Hello Steemians, today we would like to disclose our public support for a proposal that we believe would improve the economic incentives built into Steem. The Steemit team recently met to discuss this issue. We agreed on the nature of the problem, and more or less agreed with the proposal presented by the Steem user @trafalgar which we will refer to as the “Economic Improvement Proposal” or “EIP.”
Improving Content Discovery
The problems that we believe should be solved are that of self-voting, passive delegation to bidbots (instead of participation in content discovery), spam (especially microspam), and abuse. These problems undermine one of the core unique value propositions of the platform; proof-of-brain. People generally gravitate towards what is the most profitable thing for them to do when there is monetary incentive.
The goal of these economic changes would be to move Steem closer to delivering on the promises stated in the whitepaper of unearthing high quality content by making it more profitable for people to actively curate, and less profitable to self-vote and delegate one’s Steem Power to bid bots.
Our Focus
Right now our focus remains 100% on improving steemit.com, Communities, MIRA, finalizing the Steem Proposal System Hardfork (HF21 or the “SteemDAO”), and preparing to switch to SMTs. We do not have any plans to begin working on any code relating to these economic changes. But we do believe that this is a conversation worth having and one that we would be happy to participate in. Ultimately, the decision of when to begin work on these improvements, and in which hardfork to include them, will be up to the Steem community and the Witnesses they elect to approve Hardforks.
The EIP has 3 components all of which we believe must be implemented in tandem in order to deliver the desired effect. If you’re interested in learning more about the rewards curve and the options for improving it, @vandeberg (Senior Blockchain Engineer at Steemit) has published a more technical exploration of the subject.
- Moving from a linear rewards curve to a convergent linear rewards curve. A convergent linear rewards curve would start out superlinear, providing minimal gains at first, and smoothly become linear as more votes are made. Users that are interested only in maximizing the return on their Steem Power, instead of benefitting the platform through thoughtful curation, often engage in practices such as self voting or delegation to bid bots. The proposed curve incentivises concentration of votes on to fewer pieces of content, which increases the visibility of such counterproductive behavior. Alternatively, users could choose to act more subtly by spreading stake across more, but smaller, votes at the cost of a suboptimal return. We cannot eliminate such behavior entirely, but we can make it less economically viable.
- Increasing the percentage of rewards that are distributed to curators. One of the problems with Steem as it stands is that there is a strong incentive to self-vote. The more rewards are distributed to curators the less incentive there is to self-vote. At the same time, if curation is improved, then those content creators who are currently submitting great content which isn’t getting seen, should stand to benefit as that content will be more likely to get unearthed.
- Create a separate “downvote pool.” Downvotes are a critical component for regulating Steem, but there is no incentive to render them because they are not rewarded. In fact, they cost voting mana which disincentivizes the use of the downvote. This creates more opportunities for self-voting abuse as it reduces the likelihood that this behavior will be countered. By adding a small pool for downvotes that is consumed prior to consuming voting mana, users are more free to downvote content as a curation mechanism without losing out on potential rewards themselves.
Feedback
Discussions like this have been extensive in the past and we want to share our opinion and continue the conversation started by community member @trafalgar. Our plans have not changed. We are working to finish auditing the SPS Hardfork, release a testnet, and make a public announcement which gives everyone (including exchanges) 30 days to review that code.
Our hope with the EIP is just to highlight the conversation so that the Steem community has time to come to a consensus about whether they want these changes, and what they feel is the best timing as far as including the changes in a future hardfork.
Let us know your thoughts on the Economic Improvement Proposal in the comments section below.
The Steemit Team
Question To Steemit Inc
In February 2017 Steemit Inc re-highlighted why linear rewards are fundamentally flawed, yet they never retracted their statement before pushing for linear rewards to be implemented.
More here.
No need to ask Steemit, stop worshiping them.
Read the downvote section again. I like to think it's mostly my suggestion and I'm not bragging about it because it's so obviously the solution to people buying votes on half baked comments like this one.
Have a look at this poll, seems by the votes to far, I think all these options need to truly be carefully considered before implementing measures that make passive stake holders move to even more disruptive use of their stake.
What are you alluding to? My comment is super critical of Steemit.
Steemit Inc said linear rewards were flawed. They then supported linear rewards while never explaining why they weren't flawed, "anymore".
What's your goal to shame steemit retroactively?
I've been talking against linear reward since at least november 2017. I want a change as soon as possible to something nit fundamentally flawed.
You heard the man @teamsteem. Good old transistoRadio wants you to stop asking questions that make sense because it is "embarrassing" for him. Thank you for not saying the truth out loud in advance. Transisto Radio appreciates your silence. XD
I flag trash. You have received a flag.
o_o
https://steemit.com/joy/@teamsteem/i-saw-your-dance-video-and-now-i-know-your-rich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=165&v=4qE0SGgWU1w
@teamsteem purchased a 29.66% vote from @promobot on this post.
*If you disagree with the reward or content of this post you can purchase a reversal of this vote by using our curation interface http://promovotes.com
This post has received a 40.29 % upvote from @boomerang.
Linear is flawed, sure, the proposed curve type though even more so. It sends a signal to new users: "please piss off, you are too late, we are full!"
I'dd propose just adding a simple and modest fish-size bonus. Irrelevant for new users, but sufficient an incentive for big fish not to break up their stake into hundreds of puppet accounts.
The blue line instead of the red line
Can someone help? i started several accounts a few years back. I have been able to access them all recently but one...I am using the same master key and I am not able to get in....all of my other accounts are fine. I copy and paste the master keys no problem...I have never changed or attempted to change any passwords. My husband and daughter have both tried to no avail. the account I can not access is @jadabug...could it have been compromised. no steem is missing ...i just can not get in ...it is strange ..I set up the accounts and would like to give it to my daughter to run and i can not get in .augh! I have all of the keys they just do not work!!!! Thank you for your time.
I'm guessing: you are using Master Password to access https://steemit.com site, but it's no longer possible after wallet/social features split. For social part you should use your Posting Key. If you haven't written down separate keys go to https://steemitwallet.com site log in with your Master Password and get your Posting Key to be used on https://steemit.com.
sadly none of them work. Thank you for responding. Just know that @ jadabug is stolen and running a bot scam of voting every few seconds...Happy day! Melissa
100% this. We have to take steps to shape the system in a way where even the greediest of people will have to act in ways that benefit the whole ecosystem rather than slowly milking it to its death and forcing everyone else to either follow suit or feel like they're being left behind and wasting time when others are just aiming to maximize their own short term profits with minimal effort(read: zero)! I'd guess it doesn't take long for people to change camps, I know I'm selling almost 100% of my votes now after vocally being against bidbots since the day they appeared. I've read from all over the place here on Steem, how active members are sad that they aren't actively curating anymore. I know how that feels, I'm a bit gutted as well, this isn't the Steem we were promised at all. And if you're asking why these people don't just curate, what's stopping them, you might want to spend some time pondering how this current situation affects individuals over a long period of time. I've been active Steem member for around 2 years now and I've regularly browsed the trending, it's never been stellar but back then it was other members voting for people rather than literally anyone being able to buy the top spots (these days this is required actually) without any community support or content discovery happening. We're being shoved bad content down our throats... As you can imagine, I'm not checking Trending daily anymore.
We've all heard the saying one bad apple spoils the whole barrel, and we're seeing that in full action here on Steem. Majority of stake is selling their votes passively, content discovery is minimal and manual curation just isn't happening because it isn't worth it. Just look at our "trending", is it something to be proud of or does it show that proof-of-brain exists on this platform, like at all, and that should be our main attraction! (See reddit as an example here).
I'm not sure about anyone else here, but I'd like to one day use Trending to actually see the best content submitted to our blockchain, that's actually worth reading and sharing to others (read: interesting, quality content rather than just another ad or an attempt by the author to benefit from their readers in some way).
If we can't accomplish a trending that's actually attractive to outside visitors, this place is doomed in the end. I could go on and on why this is so important but system that's fair will attract people over something that is not. Steem has always had a hard time representing itself as a fair system, fixing these issues would help us immensely in building our reputation back up again (It's never been high, let's fix that).
Seeing all the changes Eli has done and her leadership makes me hopeful, this post is showing that you guys are ready to truly lead this ship and I really like that. We've needed a captain since Dan left!
This isn't the first lengthy post from me on this issue, and probably won't be last either as long as I own some Steem and care about the future of this decentralized social media platform.
Let's make Steem great again!
Thank you for this!
If you read the whole thing, thank you!
Absolutely agree with your description and analysis of our problem
Good economic systems force bad people to do good things in order to be profitable, bad economic systems force good people to behave badly to profit.
We currently have a huge problem of misaligned incentives: we're rewarding people the most to do something we don't want them to do: content indifferent voting. Whether it's self voting or vote selling, it undermines the content discovery and reward value proposition of the system yet we're paying all the stakeholders 4x as much to do this than to curate honestly. Insanity
This is very fixable and I'm glad Steemit Inc are now looking into this, it really is the #1 priority, well above SMTs, communities etc. And it is also relatively easy compared to the other projects.
I agree with you that we have misaligned incentive system, and think your suggestion would create better economic mechanism. However, it won't be the perfect system. There are still, while fewer, people to self vote in order to take all author and curation rewards.
Then, what do we answer to the new guys who seek maximum profit from the broken system saying they won't stop until the system fixes the hole? There will always be these sort of people.
The crux of problem is a mixture of rewards; investors want to maximize profits using contents rewards, and contents creators are competing with investors on the same resource.
I think we'd rather have to focus on SMT and separating the heterogeneous incentive system, and do experiments using different parameters with each SMT.
I think Clayop is correct and that's my general conclusion as well. SMTs will give the opportunity to experiment. I happen to believe that stake-based voting has been proven a failure when it comes to content discovery. Trafalgar's well-intentioned proposal will make Steem/it a bit better, but in the end it will simply last slightly longer than what we have now. People want money more than they want to vote for good content. Eventually, downvoting will be abused also and all of those mechanisms the proposal creates will still end with the same outcome. Therefore, let STEEM be the investors' reward layer and create some SMTs that try to do a better job of creating a reward system.
Totally areed.
First of all, Steem's inflation should be removed for rewarding the content creators and rewarding should be delegated to front-end DApps. DApps can launch their own TOKEN and reward algorithm to discover contents. Current inflation is not keeping up with low demand. If Steem did not have relative high inflation, it would easily sit at top 30 in CMC.
Steem's Inflation should go to protocol developments, witness compensation and PoS interest (2-3% vs current 8.5%). Rewarding content creators should be done with SMTs. STINC can launch their own SMT and share profit from ads with celebrity creators by SMTs.
Steem Investors can earn TOKENs through RC/SP delegations. @steemhunt is already showing a good example. Creators and DApps will figure out optimum synergy with a token.
Bidbots are not evils. They have their own business model. They can host in a front-end DApp where they can succeed or thrive. Competition within front-ends with SMTs will spur innovations.
All the front-end DApps can try their own SMTs with different distribution technique. Finding a sweet algorithms to rewarding the best content is more than rocket science. A former founder, @dan is bragging that he can fix it, I totally disagree. It needs lots of trials and errors and should be the realm of DApps.
DApps with SMTs can try different algos. @steemhunt, @actifit, @dlike and others are already experimenting. Steem's inflation and broken rewarding is helping its price.
here here!
The entire idea here is to align making more money with content discovery and making it more expensive to behave in a way that contradicts that (eg self voting or vote selling)
It's not inconceivable that with the right economic incentives, we'll reach a equilibrium of relatively good behavior that'll continue to serve the entire platform well over time. Behavior that deteriorates over time isn't necessarily an inevitable product of stake based voting. It all depends on how well we align individual profit maximization behavior with honest curation.
It's hard to abuse a modest level of free downvotes in the sense of profiting from them. They can be abused in the general sense to bully and harass people, sure, it's one of the downsides. The idea is to limit them as much as possible while still have a sufficient amount of them to turn this place around.
Just came across this reply and I fully agree with it. I can't believe just how disillusioned large holders including witnesses have become. We have been struggling to onboard people now, expect that to be 10 times harder when minnows see half their post rewards vanish. Reverse robinhoood.
Exactly this.
Investors maximising profits is not compatible with content creators seeking an audience. Throughout history, plutocracies have always ended in catastrophe. In the early days of Steem, I was optimistic because this is a new system, but the inherent greed of homo sapiens always wins, and giving them a platform that they are encouraged to dictate with their wealth was always going to end poorly.
For 3 years, we have made incremental improvements over a fundamentally flawed platform. It is about time for an overhaul. I'd vote for cancelling the common reward pool (over time) and focusing on SMTs. Who knows, maybe some SMT will come up with a new paradigm which makes this whole thing sustainable.
PS: That said, till SMTs are ready, I'd support the above proposal as an interim "lipstick-on-a-pig" solution. If it is proven that these can be implemented with relative ease. I believe it's going to make things slightly better. Maybe a 1.5/10 from a 1/10, and is thus worth the effort. I'm open to changing my mind if I see better data, evidence and simulations suggesting a better result.
This tells a lot. Because it is about humane nature.
Yes, and Steem is no different.
Indeed. Water flows downhill. This is not a problem, but the key to the solution. We need to provide a mechanism that promotes development of Steem and capital gains that is separate from the rewards intended to curate content and market Steem to new users and potential investors. We need to take advantage of gravity, not try to force water uphill.
Thank you. I've been thinking along those lines since this post came out. We need something that investors can actually do, especially if they're not inclined to curate or post and comment. Could it be RC delegation? I mean, I've never really understood what's in it for the strictly investor here other than the market, especially if they're not really aiming to participate in the social side of this platform because of less than desired returns.
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Thanks to the investors the price goes up. By contrary, the inflation and rewards makes the price go down... I think is impossible to separate investors from content rewards without letting the steem price go down.
For this reason I think we have to deal with this "mixture of rewards" forever, and try to find a better distribution, like this proposal.
Yes, the original post concedes there's probably no such thing as a perfect system. But what we can do it make it less profitable to engage in behavior we don't want (eg self voting, vote selling) and more profitable to engage in behavior we do want (eg honest curation.
The right incentives are probably more powerful and effective than you have you mind. If curation pays a lot more and a moderate amount of free downvotes are available, the threat to any obvious abuse is very real. If we get the numbers right, it should be sufficient to deter most misbehavior to the point where we have enough free downvotes to take care of the actual misbehavior that were not deterred.
Also, while I personally believe a functional base economy is more important and essential for SMTs to really take off, I don't really think SMTs vs Economic Improvement is a dichotomy. Realistically, even if it took priority, it doesn't require a lot of work from a coding standpoint. It's only a small exaggeration to say that @vandeberg could knock it out in an afternoon (well maybe like a week :p). Think about how easy these changes are to implement and how important they are compared to the complexity and uncertainty of an undertaking like SMTs built on a broken economy system. If we're half right about these economic changes, then it'll represent the greatest value for cost and time investment than any other undertaking.
While I agree that the current system is flawed, I think it needs to be "fixed" at the SMT and community level. A separate downvote pool likely will end up doing more harm than good in my opinion as it will most certainly be abused and overall end up driving more people away than any perceived good it might do.
Yes, it's been painful being an active Steem user ever since bidbots came around.
I'd also welcome people to think how much more valuable and in demand would Steem Power be, if people could really affect what content gets the spotlight with it. These days it's all about bidbots when it comes to top 20 spots in trending.
Please consider my reply to the OP below, as I completely agree that we need to create appropriate incentives to promote beneficial behaviour, and reckon I've come up with a nominal solution that doesn't just tweak the rate at which ROI is extracted from rewards.
I'd appreciate being set straight if I'm wrong, and your thoughts on improving my raw proposal if you agree with the principles I set out there.
Thanks!
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You guys, are like the cabana boys on the titanic moving around deck chairs instead of bailing out water.
The problem is not the economics, it is simply the barriers to use, the inability to classify and search, the lack of good graphics and standard simple wiziwig interfaces. No tutorials, long onboarding, and simple ability to dress up a post like every other blog site in the world for the last 20 years. The constant talk about rewards is not what brings people to youtube, facebook, instagram, or any other site.... It's the content and the ease of use. Simply put the UI and UX. The User Interface and the User Experience..... I joined 2 years ago and have had more people attack the group I've built up and more than 2/3rds of the people I onboarded left and will never come back because of a myriad of reasons.....NONE OF WHICH WAS THE CURATION AND AUTHOR REWARDS..... In fact, the fact that whales have been scared off the platforms for purity reasons by the pack mentality here has been easily the biggest impediment to growth, of a blockchain that has great bones.
It's fast, has a built in payment system, is easily programmable and actually serves a purpose of storing content. I suggest everyone stop focusing on the reward system and work on how to make an UI that truly classifies content (not with 5 worthless tags) is searchable and create an enhanced editor and display front end for it. That's what needed. People need to deal with feeds more effectively and have bookmarking through a outliner built into the system. Which can then be used to classify content. Kinda the way that google uses vectors in the back end of it's seach to find related content. But you guys are simple blockchain geeks and not systems architects of systems used by real people.
That's my 2 cents.....
I'm surprised there isn't more people discussing this here. While I think having some form of incentive for users is good, the rewards alone aren't enough to really spark the growth.
Mass adoption comes with ease of use and a solid user experience, and STEEM does not offer that at the moment. The barrier of entry is severely impacting the rate at which new users are on-boarded. The economy wont go anywhere good if less and less people participate in it every day.
Thanks for sharing your 2 cents.
Relatively easy to get horribly wrong as well I'm afraid. I agree fixing the problem should have higher priority than SMT (and slightly lower priority from getting rid of TTPs. I'm afraid thoug that this particular solution might actually end up doing more harm than good.
The curve, while not a specifically bad idea creates the appearance of increased social injustice. The higher curation revenues work against attracting top content providers to the platform and are likely to drive more content providers away from the platform. Not much sense curating without content. The downvote pool is a futile measure when the main problem with non-functioning self correction lies in the retaliation culture and the failing reputation system that allows crap content creators to bid not themselves bulletproof.
