The Claim
Let's attempt to leave emotions aside for this one. Let's refrain from using insults, nicknames and all those things that are not really too helpful to the conversation. Because honestly, we got plenty of that already and this little blog of mine has absolutely no intention of adding more fuel to the fire.
"When a selfish whale or dolphin for that matter upvotes himself, or herself almost exclusively over and over, this reduces the amount of money on the pool, thus resulting in smaller payouts for everyone else"
At first glance this makes sense, specially because it seems to go against the idea of this very platform, the initial idea that is. Content gets discovered, the best content gets rewarded, etc. So, it makes a lot of sense that I could boil it down to this simple analysis and feel frustrated that others don't see it my way.
But, let's dive a little deeper on this, again focused on facts and not on emotional reactions. These would be some of the things we would effectively have to accept as our truth, in order to not explore this nuanced situation.
- Most, if not all rshares belong to content creators, not to upvoters and investors.
- Investors must comply with my tastes. Hence, my opinion of good quality content is more valid.
- I would never do the same, even if I had invested millions.
- If they did not upvote themselves, they would sure be upvoting me or my friends.
- The Reward Pool can be overspent or over allocated.
I'm sure the list could be expanded some more, but for now, for the sake of my "risky" post, let's leave it at that. Granted, you are welcome to add anything else you could think of to the conversation.
Now, departing from these little bullet points, let me ask you some questions. By the way, I welcome disagreements here, I'm not trying to scream into an echo chamber, I'm simply trying to add some perspective to the controversial subject.
Who's the owner of the Rshares?
Attempting to explain it without using mathematical formulas is a bit tricky, but I will do my absolute best. However, if you don't shy away from this kind of stuff, you could go visit the steem center and engulf in all the nifty numbers of awesomeness. Everything is detailed there.
You could think of rshares as a hidden currency. As a token that expires in seven days and it's claimed against the pool. Think of it as an IOU maybe. As if I would give you a piece of paper that said, In seven days you can use this paper to claim 3% of a keylime pie. Granted, in my little explanation here, A cook makes a keylime pie every single day. Come to think of it, that sounds awesome, but I digress.
So back to the question, but let's move it into the keylime pie realm. Who is authorized, who is the owner, the one that can emit the little IOU paper for the percentage of the keylime pie. The answer of course, me. In order for me to have the right to print the little IOU papers, I had to buy into the right. Now payment, could have been cash or maybe work. Maybe, I mowed the lawn for the bakery (yeah that makes no sense, but indulge me) for months so that I was given the right to print a finite amount of IOU papers.
Can the reward pool be overdrained?
Let's go back to the pie example, yes, the same keylime pie. If everyone who has rights to a certain percentage of the pie, regardless of their capacity to emit IOU papers, have to add to 100%. Is there a mathematical way to exceed 100%?
Another way of thinking about this would be: Could I eat more pie than there is? Could I take more pie than there is? - It's of course physically impossible to do. This means, that if all the people who have either bought or work their right to a percentage of the pie, can only eat, consume up to one pie. I hope this mathematical pie is starting to make sense.
So to answer this particular question, I would say no. We cannot overdrain the reward pool, not mathematically.
Is self voting wrong?
Here we go, this is the controversial part of the key lime pie conundrum. Is using your little IOUs only to eat pie yourself an evil act? Before we answer that, let's add more questions to this, or more accurately more considerations. Remember, you worked for those IOU privileges, and also remember that when you acquired them, the bakers (blockchain) did not give you conditions. The baker never said, if you use this IOUs to eat only yourself, you will lose the right to print more and screw you.
Ok now, let's ask - Using all your IOU certificates to eat all your pie, Good, evil or neutral? - AHA! now you are in a pickle, and honestly you should be. Because all of us, as key lime pie enthusiasts would have to constantly think about how much we want for ourselves, and how much we are willing to hand out to others.
We could come to a few conclusions however, those who don't understand the power of sharing, the power of communities usually don't enjoy other valuable things of life. Things like loyalty, friendship, a sense of belonging, for example. But, does this mean that they are evil because they don't understand it? Or could it mean that they are blind to the other benefits and that they are thinking in scarcity?
