The expected result of the change in target votes from 40 to 5 is less discrepancy between top paid posts and the long tail of paid posts by decentralizing the Steem Power allocated by each voter, primarily whales and bots. Under these rules, a person voting once per day at full power will have greater value than it would under current rules. The target votes per day had been changed once before from 10 to 40, however, voting regeneration had also been changed (from one day to five). Changing from 40 target votes to 5 without changing regeneration days allows Steem to ease into more optimal ratios for quality curation.
The Revoking Voting Permission was a simple upgrade allowing anyone who sees regulatory risk in the ability to use voting power to remove voting power from their stake. We do not expect this to be a feature used by most users, and it may not be used at all. We have no plans at this time to bring this change to the Steemit UI.
As a frequent voter on Steemit I can tell you reducing vote target to 5/day is a terrible proposal. Some people spend more than 20 minutes a day enjoying this site, and voting shouldn't be catered to just the people who vote once in a while. That's catering inversely to user-engagement, or if you'll accept a new concept: time-stake.
It will also dramatically increase the cognitive load on voting decision, something the 40/day target fixed very well. Maybe you never experienced it, but when each vote used 5% of voting power, it was becoming a pain in the ass to decide what to vote for even with much less content that there is on Steemit today.
Edit: Another thing I thought about while upvoting comments that question this change in this post. Comment voting will be hurt as well. I frequently upvote quality comments but would have to cease if votes were targeted at just 5 per day. How ridiculous is that?
Again, this is penalizing people who are actually engaged on Steemit. I shouldn't have to explain what engagement is worth to a website.
Excellent point about cognative load. Each vote must be relatively unimportant and 1/5 of a day's allocated voting power too much. I intuitively understood this in disliking one aspect of the proposal but I hadn't yet put it into those terms.
Specifically, I current vote on comments at 1%, which at 1/2000th or so of a day's voting power was too low to matter, even with a lot of comment votes. I put zero thought into it beyond liking the comment. The 1% votes are enough to award 30-40c and start to build a payout on the comment. With this proposal I will have to think very carefully because I don't want those comment votes (which are entirely altruistic/social) to burn too much of my valuable voting power.
Thank you for the insight.
very true, i like the cognitive load argument.
It seems like these changes and many others are trying so hard to stifle bots they stifle activity. I though this would change when falling active users is widely see as the biggest problem on site. We'll see how long it takes to fix. I think we need the synereo competition to focus the mind.
I would also like to chime in on this topic. As many people have already mentioned, I think changing from 40 target votes to 5 without changing regeneration is actually just going to end up hurting new content creators who do not yet have their foot in the door. I can see a situation where people conserve their votes only for "hot" or "trending" posts or for authors who are already popular. I can see a situation where people only vote 5 per day on popular authors in hopes of gaining large curation rewards. This may create a situation where people may not want to "chance" their vote or give their vote to lesser-known creators.
I rarely look at hot or trending posts. Honestly, I'm kind of sick of seeing the same people all the time. While I do not like the significant drop of target votes, I'm not sure it will stop me from voting quality whenever I can find it. Hopefully there are more like-minded people who actually focus on PEOPLE rather than the bottom line all the time.
I agree, and I think that's unfortunate. It seems to me that the best way to spread the wealth, is to get as many into the upper tier as quickly as possible, this seems to have the exact opposite result.
This was exactly the effect when the opposite change was made a few months ago. With more votes per day and each vote being less critical people were more willing to spread votes around and give them to posts that had a good chance to go nowhere. With greater scarcity of votes that probably won't happen.
A person voting once per day is likely to be a casual curator. Someone who logs in a couple of times a day and simply votes on a couple of trending posts they like. This change severely impacts those who are regular and involved (human) curators, responsible for digging out diverse and niche content that a casual curator would likely miss.
It would be fair to give a restrained curator greater power, but not penalizing regular deep curators so heavily at the same time. It may lead to a significant loss in diversity of content.
i'd upvote this but you see....the new 5 rule....
Right. I'm logged in all the time, reading and curating/commenting periodically throughout the day. I don't see how limiting my votes like this encourages spreading the love around - especially considering the low level of influence I have in the first place.
I think you might underestimate the number/influence of casual curators.
I also think you might overestimate the upvote rate of regular and involved curators. 40 votes/day, every day, is a pretty large amount of upvotes and a considerable amount of time that most people can't spend on the site. Very easily achievable with bots though.
Still, someone who spends more time on the site will be exposed to more quality posts and have a larger sample size to choose from. He will still have an advantage over the casual upvoter. i.e. If I told you you need to find newly created high quality content in the next 30 mins, you'll have a much harder time than if I gave you 5 hours.
40 votes isn't so much. As part of a deep curation team, I'm probably least likely to misestimate the situation. Daily, there are approximately 3000-4000 shit posts, 200-500 posts worth a read. 50-100 are very good - well worthy of upvotes. About 10 are excellent. 5 is nowhere near enough - at that point all curation on the site will grind to a halt.
If you read the comments, pretty much every regular curator is opposing this proposal for this very reason. For me, it's clear there are 50-100 posts every day that deserve my upvotes. With a 40 votes/day target, it's possible to vote on all with voting weight control. With 5, curation - in the true sense of the word - will halt on Steemit.
You make a very excellent point @liberosist
While I'm still a minnow, I'm doing my best to invest back into STEEM and increase my voting power. I also check in throughout the day to curate, comment and upvote the quality posts that cross my feeds.