Yes, these issues need to be addressed, but no, not with this proposal.
I think though that it is great this proposal is here now to spark public debate. Next step I hope is to ask the community for alternate proposals.
I tried for one here, and I think it would be great of others would do the same. Get them grey cells working and keep the debate going untill we find a set of measures that have the highest probability to actually work.
I did look through your suggestions and some of your other replies
The primary economic problem we have is that 70% (rough guess) and ever increasing amount of active SP are just clawing back their own voting rewards in content indifferent voting schemes (self voting or vote selling).
We're stuck here not because stakeholders are mostly bad or stupid but because it pays us 4x to engage in these activities that negatively impact the platform than to curate honestly. That has lead to the failure of us as a content discovery platform, as one glance at trending would show.
So right now, not much of that 75% author rewards is getting into the pockets of actual non staking content creators.
All the suggestions within the EIP are designed to either directly make it more profitable to vote honestly (increased curation) or directly make it less profitable to act otherwise (separate downvotes).
Every measure within our EIP admittedly has downsides that increase as you tune up the dial. We want to leave as much possible on the table to encourage content creators to participate while sufficiently compelling most of the active SP to take part in voting that honestly reflects their appraisal of content appeal.
I can't see this being done without costs. If anyone has a realistic way of giving authors 100% of the post rewards, have no downvotes at all, no level of inequality while still somehow keeping the stakeholders honest, I'm all ears. Obviously I'm open to ideas with less costs that are effective to this cause.
The major shortcoming I see in your proposal is that I think they're either irrelevant or grossly insufficient in compelling stakeholders to vote honestly, which I view as the predominant economic problem right now. Maybe they're sound in fixing other problems, but they still mean stakers are only going to be paid 4x as much undermining the system so that's what will continue to happen.
For example I'm not sure 2. (reputation) is on the blockchain lvl or UI, and 3. (ad splitting) is certainly not a blockchain issue. Reputation is pretty useless right now, it can definitely improve or we can get rid of it until we come up with a better version. Splitting ad revenue of the front end is a business decision that's entirely up to Steemit Inc, not really a blockchain issue. It might not be a bad business decision, but from their last video, they're getting maybe $3k a month and have financial problems of their own. Dividing it up really won't do much for now, maybe in the future they can play with ideas of ad revenue splitting among posts that can have their individual ads etc.
Again, I don't think your ideas are bad, they're just not addressing the core issue of content indifferent voting being paid 4x more than honest content reflective voting that has lead to the dump of a front page and a failure as a content discovery platform. The vast majority of active SP is contributing to this due to a poor economic system and that's what I intend to fix. I'm aware of the trade offs and intend to minimize them while still having a realistic chance of turning overall voting behavior around.
I think you are absolutely right that "content indifferent voting being paid 4x more than honest content reflective voting" isn't really addressed by my proposal. But that is because I don't view that part as being most directly causal to problems with the current economic model. STEEM is two economies folded into one, and that creates a number of challenges where these two economies touch.
One aspect of the economy is made up of content providers whose contribution is increasing the intrinsic value of the platform with top content. An other aspect of the economy is made up of big investors whose primary contributions are not selling off their stake and, optionally, create incentive for top content providers to choose the platform.
A healthy economy would
From where I am standing, my proposal would improve all three of these things where yours addresses some of these aspects while frustrating other.
To illustrate, lets consider two scenarios:
I want to argue that:
With respect to Steemit Inc only making about $3k a month, that only underlines the need to draw in top content providers with advertising revenues. Advertising should be a blockchain wide economy capable of drawing in top content providers who would miss out on hundreds, and for some thousands, of euros per month if they switched to STEEM today. Given that an advertising economy would be a huge new user boost for the STEEM economy, implement it would balance against your reward curve or my fish-size bonus. Something I feel is very important from a social equality point of view.
Hope I am making sense with all of this.
We strongly disagree here. I view this as of paramount importance and absence this, we have a completely dysfunctional social media platform due to its inability to discover and reward content. (and it's a complete failure right now). I strongly believe that a working platform with respect to the above vision would in turn greatly attract users, interest, businesses and ultimately investors would benefit far more than being forced to mindlessly defecate in public to obtain their staking returns.
There's no real distinction between an economy that favors vote selling (bid botting) and self voting. You're describing the current one, they're both content indifferent behavior. If your proposal favors 10x self voting, that would eventually be nearly the total equilibrium of staking behavior (it's already like 70%), which means you can't possibly 'draw in content creators' as soon there will be literally no rewards for them left on the table.
My proposal does not favor bid botting over self voting. It's an attempt to overturn the norm of content indifferent voting which they both are. A combination of higher curation and a certain amount of free downvotes is likely enough to actually turn the dominant form of profitable voting behavior here to become a content reflective voting behavior, either directly or through use of a curation bot. Because curation is a zero sum game and there's a 15 minute tax timer, it pretty much forces fair play as long as the other incentives compel us to play at all. The hard part is optimizing the numbers around curation and amount of free downvotes to maximize effectiveness over costs.
Intentionally designing a platform that encourages stakers to vote 10x on their own posts a day and to view voting rewards as staking rewards is a bad idea. It's exactly what we have today (albeit unintentionally), it's a flaw, not a feature. The current price is indicative of investor interest in a broken platform that encourages this behavior. This is the most obvious redundant use of inflation. Why have an inflation if it's just to make investors spam on a garbage platform just to get their staking returns? Why not just remove the inflation and internalize that value into the currency itself? The only justification for having an inflation is if that inflation is distributed in a way that brings in more value than having the inflation itself, for example, steadily passing currency from the stakers to the talented content creators to incentivize them and expand into a robust social media discovery and rewards ecosystem.
I feel you really underestimate the importance of social pressure and of the potential of an advertising economy. The important distinction is that providing a functioning advertising system and removing the reputation benefits from bot up votes together removes the incentive to use bid bots and shifts the most viable business model for bid bot owners to either the 10x up vote of their own posts, or the I believe preferable 10x up vote of their own comments (as this won't affect trending and won't undermine the content part of the platform).
Your proposals taken together, especially the down vote pool make the opposite move more likely to occur. Remember, bid bots don't need to post and down voting bid bot users just for being bid bot users misses the actual abusers. So by implementing features likely to hit the own-comment up voters that leave bid bot owners bullet proof in all ways that count do in the end promote bid bots over comment up votes.
From a short term money flow perspective both may be equivalent, comment up votes don't disrupt trending and don't disrupt the reputation system and are thus by far preferable. And if you end up discouraging both, in the end this would likely lead to the big players without an intent to curate powering down and selling their stake, driving down prices.
I feel we want to keep as many big players on board for market risk sake, but in the meantime add an advertising economy that makes us less dependent on inflation all together and that can help us make abusing the voting system something that people do become socially accountable for.
I've gone back and forth on this issue, and I have both bought and sold votes, and I've frowned on it in the past...it's hard not to get into this game when you see rather banal posts making hundreds and all the top votes are bidbots.
BUT...
The value of STEEM is based on whether people want to buy it or not. Holders of the coin (and of SBD and of SP) are only going to value that stake if it is profitable.
So from the beginning, the central argument is that holders of SP get to decide how they use their own SP
Obviously there is going to abuse of that power; humans gotta human, after all.
I don't think that system changes are going to change the problems here; my guess is that we need more whales to diversify the vote power...true decentralization.
A second problem is that content value is subjective. I see posts I wouldn't spend a cent on make good return from people that value that content. Remember the old NSFW content argument?
I'm not a popular writer (not claiming that I should be either); most people don't find value in my work, and I don't think there should be any mechanic that forces others to vote for it (or conversely, to prevent others from voting for it, if I was a popular writer)
right so advertising would put money in the pools attract many more users and actually generate more content. Because natural following would bring advertisers to specific authors. If a I user wants to opt out of the advertising they need to pay a small amount of dust each day. Essentially you need some small locked up steem.
I'm not saying fill the page with ads but a smaller header, and footer and a simple sponsor's ad on the right hand under a outliner plug-in.
In addition there should be plug-ins addable to the interface which are sponsored.
It would alleviate the costs, and incentivize new content producers to join the platform.
There are ways to create incentive with code, and this OP is an attempt to tweak that behaviour with code changes. This does not tell people how to deploy SP, but simply changes the environment in which they deploy it. Tweaks are insufficient IMHO, and we need to eliminate incentive to degrade curation for financial return completely. We don't need to force water uphill harder. We need to use gravity to our advantage.
As to subjective interpretation, I think we agree that is what makes society valuable. Our interests are improved and extended by those our our fellows, and few would want everyone to simply agree with them all the time. Hell, I'd kill myself if I didn't have problems, challenges to surmount, or were denied that social benefit I desire most: criticism that enables me to stop being wrong and change my mind.
Thanks!
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I'm slow today ;>
Are you suggesting we remove curation rewards, or to stop messing about with the system?
Where have you seen people discussing about mechanics that would force people to vote certain content or not?
What people have been asking for is more rewards for curation, a seperate downvote pool and other ways to actually make it worthwhile for humans to interact in Steem ecosystem rather than just sell votes passively and get their rewards for doing so.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't tweak the system rules so this place actually becomes an attractive for normal users and we can actually start competing with major social media platforms...
it could be just the semantics of how I understand this, but that sounds exactly like saying "vote for content the way the community wants you to vote for content"
One of the reasons STEEM has additional value for investors is the possibility of passive income PLUS the potential likelihood of market value increase.
you either have to remove curation rewards for curating, or face the likelihood that some people will game the system for their own best ROI. when you remove curation rewards, whether passive or active, you remove the value for some investors.
The best way for any creator to make SP is to network AND to create quality stuff. I'm not good at networking, but I realize it's still the best way.
Yes, reading your comment made me remember one proposition I really liked actually!
Separate passive investors to their own reward pool so they don't diminish the efforts of active curators! If there are people who only want to maximize their profits from investment, let them, but we shouldn't let that behavior effect everyone else negatively and forcing them to join since there's no other good option. If we do this, there will be more curators, since they can actually affect what the trending looks like. And as our content discovery actually starts working, we'll start getting more members. And as Steem Power will actually have effect after this change, there'll be more demand as well, both for passive investors and active users which will drive the price up. So in my mind this is a win win for everyone, other than those who want to see Steem not succeed in a major way.
@elipowell
Sounds like an SMT backed with an Oracle could be the solution here? That way the post rewards as viewed by the SMT may choose not to include bot votes and self-votes.
Yes, SMT's could try a lot of different schemes, and I'm also interested in making one that focuses solely non promoted ecosystem.
I think that we can indeed almost completely eliminate such behaviour, with appropriate incentives, and do far more than merely reduce it's impact. While some folks will do irrational things (as do I, by not delegating to bidbots) few rational people intent on prudent finance will act contrary to their financial interests. I hope I'm not irrational, but merely more highly value other metrics than financial.
Tweaking the rate at which profiteering extracts rewards intended to promote curation can tweak that behaviour at best. We can eliminate incentive to do so altogether, and we should.
Thanks!
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Well said and I agree to the part that we should try our best to atleast try and incentivize the behavior we want to see to the fullest rather than just watch by as people create services like bidbots which totally alter the ecosystem in, what I'd say, a destructive way.
Nice rant, but honestly your just saying the most obvious that everybody already knows and is experiencing here on Steem.
The question of this post, from our lovely Steemit Team, was how to fix the problem?
I don't read any solution from your comment and still its trending on top of all others.
Its not only the reward mechanism that makes Proof of Brain sometimes odd, its also the narrative of people that they like rants more than solutions.
I would like to see a comment on top that provides are real alternative to the current reward system and not just the overall repeated mantra of problems that we are already aware of.
Oh, sorry. This topic has been discussed over and over again by several members of the community for a long time now, so you tend to forget not all are educated on this topic. The current issue is that passive vote selling is the most profitable thing to do here, so we need to increase in any possible way an active involvement. Increasing curation rewards and adding a seperate downvote pool has been suggested for year or two now by the community, I think those are first good steps towards better situation. With these additions we'll see more curators and they'll be pushing good content up and bringing bad content to where they belong, making buying content to top not so profitable. I've probably seen and forgotten many other good solutions also... It's been a long time. Finally it's nice to see that the Steemit Inc is ready to acknowledge the problem, or to say it out loud rather.
I do not support all three of these things together. While I might be able to support higher curation rewards, I do not see this as the most important element to work on at this time and I do not want to see SteemIt, Inc's dev team pulled off of SMTs and other work that ads appeal to those outside of our community.
Curation is a large account game, it means very little to most of our users.
We had everything in this mix before and it didn't matter. minus a downvote pool. The big accounts just followed Authors they thought would be successful and upvoted them for rewards. There wasn't any curation in it the first go around either.
I think fixing the economics has priority over SMTs at this point. If the economics don't work then who is going to be using Steem for the SMTs to matter?
The issue is that unless we have communities to test these economic theories, no one really knows if what they are doing to 'fix' the economics is going to work.
We've had a community to test this for over a year now (steem has existed longer but I'm talking of current situation with bidbots), and as you can see, there's really not one to speak of.
Community. We need that ies or it doesn't count. When we have hundreds of communities (or fine maybe just dozens) each one can do something different and PROVE their theories. Stabbing in the dark is how we got here, and some people think we are worse off than 2017 in this very comment chain.
Should we go linear? How about super linear? Parabolic? I don't know, but I know that if there are all three at the same time we can test them
We've already tested the current rules and they clearly don't work as well as we need. So we're not stabbing at the dark here at all. But it all depends on how long the SMT's take time to get out, we can't really wait for year or two when we have competitor coming out that's backed by big money in few months only, that's specifically learned from the issues Steem is facing...
We have dropped 30 places on Coinmarketcap in the last two years. We are worse off now than then.
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Not only would that require for us to wait for Smts and communities, it'll also require some SMTs to reach a level of recognition, legitimacy and market confidence that would dwarf the underlying Steem token for voting behavior surround that SMT to be indicative of its viability in terms of economic incentives.
This is basically impossible in any reasonable span of time.
Just because we have to speculate over the the economic equilibrium of a change doesn't mean we don't have any intelligent things to say about it.
100% hyperinflation is a bad idea, because in 30 years, the currency increases by 1,000,000 times
n^2 is a bad idea, because someone's who has 1000x your stake will have a vote 1,000,000 your weight
linear and low curation is a bad idea because it leads to content indifferent profit maximization voting behavior (ie self voting and vote selling)
I don't need to test these to tell you they're completely off. I can also give you numbers around around curation rewards, rewards curve, separate downvote pool size, curation curve that are at least not completely off and likely conducive to getting the behavior we want at an acceptable cost.
It's hard to do worse than what we have so what do we have to lose? The status quo doesn't merit caution. Why fear changing it?
That's not factually correct. Curation rewards fundamentally encourage content agnosticism and financial manipulation of voting to maximize rewards extraction IN ADDITION to self voting and vote selling. You can verify this by considering whether any minnow ever gamed curation for rewards, without doing either of the others. Someone might have, but it's so small a financial return for small stakeholders they didn't do it for long.
Curation rewards are only significant incentive to game for financial rewards. They do not encourage anyone to curate content qualitatively, and since author rewards are highly gamable, are essentially merely additional incentive to game author rewards. They don't even matter to folks without substantial stake, and no one with substantial stake is able to curate both for content quality (actual curation) and maximize financial extraction. Folks intent on ROI ignore quality for gamability.
All curation rewards are counterproductive to curative purposes. Even if 99% of rewards were curation rewards, this would not change. Conflating curation with extractive mechanisms replaces content quality with financial return as incentive to vote, no matter what the curation rewards rate.
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Boy I guess this is the part I am very unsure of:
I actually think it would be very easy to do worse. That doesnt meanim against everything, actually I am testing 60/40 curation on weedcash.network right now; its an incentivized test net.
The problem with testing our economic equilibrium accurately is that it requires people to actually care about the currency. That means the stake has to command a certain level of real world legitimacy and confidence for the voting behavior to be indicative of anything.
This is why I'm against testing it out with SMTs and other currencies that have yet to be really established.
Smart traders paper trade their systems first, and then find that reality behaves differently. This is why large quant funds do back-testing first and then forward-testing with small allocations before scaling to meaningful size.
I go back and forth on this a lot. I think test nets are important, and SMTs will give an opportunity to test a lot of things. On the other hand, the most important impacts will only occur if the change happens universally across Steem instead of being opt-in.
Long-term, I don't think it all matters that much. SP holding will be about RC's instead of vote value, and most of the value distribution will be SMT's within communities. We do have to actually survive to the long-term.
While I responded negatively to your other comment about the tax, I think you are correct about the overall impact (and need) for these economic changes.
This.
Curation is one reason that should incentivize people to have a stake in this system. And I hope you do realize, that large stakeholders, who are not selling, are allowing small accounts to benefit from the system.
That's why we need all 3 combined.
As you'll soon note from my votes on this comment, that downvote pool will just be gamed. You're a gamer, and probably looking for ways to profit from said downvote pool.
The fact is that most people cannot pile stake into Steem, because they don't have it. Your stake immunizes you and enables you to profitably ignore this reality. You do so to the detriment of society, for your own profit.
I consider your facility with financial manipulation potentially beneficial to the community with the right incentives in place to encourage your profiteering to promote improvement of the investment vehicle that creates capital gains. This is why I propose replacing your current business model with dividends from funding development. You're agile. You'll quickly maximize your returns from new incentives that don't degrade curation and the market for Steem. The only reason you do that now is that the incentives make that the most profitable business model today.
We need to change the incentives that drive you to benefit the community, rather than continuing to degrade our market as you do today.
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Yes, if you don't give me a reason to vote for content I consider good rather than my own, I'll just vote my own
Now you can't give me 100% curation or there's no reason for anyone to create good content. So that's why we need the other measures. I need not just more incentive to vote others, but a deterrence to vote myself (or sell my votes). That's where some free downvotes come in.
A little bit of converging linear curve brings all profitable spam into the light to get downvoted.