I don't think using the word evil is helpful, not in the slightest, hence why I think that the conversation at times lacks a lot of nuance.
You may have noticed that @sirvotesalot has become a self voter, and honestly I can't demonize him for it. He bought his SP, he bought a big percentage of the rights to the pie in my analogy, and this makes it reasonable for him to want to leverage his risk by self voting. Now, do I think it's the most effective way of doing it? Not at all, but that is my personal opinion and I can't impose my rationale on him. How could I? I could present him with some numbers, maybe even have his ear for a second or two, but... Who decides? Him or me? - I think the answer is obvious.
What would you do?
To me it's obvious that not all people would act the same way, but then again it can be easy to say that when we are not the ones living through the experience. I could sit here and tell everyone who would bump into this blog that I would never self vote like that. However, I've not invested everything I own into STEEM. I have invested a lot, honestly more than I probably should given my financial situation, but in the macro sense, I'm a tiny investor.
What I'm trying to point out is that I don't have the choice to make that choice, and that makes my opinion not fully scoped. Because, let's say tomorrow I decided to kill all my community/social initiatives; What would happen to me? Would my earnings tank as I just start self voting with a "It's my stake, its my right" spam posts? - I think financial ruin would be guaranteed. Now, this is not taking into account the fact that we may have different sets of values, and that for me It's absolutely not worth it to be here without my community, but I'm trying to paint a realistic picture here too.
Let's be ridiculous for a second and imagine that your car payment is due in two weeks and you are in a financial pickle. You've been doing OK on STEEM, but lately your posts have not been making as much as they used to in the past. However, you know that if you post 10 times a day and self vote, you would be able to make that payment no problem. Now then.... What would you do?
Listen, you don't have to answer me, that's not the point. I'm trying to lay down some perspective that in my view is very much lacking on this conversation.
If the whales only voted minnows
How do we know what would happen? Do we know this for a fact, or are we speculating on the idea? - Listen, I'm not trying to be difficult about this, not at all. I'm simply trying to say that we have a lot riding on a horse that may not even exist.
The way I see it most on this platform are takers, not givers. Out of the thousands of accounts I see active every day, most of them are shouting to the winds me, please, me, me and me. Upvote me, follow me, me, me. Of course I realize this may make me sound heartless, but realistically speaking: What do you think would happen if say @thejohalfiles all of the sudden starts upvoting a vote beggar every time he asked for a vote. Would that account power up, support his comrades, his friends? or would that account power it all down and build nothing to sustain itself? - I don't know, but I don't claim to know the answer either.
This is not even addressing the fact that some who are angry about the state of things are actually convinced THEY would be the ones getting upvoted into trending. Something that is hard for me to get my head around, because that implies a level of entitlement that really looks pretty ugly, right?
Now, I'm not addressing their talent, or anything like that. I know some of them are very talented, I'm simply saying that assuming that "if only they wouldn't rape the pool for themselves via bot delegations or otherwise.. it would be me getting those votes" - sounds like a poorly crafted selfish argument disguised as justice in my opinion.
And then.. We create monsters
And that's why I'm "risking" talking about this, because it just seems to be very apparent to me. We demonize the bot owners, threaten to rape their families because the system is wrong, because its failing, etc. And we do this at the same time that we are saying to them, to the "monsters" - "HEY YOU SELFISH BASTARD... UPVOTE MY STUFF" - Does that make sense to anyone? Anyone at all?
What I mean by creating monsters is not of course that they are monsters. What I mean is that we believe them to be, we un-invite them from the conversations, kick them out of the communities, call them names, make videos on youtube about how "evil the whales are" etc. But in the same breath ask them to change their ways.
I can't say I see the logic in any of this, in the approach, in the plan per say. All I tend to see is a bunch of emotional personalities trying to make sense of it all, while not realizing we are all riding in the same boat.
Can we try more Diplomacy?
