think about it the more I'm moving towards 50/50.
If that change will come to pass I hope it will be implemented on its own. Otherwise it would be hard to understand how it changes behaviour.
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@KevinWong 2 You, Family & Friends...
Happy Thanks <--- Giving !!
Thank You 4 Everything You do here that often may go "un-noticed" by some...
Cheers !!
you got my vote
Actually I was also confused to see the figure in my steemit account but I guess it is just a minor error that will soon be corrected. It has really made me feel a little bit millionaire by myself
I think the problem is deeper. It's in human mind. We are behaving like herd and we love centralisation. That's why we need to change our mentality first.
Incentive = mentality.
Hopefully in time things will change. An ebb and flow..a balance. We ARE resilient
Isn't there a possibility that some of these issues will be fixed after SMTs if they come out in a timely manner.
@kevinwong!
By seeing the balance amount in the wallet, I too had a great effect on how suddenly so much happened. Then we went to Blocktrades,and Cryptopia there saw that the value of any coin was not unusual. Then I was convinced that this is a software-related micro fault. Hopefully it will be okay soon, though still the increased value in the wallet is visible .
Thanks, Kevin, for not giving up on us... I Steem the same way I hope, against hope, because of some queer inner imperative. And, I continue hoping that powers-that-be wake up/wise up, to save all the potential, here, before it's too late.
Here's a winged thing for good luck!
The liquid steem in the circulating is keep on getting increased day by day
I think it'd a good starting point as a visualisation. Too much text from a strictly viz. perspective though.
Isn't it 75-25 atm?
Something to build on for sure.
I thought @tarazkp's idea was great. Should attract investors. Then plus a rebalancing to 50-50 (or maybe 65-35... 50-50 sounds like a hard sell) and a slight tweak to linearity.
I'm surprised thrrealwolf responded saying he's in favour of moving away from bidbots.
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50/50 will make voting better. but what will it do to content creators? I've seen many individuals saying that they might give up producing content if 50% of their rewards go for voters making voting a much better alternative to producing content. I mean why should I even spend 2+ hours writing a post instead of posting something short and go back to voting on stuff.
More large stakeholders will be more willing to vote on great content? It's less likely under our current situation.
It was good to read ... I must think and look more this info .
Hello!
I am writing to you because I would like to have the opportunity to create a post for your Steemit blog.
Snax as well as Steemit rewards its users for the content created, but Snax works as overlay solution over existing social networks (e.g. Twitter)
We have no ICO. We already have a testnet, mainnet will be launched this month.
If our project is interesting for you, it will be great if you can publish your opinion about Snax in your twitter or Steemit blog.
Please write me in Telegram @Kunkkasds, if we can cooperate.
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