Every measure helps but have diminishing returns and increasing costs. That's why a combination of measures is best, it provides the maximum utility, assuming we get the numbers in the right ballpark
I can no long bother to explain to you the incentive to downvote is the value of your stake.
If no one has put that together yet watching the price and current activity. Nothing is going to teach them.
Yes, by the way, I fully understand that the stakeholder's INVEST in the end users to make the whole thing work.
So what's your reasoning for not using your downvotes?
I use around 10 percent of my stake for downvotes normally recently less, because I have massive burn out and am considering get out entirely. What is your reasoning?
He's entirely focused on financial maximization, and the present downvote mechanism reduces his profit. When some mechanism makes returns from downvotes profitable, he'll become the most egregious downvoter on the platform.
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yes they are leaving something to the small people to hope for and by doing so keep this place with at least some number of users. so they are thinking abut the greater good or thinking that they will benefit in the long run. one that are not doing that are thinking just about themselves, they never build their sp to reward others, and are here for here and now.
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What would appeal the most to investors is a functioning content discovery and rewards social media platform where there's actually an incentive for people to take part and engage in rather than one that forces stakeholders to defecate all over the front page if they wish to retain their stake.
Imagine how good SMTs or Communites would have to be in order to turn this place around if our economic incentives continue to force people to spam, self vote and sell votes. Realistically, what are the chances of Steem based SMTs taking off to the point where they're not just successful themselves but can carry the failure of the entire ecosystem when Steem is spirally down in CMC charts and Steemit is dropping Alexa ranks because there truly isn't any reason to be on a platform whose front page is a dumpster. SMTs and Communities would need to be impossibly, unfathomably good.
Now imagine how good a more reasonable economic system would only need to be to fix this. It just has to make an intelligent attempt at aligning better rewards with behavior we want, such as people to actually vote based on their subject opinion of a contents appeal. The answer is economic reform just has to be sensible. This is by far the most important and most cost effective change we can make.
It'll only be a small exaggeration to say that @Vandeberg could probably bash out a pretty sound economic system in an afternoon (maybe a week). Yet this would be the one change that would totally turn this place around. Not only that, a functioning content discovery and rewards system would greatly magnify the value of all the other initiatives. SMTs, Communities, Marketing. They won't get us far if our core value proposition is the one thing we're failing the hardest at.
For the record, no engineering efforts are being diverted. This is just the start of an important discussion
"Imagine how good SMTs or Communites would have to be in order to turn this place around if our economic incentives continue to force people to spam, self vote and sell votes. Realistically, what are the chances of Steem based SMTs taking off to the point where they're not just successful themselves but can carry the failure of the entire ecosystem when Steem is spirally down in CMC charts and Steemit is dropping Alexa ranks because there truly isn't any reason to be on a platform whose front page is a dumpster. SMTs and Communities would need to be impossibly, unfathomably good."
Those words are gold. I actually starting to question whether Steem has to compete with other social networks. They do know blockchain exist and will do their best to stay in the trend. The worst part is that people don't really like being on all of those platforms. They fight for those that deliver the best features and unite people together to share unique and amazing content. Steemit was those things in the beginning, then it faded somehow but why? I'm still trying to figure it out. It seems like the level of hype is correlated with the number of quality posts which is weird and shouldn't be like that.
I believe Steemit as a website and company is missing very critical point and that is strategic marketing. I've never seen Steemit doing that and that could be a problem. People outside of crypto are not aware it exists unfortunately and that's not cool.
Those things are pretty obvious but were not addressed yet so decided to share. Thanks for starting this conversation. I know you create lots of cool posts so I know how you feel to produce great content and simply having 0 feedback because people are not on this platform. There are lots of people playing games built on Steem and that is an advantage. So maybe that what Steem in particular has to be focusing on? Your thoughts?
In fact it is quality posts that market Steem. Good content attracts eyeballs, and that attracts those eyeballs to the platform, where those that like it can invest in Steem. Curation and the rewards it delivers is intended to encourage creating good content, and is thus the strategic marketing mechanism for Steem.
More mechanisms besides blog posts are being created to market Steem, but like DLive and now Drugwars, they aren't loyal to the platform. Few mechanisms have proved to be as powerful at creating value as social media, and all that is necessary to grasp that fact is a look at the growth of the FAANGS in the last decade.
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Thank you @trafalgar. Im a steem newbie of just 16 months and I have earned every steem I have, rather than buying in. I curate manually for both @ecotrain & @freedomtribe. This EIP excites & encourages me - thank you! Im a single mom living in Chiang Mai, Thailand & MAKING SURE to get a flight to BKK for SF4. Hope to thank you in person for all you do.
Is reasonable development that imbues the investment vehicle with increased value, producing capital gains.
Content isn't their focus. ROI is. Presently ROI is able to be extracted immediately from rewards, and cash is king. That needs to end, and ROI enabled from funding development that improves and imbues value in the investment vehicle, Steem, needs to replace it.
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Anyone that weighs in on this post without actually digesting @vandeberg's latest post might be making a huge mistake.
This is the whole argument. I'm curious to what you really think of it. And no, not if Traf and his likes will profit or not.
I agree with this comment! Read Vanderburg's post also
That quote is factually incorrect. Code is infinitely mutable, and all financial incentive to corrupt curation can be eliminated. While some people will continue to act irrationally against their financial interests, currently it's irrational to not degrade curation for financial gain. Eliminating, rather than merely tweaking that incentive, can be done, and I propose it below in reply to the OP.
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Traf doesn't want the vast majority of active stake taking part in mindless self voting or vote selling just to get staking returns, because that's seen as the norm now.
Traf can't afford/is unwilling to not do this to defend his own stake, but would much prefer a system where everyone is incentivized to act honestly with respect to voting behavior.
That's what these suggestions are designed to do
These proposals do not eliminate incentive to extract rewards from corrupting curation at all. They only tweak the returns a little.
Those incentives can - and should be - eliminated altogether.
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I honestly think the only way to fix it at this point is to make actual curation more profitable than self voting, which requires a return to exponential curation curve and around a 50/50 split. I honestly don't know if anything will fix this shit at this point because like you said voting collusion trumps content quality for passive investment, but the fact that we literally have to build a second layer protocol to disregard the distribution of the first layer protocol because it is so fucked is simply hilarious to me. We've gone full circle to the point where we have no value proposition over someone creating their dapp and community on tron, eos, neo, or countless other blockchains. Three years of running a company like a personal piggy bank and then lobbing a hail mary by allowing people to circumvent the distribution is a joke at best.
This does not even impact curation for content quality at all. It merely changes the financial equations governing how profitable corrupting curation is.
We can eliminate financial incentive to corrupt curation altogether. We should.
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Omg, this hurt to read due to the truth in building a second layer protocol to fix the first layer. I had never thought of it that clearly...
It's painful
This is a good idea in theory but in reality whales eventualy just vote for the same people because they think other whales will as well, in an attempt to maximize profits from curation. This ends up a few lucky authors getting most of the rewards as everyone piles in to get curation. We saw this happen when this platform first launched. In my opinion they are trying to solve a problem that may not be fundamentally solvable. I don't think stake based voting can work. Sounded good, but when money became involved, it changed everything.
Plus the post literally says...
Are people deliberately skipping this part?
I'd say most of us that have been around since the beginning realize that it's a bit "too little too late" considering the middle class on STEEM has basically been taken out to pasture and there's not much left besides mega-whales and plankton. If they made these changes years ago when plenty of us were asking for them and telling them explicitly that this (the situation we now find ourselves in) is where it leads, the warnings were not headed. You can't wait for a house to burn down and then realize you need to call the fire department if you want a chance to save anything of value inside.
Saying that the house has burned down is an exaggeration. I'm not arguing that these changes should have come much earlier, but better late than never. I can't tell you if they will have the dramatic effect we want them to have, but there are 2 decisions: giving up or fixing the system.
Right, but by ignoring these suggestions for years they exponentially compounded the problem and now only want to consider fixing it because the majority of users are gone. There's no illusion in my mind that this is anything other than a ploy to lure people back.
The question is what is it in it for anyone to come here now that all of the easy stake has been hoarded by whales and we've gone from begging for scraps to praying a crumb falls. I get that there's a disconnect between the haves and the have-nots on this platform, but it's a little late for singing kumbaya and ignoring years of intentional abuse by the power players that created this situation.
Choosing to ignore this problem and run a vote selling service gives what you're saying here zero credibility from my perspective because you are in fact one of the people that chose to enable the shit that led to this situation for your own profit. Stop pissing in the wind and own it. I'm not going to sell anyone lies to help you guys keep getting rich off them.
Steem has been a platform where whales thrive since its inception - it was even designed for that purpose. People should be incentivized to buy into Steem, so they have power in the system. This was the case even more so in the past than today since the stake is far more distributed.
And vote-selling is simply one way for people to cope with the way content-discovery on Steemit (and most other frontends) has been designed. In the past, people were much more reliant on whales upvoting their content, thus gaining visibility; than they are today. Thanks to vote-selling.
Now, should everyone be able to reach trending with their potential shitty content? No. But putting the blame on me, for giving people what they want - I think you're making it a bit too easy for yourself throwing blame around. Especially, since I've still powered up nearly everything (~99%) I made on Steem. You're welcome.
We actually proposed something very similar 2 years ago as well:
https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/details-on-proposed-comment-reward-curve
I hear you, I spent way too much time and energy trying to preach to people that their greed was destroying a potentially world changing technology, but none of them gave a shit as long as they could get theirs. There's no doubt why people left and it's not just the price. Whale games are whale games and if you didn't get in first or fuck people over for stake you ain't getting shit out of this place. Unless you live in Nigeria, Venezuela, or the Philippines (or somewhere equally impoverished) this technology isn't changing your life and empowering content creators. The greatest lie ever told on this platform was "bid-bots are for promotion." Why the hell would anyone come here and promote to a community of a couple thousand people that are pretty much smart enough to avoid the trending page unless they had no following to begin with. I literally don't even care to rant about it anymore, but I'm right there with you, we tried to stop this shit and the people that had the power to change it did what was in their best interest, just like they always do, and got rich off the illusion we (the community) were pedaling for them.
Are you really surprised that people did what's in their best interest? Humans always do what's best for them. Greed is pretty much a natural incentive. Similar to the need for power. From my perspective, what you're doing is shouting at the water for being wet, not seeing that it could be poured into a glass and shaped. Or in relation to Steem: you want people to behave in Steem's best interest? Then align the incentives that Steem's best interest equals the individuals best interest.
I hear you, but the problem isn't precisely greed, it's designing an economic system that's more resistant to game theoretical pitfalls like the prisoners dilemma or tragedy of the commons.
It's not that I don't understand if we all stopped and voted honestly, we're all better off, but individually I know that if i did that, everyone else would still just keep milking. So the options to me are join the milking or abstain and lose your share but not make any material difference to the failure of the platform overall. I bet many other stakeholders are in the same boat.
Good news is different economic incentives vary in how resilient they are against these game theoretical pitfalls. This is fixable :) I finally got Inc to listen to me, so that's a great start
I'm supporting a 50/50 split
Exponential curve is likely too strong because n^2 means someone who has 100 times more SP than you has a vote that carries 10,000 more weight than you. Now that people are more sophisticated, this perhaps would open up to even more abuse than the current system
But indeed some level of superliniearity is necessary. I like the convergent linear curve proposed by vandeberg as far back as 3 years ago. It has a superlinear head that forces all profitable spam into the light, and a linear tail so no collusive piling on between whales/bid bots
I also think a moderate amount of free downvotes are necessary. Basically every measure helps, but every measure has their own downsides if you tune them up too much. This is mostly an optimization problem.
I broadly agree with your points and think it's better late than never. I share your frustration as I've been proposing this for over a year, and I'm grateful that recently @justinw, @andrarchy @vandeberg and other inc members became receptive to these ideas
Sincerely, I hope it's not too late, but after years of being ignored and no delivery of promised updates it's hard to be enthusiastic about anything at this point. I guess time will tell. I agree we never need to revisit the old exponential curve, my thoughts were more slightly exponential, but I think the vandeberg model is fairly close to what I was thinking.
Yes, yourself, van and me are no foreigners to feeling that we have an answer but being told to go beat it for long periods of time
But now that we have Steemit Incs attention, it remains our best play. Incentivize the behavior we want. Each measure that does this (curation, free downvotes, superlinear) have their own drawbacks as you increase their intensity. So it's an opitmization problem of maximizing benefits - costs.
I believe this is a broadly fixable problem and yes, i feel it's overdue by a couple of years, but it might not be too late to turn this ship around
Isn't that behaviour development that imbues the underlying investment vehicle with greater value, creating capital gains? Let's do that instead of corrupting curation with ANY financial incentive through which funds intended to market Steem are instead gamed for profit.
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Also - more curation rewards means delegation to curation pools (of which bit bots are one type) would become more profitable, not less. It is not immediately clear to me that the raising curation reward amount would have the desired effect, in fact the opposite seems very possible.
Precisely! It's very simple mathematics.
I shall digest everything later, as need to go to work. To look closely at the whole economic system is something I have said for over a year, but the 3 proposals are, yet again, tinkering with the most obvious parameters and ignoring some of the deeper problems within the core code. Returning to super-linear is a whale-feast, for example - what's the point in that? What are the newbies going to think? Gotta dash.... more later.... probably much more :-)
I agree with this.
And to add: I think the real issue with our economy is one specific company dumping thousands of Steem and essentially strangling potential success by doing so, scaring away potential investors.
I think Steemit Inc needs to focus on other methods of generating revenue that doesn't just involve dumping Steem or ads. Also don't want to see SMTs get yet another delay.
Once those two things are properly addressed, we should talk about how the community itself is using Steem and what could be changed.
And you are right it wasn't perfect earlier on but it was certainly better back in 2017 than it is now in 2019.
I disagree outside of having more attention it didn't work any better except for a handful. A very small handful.
However, I do appreciate the opinion though.
I support the changes in this post, but I would also not agree necessarily that it was "better" in 2017. It was certainly "different" but there were other problems which were still very serious.
Since there is no suggestion to go back to the previous rules, I don't think it actualy matters. You have to evaluate this new proposed set of rules on its own merits, as they are significantly different from both the current rules and the 2017 rules.
At least in 2017 there was the incentive to create good content. Sure not all good content was being discovered but at least some was. Now there is no incentive. So yes in 2017 at least some content discovery and incentive existed even if flawed.
Now it's just bots and basically pay for popularity. This is also called pay to win.
And yes the current rules differ from 2017, but anything is better than to do nothing with the current proven broken economics.
Much of the problems I feel could be addressed by a better "pay for popularity" system that is part of the actual platform. The promoted tab failed in this and bidbots took its place. If we were to give some real thought into building an advertising economy into the platform, we could pull in top bloggers and vloggers and provide facilities to pay for popularity without diverting the whole reward pool through the bidbot economy.
If I had to score them out of 10
Hyperinflation - 1/10
n^2 - 2.5/10 (this appeared to have worked better because people weren't as sophisticated back then and abit and smooth were incurring some of the costs of making it work better than it otherwise would have)
our current system - 1.5/10
I think we can do maybe a 5.5-6/10 on our next attempt if we frame the problem correctly and identify both the benefits and costs of each of those measures to reach sensible numbers.
That was only for a relatively short time in order to demonstrate some of the negative effects of unrestrained n^2.
For most of the time it didn't really work at all, and people claiming that it did either weren't around at the time or were out of the loop and didn't know what was actually going on.
I agree @whatsup!
Check this idea out. Limit a person to 1 vote for 72 hours for each particular account.
This will make more people curate others as they can’t keep upvoting the same person all the time.
This will also tame bidbots, selfvoting and whale circle jerkin’ Action 😂
it's easy to circumvent by creating multiple accounts etc.
By the way, the whole point of communities (backed by SMTs) was to avoid the need for STEEM itself to implement "what if" scenarios.
Yes, bring in the SMTs and Communities 100% x infinity before going ahead with these changes. Do that, then see how better or worse things get. Priorities. SMT. Communities.
Yes.
Then you would mostly be wrong. There is an extremely weak indirect incentive, but there is also an extremely strong direct disincentive. You can't properly understand the system without considering both, and in doing so it is clear that the latter mostly overwhelms the former, both in theory and in practice.
This coming from someone who has probably downvoted close to the most of anyone in Steem's history.
I 100% agree with you as said in my comment. Also I think there are some more merits focusing on SMT instead of many "what if"s
While I like those technical approach, I don't think changing the current reward dynamics on STEEM is a good idea. Because there are diverse opinions on this issue, as we can see many people's comments here, moving towards in favor of one side of them would make the other sides dissatisfied.
Rather, I argue for removing contents rewards, i.e. author rewards and curation rewards, from STEEM and shifting the role to sub-community tokens, a.k.a. SMTs. Steemit also can issue STEEMIT SMT that has similar or suggested (by @vanderberg) PoB economics to the current STEEM. Others like @trafalgar can issue alternative SMT that meets his EIP. This approach has several merits.
Given the approach, we can focus on SMT development and don't need waste time for debates and following code changes about the economic model.
Market models will work. Various approaches can be experimented and be proven their values in the market as a token price. This survival of the fittness environment will strengthen Steem's ecosystem.
By removing PoB rewards from STEEM, its inflation can be dramatically reduced, hence investors can be more attracted to the base currency STEEM. Also, investors don't need to compete with contents creators by self-vote, etc. to ensure higher ROI.
Given decreased inflation, we have more room for ecosystem-level experiments like Steem Proposal System by @blocktrades.
This change make STEEM as a base currency and investor-friendly token; they can earn identical ROI without doing 10 self-votes per day. For comparison, in the current system investors who don't self vote have much less ROI than those do 10 times per day. It will also reduce meaningless votes from investors' purposes.
Some SMTs can be built on the investors return. Good-will (or smart) investors, or Steemit inc. may launch SMTs which value and inflation speed are pegged to STEEM. I am sure there will be much more creative ideas for Steem's growth.
I wish the dev team solely focus on SMT and redeveloment the whole thing with the new paradigm, rather than band-aiding the current things.