For the sake of the platform, for the sake of the health of the communities? - Can we see past the inflammatory language and talk about realistic ways we can move forward?
I don't know... But what I do know is that the ball is in our court... it always has been.
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Pure self voting is still bad, from the perspective of reward pool allocation. I'm not calling it evil, but I posit that we should not remain so neutral either. As I talked to a few of you that hold this view on rshares, it sounds like none of you agree that it's a good thing. Yes fine, don't demonize, be civil, but I think the language of this post goes too far the other way. All from establishing a view of rshares that I think is wrong, which I want to get into now.
Rshares are the implementation details of a more abstract concept, one that strives to assign value so that the reward pool is distributed. This much is obvious. The more stake, the more of a say you have. Let me give you a different analogy other than pie. You are playing a game, in which you are a government, with finite resources, and the means by which you are allocating the resources is by stake based voting by the community. The better you allocate the resources, the more resources you would be getting potentially later (by price of the token). Actually this is pretty close to not even being an analogy... Yes, the person owning a lot of stake has a lot of say in how this happens, and yes, they can funnel it to themselves and friends, like we see in some governments, but if that's what's happening, people catch on, and the perception is not positive. And that will reflect badly on the platform and on the price.
What am I saying here? Exactly that cases of bad allocation of stake, even if the stake is theirs to play with, give negative value to the platform. That's why we cannot simply wave our hands and say "but it is theirs". That's why flagging exists, and you can have respectful disagreements over this concept, although of course as you mention, people need to be more respectful about it.
My request is that we stop saying there is no reward pool abuse. Because from the lens of looking like a shitty government, it still appears to be so. Instead, we direct people to be civil about it, and we direct people towards education of what we have.
Thanks @meno @crimsonclad for your perspectives earlier, tagging so you can see what I'm going on about.
Great comment, @eonwarped. I think one thing that people get mixed up on is the fact that investment gets you influence to decide on where the pie goes, but it does not entitle you to a piece of the pie. Others still have their say. The problem comes in when people attack others for simply exercising their say. Which, in my opinion, seems to happen a lot more in the case of whales.
Regarding my own efforts with opposing reward pool abuse, I have tried to be respectful as much as possible...certainly to a higher degree than the other side ever has, but I found that it was answered with downvotes instead. I'm ok with that, because I feel it is important to be able to voice your say in any way possible.
Hi @eonwarped, you may find this post from me useful in explaining how flags can help distribution of the reward pool and it explains why I feel more of us need to flag more and not let the "it's our SP, our vote" crowd get away with self voting trash. The same argument works the other way to, "it's our VP, our flags", we can flag any content we feel necessary if it is posted on OUR blockchain
https://steemit.com/fulltimegeek/@kabir88/if-you-want-to-understand-how-the-flag-wars-effect-your-rewards-look-at-these-diagrams-you-may-be-surprised-at-their-effect
Perfectly said Eon... that's all I want, a balanced non demonizing conversation with everyone involved.
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Not sure if you will get to see this comment @meno as my rep is still negative. But I tried to explain how the reward pool distribution can be changed if more people were willing to flag bad content using some visual aids!
https://steemit.com/fulltimegeek/@kabir88/if-you-want-to-understand-how-the-flag-wars-effect-your-rewards-look-at-these-diagrams-you-may-be-surprised-at-their-effect
Hi meano lol. I suppose you have to put yourselves in their shoes. Let us say this particular person is so big that they don't need the community. This person posts numerous posts a day and makes $2000 per day or $60 000 per month. This person is milking the system but not really breaking any rules. It is frowned upon by the community but there is little anyone can do. There are issues that I think need to be fixed to prevent it and most likely won't happen. Multiple accounts is one and self voting is the other. This won't fix it either as the individuals will find loop holes and will carry on in another form of self payment.
The reward system plays into their hands as they are big enough not to worry about the community. In some cases they are like a corporate giants that will only get bigger and bigger and changing the system is the only way of stopping them. Greed has made monsters who just want more.
Very good points brother... But except for the one account that I'm sure you are referring to, the demonization of all whales has gotten out of hand. And, because of our inability to have civil dialogues about this disagreement, we keep on adding fuel to the fire.