This is why it is important that getting more filtering capabilities added is so important. In future releases I understand there will be a group system, and this will also help. But something needs to be done to get other interfaces other than steemit.com up and running. I am working on something, but I am not in a position to put nearly as much work into it as I want. Especially for an application like the one I am making - find posts about it under #steemportal - python scripting is very easy to get into for casual coders and making extensions that allow users to use algorithms to filter and search better, would massively help the curation business.
This is true but also decreases the upvote power of a user a lot faster , lowering his /her ability to reward quality content more frequently. I do believe with the increase in users there is also an increase in quality content , limiting votes for users like myself would potentially let this good content go unrewarded or noticed and drive away the users who generate that quality content. I think the number may prove to be too limiting but this is my opinion. On the other hand I do like the slowing of exssesive Steem creation.
The one thing to keep in mind is that this affects everyone voting, so realistically your average curation rewards shouldn't change week over week. You may vote on less topics, but so will everyone else, thus increasing your total reward from each individual post.
This is also something that could be increased at a later date if the community considers 5 to be too low (just like we went from 24h payouts to 12h, and then back to 24h).
Everybody is talking only about posts, what about voting for comments? People will now start saving on their votes and not upvoting comments as they will want to be able to vote for good posts...
I completely agree with you there :)
Yes it's like prospect theory. If you feel like you had 40 votes and now have 5 it's a loss but really it's 5 super votes or 40 votes like you had before. With the bar you can vote as often as before at 1 percent and then actually drop a 100percemt super vote.
Good points. I think we just have to give it a go and find out ;)
But it's not just about curation rewards, it seems to me it will penalize those who count on Whale votes for payouts as well. unless I am not understanding this at all.
Won't this just encourage a sort of patronage system, where those with the power will continue to vote only for those that they already vote for, without exploring further?
Whales don't vote with 100% of their power typically, which will let them vote on more things. 50 votes @ 10% power is the same reduction in power as 5 votes @ 100% power.
I don't think we're going to see a drastic number in the amount of votes being cast, but we will likely see a large drop in votes that are worth 100% of the voters weight.
Jesta I didn't even realize that we went back to 24hr payouts - you really get the feeling that techies are making all the decisions, sometimes easy/softer touches are more practical for average non-techie people
I had this same concern, but I think it will probably just lead to more people voting at, say 70%, 60% or even 50% power instead of ~90%. The rewards are still there, but they may be smaller.
It is 25 votes regenerating over 5 days. You can actually burst vote 50+ times and not run out of voting power. But each successive vote will be worth less.
@ned - Wouldn't this new 5-vote system just incentivize users to only vote on their own posts? If you post four times per day, why wouldn't you use four of your five full-power votes on yourself, and maybe save one for your own comment?
I know there's a long tail, but surely that won't get shorter with less voting, right? New users who have no following or influence will still get very few, if any rewards. But now they won't even be voting for each other. Unless I'm missing something, I don't really see how the tail problem is fixed by this. Is there a more detailed explanation of this proposal?
I think that in this way you are creating more discrepancy... will be 2 o 3 well paid posts and all the rest ignored! I think it is one of the worse ever thing you have done! Sorry! As I said in an other comment... I am not the best ever blogger but I am 100% sure I will not get anymore upvotes anyway I got normally 50 70 90 upvotes per post!
What your saying is, the hope of an author to regularly collect big money goes down. Meanwhile, it was stated that a single vote would be worth more, so please explain how that closes any gap. It seems to me that fewer posts will payout at all. but, I don't know a lot about the technology.
@ned These ideas might help in this particular circumstance:
RobinHood and others similar to this community:
If this 5 vote a day is implemented, it might be important to balance out by allowing Whales to redistribute their voting power. This can help groups like them still seek to help find the unfounded, but would probably require more members in this particular case.
More of a headsup from what I've been reading throughout the site:
It's important to note that many of the hot topics in Steemit are anarchic and libertarian-based, so it might damage investments as well as faith from the crowd who sort of find it iffy or discouraging when they see their votes limited - the thing they want to avoid when it comes to cryptocurrency living. Liberation in a sense that people can help people out, like in the paragraph above, can balance out the turmoil.
What happens if the rules changed a bit and allowed your author posting per day and your time of existence help improve your voting power? Or at least increase voting reception percentages from a vote? The latter might or might not get rid of the ranging and sliding of one's voting, by simply allowing the power of the vote become natural and automatic depending on the author's activity.
People are stuck on the "40 target" while the key point is "without changing regeneration days" This will contribute to balance voting power by diminishing the impact of whales. The intention that underlines this feature is it seems to distribute more voting power accross users.
I think this is an interesting feature that has to be tested. Let's not prejudge the outcome, we cannot anticipate how each one of us will be affected by this change.
I think that overall the system of weighting votes by stake helps keep the system more fair, though for moderating the effects of whales votes, I think that your idea of modulating vote power based on a users posts and the votes on them (and their rep) would help diminish the giant whack that whalevotes give, and it is not a good thing entirely because it narrows what hits the top. If someone is making a lot of effort and getting good traction posting, versus a whale with 3 posts and a million snarky comments, their vote should matter more than it currently does, and the whale's less. I refer to a particular whale when I speak of this, who has a post whining about being hounded for votes by people. In effect, this would placate this whale and make less people hound him for votes. Stake based voting is very good, and I don't want to see it diminished too much, but I think that reputation and upvoted posts should be a parameter in the formula for generating rewards. This is a means to increasing quality contribution.
I have a better idea. Remove the voting function completely. Oh, you practically did this.
I totally disagree with that, like this if have to think who i will upvote and who not. I use steemit 3-4 hours a day, read and upvote a lot. If this will be changed whats the point to read and curate?