The short answer to this is I don't think we'll survive long enough for any SMT to come into being on their own given where steem is right now.
I don't believe we can compete if we completely convert to a bandwidth token as our system doesn't support turing complete smart contracts, nor is it as robust and fast as many of the DPOS competition.
If we pivot to a general purpose bandwidth token and rely on the abilities to make Steem alts to carry us through this while our base token is cmc rank 60 and dropping, we'll be competing directly with better tech and bigger wallets and we'll lose. We'll be behind in everything and have nothing to compensate for that.
Our competitive edge is that our core token focused around a social media platform, and I believe we'll see immense growth with a fixed economy if we do so quickly. We have maybe 10k-50k active users, and more would return if we fix the economy based around steem. Our alexa rank is fallen but it was as high as 800 at one point. Focus on our initial mission, that's our strength. I'm confident we can fix the economy and turn this shit show around and light a fire to bring real users and engagement back on here. That's where the real value is, we do this correctly and it'll magnify the value of SMTs and Communities and marketing efforts. Fail at this and everything else is futile.
On my scenario, STEEM isn't only bandwidth token but also reserve token for many SMTs. Also there can exist other methods in favor of investors, such as LPoS scheme.
I agree fixing economy is desperate. But we already have a wide spectrum of economies from curation guilds to voting bots. Changes of parameters can fix some of them but not for some others. And these groups will continue their own economies with a new broken economy. I think we need to find more prudent and wise approach, and thanks for initiating this topic :)
Whatever economic remedies we have at the moment are completely impotent against a system that actively rewards content indifferent voting behavior the most. It further just shows how useless it is to try to organize around dysfunctional economic incentives rather than fixing the incentives directly.
I think @clayboyn had another strong point wrt SMTs over our broken base platform: choosing to build a second layer which will attempt to do what the first layer failed to do and hoping it'll somehow take off and succeed to the point where the first layer can replicate its success is a fool's errand.
For the record, I agree that if things continue as they are, then any use of the inflation other than to pay witnesses is a waste. But I much prefer trying to fix the economics to align with the original vision than pivoting. At least let's make one serious attempt at this, we deserve one serious attempt.
So far our attempts have been:
100% hyperinfaltion - total currency increases 1,000,000 times in 30 years
n^2 - someone with 1000x your stake has a vote that's worth 1,000,000 times your weight
current - voting rewards are now seen as staking returns in a way that forces everyone to litter all over the platform just to claim back redundant inflation while we bleed value overall.
Maybe the current problem was a little bit more subtle but these were all bad. Ironically, most of those who came up with the first 2 problems actually foresaw the current one.
Let's give it one serious attempt before giving up and pivoting. Please. I really think we can stick the landing if we're smart. Or at least not super stupid. This really is the best play, we can't compete otherwise. We have still a pretty big community and as long as we can get the basic economy to function relatively well, I think our popularity will explode.
Made this facet contract sugestion a while back as partial solution for the TTP problem. Might be part of a bigger picture as well if STINC were to give it serious consideration instead of looking to take yet an other potentially disruptive gamble by cutting author revenues by one third or adding a likely futile flag pool without addressing the false reputation problem first.
I would support this approach as well. But as you say there are diverse opinions on things and I'm not sure there is clear consensus to separate the curation and rewarding function from the base token.
this is what i think as well, remove it entirely from steem, less inflation and no need for bidbots. the steemit_smt can then do whatever it wants...
I fully support all 3 components of this proposal, and I think it should be implemented ASAP.
I would rather see SMTs launched and then communities able to implement their own economics within their own communities.
I don't think changing things on steemit.com does much good at this point. I would rather just wait for SMTs and communities and let them set their own economics, maybe even eventually exploring an SMT for steemit.com itself at some point.
1.: I would clearly support a convergent linear reward curve!
2.: I could live with higher curation rewards, even if I don't support it:
It's hard enough for new users anyway: to create an account, have enough RC for upvoting and answering comments, earning any small amount with their posts. It would get even worse! And if then for example I would be one of the few upvoters of such a small new account I would get a big part of the reward myself (as curation) instead to be able to give it to the author ...
I really like to curate already NOW with only 25 % curation reward if I find good stuff (I don't care when I vote and who else did vote). I curate because I like what I see. I think the voting behavior of people who are curating this way wouldn't change much with higher curation reward. I guess only people who curate just for earning money, most of the time in an automated way (without reading what they curate) would be affected by this change. And they still wouldn't support new users anyway. Thus they still wouldn't support the growth of the platform.
To my mind, this kind of voting behaviour, which is geared towards short-term profit, only apparently leads to a higher return on investment: although more STEEM is acquired, the STEEM price is reduced by lowering the attractiveness of the network for the majority of users and thus also potential investors. I would like to forego earning even one more STEEM if I knew that this would raise the STEEM price to 20 euros in the long run ... :-)
3.: As I have already stated in My STEEM Vision. (I would appreaciate you to read the full post), in my opinion the suggestion to provide each user with a certain number of 'free downvotes' (by adding a "downvote pool") so that spam (or overvalued posts) would be flagged more frequently in the future, wouldn't really make a big difference under the current conditions. I assume that only whales flagged more often than before, while smaller accounts would still not dare to do so for fear of retaliation.
As I have described in my post, I think flaggs (downvotes) are an important part of the STEEM ecosystem, but at the same time users should be protected against 'despotic' flagging.
Wha tis the threshold, Is there an example of how this would work? It's pretty vague.
This essentially empowers the popular accounts to get more rewards because they get more votes, while those who are less popular will get less rewards than they do now since only hiugh SP superlinear voting can give them significant rewards at a lower vote count.
Coupled with changes to curation which is to motivate people to curate through financial incentives, the way curation is done is already highly geared towards financial incentives, i.e. people are motivated/incentivized to vote in order to get curation rewards by voting for posts that get higher rewards.
When you reduce the curation rewards that will be obtained by voting for content that is not highly rewarded, this motivates more people to the incentive to vote for the popular highly rewarded accounts (more so than now). If they vote as they do now on less popular content, they will get less curation rewards. They will thus be more inventivized to go vote for more popular content in order to match the the relative curation rewards they used to get. Unless the curation reward increase is enough to offset this, those who vote on less popular posts will see less curation rewards due to the superlinear rewards allocation. But even then, the more popular posts will generate even more curaiton rewards compared to less popular posts.
The more powerful accounts will have more influence over who is rewarded through superlinear voting. Finding or rewarding "quality content" will be determined by the "whale" class once again. Or by the new "whales", the vote selling bots and their vote buyers. You won't need quantity of upvotes when you can just buy a vote. Won't this increase more authors to buy votes since they will be getting less rewards with the curation reward increase and the superlinear reward change?
Curation rewards are nill to most users until they have enough SP. That's the majority of users. Those who beenfit the most from higher curation are the higher SP accounts.
Didn't Ned speak in favor of vote selling in the past? If this is a problem as mentioned above about passive delegation to bidbots, why isn't that being targeted directly?
Vote selling and buying will still be around with all these changes, and those who buy votes buy the packing on of votes (quantity), which this quoted change will simply increase their rewards. Meanwhile, the people who aren't buying votes will have less rewards go to them through reward pool allocation.
If implemented, will any of these changes possibly be reversed? If so, what will determine if they are to be reversed? What will determine if it is a success and should stay?
I don't agree. Some don't have any issue flagging people because they don't like the author or their posts. Rewarding this behavior simply incentivizes more malicious behavior, as they will be rewarded for doing it.
All these changes will likely be implemented anyways, despite objections about the negatives they can (or will) bring. I hope changing things back can be done quicker if the negatives happen. Though changing things back hasn't been something done quickly on Steem before, so I doubt that will be the case. Has anything ever been changed back before?...
100% agree. Such fundamental changes should be automatically rolled back after a predefined time period, UNLESS the community votes to keep it.
I also think trafs logic is not correct. In my opinion, it only benefits the whales, everyone else loses influence, income, and incentives to post because the curators get a bigger share. 50/50 is nuts...
Whales can only benefit from curation if they own enough Steempower. Which is what this platform needs - more reasons for stakeholders to buy STEEM & power-it up, instead of selling since it's not really needed anyway (due to the implementation of delegations & co.)
Delegation is like 30% ROI. Good curation is 100+% ROI which is a HUGE difference.
There is proof regarding your assertions, and it demonstrably contradicts them. Today CMC reports we are at 63, and have slid ~30 positions since I got here. Due to your exact recommendations. Your disingenuity regarding what is good for Steem is inexorable and provable, as your personal extraction of the wealth of the community has done the opposite.
I recommend to the community that whatever you propose, we do the opposite. Every tap of your keyboard is intended to increase your extraction of the wealth of the community. That is contrary to the interests of the community.
We need to create incentives that will financially encourage you to invest in Steem for dividends (since you'll never await capital gains) that increase the value of Steem and produce capital gains, or watch you extract that last bit of wealth that's worth your time, and witness the death of our community.
Please let me know when you abandon Steem, so I can turn the lights off when it dies.
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Think this may be a little harsh but I understand.
The TRW has helped somewhat in helping us fighting abuse but services like his have contributed to many a bad actor getting influence and/or cashing out our tokens at a lower and lower price
I am glad to coordinate with them to remove rewards from abuse but it is incredibly rare we get unvotes on abuse which frustrates the hell out of me.
The one thing I am looking forward to is MIRA. We can then run witnesses on consumer hardware (not sure of the impact on full rpc nodes) and hit the reset button on distribution. (We can out a fork in it.)
Too much influence is in the wrong hands to be honest. Folks, willing to sacrifice good for gain by serving the lazy and vain.
Btw what's you do to piss off ngc? Looks like you are on auto flag. That's a case against free downvotes if I ever saw it.
I also greatly anticipate MIRA because I am a huge advocate of decentralization, and reducing the cost of plying nodes promises to advance that cause on behalf of Steem.
I've tried to advance a basic concept of investment: capital gains is the reward for increasing the value of the investment vehicle. Extracting rewards does the opposite and is contrary to basic investment principles and the vision of a social network that enables people to be rewarded rather than parasitized for their engagement. The slide in market cap is clear evidence of the consequences of not building proper incentives for investment in building value into Steem, and reveals the opposite impact of profiteering that extracts value from the vehicle instead.
This could be easily remedied were the devs able to grasp and effect necessary changes. Code is law. They're smart people, but likely to have little experience in investing. I prefer to account for the extant code as a result of that, rather than the other possible reason.
As to Bernie, I appreciate his attention. He may not realize how his autocomments will financially reward me should I adopt Snax. Our current relationship is proof that one should not approach vipers with the same innocent regard one does bunnies. What is in a person is what comes out of them, and given the history Bernie reveals across the blockchain, I should have known engaging him with any purpose other than pandering would produce venomous attacks, rather than cuddly snuggles.
I also agree that free downvotes would but spread the cancer of Bernie further and deepen it's harmful impact.
Thanks!
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My very rough guess is that right now, around 70% of active steem power is redirecting rewards back into their own pockets through either self voting, voting selling to bid bots, spamming micro votes or some other means
This is because the current economic system pays stakers 4x as much to undermine by platform via the above means than to take part in honest curation. We've long passed the point where big stakers can keep each other in check with downvotes because we understand we understand that if any individual staker chose to use their voting power to downvote someone else, not only would it deprive themselves of the opportunity of claiming that reward for themselves, most of the rewards rescued will just be redistributed to others engaging in the exact same actions.
75% of author rewards might sound like a lot, but in reality stakers are claiming both the author and curation rewards of their own votes leaving pitifully little for actual content creators, irrespective of how good their content is. The paper value of the split doesn't matter if none of it goes in the right direction: that is gradually from the stakeholders to the talented content creators via inflation like it is intended. This isn't happening at the moment because our economic system isn't sufficiently incentivizing the stakers to vote honestly, thus the plead for EIP.
I actually want the maximum amount of rewards going from stakers to authors in an honest way at a steady rate. Because the part that goes back into the stakers pockets is redundant; making a inflationary coin just for everyone to reclaim is silly unless it serves a purpose: if it sufficient motivates stakers enough to actually find and reward good content.
Raising curation from 25% to 50% will mean authors will suffer a 33% on paper decrease in rewards. But 50% of an system where votes are mostly honest is vastly more than 75% of next to noting because the money just gets shoved back into stakers own pocket. So in practice, the idea is to get much more money into the hands of authors.
Economic system is not about the naive direct effects of a change, it's about the result at equilibrium. We can make author rewards 100% but if all the large voters just get that money back for themselves, authors see none of it and the system fails. The entire idea behind EIP is to make it more profitable for voting honestly (higher curation) and less profitable to do otherwise (threats of some free downvotes)
Of course if curation was 90%, most of us stakers would vote pretty honestly, but they'll be too little rewards motivating good authors to create content. So you see, it's an optimization problem of finding the right amount to mostly maximize author rewards in practice.
I understand that it is an optimization problem, but I don't understand why you are so fixated on 50/50.
Usually, when you are trying to optimize something you slowly turn it up until you reach a point where you see the change going into the wrong direction again. Then you start testing the range of the breaking point.
Lets say you find the breaking point is 45% curation. Then you try to find the best split in the 38-44% range.
I understand that testing would take months or years, but nobody seems to even consider testing this. Stinc could run a live copy of the steem chain an see how it would affect the distribution if you change the numbers.
But just picking a random number like 50/50 and hoping that it's the best split possible for reaching your proclaimed goals is delusional in my opinion. It might be better than it is now, but is likely not the best split possible.
@vandeberg's deep dive on the topic should help explain this better: https://steemit.com/steem/@vandeberg/reward-curve-deep-dive
The idea is to gain the benefit of having a curve without moving far away from linear that we currently have. It's being described as convergent linear because you quickly converge into mostly linear, it could also be described as minimally superlinear. This is drastically different than the n^3 or n^2 that we had prior to linear.
No solution will ever be exactly perfect, but we may be able to attain something much better than we have and promote the type of behavior that most user's would like to see (by making it more economically advantageous to do so).
No solution that only tweaks how corrupting curation can be profitably undertaken will. In that you are correct. However, code is infinitely mutable, and I have proposed mechanisms in reply to the OP here that do eliminate such corruption of curation as financial incentive, and replace that incentive with one to fund development via the SPS and @steemalliance.
Please take the time to set me straight on that proposal.
Thanks!
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ty, I've heard a hundred of these discussions, but there is never anything approaching consensus... kind of grinds on the community
SPS will be a big improvement since we can have stakeholders directly vote on proposals and see where people stand relative to consensus in an objective way.
Everyone can voice their opinion, but listening to everyone is a fools-plan. Sometimes, it's better to listen to experts and just do it; and if it didn't work out, revert it back. (not saying that decisions should be rushed)
But this is simply a learning experience in a decentralised community such as Steem. Coming to decisions takes simply much longer than it would take in a centralised company.
LOL
There are no experts of consequence regarding these matters. Blockchain is highly mutable and there are no established standards. Regarding investment, there are thousands of years of history of investment to consider, and myriad examples that reveal a distinct difference between investment that creates capital gains, and profiteering that extracts profit from destruction of a vehicle.
'Barbarians at the Gate' is an excellent example of the latter, as are your own efforts. Warren Buffet is as good an example of the former - actual investment - as can be found today. I don't think that you'll be around for long, as you've started sliding down the backside of the curve regarding profitability of extractive corruption of curation, and I see but little sign functional incentives will eventuate to keep you around by providing a new curve you can surf into the foreseeable future that actually improves the value of Steem and creates capital gains.
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The only important consensus is between steemit. inc and witnesses.
Luckily.
Larger accounts having a bigger say in the way rewards are distributed is an unavoidable consequence of stake based consensus. As much of a disadvantage as this may seem, it's one of the few sybil resistant ways that things can work in a decentralized fashion.
The idea is to get stake based voting to approximate general consensus over content appeal. This can only happen if stakers are motivated to vote in a way that consistent with their honest estimation of the general appeal of content.
Currently stakers are not motivated to do this because curation rewards are too low so they just end up selling votes or voting themselves causing the broad system failure. We have to change the economics including curation to entice them.
The phenomenon of having established popular authors gaining higher rewards is something every social media platform sees. To some degree, it's not a bad thing as people building a good reputation based on skill and talent will see increasing rewards over time. Higher curation itself doesn't solidify established authors, as there's a zero sum game between curators to vote early (but not too early) to take more curation rewards from later voters, but not to over vote due to the threat of downvotes.
Downvotes suck yes, but they're necessary to turn this place around. I'm not advocating for a separate pool the same size as the upvote pool, but just a fraction of that size so that we all have a stick to keep the other stakers honest that doesn't cost us money to swat them with.
This is false. It is entirely dependent on incentives as to how that distribution is effected. Currently, and under your proposal, financial incentive will promote extraction of rewards for ROI.
Substituting gaming curation rewards over selling votes does not fix corrupting curation at all. It just changes how that corruption can be gamed. The change of economics necessary to fix the problem is to eliminate incentive to game curation altogether. Nothing else will prevent @therealwolf from maximizing his financial returns from corrupting curation.
A critical part of that equation is financially encouraging development of Steem via SPS dividends to promote capital gains by improving the investment vehicle, and together both mechanisms I propose do that.
Downvotes are broken presently, and adding financial incentive to Bernie's efforts to censor will not fix the problems. Look at my last 100 comments for necessary background requisite to consider how to fix downvotes. I'm fine with how they are now, if the only alternative is making it actually profitable for Bernie to flag.
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Indeed. IIRC he called it an interesting business model or something to to that effect.
That, my friend, was a catastrophic fail of both leadership and ethics imo. He could have readily nipped that problem in the bud long ago.
Tbh it is one of the single greatest reservations in investing in the platform. @ned giving vote selling a nod and now their kind are basically running the ship.
I don't know what kind of cognitive dissonance some of these stakeholder must be experiencing. They have been selling votes for their financial interest instead of fostering an economy that encourages meaningful contribution. Now they suddenly think 50/50 is going to change the dynamic?
No. The incentives will still favor vote predictors / curation snipers over people actually evaluating content.