That's not how it works. Schemes like @haejin's are slightly more complex than that.
It is not an evil act, evil is something else. But it is a decision that will make a project like the steem blockchain unsustainable in the long term.
This place is supposed to be driven by content that gets rewarded according to its quality.
I understand the urge of investors to monetize their investment in Steem, especially with the current low prices that must make them feel very discouraged. But ironically, that idea of maximizing their stake without sharing the votes with other people, will only make their investment go lower and lower as time pass because that attitude is not good for the health of this blockchain (in my opinion), making their apparent "solution" worse than the initial problem.
An easy way to see if something is sustainable in steem is to ask the following question:
If the answer is yes then whatever X is, it is sustainable.
If the answer is no, then whatever X is, it is unsustainable, and therefore, unhealthy for this blockchain.
If enough people exclusively self vote, then yes... it makes the experiment unsustainable because it truncates the network effect a good economy requires.
For the love of everything that is holy...let's drop the RAPE analogy...
dood bro... dewd...brah... dud... brow... did you even read muh post?
That's what I'm saying... So you basically are against your own cause... hahahahha
/me flags Itstime cuz apparently its not the time
I don't like calling it rape. That may be offensive to some. I call it plundering. Those who self vote for junk posts are adding no value at all. At least put in some effort or just sell your vote to others. I'm not saying people can't make a profit, but find ways that benefit the platform in general
Agreed steve... this is my little call for civility.
I meant what steve said...
I know you TLDR muh post bro... I can tell because of you being an avatarless discordian
Lolzz..
I am a sleepy head most off timess..
By the way ..I did read your post..i agree with the central message but my point still stands that even you could have delivered the same message without invoking Rape...
Well i hate using that name for it which is why i never did. Not only because i find it ugly but rather because i never thought such a thing was taking place.
Now the point where i must disagree with you on is the point of "not blaming", or rather "not demonizing" people that act in completely selfish ways by not spreading some of their upvotes around to other content creators on this platform..
My point is that just because its allowed doesnt make it fine or ok. You are using words like demonize and evil... But the fact is that i dont think anyone sensible would call those actions evil or demonic. 😁
You could say these people are just selfish, maybe even self absorbed, non-caring, lack any altruistic attributes, non-social.... Etc...
But thats far from calling them evil.
The system is set up as it is so when you dont have users properly incentivized they act in ways their character leads them to.
There are probably some that wouldnt self upvote even if that meant 90% less earnings for them and more for others and then there are those that would self upvote even if it meant just 0.5% more earnings for them..
What im saying is that just because its allowed doesnt make it cool and fine because it goes against the ideals of the platform, but calling those people evil is not the right thing to do..
Did you just sum up my post in one line?
pffff
/me flips a cake on Silentscreamers head
Well then i mistook our disagreement. Haha.
I wanted to edit the comment to add something so ill drop it here.
I see it like this.. I made everyone this oven here so everyone can bake themselves a cake. Of course some of you will have all ingridients and some of you dont have many. Now you can bake yourself a cake and eat it all up by yourself in front of all these starving behind you.. Or you could share a piece of that cake so the others can grow and get stronger and one day maybe bake you a cake. Now you can say let them "starve" i worked hard for my cake or you can share a few pieces..
Is the guy that doesnt share evil? Nope and neither is he the best person in the world. 😂😂😂
A short and silly analogy for you.
I like this cake thing we are doing...
But I will add... a Good Maker of Cakes knows who to teach how Cake making is done, so that his efforts don't get spent on selfish bakers. They in turn should continue that Baker Legacy until they dominate the Baking culture enough.
Yes..
Haha. The cake is strong in Helpies. 😁❤
While I have a position on this, for the sake of reality check can we please remember that 98% of content creators here would be writing for likes, (not financial) upvotes or claps if not for this platform.
Like almost everything since Web2.0, the beautiful democratization of online publishing, the bitter side effect is that many show how entitled they feel.