And free downvotes? Don't get me started. The most vocal advocate for this is one that self votes his alts all the time. Now they want free downvotes? Why? So they can downvote competitors bid bot posts and not lose the opportunity those precious proxy self vote opportunities? Or maybe they just want to downvote actually trash to virtue signal while proxy their trash.
Bunch of damn hypocrites if you ask me.
Totally agree. SMT'S and Communitys should be Top Priority. Because this is a thing that could really bring value to Steem. New ideas and Projects that could rise from this.
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Self voting has been removed then reinstalled a number of times if memory serves.
Well said! I agree with you on every point of consequence.
Thanks!
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I would like to see, that the Coin "Steem" and its "Reward Pool" will be designed more towards an infrastructure Coin instead of using it primary for POB content discovery. The reason for that this is, that with the introduction of communities and SMT the Steem Ecosystem is not only more about "Content creation" and discovery.
No, we have a bunch of financial dapps, gaming dapps, services etc... which don't have anything to do with content discovery. All those Dapps should have more or less "equal" chances to receive Support from the underlying Steem Reward Pool mechanism to earn and empower their communities.
I think Steem is good with Steempower for Voting on Witnesses and Proposals (plus a new feature in the future Voting for Communities and Dapps) and as a source of Ressource Credits. For me that should be enough, on the level what Steem is doing to support its Ecosystem and for the use of the POB mechanism...only vote for Witnesses, Proposals and SMT or Communities.
No, more voting and abusing the reward pool by creating and discovering or gaming the content creation part.
All this POB content creation and discovery mechanism should be happening on the level of SMTs, and its communities, because these groups will have Admins who are able to set in rules how each community handles its users and the way they value content creation.
If Steem gets understood as a infrastructure Token and SMTs are understood as a empowering Community Token, than we have a clear Vision for all participants Investors, Users and Creators alike.
I don't like the idea that we are aiming for a SMT Ecosystem where all these project fight for attention but the real mining of Steem only happens on the content side of things...somehow that doesn't make sense.
Why should other Dapps or Communities suffer from miss management of the Steem Reward Pool which is only used for content creation and discovery?
This time around I fully understand it! I tend to agree in principle - with one caveat:
The amount of staked SP in each project will determine the level of support for each d.app, give or take some cross over curation activities. A community with 100,000 SP staked will receive 10x more of the reward pool than a community with 10,000 SP staked, and 10x less than a community with 1,000,000 SP staked. This is in line with the 'every SP counts' system of voting, although there is currently a regressive 1.2 sp tax on distribution, if I recall correctly.
Thank you for your support.
I don't really have a fixed idea of how much of the percentage of the reward pool should go in this case to SP holders, Voting for Witnesses or SMT / communities. But it is clear that projects who hold SP in their main account will not suffer of any kind of content abuse nor abuse of the reward pool this is my main point here.
We should design the Ecosystem of Steem in the way that the fundamental structures are easy to understand, easy to apply, with clear benefit structures and to avoid abuse.
What happens on the level of SMT and communities is all up to the users and developers how they wish to handle it.
In this Vision it is also clear that Steemit.com needs to become its own SMT Project / Community by itself without the only dependence of the main Steem Reward Pool.
I actually think that is already happening, except without the extra token. So in this case, Steem and (new token) will be distributed in each SMT/Steem-Engine project, each based on the respective stake.
So I think we are seeing less stake being used for 'quality content curation' and if communities like (off the top of my head) freewritehouse, thewritersblock, steemSTEM, dtube or others want to give their own tokens for their niche content judged to their own quality standards that they device, they will also deliver Steem in their votes to the level of staked SP.
With more communities coming in, there will be pressure on the Resource pool for transactions and account claims, which will create an SP sink. This is the idea, anyway.
(OOC: This turned out to be stream of consciousness, I'm not sure I am actually responding to you anymore but I wrote enough that I'm going to post 🤣)
Give me an example of a business that is both good for the ecosystem and whose success depends on Steem itself to not function as a proof of brain content discovery and rewards token. Or give me an example of a project which would bring value to Steem whose prospects are hindered by Steem's ability to function as a content discovery token. I can't really think of any but I'm open to the possibility
The reverse is much more likely to be true: a working content discovery and rewards platform with a functioning front page will greatly attract real users and investors. This user base can then in turn be leveraged by businesses built using SMTs and Communities which will in turn bring more value to the system as a whole.
With the Steem economy how it is currently, voting rewards are predictably used as staking returns or payment, which is precisely how they should not be used. Profit minded businesses using voting rewards in lieu of transfer are far more likely to extract value from the system than contribute any real value themselves. And it's not their fault - we simply have the wrong economic incentives in place.
If we wait for SMTs and Communities on a broken system, when our front page is in disarray due to spam, bid bots and self votes and our alexa and cmc rankings are dropping steadily, how realistic is it to expect businesses built over this rotting core be able to garner the legitimacy and confidence required to only thrive itself but completely turn this place around? You're far more likely to get a few just extracting the dwindling value of this place and then moving on to greener pastures.
The underlying economy of Steem must be fixed. They're a higher priority than anything else and require far less investment, but they're the only change that can turn this place around and infuse value to every other endeavor we pursue (SMTs, communities, marketing etc.)
The reason this is true is because the incentives are misaligned. Any curation rewards are simply additive to corrupting curation for maximizing financial extraction, a la @therealwolf. Only providing a mechanism that financially encourages development and improvement of Steem better than rewards pool rape will change his behaviour. Tweaking rates will not do that, without adding another more profitable mechanism.
We need to focus investment on capital gains, not extracting gains from working capital intended to market Steem. Capital gains have worked to grow industry for literally thousands of years. Let's use that to our advantage.
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Hi, thanks for your responds @trafalgar.
I can't give you proof of an actual business that decided not to come here, or said that they are hindered by Steem's ability to function. How should I know that? I don't run a business and I have no insight in other businesses books.
But it's clear, that the current Reward System has some fundamental problems that are effecting everyone alike e.g. Users, Investor, Businesses, the perception of Steem in general etc...
I think you gave to yourself the best answer on this point...here is your quote.
"If we wait for SMTs and Communities on a broken system, when our front page is in disarray due to spam, bid bots and self votes and our alexa and cmc rankings are dropping steadily, how realistic is it to expect businesses built over this rotting core be able to garner the legitimacy and confidence required to only thrive itself but completely turn this place around? You're far more likely to get a few just extracting the dwindling value of this place and then moving on to greener pastures."
I agree, but in order to achieve that we need Admins for communities who set in rules and fight Bid Bots, abuses etc... All the good stuff about POB should happen within the communities, where there is some sort of guidance for the users, or even if some communities wish no guidance. The point here is that we need competition thru out the Frontends on a plain level field where all communities have the same access to the Steem Ressources aka. Steempower and Reward Pool. Thats why I would like to see Steem as an almost "pure" infrastructure Token (Voting for Witnesses, Voting on Worker Proposals and Voting on Dapps or Communities and SMTs or SteemEngine as the POB layer where Users create and curate for content.
I totally agree.
My suggestion has only that in mind to make Steem on a fundamental level more easy to understand and to handle so that the complexity of the POB mechanism can thrive within the different Dapps and Communities.
I see, maybe I misinterpreted your views, I'm sorry, I was going through a lot of responses
I merely like these economic changes implemented sooner rather than later as they're imperative for a functional content discovery and rewards platform. I don't believe SMTs and Communities could sufficiently mitigate all the ill effects of our currently economic failure want wouldn't not want to rely on them exclusive to get us out of this mess.
It's not really a choice between SMTs or a working economy, the latter should take very little implementation time if we can work out the details and converge on the right numbers. So either way, it won't be much of a setback or delay for SMTs and Communities :)
This is exactly the problem, and tweaking rates and splits won't end it.
We need to end it, and we can.
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I really appreciate your efforts in order to change the mathematics behind the Reward curve in order to bring more quality and value into content creation and curation.
I think your solution of how to reward content creators and curators should happen on the level where the Action is...in Communities and SMT projects.
If we still try to fix the reward curve on the Steem Blockchain level we will still miss the problem that the Steem Ecosystem is not mainly about content creation and curation!
The fact that we have real business minded projects like Steemmonsters, who bring in value thru an awesome gaming platform, are still in competition to its underlying base Blockchain structure, which is Steem tangled up with Steemit.com (Aka Blogging) + Reward Pool distribution.
Its genuine counter productive to have the Reward Pool tied up to one aspect of the Blockchain - Blogging / Steemit.
The Baselayer Steem needs to be just an infrastructure Token which is good to serve RC ressources, Voting rights for Witnesses / Proposals and maybe approved Dapps and Communities (selected by the Steem Foundation).
I hope that you understand that I like your ideas and they will find their way in the POB mechanism, but they need to be implemented at the right level on the Blockchain, which is IMO the SMT projects and Communities.
Exactly, in terms of financial incentives and how they have demonstrably been used.
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Reducing the inflation of steem by exporting POB to SMT's sounds like an awesome idea. Keeping investors happy is one of the big reasons we are at #60 now. But I'm cashing out anyway, tired of waiting for steemit inc to have an investor friendly strategy.
That's why dan left lol
Yep, I agree with a lot of this. Have this be on the SMT level.
Thanks for your support @jrcornel
l'm keen to know, what the Steemit Team has to say about this.
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Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
I talked about my reasoning for increased curation rewards & downvote-pool in this post a few months ago.
We also agree on the three points.
Great, happy to see you're on board
I've tried to explain before that if Steem falls enough, even low staking bid bot operators are losing too much in opportunity cost to want to support the status quo.
Conversely, bid bot operators are very much in a great position to adapt their platforms to a curation service where they can similarly profit but vote in a way that isn't completely content indifferent and therefore beneficial to the platform.
As a self voter, I certainly don't judge people for pursuing their rational self interests. But we can recognize a broken economy when we see one and it's in all our interests to fix it!
I'm AGAINST all of the propsed changes.
On the author/curation split just make a slider in the range 60/40 to 100/0.... for flexibilitie.
I've wanted the custom curation slider for ages.
If we have a curation slider, most votes will go for anything set near 100% or 100% curation over time.
...and someone can use an account to make posts with 100% curation and upvote the post with alt account(s) for 100% post reward.
You just planted 0.10 tree(s)!
Thanks to @ucukertz
We have planted already
7982.00 trees
out of 1,000,000
Let's save and restore Abongphen Highland Forest
in Cameroonian village Kedjom-Keku!
Plant trees with @treeplanter and get paid for it!
My Steem Power = 21297.03
Thanks a lot!
@martin.mikes coordinator of @kedjom-keku
That's just equivalent to self-voting, nothing extra.
Reward-wise, yes. But on bots that tracks self-vote it won't count as such.
You just planted 0.10 tree(s)!
Thanks to @ucukertz
We have planted already
7908.25 trees
out of 1,000,000
Let's save and restore Abongphen Highland Forest
in Cameroonian village Kedjom-Keku!
Plant trees with @treeplanter and get paid for it!
My Steem Power = 20403.29
Thanks a lot!
@martin.mikes coordinator of @kedjom-keku
I think this is probably one of the better ideas so far. Greedy users won't see nearly as many upvotes, but others who split the pot will see others come along and upvote...
And a new proof is born... Proof of Greed. 😆
I believe the markets have turned and we are in a new crypto bull market, also competition will likely increase in the near future, therefore these proposals should be implemented ASAP !
These proposals only increase the amount of rewards that can be extracted from content whales don't create but extract the most rewards from. If the general market rises, we will simply fall faster from our current position at 63 on CMC.
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Yes, let's make sensible changes.
lets finish smts please!
Please not #2, at least not without a 13+1 wk heads up. And for the other two, let's pretend we are out of beta now and stop pushing through untested stuf without even simulating it. Let HF20 serve us as a warning and a learning experience.
I'm glad to see that you understand the merits of these proposals
The fundamental issue is that on Steem, a very significant portion of the reward pool is allocated by bid bots.
According to Steemdb, just yesterday, the top 5 bid bots alone allocated an astounding 27% of the reward pool. I don't have the latest numbers but in mid-2018, the last time I investigated this "organic curation" accounted for less than 25% of the reward pool.
Moving to a convergent linear rewards curve. While this may show a marginal gain in visibility of profitable behaviour, it also comes at the cost of further disincentivizing the already squeezed minnow voters. Discussing with active curators and content creators, we found that the vast majority of actual, engaged contributors to Steem as a social network have low stakeholding. On the flip side, this will minimize sybil attacks, but given the insane inequality on Steem, sybil attacks are a negligible concern at best. I'll withhold final judgment till I see the exact numbers and some simulations, but for now, I'm neutral about this. It's worth the trial and error.
Increasing the percentage of rewards that are distributed to curators. Whilst this may encourage the minority of organic curators to curate more, it comes at a steep cost as disincentivizing content creators. Without content, there will be no curation. I was a proponent of going back to 50:50 in 2016, but discussing the matter with the most engaged content creators on Steem over the years, I have realised this would be divisive and unpopular move.
It'll only be a marginal deterrent to self-voting abuse. To a self-voter, they get a 100% split every time, matters not what the split is. Sure, for further voting, they'll now share more with curators who vote after the self-vote, but they don't really care - they have already cashed in the initial 100%, anything after that is a bonus. We have evidence for the type of personalities that engage in self-voting, they are often ruthless and selfish. I'm sure they would be slightly more inclined to vote elsewhere; but it seems to me their primary goal of rampant self-voting will remain largely unaffected.
Similarly, bid bots will see marginal losses at best. Whatever they lose in bid surplus, they'll make up a significant portion (though not all) of it in greater curation rewards. The end result would be a slight decrease in net income, but nowhere near enough to put them out of business.
Finally, the whales who are delegating to bid bots will continue to do so. Given the above, whales will see a slight decrease in ROI. I've done the maths on this in mid-2018, to make curation even in the same ballpark as lucrative as delegating to bid bots, you need to offer a ~85% curation rewards split, which would of course kill the content creation community overnight.
Considering all benefits and drawbacks, this one's difficult. I'd be open to experimenting with a relatively conservative change in split and see what the results show.
Create a separate "downvote pool." I'm all for enabling downvoting, but I remain unconvinced that a downvote pool is a sustainable solution. Users are more free to downvote, sure, but the abuser is also free to revenge downvote by the same amount. Most people don't want to get caught up in a perpetual downvote game with whales. All that said, I agree that it is a net benefit, and I would support this change pending a better solution.
You should make this into a post instead of linking it. Ive been rambling about this for months now and it mostly got passed over due to sheer volume of opinions.
I know you used to be a whale and you powered down, but there are still folks here that value your opinion.
And then theres always a one time bot investment.
Oh and .... Im pretty sure you cant account for vote selling services due to it being hard pulling data from the chain for them... or that number could be much higher for non organic voting. :)
Some change to the curve and posting/curation split may help matters, but it should not penalise small accounts too much. We know the orcas and whales do well from curation. Then again the system should discourage creating masses of small accounts. It's a tricky one to get right and you will never please everyone. Maybe it could be a variable system that adapts to deal whatever ways people try to game it, but then there will be lots of strategies going on.
One thing that should change is that rep should go up slower if all votes come from the same few accounts. We have people with really high rep just from buying votes, so it is meaningless.
Every measure i can think of has some negative side effect that goes up exponentially as you increase the degree of that measure.
Curation - less $ for authors, assuming honest voting
Free downvotes - toxicity, bullying, possible collusion at high levels
Coverging Linear - punishes smaller votes
The idea is to use as little of these measures as possible while still being sufficient to bring about honest voting behavior from most stakers.
If you can think of other measures that can bring about this change we desperately need with fewer negative side effects, I'm definitely open to them.
Might help to run some actual simulations with historic data. People can explain why they think these measures might work and others like me might explain why we feel these measures will likely backfire, but in the end simulations and causal modelling can answer many questions that pure reasoning can't. And if these give ambiguous results, incremental changes that can be rolled back can help to test the model without being too disruptive. Let's try to avoid an other HF20 incident.
Yes, I'm not against running simulations, of course when the idea is to change behavior it's difficult to get a clear idea of what the new behavior would be under different economic incentives if we just model it on historical behavior, but it'll definitely help avoid something like using the wrong multiplier by a factor of 10 like with RC.
I guess this would help the covergent linear curve the most to help us arrive to some sensible constants in the n^2(n/c+1) curve.
It's obviously possible to not get close to the right numbers with curation and free downvotes too, but it's harder to see how historical behavior can help too much here.
I'dd personally like to see the simulated differences in outcomes between a set of those curves for different c, with a set of something like:
Where V is effective vests and S is a scaling factor somewhere in the 1.01 .. 1.05 range.
We have some benefits to down votes with SteemFlagRewards, which has manual checks to prevent abuse. Any automatic system can probably be gamed.
I don't claim to have the answers. I do okay from rewards, but I see many getting frustrated whilst they see others raking it in (by whatever means). Reducing the benefits of self votes is okay unless people create proxy accounts.
The freedom of Steem is a great feature, but we see it being abused all the time. We can create as many accounts as we want (RCs permitting) so there could also be a landgrab of good names.
I support these changes (as well as the notion that they won't fix every problem but will make undesirable behavior less economically incentivized, which is all we can do with the blockchain) but I also support the focus on SPS first. Once SPS is in place then this can be revisited as a proposal for stakeholder consideration, as well as giving stakeholders the opportunity to weigh in on priorities on this work vs. other work.
I'm glad to hear it
I think they stated very clearly that all their current projects SPS, SMTs and Communities are unaffected by these changes and that SPS is on track for next month.
We just really need to be considering these issues and I'm glad I finally managed to get Steemit Inc's ear on this
With those changes, in my opinion, users will just move from delegating to bidbots to selling the "right" to vote in their name to services like minnowbooster and smartsteem.
Also many users enjoy the passive income that comes with the delegation. Maybe you are focusing too much on the social side of steem, failing to see it as a platform for many other services / businesses. If so, private chat on steemit would be a great start (it doesn't have to be on blockchain).
Voting services are not necessarily bad to the extent they vote on content in some sort of intelligent manner, which is what these changes would encourage (otherwise downvotes and poor return on curation rewards is the penalty, and even if they do pay this price, the rest of the system, i.e. people doing things closer to as intended, benefits from that penalty). A voting service that takes care as to what it votes is called curation.
No voting services intent on financial matters care at all about content. No tweaks to rewards curves or curation splits will change that. Any financial incentive to curate is financial incentive to corrupt curation for profit. At best some curation services like @ocdb seek to reduce financial manipulation, but they cannot compete with stake.
Eliminating incentives to corrupt curation is possible, and will solve the problem with facility and simply.
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Entirely correct. The idea is to get bid bots to alter their businesses and compete over some form of curation that isn't mindlessly supporting the highest bidder indifferent of the actual content. It just needs to somewhat track content based on the its predicted general appeal for the system to work. Some amount of free downvotes are likely needed to keep everyone honest
I was literally just talking about this on my discord chat with @canna-curate members.
The whole platform is economically incentivized and this creates an environment where users simply want to game the system for max reward. This is clearly not how the platform was intended to be used but there is no way to completely prevent abuses and loopholes. We can only work to minimize or disincentivize this kind of behavior.
One of the biggest things I have noticed is the lack of genuine user interaction in favor of autovoting and spammy comment farming. People have found ways to receive the reward without having to do any of the work involved in participating actively.
We have a heavily flawed economic system right now. You're correct to spot that it simply just rewards behavior we don't want (self voting, vote selling to highest bidder) rather than sufficiently rewarding honest votes that reflects one's opinion of the underlying content. This has caused a downward spiral that is threatening to break the system unless we take action to rectify it very soon.
Link pay-outs to engagement too. Create an engagement score and apply that to the payout formula.
Therefore it is not just your SP that governs pay-outs but also your level of engagement. How many unique comments did you receive, how many did you give? And if your upvotes were always on the same account, or handful of accounts, there will be a negative effect on your ES. This way we can get away from a punishment mentality and concentrate on rewarding the accounts that foster and pursue engagement.
Also bring back view counts and link them to proof of brain.
Yes! Thank you for this comment! No other proposals I have seen fixes the problem of circle-jerking!
Yeah a vote diversity parameter.
Ha ha, this comment is far too sensible and your idea would actually create a better value system if it could be achieved.
Hmnnnn... But just as with my comment.... No one involved with this proposal seems to have taken any notice of what you're suggesting. Could it be that they're also more interested in increasing their rewards than actually trying to make comprehensive changes that will fix the wider issues!? I'm not saying this is the case but the little comment circle jerk at the top of this feed shows another issue with steem. Oligarchy doesn't breed the best consensus, and sp in the current steem system has created an oligarchy.
I'm gonna vote your comment as far up the pecking order as I can though 🤪🙂
Thanks, Raj:)
I think once those who have a lot of SP come to understand that 100 000 steem at 35 cents is worth far less than only 10 000 steem at even a modest $5, they might change their mind about empowering a larger proportion of steemians, especially those that make the blockchain the most attractive.
Likewise, a steemian can post just once a day and make a much larger payout if steem is valued higher than if they are posting 7 times a day for a fraction of the payout and only upvoting themselves. Unless they truly are posting nonsense, it is actually less work to read, comment, and upvote others then create several quality posts a day. Supporting other is not hardwork; it's fun and interesting and with it we could truly build an extraordinarly healthy and profitable block chain.
Unfortunately, I don't think a lot of them care so much, as steem is just one of many big bags of crypto they hold. One thing I noticed at steemfest 3 is that a certain amount of the very high SP holders I listened to talking were only interested in one thing; passively earning from their investment.
Hence why they're not interested in the long term over the short term.
I sat in on many conversations and observed like a diligent writer 😉
Many of these people are very big crypto bag holders. They're millionaire coders etc. Honestly, steem (as it should be working for maximum impact both financial and social) isn't where they should be if they want to be passive. This is why they game the system instead of putting the work in. They delegate, build vote buying services... and any other way they can find to automate ROI. These are the choices they make and these choices are killing steem's long term potential.
But that's only half the story. Often coders and Devs with big steem holdings aren't natural content producers so how do they get fair ROI? I'm sure that many of them feel that they're justified in running vote buying services or delegating to them. What needs to happen is a more positive alternative for the passive investment crowd. I hope that if curation is made more profitable, communities and curation entities will be able to make ROI through delegation to their manual curation efforts higher than any bots and this will kill bidbots, bringing about a virtuous cycle.
I'm currently using OCDB out of sheer frustration... But it's my hope that if this system I describe above came to pass @ocd and @acidyo would scrap the bot and simply return to curating and rewarding based on the old model. In this scenario I describe above curie, ocd and various communities would ensure that quality content gets noticed in a purely 'payout' sense and content creators would be incentivised to stay and improve the overall quality of steem through their content. While the passive investment crowd earned through return on the 50% curation rewards as well as hopefully trail-voting who they delegate to.
At the end of the day, 50% of a $15 post is still around $3-$4 more than I'm earning naturally from my posts at the moment and that's after nearly 2 years networking on steem. About half of that payout comes from curatorhulk, which belongs to theycallmedan, so when you consider that after 20 months of consistent content creation, networking and project/community involvement I'm getting around $1.5 organic payout on each post. This is both me moaning and using myself as an example as I know there are many (high quality) writers like me in the same boat. You're one of them Prydefoltz. I came here both to earn and for fun. I'm not gonna comment on if this was a realistic or sensible outlook 😉 but the reality is that the system as is now, will continue to drive people like me away. Further depleting the potential user-base and audience for real investors to flock to steem.
The biggest chance of success for steem allways has been, and remains; offering business an engaged, captive audience. Add into that the potential to incentivise an audience with votes (through staking rather than spending) and it's a powerful value incentive...but only if the audience is here... and remains here. With a large active, engaged audience the possibilities are endless.
P.s. I agree 100% with your logic about good behaviour leading to higher steem price and reputation. I'm just not sure some of the people with high SP necessarily care. In fact, I'm pretty sure some of them just use steem to leach value so they can sell that value out into the markets and play with that capital trading. It's up to us to remove the mechanism for that drain on the rewards pool without contributing something beyond perpetuating vote buying which is a mechanism that takes advantage of people's desperation and hope to be rewarded for there work.
Amen to that! I know my comment advice may sound cynical, but I'm still hopeful that steem can draw closer to what you describe above 🙂
Absolutely there is short selling going on with steem and including manipulating the price. But it needs to be understood that nothing is more passive in way of earning than watching the price of steem go up. It is the only scenario where we all win and a helluva a lot more.
To the bid bots, like buying votes on any other platform, and that happens let's be clear, a lot, my understanding is that it is less than a percent of all the votes. I am not sure what percent of the payout is filtered their way. And it is out in the open and people know when you are doing it, unlike the with centralized platforms like say facebook. And people are going to do it anyways, at least here there isn't the smoke and mirrors going on with other platforms. I wish they weren't there too but I am thankful for the SP reserve they maintain.
In the long run using them hurts the user and gives neither ROI or the increase in esteem of other steemians in a real sense. But I would not disallow them because we can't. They would just go back in the shadows.
An accurate view count would remediated most of the issues with them and help steemit and other sister apps grow and open room for blog operators to monetize their own work. Until human nature changes, I think it is best to allow the bidbots but to oversee them better and maybe 'tax' them a little to help the blockchain thrive. Sure you can operate a bidbot, any size you want, but a percentage of your VP goes to curating genuine quality posts through an app-run curating system.
There are lots of solutions but any choice we make should be about getting more eyes on the page.
This is actually a good idea but how would we know it's not a bot taking engagement?
We all have comment and reply feeds already. Algorithms can easily pick out spamming ones. Then you run an algorithm for variation in upvotes. If an account upvotes say more that 15 accounts in a day, they get an average score. They vote on 25 or more they score increases. I have no idea what the ideal ratio would be and there would need to be a way to discern manual upvotes from botted ones. If they are only voting for one account or just a few they get a much lower score or even a negative score. This way people can still upvote themselves but in a moderate way and they are also encouraged to vote for other people. Even a moderate increase in curation from bigger accounts would make a marked difference to engagement and block chain health.
As a content guy, I have a few serious concerns.
First, I think this would be repeating a very big mistake from the past: changing too many variables at once. If you changed all three of these at once, it would be impossible to gauge the impact of any one of them.
Second, the problem's outlined above involve the selfish use of upvotes at the expense of the success of the platform as a whole. Over my nearly three years here, I have not seen any evidence that would lead me to believe downvotes would be used in an unselfish way. In fact, all of the evidence points to the exact opposite. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that receiving (and I mean receiving not earning) a downvote creates a far worse user experience than simply not receiving an upvote. I think it is safe to say that a person earning a reward, seeing the reward and then having the reward taken away is far worse than simply never receiving the reward in the first place (and I am talking about feeling and emotion here, not logic). I am sure someone cashed a huge grant check to study that bit of common sense... but I'm not going to search for it.
Third, why the urgency to change this now? Why not see what communities and SMTs accomplish before adding in another variable?
The measures unfortunately all have downsides that increase as you tune up the dial. Curation leaves less for the author, Free Downvotes increase toxicity and at high levels open abuse to collusion, Superlinear leads to inequality and at high levels collusive abuse as well. Using a combination of these measures allow us to minimize the dosage of each poison individually while still having a sufficient enough impact to turn this completely failure of a content discovery and rewards system around.
Yes, I agree that downvotes suck. To say they'll be used selfishly is ambiguous, because unlike upvotes, modest amount of free downvotes cannot be used to direct value towards something, only away from something. That is to say, it's harder to profit directly from them. But if you mean selfishly as in some will use it with reckless abandon to bully and keep a stranglehold on smaller players that they dislike, and this would definitely increase toxicity on the platform - yes. Hopefully that's not the only way they'll be used, but an increase in toxicity is a considerable and expected downside. Again my intention is to use as little of these measures as possible, especially this one, but I'm afraid some is likely unavoidable if we're to have any hope turning this place around.
But look at the platform overall today my friend. It's complete trash. It doesn't work at all, there's no correlation between content appeal and rewards because the incentives are badly aligned. Our price and alexa rank are in free fall. If we don't attempt economic reform, we're going to just die out.
I don't think this is going to delay SMTs. It can likely be coded in a week. But it's the fundamental core to our value proposition and if we stick with the status quo we're doomed. SMTs can't carry a disfunctional core system, nor can Communities.
It's like if the house is on fire and we're still debating about whether to put it out or to go purchase a new couch to put in the lounge room that's burning down. Half the people are like 'aww but I've been looking forward to having a new couch' or 'I dunno, we've been saving a long time for a new couch and almost have enough money and now you want me to spend a bit of it on an increased water bill?' or 'bahh how sure are you that putting out the fire will increase the resale value of the house more than getting a new couch anyway?'. It's sort of insanity :p
First of all...
Now that I have that out of the way, you know me. I 100% agree that this is a raging dumpster fire. The content on here is a joke (and I don't mean the good kind). Where you and I differ fits right into the house analogy.
The house is on fire (super shitty content), I believe the fire department is on their way (SMTs), and there are three buckets of liquid sitting at our feet (these proposed changes). We don't know what is in the buckets for sure. We can only take a guess. I think one is filled with gasoline for sure (free downvotes). I'd prefer to wait for the fire department. I'd like to see if they can put it out before taking the risk that I am throwing gasoline on this already toxic disaster.
It sure would help if I knew how close the firetrucks are. If they are right around the corner, I'll wait. If they are 24 moons away, perhaps it is time to simply toss away.
haha I think it's very optimistic that SMTs are the panacea but you'll likely get your way and one of us will get to tell the other one 'I told you so'
But if they bring it out in the same hardfork then we'll never truly know that I was right :)
Exactly! That is why I say one at a time. The fire has already been burning for like 2 years. Its pretty much all burning methane at this point. I'm confident there is still plenty of bullshit left to fuel it.
And I certainly don't care about being right. If this place becomes a raging success, I will rip off all of my clothes and run don the street screaming "I was so fucking wrong! And I've never been happier!"
But to be fair I do some version of this every other Tuesday so it probably won't garner a very big reaction.
FTFY.
If we implement these changes you'll personally profit more from extracting rewards. These are the wrong changes.
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If bid-bots are the problem, why would you increase curation rewards. Such an increase would only increase the incentive for more people to use bidbots. Why not find a technical way to effectively outlaw bid-bots?
If self-voting is a genuine problem (and I am not convinced it is) then disable the ability to self vote (yes people could create a second or third account - but the friction of logging in and out will eliminate some of it).
Maybe the answer is to add a non-rewards voting capability that is used to determine trending, hotlists, etc. It may be more pure because there would be much less incentive to game it.
Finally let me personalize the look, headers, footers, etc of my blog so I feel like I have more ownership of it. Improve the search tools so content is more discoverable. Show links to related content to drive me deeper into the site, etc.
How about just limiting self voting by making it cost far more in RCs and or limiting how many times an account can self vote in 24 hours. Please do not make so there is even less motivation to produce quality content by taking an even larger % of content creator profits than is already in place..
Will always be gamed by being voted on through alt accounts.
Any change implemented can be gamed to some extent. I just dont want to see quality content creators being punished for others greedy behavior..
The idea is to minimize the amount and effectiveness of gaming, not eliminate it entirely. Just going at literal self-voting is very ineffective at limiting anything. The approach needs to be a bit better than that, even if perfection is still unachievable.
Obviously self voting is not the only issue being discussed here. It just happens to be the one I focused on because I had thoughts on a solution to that particular problem. This is just my small contribution to the conversation at hand.
The whole point to implementing the RC system was to reduce spam and gaming the reward pool and is a good example of a solution that did some to minimize gaming while being far from perfect. The poorly thought out implementation of HF20 hurt a lot of initiatives and smaller accounts. I just don't want to see that happen again with a whole new barrage of changes this time around.
I feel this is a horrible misunderstanding of financial incentives. We should take advantage of gaming, not seek to reduce it. Water flows downhill, and we should profit from that, like hydropower. Trying to limit gamers impact is like pumping water uphill. It's a losing game.
We have misaligned incentives, and can replace them entirely with appropriately aligned incentives that encourage development and promote capital gains, rather than seek to reduce incentives.
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+1000
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Good job, maybe there is some hope for Steem. Let's have this discussion.
Yes, it's been long overdue and is desperately needed
I've read through nearly 50 comments on this post from a diverse set of users ranging from people who perpetuate vote-selling, to old school steemians who've been pissed at how steems economic system has incentivised this leach of value for a long time. It's undoubtedly a complex issues. I've only been around 20 months, but I've observed a few home truths.
The way things are incentivised on steem works to drive away the people you want to encourage to stay to fulfill steems original value proposition. Good content creators are driven away by vote selling and whale circle jerks. It's that simple. I can only speak from my perspective but I've been writing less and less high level content on steem because it's simply not worth my time! It's very important to understand that this statement is not me self agrandising; the only way to encourage all those bloggers using WordPress, YouTubers and serious freelance writers from places like medium onto steem, is to have a platform that consitently rewards based on quality. Tbh, if we could achieve that the influx of users would be immense and maybe some larger incentive to power up steem might be needed.... Oh wait a minute.... Higher curation rewards might provide that incentive!?
The price of steem increases with the demand and how will that happen with no new content creators? At the moment they're either leaving, or if they can stomach the insulating levels of payout on posts, then they're cashing everything out as they have no confidence in the system! Apart from ideots like me who've powered up nearly everything earned and even bought some steem. Or, they give in and buy votes, or start putting less effort into posts. This issue with trending, bidbots and vote buying is literally creating negative marketing for the whole ecosystem. Short term gain to a few people at the cost of many people and the overall price and perception of steem currency/Blockchain.
I'm in favour of these proposals... If they can be shown to make manual curation return better ROI than delegating to bidbots. This is not about my dissatisfaction with my steem journey at this point, but rather saving the original USP of steem and the only thing which might restore faith and bring huge numbers of new users in the case of a potential bull run this year. It is now or never with this. There are far too many people raping this economy for short term gains and as @trafalgar pointed out... the best we can hope for is to try and incentivise good behaviour before steem disappears further up it's own ass.
Ok, I'm paraphrasing a little 🤣😉
But, seriously! something needs to change before EOS brings out it's own crypto socmedia/content platform or steem will be in big trouble, despite being the first mover of a decentralised proof of brain social platform.
This is IRONY at its best. I can't believe that I am reading this on official blog of Steemit. There is talk about 'Improving Content Discovery' and Steemit is considering proposal of @trafalgar.(Really!!!)
Have you guys checked his alt account which goes by @traf and his self upvoting for past 30 days? And he basically just posts shit there and even self-upvotes his comments too.
This is done on purpose, apparently: he basically wants to "rub it in" and demonstrate that as long as his proposals are not implemented then the most profitable behavior (under the assumption that people are machine-like, shortsighted maximizers) is to self vote. Therefore, to prove his point, he engages in that ostentatious behavior.
My fear is that as soon as his proposal gets implemented, another whale will feel "this is not right" and devise an ingenious way of abusing the @trafalgar system ... So we'll be back to square 1 ...
To clean up the shit in the streets, we should just shit in the street some more. To stop murder, we engage in murder? To stop X, we do X? Great way to live by example.
"I want to stop abuse, so I will engage in abuse myself!"
Winning... great way to make things better.
I totally subscribe to your view, I think it's completely ridiculous but ...
No, it's not that I want to 'rub it in' or shining a light on the problem by exploiting it myself
I, like many, are unwilling to surrender the rewards offered by a broken system even if it causes us to behave in a way that harms the platform. Otherwise, we'll just be surrendering more stake to most of the active SP who are willing to do so.
That is why I wish to call for economic improvement so that not just me (certainly including me) but everyone else are more incentivized to vote in an honest manner.
My opinion, backed by years and years of research (by others) is that economic improvement cannot fix what is at heart a social problem.
Thinking you will find a solution to the harm wrought by those who act in bad faith by tweaking the economics is illusory.