I don’t care that much about it because it reflects more on them than on me but some reality check and self-introspection is not uncalled for.
As for the topic at hand: you can technically not rape the pool. Everyone contributing to one’s rewards makes an explicit choice (that includes delegators).
You can maximize but not rape. The code doesn’t account for sentimental trust and as such rape is impossible.
Yes, so from the conversation, we must remove the inflammatory language.
It's not rape if the reward pool consents.
this actually made me laugh... maybe that's not appropriate, but it did...
Oh my God I snorted a bit when reading that too.
"Can we see past the inflammatory language"
Thanks for raising this. I agree. This is just a disagreement about the correct business ethos to grow the platform, and who is responsible for doing that.
Growing the platform requires people not to self-vote or sell votes, as that redirects funds away from growth, to profit-taking in the here and now.
However, since stakeholders own the portion of the reward pool that matches their stake percentage, and since people are free to do what they want with what they own, taking profits in the here and now is something they are entitled to do, even though it is shortsighted and selfish, since if everyone behaved like that, Steem would have close to zero value.
And there is also a whiff of hypocrisy about, where some self voters jump on the bandwagon of people critiquing other self-voters, on the grounds that those self voters have bigger stakes. They have bigger stakes because they legally acquired them, and are entitled to do the exact same thing as self voters with smaller stakes. There is no difference.
There really needs to be a fork that prevents self-voting for everybody, if this platform is to moon. I don't think coercing compliance with a voluntary code of growth is feasible, and the attempt turns Steemit into an unnecessarily frightening battlefield for clueless newbies. :)
Rodney I like you brain dude.. and the best news is... I'm not a zombie.
Why don't you find me in discord, you belong with us...you belong in @helpie
I will have to find out what @helpie is, and how discord works. I will, after I have made some posts, including an intro post lol. Signed, the Prince of Procrastination. :)
exactly what I keep thinking...what would I do?? I would defo vote on my own posts (i already do!) but now my vote is worth almost nothing. I think it's only fair to reward yourself for hard work later on when it starts to pay off. Maybe not doing it 10 times per day on memes however...
As with many things in life my dear Eve... balance is the key to health.
If we are too selfless we deplete, if we are to selfish we don't grow...
wise words =)
From what I understood, the pool is divided according to the stakes. And each person who owns a percentage of the stakes has the right to use them as they wish. People voting for themselves does not mean raping the reward pool because they can only distribute what they have by right. My personal view is that sometimes the people that complain about that don't power up their accounts and want to be upvoted by the ones that have done it. Of course, I believe in making good content and understand the frustration of seeing crap posts with huge gains
that is correct my friend, but some don't understand how to properly use their SP for the benefit of the platform and by proxy themselves.
Meaning that if I act selfishly at all times, I might be hurting the very thing that feeds me. Thus never actually create the network effect.
Imo, the STEEM blockchain is what we want to make of it, look at the blockchain as the Wild West, we have no laws we have nothing, and i think it's up to the big guys (whales, orcas and dolphins) to come up with some "rules" to make a future for this space! How?
Well, i don't really know how, i think votingbots shouldn't be demonized but they should be made accountable for shitty content getting on the trending page, and trending pages with 700 bucks payouts, i don't want to demonize them, but maybe the big votingbot owners should try to get some laws around , like for example only 1 bot per post... or max voting bot payouts in the 50$ (with the current STEEM worth)...
I don't think it's wrong for someone to self upvote, but i do find it a little greedy for someone to make 11 shitty posts a day and upvote all those posts and never get into the community... I don't think I would get those upvotes, but i see many content creators that should get a lot more payouts and aren't getting!
We either unite and talk about the issues and try to come up with some fixes or this whole blockchain is going down... and like you said, leave the inflammatory language at the door!
My opinion is the value of the Steem coin would rise if more whales acted like @fulltimegeek with his bot army of support for content creators he personally feels deserve the support. If many of the whales followed his lead, Steem/Steemit would not be in the toilet.
I could not agree more, but we can't impose that mentality by force, we have to be patient teachers.
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wtf