Hirschman's analysis, like that of most political philosophers, underlines the existence of two dimensions of the human soul. Two dimensions which are complementary: passions ("social"), on one hand, interests ("economic") on the other hand. It is essential to keep in mind at all times this bi-dimensionality of humans and human groups
The only way to protect the platform and the honest people from the harm and exploitation of "bad actors" is by working on the social dimension. It's hard, it will never work perfectly but it has been proven throughout human history to be the only viable way.
What does that imply: create "culture" - federate people around a common goal (needs to be quite generic) and set of values. Think "Agile manifesto" for instance, if you want a concrete example of what I mean.
Then register "communities" which can each "translate" the generic goal and set of values into more specific goals and a more elaborated set of values and create a framework for communities to register and regularly be challenged to prove they are still there and doing their job.
Then let each community "shepherd" its members and take responsibility for them and their behaviors.
Ultimately, it will depend on users assuming personal responsibility for doing what is good and refraining, of their own volition, from doing what is evil. This is what, for instance, Jordan B. Peterson says.
I reflected on this before already, in this short post: Barcelona and thoughts about decency
No economic mechanism can save us if people on Steem do not display a sense of decency.
That implies caring 80% for your own interests but also 20% for the interests of the others here and of the platform
I'll try to write at least one post elaborating on this position further
I agree that society is critical to solving the problems of the community, but eliminating financial incentives to harm society is not ineffective. Profiteers are NEVER going to act as you recommend, and will respond to financial incentives that financially reward them for benefitting the community.
It's facile to simply appeal to their better nature. Some people have no better nature. They're called sociopaths. They're broken, and the best thing we can to is to implement financial incentives for them to act beneficially. Further, the lure of financial gain corrupts even non-sociopaths, and I think this applies to @trafalgar.
While we should grow our community in all the ways you suggest, doing so will be useless unless we also implement appropriate financial incentives to encourage beneficial acts by those susceptible to the lure of mammon, or are incapable of proper socialization because they're sociopaths.
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Yes, what you write is not false. There is a degree of evil in each one of us. We are all doing a permanent balancing act between our righteous self and our uglier urges. We need an economic system which encourages people to act beneficially. My position is that, absent a social dimension, such a system does not exist. Even if you modify the current one and close the avenues of abuse it has exposed, its replacement will reveal relatively quickly completely different weaknesses and new possibilities to be abused its designers have simply not anticipated.
The only way to "plug the holes" in an economic system (albeit incompletely ! ) is to add a social dimension, a shared sense of "good" and "bad". It will not completely eradicate bad behavior but it stands a chance of bringing it under control, below a threshold which the system as a whole can cope with.
One of the first things I proposed, and I think at least one of the future communities will be built on that, is personal responsibility. That implies voluntarily linking your steem persona with your real life identity.
I am Sorin Cristescu in real life and I am sorin.cristescu on steem. I do that because I want to send a message: I pledge to act with a sense of responsibility and do things that I will not be ashamed of in the real life. I understand that might not appeal to everyone here and I remember reading your arguments against that. Fair enough. When communities will be around, I imagine we'll belong to different communities.
But let's not forget that there is an English proverb saying "the best disinfectant is sunlight" (or something like that). That is because exposing bad behavior from an actor (provided the actor has a sense of belonging to a community of values) usually leads to that actor decreasing the number of his bad actions or stopping acting evil altogether. "Naming and shaming" it is also called. For that to work, I agree, you need a commonly agreed definition of "shame". But once such a system is in place, it is effective, it significantly decreases abuse.
You can then bring abuse even below that level with some kind of an "enforcement entity" (a "police" of some kind). Here perhaps the "free downvotes" or "downvoting pool" might help, but it is essential that it be paired with an elaborate set of "rules of engagement".
I don't see any realization of that in those peddling the idea of "free downvotes" or "downvote pool". I've only seen people advocating such a thing implying that every user should be free to use them as (s)he sees fit. That is a recipe for chaos and disaster, like the old "wild west" (everyone is a police onto oneself) which had to be tamed to make life livable.
I agree we will be in different communities, but also that does not mean we cannot agree on truths we both accept. I have been tortured and held as a slave by the very kinds of parties you consider beneficial. I will fight such parties to the limits of my life.
The 'wild west' is difficult to grasp for someone that has not been free. It is true that criminals take advantage of defenseless people in the absence of police - but it is the existence of police that convinces free people to leave their security in the hands of others, and this generates opportunity for criminals to prey on them.
Worse is the horrifying depredations of maniacs and criminals in present 'civilized' cities, where people are forcefully disarmed and helpless to protect themselves, and where police have zero actual liability to protect them. Worst of all is when those criminals are the actual police you expect to protect you, and that criminalize any attempt to protect yourself from them, or tell others the truth.
Let me know if your opinion changes after you have been beaten by cops. Mine did not. I already knew they were thugs from my earliest youth.
Yes you've mentioned before that the economic incentives can't affect behavior at all, only culture
Grant me one thing though, just one thing: it's at least trivially easy to come up with a worse economic system correct? Here, 100% curation, n^10 rewards curve, infinite downvotes and the ability to send people negative funds. Surely that's worse right?
If a society decided to reward anyone who masturbated in public $1000 each time they did it instead of punishing them, surely it'll be no surprise to see an increase of public indecency. And a very sound way of trying to stop this would be to repeal the law the rewarded people for it right? At least on some level there are better and worse economic rules that have a very real effect on behavior?
In this case, doesn't it stand to reason that at least some of the unwanted behavior on here are responses to economic incentives and to some extent can be altered by changing these incentives?
No, I never said that "the economic incentives can't affect behavior at all", you want so much to "be right" that you feel the need to strawman my argument.
On the contrary, I believe economic incentives are the PRIMARY driver of human behaviour. Now please read again and try to understand what I mean
then what compels you to believe that in this particularly instance economic reform is not apposite if it's the primary driver of behavior? I dont understand your argument and would wager not many do
Correct. Exactly my opinion.
He bought all his steem to become a whale.
Sorry to say - but that is bullshit - he does that since ages. However he was one of the best content creators of the entire platform when he started - but curious to learn more still - he is a guy with brain,
I totally agree with you. Didn't know him "when he started" but his current argument is indeed BS
Good luck exploiting the original 'crabs in a bucket' n^x situation with more than 5 big stakeholders.
I still believe n^x would have worked if there had been more heavy wallets than really just a handful.
Ad hominem arguments are not persuasive. Please address the substance of the proposal, not the personalities.
I don't think the specific examples of @traf's actions are ad hominems, unless you consider those acts themselves socially reprehensible. Being upset at actions that harm the community is reasonable. The closest he came to ad hominem was 'irony'.
Frankly, @xpose is right on point, as I believe @traf and @therealwolf are simply seeking to create an environment that increases the profitability of the actions they currently undertake, that transfers Steem from the community to their wallets. Is that an ad hominem? No. It's my opinion based on the demonstrable actions they take. Those actions are factual, and stating that extracting our wealth is harmful to us is not an insult, but something else that most people would regard as a fact as well.
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^This
Unfortunately the comment section is made of 90% emotion, 10% logic. Who knows maybe that's the kind of reward ratio that might make sense.
Can you blame him when the economics are broken to play by broken rules? Fix the economics and maybe his account behavior will change.
He and his circle jerks are part of the problem not part of any solution.
I really wish that he would go back to posting as @trafalgar which used to post some really good content. Agreed though, the @traf account posts are merde.
If we want good content we will fix the economics which provide the incentive for good content. Currently there is no incentive.
I, like many, are unwilling to surrender the rewards offered by a broken system even if it causes us to behave in a way that harms the platform. Otherwise, we'll just be surrendering more stake to most of the active SP who are willing to do so.
That is why I wish to call for economic improvement so that not just me (certainly including me) but everyone else are more incentivized to vote in an honest manner.
In other words, I want everyone including me to stop self voting or vote selling. The only way that can be done is if we fix to economic incentives that compel us to. Right now, my behavior alone can't change the system, it's either milk the platform or don't and surrender it to those who do. But a smarter economic system can change this.
If you can spot an alternative agenda in the proposal that would likely lead to more unfairness than the current system, I would very much like to hear it
Also he hold Raindrop and mostly the rest of the accounts he upvotes also.
I thought you guys just announced being out of beta and being out of survival mode? These three proposals are impeding(1), disruptive(2) and futile (3) respectively.
Those three proposal will only drive away most investor who hold big stake as bot operator in my opinion. Because, people do invest to make profit and not to lost.
Why not just add reward poll to reward post based on organic view from search engine. In addition, this post will keep rewarded until it adds value to the blockchain. Let author earn like they own the website as there personal blog. You may get those fund from adverts.
This makes those author out there to start blogging on steem blockchain instead of registering there domain name. Furthermore, it encourage old user to post only and really quality post.
Those users you're so worried about driving away take a huge amount more out of the pool than they ever put in. Why would we want such investors? I'm not sure. You have services such as steemhunt etc trying to build genuine marketing/advertising use cases for serious investment in steem... Yet the shtshow that is steem bidbot platform drives all the potential audience away within weeks of joining. This stifles any chance of positive investment in this space. Why would anyone invest big buying steem to try and incentivise a none existent audience?
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Good idea
But tell me also this
If a blogger has a good alexa ranking and he posts similar content from the blog here on steemit. It impacts negatively the alexa rank of his blog and steemit both. (Duplicate content)
Why isnt there an option to turn search indexing off?
Yes, duplicate content is plagiarism and plagiarism leads only getting block listed from search engine index.
I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the best strategy to get curation rewards is to "bet on" posts from people who already have a track record of having popular posts. If this is true then it's not clear to me that this works well as "proof of brain" so I'm not sure it makes sense to devote more rewards to it, especially at the cost of rewarding creators. Is there evidence that careful, thoughtful, content-based curation "works better" than dumb algorithms like voting for posts from accounts with good track records?
If the goal is to improve the incentive structure on the blockchain to encourage people to manually search for good posts based on their content then it isn't clear to me that this proposal does that. For one thing, since the share of curation rewards you get are still tied to impact of your vote most people won't see very big curation rewards since most users of the site don't have large amounts of SP. If the reward for identifying an awesome post is still tiny for the majority of users isn't it bad ROI for them to put in the effort? Or is the idea to try to incentivize big accounts to curate?
Anyone can build a track record over time. It takes a while but it does happen.
The highest ROI even for smaller accounts is to find unknown content that figures to be successful once it becomes visible and vote on it. You won't earn as much as a larger account in absolute terms, but you may actually earn more relative to your SP level (return on investment).
Voting mechanically for authors with the best track record doesn't work to generate the highest return because you have to vote earlier and earlier to get ahead of everyone else doing the same thing, which then reduces the curation rewards (the system docks them back to the reward pool for votes before 15 minutes).
The ROI available to such small curators is so insignificant that it is ignored.
Curation rewards do not create incentive to curate good content.
All they do is create financial incentive to corrupt curation for profit, and only for substantial stakeholders. They are a drag on Steem and basically a tax on capital gains.
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Dear @valued-customer
IMO I see the present issues with whales circle jerking, downvoting as a hole in the bottom of the bucket. These solutions only appear to widen this hole. I wish I had higher SP to give you larger upvotes Sir. Your comments are fantastic and you really hit home with every point.
Great work.
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If there are N low-reward posts the odds of finding one that will be a hit are very low. Is there an effective method for finding posts that "figure to become successful"? If there is why aren't people using that mechanism today? Is the argument that they're not but they would if curation rewards were ~2X what they are today?
Do you have some kind of evidence or analysis for this assertion, or is this speculation?
Well, that is the competitive skill in curation, and there is no cookbook approach to it. There are different methods that can get there from just being a good judge of content popularity to things like machine learning.
A few are, and if you look at the highest ROI accounts by curation that is generally what you will find them doing. A big reason though, is that with 25% curation it is very hard to overcome the natural 4x advantage of just self-voting or delegating to a bid bot. The change from 25% to 50% base curation share is a step to rebalance the system back toward better ROI for curation.
Yes, there have been numerous posts analyzing voting times over the years. I don't have a link handy but the analysis has been done, and it agrees with the game theory (which is itself not mere speculation, it is a theory that is shown to be predictive).
My understanding is that since HF20 rewards from votes prior to 15 minutes goes to the author and no longer back to the reward pool. Can anyone confirm or deny that?
It's the other way around, before HF20 to the author, after to the pool.
False.
Thanks @smooth.
Just quoting myself from earlier:
So because you can't figure out how to improve the situation you want to double down on it?
And it can incentivize giving up if it looks like becoming successful is an extreme long shot.
The current proposal doesn't change the 15 minute thing, so whatever effect you think it has should already be in effect, no? Also, in response to someone else in the thread you said:
So which is it, it doesn't have an effect or it's the solution to the problem?
Currently we have pretty much complete system wide failure as the vast majority of active SP are just winding up back into the staker's pocket via some form of content indifferent voting (self voting vote selling).
The 15 minute timer has an effect on the issue you're raising: the mobility of votes when it comes to established authors. Currently, the focus is on avoiding the near complete failure of votes to reflect content on any level, which it doesn't have too much of an effect on.
I don't doubt your intentions are good, but, the way I see it, these proposals will do more harm than good.
The main reason big accounts generate big rewards is not necessarily self-vote, but circle-jerking, and this will go on no matter what changes you make in terms of curation. Circle-jerking is how the system works at every level, let's be honest.
Big accounts will still be making money... As for small accounts who barely make anything, they'll get even less. 'Come for the money!' What money are we talking about? New users struggle to make a few cents and stand to make even less under the proposals. There is no incentive to curate posts that make a few cents. I am one of those who never bothered much with curation rewards, for the past weeks I've been voting regularly a new user with good content who makes a few cents a post. But as I stand to lose in author rewards a better strategy for me would be to vote for big accounts regularly to compensate for my loss... I might as well put some big accounts on auto-vote and be done with all curation business.
As for the downvote pool, that's tricky, too. If people used downvotes to eliminate spam and all that, yeah, that would be great. On the other hand, we could see even more downvote wars... and frankly I've had enough of them....
Well said. As I find your insight substantial, would you do me the favor of reading my reply to the OP below? I'd value your input.
Thanks!
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I still think the best way to Fix the curation issue that everyone seems to be so concerned about is to simply write in code that completely randomly starts the curation payout timer. With that one simple action then curation becomes a reality because there is no way to game the start time of curation.
Right now almost everyone thinks the 12-17 minute time frame is the absolute best time to vote to maximize most curation rewards. Vote buyers and sellers and bots and vote trails all shoot for this time frame, vote trail votes are not curation, vote bots are not curation,vote buys are not curation.
Curation is people voting for content they like regardless of what time the post was posted. That is curation. Can you imagine what the trending page would look like if you completely ignored the number of votes a post received in the first hour? It would be a real trending page then.
I understand the random start time of curation reward payouts will never be a reality, at least not on steemit, after all look at your post a free downvote pool, yes by all means lets reward bad behavior, and there is a lot of bad behavior downvoting going on whether you or anyone else wants to see it or admit it.
People are punished forever for a error in judgement, look at mack.bot, it does not matter if the person changed their ways, they are punished for ever until they simply give up. A downvote needs to be for a cause, and downvoting a comment someone made simply because they made a comment is wrong, Down voting a post that does not violate any of the suggestions for a reason for downvoting simply because of a bad decision in the past is wrong.
I would like to think the downvote pool is not a done deal, but the writing is on the wall and it seems the decision has already been made.
A "flat" curation system, under which all voters receive the headline curation rate (currently 25%) could be a simpler way to implement this. The timing of each vote and the current post payout then become irrelevant, leaving manual voters free to vote on content whenever they find it.
The incentives of the current non-linear curation system only reward curation bots, whilst disincentivising manual curators to vote on popular posts. There is very little manual discovery.
Manual discovery is the only true curation. Anything else is just someone pretending to be a curator to make money.
Innovative thinking regarding random timing.
I completely agree regarding flags. It isn't necessary to make a bad decision to get flagged. Sometimes flags are flown for bad reasons. The downvote pool is a solution in search of a problem IMHO. It will only encourage flaggots.
Trust me on this. I know.
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Oh I have seen it in action. iflagrewards and mack-bot are in my opinion a problem not a solution. There are very very few places where an individual is crucified over and over and over again for the same mistake. No flag should be allowed with out a person commenting on why it was flagged, that is the first issue with flags, if you an not give a justification for it regardless of how lame the justification is, the flag should not be allowed to stand. The blanket party flagging that goes on is useless. There was no justification for any of your comments to be flagged in this stream. there was no reason for sift666 comments on another stream to be flagged other than someone did not like his responses to bot style suck-up give me a vote I left a comment comments.
Each and every flag needs justification behind it, and it need to be justifying what is being flagged, not some post or action yesterday or a year ago, but the comment being flagged.
Seems logical, but how would you do anything like this random and not transparent on the blockchain. While people initially wouldn't know when it is, people after a while would develop interfaces which display the random value and bots which can read them.
Use a hash of the block before the payout block as an input to identify location on curation start-time graph.
Totally unsolvable in advance (just like you can't solve a bitcoin block until the block before it is available), but super easy to validate after-the-fact.
Ah, to be defined after the 7 day period passed. That'd be possible. I didn't think it from that side.
I am not a computer programmer, how many bots defeat the random dice generators? Yeah they would be able to see the formula for the curation reward, but how would that help them defeat and build a bot to beat the random start time.
The post does not pay out until day seven, Rewards are not paid out til day seven. On day seven the algorithm kicks into determine the start of the payout timer. How would having a bot help beat that?
It's not like the bot can go back in time and adjust the time that it voted. The random value may be shown, but it will not be the same for each and every post, and it would not be shown until the post pays out.
It doesn't matter how many times I tell @rollthedice to roll a 2 it will roll what it will roll. Is there a bot that knows what it will roll?
Shake shake shake, you roll the 6-sided die.
You rolled a 4.
Yeah, I only considered calculating the time for curation to kick in before payout and not after payout. This way it is almost impossible to cheat out of that. Good idea.
The 15 minute curation tax timer are one of many other secondary issues that deserve another look at, but they're not what I call core economic issues, that is I don't believe they'll materially affect the content indifferent voting behavior problem we have
Curation is about incentivizing stakers to actually vote on content which they believe others would agree is appealing by rewarding them for it. It's true that established authors can become very 'sticky' but this is also true for all other platforms. It can incentivize people to build a long term reputation.
I also think that mobility away from established authors to uncover new talent is a good thing. Some amount of free downvotes is one mechanism that this can be done, as people will be more liberal in their use to bring down posts that are overpaid, and curators over time will learn this and adapt their behavior.
I am, of course, sensitive to the downsides of additional downvote incentives. We will try to work with a moderate amount of free downvotes, just sufficient to keep stakers mostly honest and no more. There are costs to all these measures and the challenge is to find the right balance
I have not seen that very much in the past almost two years I have been here. There is no incentive to find good content, if that was the case then there would be many more post that get voted on day 4 or 5 and that simply does not happen. Even the post that are on the trending page rarely get votes on day 3 or 4.
I have yet to see a post that was on the trending page be down voted other than @haejin. All incentivizing downvotes will do is lead to more bullshit down vote and tack on downvotes such as what the @mack-bot does. @mack-bot does not stop punishing a person at all from what I have seen. A downvote is for a piece of content, or an excessive reward or the other reasons listed.
What purpose does a forever downvote serve? You are no longer downvoting content or reward, you are downvoting an individual when that is allowed to occur. If an individual is that bad then steem should prevent the account from posting anything at all. If they can do an account recovery then they can do an account rights to post take-away.
I have yet to see a single solid reason for rewarding downvoting. It does not matter what the community wants in regards to downvotes, it will be incentivized simply because it provides another method for the stake holders to make more money. Downvoting has never been about a post payout. It has been about bullying and someone getting there way for the almost two years I have been on steemit and posting to the steem blockchain.
Downvotes are not about content quality either. it is about a bullies idea of what should or should not be allowed thought wise on the steem blockchain.
But we will never see eye to eye about downvotes and how they are used on steemit, I will see them the way I do as bullying and you will see them as you do about rewards and content quality.
Blacklist do not work, and should be banned.
Increasing curation rewards will just help those who have a lot of SP, I see no way in which that could help Steemit. The main problem is the we have this circle jerk voting, you scratch my back and I will scratch yours, and nobody else gets votes, 50/50 curation makes no difference to them because they always vote for the same people and they get the same votes back, the money they get will always be more or less the same. Only now they can also vote for other content and get 50% of whatever that author gets, win /win for them and lose/lose for the author, if anything reduce curation rewards that might do something. The problem with Steemit isn't curation, or bid bots or linear or curved rewards, the problem is greed.
The current system incentivizes greed. That is the root cause.
I want a system that makes self upvoting less profitable than curating, but does not punish authors and small accounts as a side effect.
The current system improperly incentivizes greed. Greed is like gravity, it's simply part of the environment we are in. We can either create mechanisms that benefit the community from greed, like a waterwheel profits from water flowing downhill, or we fail, as these current proposals will do. It is the stakeholders - not the community of content creators - that will profit more from these proposals and gain an even larger portion of the rewards content creators make possible.
Tweaking the extant broken financial incentives is akin to trying to spend less on pumping water uphill. It's not ever going to be profitable to do that, and we need to make development of Steem more profitable than extracting rewards by corrupting curation.
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The words are wrong but the image is powerful. They are trying to solve problems by taking more 'rewards/water' from the users of the platform by widening the holes that are already the problem in the bucket? Am I missing something?
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If you can come up with any way to shift the status quo from our current failed system to
one where stakeholders actually vote based on content appeal with fewer or no negative side effects, I'm 100% all for it
Every measure I could think of had negative side effects which is why a combination of them used with modest intensity is likely best.
I think a lot of people (including you and me) are trying to think of a better system than the current one, but everything come up with so far has negative side effects as you already mentioned.
I like that you started a new discourse about it, which even Stinc picked up on. Maybe they can come up with a better system with fewer side effects.
The best I have come up with is:
And I don't think it would be able to kill bidbots (which is something I want as it hinders content discovery) Maybe you can think this through better than me...
Can you come up with something that will make bidbots disappear?
Maybe combine this with passive returns for "locked up" steempower for the investors that don't give a f.ck about content discovery.
I also had a thought experiment with linking ID documents to the account. Nobody is allowed to have more than 2 accounts that earn from curation and posting. You can create more accounts, but without being able to link them with ID they can only write without earning...
(Because linking to ID is the only way that I could come up with to cap the maximum earnings of whales... because they can always split their Steem to 100 different accounts)
Sorry for this long answer...
I think I did. Please see my reply to the OP below.
Thanks!
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Right, its because the stake and vote-contribution is public. Its proof of socio-economic-status and not proof-of-brain --> Hence shitty content... Stake only should give you the power to earn return (like in share-holding) not social power. Right now, its pay-to-win. Selfvoting contributes to nothing. Like downvotes/flags are contributing to nothing, like multiple accounts are contributing to nothing. ...nothing but abuse. If one wants a DAO one has to solve the identity-problem with something like Dan proposed with proof of life, then you can democratize the social layer and leverage MIRA. MIRA does not work in a plutocracy. Greed is good (its the driving force) but you have to regulate and utilize it like in bitcoin.
Proof of wallet will never provide nominal incentive to create good content. Proof of brain is not derived from stake, but the subjective opinion of actual persons, and no automated mechanism can provide it. None of these proposals changes any of that, but will make selfvoters and bidbots more profitable - at our expense.
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Wow
I love your opinion
Am outrageously excited about the new changes on Steemit. To make the platform more of social-media, wouldn't it be nice if the team could add a feature by the side of the resteem button showing the exact number of resteems a post has (if at all anyone resteemed that post). Just an idea though @steemitblog @ned
Completely against all of these proposals. If you're so hellbent on changing the rewards system, why not make it optional? If I, as a content creator, wish to go 50/50, I can make that choice. If I wish to keep it at 75/25, I should also be able to make that choice. I don't see why one rule should affect all accounts, since curation itself only helps a handful of rich accounts...
Seems to me that all these proposed changes are detours for Steemit.inc. If it ain't broke, why fix it? Why not focus on SMTs and other changes that would help grow the platform?
Just my two cents' worth...
This would be the best way IMO if you thought there was any hope the system would self-adjust. As an example, why would I ever vote your stuff if you are known to shit on curators. Maybe as a voter I would happily take zero curation for a good cause. Maybe as a creator I want to give back and take zero author rewards. Letting the author choose the ratio would go a long way to showing that they own their own content as well.
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Have you seen the paper, A Puff of Steem: Security Analysis of Decentralized Content Curation (PDF)? I wrote a Steem post about it a couple weeks ago in A game-theoretic model of Steem's curation algorithm. It suggests that before worrying about distributing rewards, Steem may first need to improve its scoring system in order to rank posts correctly.
To that end, I have been advocating for quite some time to explore how a second price auction could be adapted to improve Steem's post valuation. Coincidentally, a few days before you posted this, I finally wrote a simulator to see how payouts would change under a vote-scoring method that's patterned after a second price auction. I wrote a short description on Steem in, Simulating a Steem curation rewards distribution that is modeled after a 2nd price auction. Gametheory.net says:
It seems that the primary drawback of that method is that it would encourage people to split their stakes, so it might be especially interesting to see how it interacts with the n2/(n + 1) weighting, which has the opposite effect.
I think this would be a terrible idea. If these changes go through I think there is even less incentive to hold steem power. No one wants to come on here and spend hours "curating" the 10 "best posts" each day, literally no one. Get SMTS and communities done and let them decide their own economic systems.
Oh and a free downvote pool will get abused 100% guaranteed in that it will create downvote wars and people downvotinng people simple because they don't like them, irregardless of content. We have enough trouble keeping people here, if you make this place more toxic, you will have an even tougher time keeping them.
Dear steemit drivers, all is well. you does not need to change anything again in steemit. just implement SMT and see, when steem will touch 1$, you will see rain of new quality bloggers here. And everything will be fine.. please don't make shitty changes by the name of HF21. HF20 is the result of the current situation of steemit. Now please not again, i hate Hard fork.
Alternatively, users could choose to act more subtly by spreading stake across more, but smaller, votes at the cost of a suboptimal return. We cannot eliminate such behavior entirely, but we can make it less economically viable.See, the problem is one of perspective. One cannot have a totally decentralized and censorship free platform that grants monetary incentives (the whole purpose of using a blockchain, right?) AND control what people do with it, including spam, bid bots and the rest. To me, this is how I know it's a platform of freedom and NOT one of Facebook-like totalitarianism. I want to see some abuse take place, and I want to see community action solve it, like in many cases in Steemit's past. Not some core team of developers, who should step away from the politics of steemit, and be more concerned writing press releases about how the Steem blockchain is even more decentralized (like, way more than 19-top-witnesses decentralized).
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I don't believe changes such as these will alter the behavior of large stake bad actors in any way. The main problem is that these accounts have large votes that single handedly propel the rshares of the content they vote on to a very high point in the curve which matches the current economics, thus no change occurs for them. There also will be no change to self voting patterns because this remains the best ROI for them. Even with a 50/50 split enacted, large accounts would have to have votes nearly equivalent to their own voting strength come on to the post subsequent to their upvote in order to begin to match the gains they'll get from self voting and scooping both the author and curator payout on their own content. This doesn't happen because of their sheer size, as it takes a huge number of small users to match them. The only viable alternative for large accounts is to split their vote into many smaller votes, which I'm sure is the preferred outcome, but is entirely unreasonable to expect we'll see better quality curation out of this. Telling an investor that to see good returns they'll merely need to read, evaluate, and vote on a couple thousand articles a day using 1% of their upvote strength is a non starter. It'll still be sold, outsourced, etc resulting in no change to curation. The only thing that will begin to make curation more viable is a much larger userbase and a broadening middle class. These proposals actually stunt the growth of both with lessened author rewards and curtailed voting power at the low end. Curation should be organic. Vote on what you like. All of these changes seem to aim at making users guess what will be the most rewarded, which isn't organic discovery.
We have yet to see how the current system will function at full scale. I firmly believe that when there are tens of millions of active users and voters, we'll see genuine opportunities for profitable curation under the current ruleset, and self voting insular whales will merely handicap themselves by not growing a fanbase and interacting positively with the broader community.
The only thing I would support is some form of continuing to normalize and encourage downvotes. Much of this could be simply educational and psychological, not even on the blockchain level. Badges and avatars, a quick hover over a user that'll show stats on how broadly they curate, how much they self upvote, etc. A complete overhaul of the reputation system that embraces this. (self upvotes decrease visible rep score?)
All in all, far too much time is being spent on how to influence a few dozen people to not be short sighted... and far too little is being spent on how to prepare Steem for millions of users. We should be asking ourselves how proposals like this impact users holding 1-5 Steem power. If we get to 100 million accounts... that's how much 99% of those accounts will have. If we get to even 10 million active users in the next couple years, given Steem inflation we're looking at each account earning a median of approximately 3 Steem per year. And that's the median... since early adopters will vastly outperform that, virtually all average users following any kind of widespread adoption will see less than 1 Steem per year in earnings. Period.
Forget trying to figure out if 99.9% of the future users will get .8 Steem or .6 Steem a year. Leave improved curation and community specific rewards up to SMTs, Oracles, and 2nd layer systems as has been the seeming plan all along.
Create the much needed Resource Credit pools for dApps, communities and large scale adoption. If you want to change the current dynamic somewhat, do not allow RCs and SP to be separated during delegation. Serious businesses that have need of both the RCs and the SP for responsibly building and rewarding their communities will inherently pay more for these combined delegations than a bid bot project that has no use for the RC component and we'll see more SP shift to sustainable and responsible business applications and allow a better avenue for passive investors to pursue ROI. And finish polishing up that Promoted Post system to wrestle back some of the "exposure" spending from bid bots and create a counter to Steem inflation!
So basically we're going to address all of the community concerns and fix the shit that we've told you was broken for three years after leaving beta? Was waiting while whales systematically destroyed any semblance of a middle class on the platform and made the majority of the community leave worth it?
I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, even if it's late.
My bet is some of the people at Steemit Inc had supported similar changes ages ago, but were similarly shut down like you and I have been, and have been equally frustrated.
Let's put all the negativity aside, this is our chance to fix things. Let's take it. The community will likely come back when we put some serious thought behind the economics and make things work far better than they had ever worked before.
Its incredibly refreshing to see these ideas back on the agenda.
I have never heard anybody complaining about the costs or lack of incentives associated with down voting...
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You could also consult with economists...
The only problem with this is that they (the economists, themselves) are the only people who really consider themselves to be "experts" and there are a million contradictions between the million of them. Similar to the "scientific" field of psychology, it boarders more on philosophical debate than it does actual, objective facts.
Instead we get the software developer solution. This is akin to altcoins swapping algorithms to stay ahead of ASIC miners. Instead you are changing rewards to stay ahead of bots. People will still be incentivized to game the system and will adjust their methods accordingly.
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We don't totally disagree, but the solution is apparently not obvious and the problem is very complex, particularly because it (the problem) is rooted, and mostly rests, with human psychology, which, as I alluded earlier, is something we don't fully understand, if at all.
Try to separate microeconomics and macroeconomics. Micro is the scientific approach, which is what we're looking at here i believe. Macro is typically scientism / political bs.
Now I wish Steemit Inc could implement resteem for comments 🤣
Exactly!!!
is there any way to ever share the advertising revenue from the ads with the users? so that they can earn residuals?
There is a way for users to get all advertising rewards for advertising they themselves post on their blogs. That's the only kind of advertising I support.
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Wow! you really want to screw the little guy and reward the bigger accounts.
I don't believe all three together will have the expected results, especially the reward curve, in my opinion, increases the incentive to use voting bots to upvote your content. Using these bots is much more worthwhile especially for smaller quantities of votes.
I do support the curation change since it gives investors more control over their votes and is an incentive to vote organically. Nonetheless, it would also lead to higher concentrations of votes on fewer accounts.
I think the most promising change would be a separate downvote pool since that gives people more control over who (in their opinion) deserves rewards or not.
People will figure out how many rshares are needed to tip the curve. Bid-bots will have that as a minimum bid amount, and nothing will change (except that smaller accounts will be priced out and the incentives to consolidate stake will reduce scale of bot-nets).
The real issues are not economic or distribution issues, they are philosophical. As long as the prevalent perspective is that somebody (anybody?) has the right to dictate how others use their stake, there will always be conflict around how stake is being used and how rewards are distributed.
There is no real "tip" of the curve, it is gradual. Anyone placing a vote with the intent of rewarding the content benefits from additional votes added on top of it because of the continual convergence to linear.
The idea of this curve is to heavily penalize microvotes which attempt to slip under the radar with a million comments each earning 0.03. It probably won't have much effect (though still a little) on larger payouts including most paid votes.
This is the primary point I was trying to make. As for the 'tip' of the curve... using this curve from @vandeberg's post, the point I marked in red was the point I was thinking of...
While the curve itself is gradual, this is the vote level where rewards with n^2 and linear cross. I don't know what his scale is, but if the 0.5 shown represents a STEEM value of vote, then I think it's way too high.
Yeah I agree we will need to assess some actual curve if and when it is proposed. We may disagree on the need for some sort of inhibiting of small-ish payouts on the low end. I do think they are necessary, even if not ideal from a fairness or interaction point of views. Like most things it is a matter of tradeoffs.
Well, if the trade off you substantial stakeholders consider a-ok eliminate any interest new users have to come here, I'll be looking for the next platform where I can speak freely you didn't kill yet.
More pressure on retention is suicidal.
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If I'm not mistaken, the intersection of where n and n^2 cross has no bearing on the significance of that 0.5 point on the X axis on the n^2/(n+1) curve.
Recall that these are graphs of the derivatives, not the curves themselves. The point you've marked there is roughly where the derivative of n^2/(n+1) would have a linear tangent. In other words, it's where the second derivative of n^2/(n+1) roughly equals to 1, which has no real relevance that I can see.
I agree with Smooth that the proposed n^2/(n+1) curve just as a superlinear head and approximates to linear. The effects are to ward off profitable micro voting which happens already, but would likely increase in an otherwise new working economic scheme (higher curation, some free downvotes) because other avenues of abuse would be more noticeable and thus less profitable.
Ideally, I'd probably prefer just a 'spam tax' of say 30-50% up until Steem value is around 1, and then completely normal linear after that. But if that can't be implemented, then I'm ok with whatever convergent linear approximation curve.
If the goal is to kill off the remaining steem user-base, then I would say that's a great idea. The average post payout is only a little more than 1 SBD (about 3 STEEM), but strongly skewed by the tiny percent of posts with high upvotes.
The median post payout is closer to $0.08, well below your 'spam' range. Calling the posts by more than 50% of all Steemians 'spam' would be a disaster.
Source: @arcange's Steem Statistics
Almost all of them are spam, though. There's currently no incentive to put in any more than minimal effort.
Yes these figures are true. In practice, my suspicion is the convergent linear curve would actually hit the lower payout posts harder than a 30-50% spam tax, but of course that depends on the numbers.
If we can stop most profitable spam behavior by making low payouts accept 70c to the dollar, it's not a terrible trade off. Keep in mind that when other measures are implemented, self voters and vote selling posts would likely be hit by downvotes and would consider elsewhere. A deterrent to an influx of micro spam votes in order to continuing reaping ones own voting rewards should be considered as this could be really bad for RC and blockchain bloat.
Actual figures can be adjusted. It's really about forcing all profitable behavior into the light and there's no real way to do it without some trade offs.
Likewise, the median number could be strongly tilted to the low end due to the high levels of pre existing spam.
But even if its intent is to cull comment spam farming, it utterly destroys rewards for organic interaction between small accounts. When people make good, legitimate comments on my posts I like to hit them with a 25% vote and reply. That gives them about .03 which is just above the dust threshold which already penalizes small accounts. Likewise most accounts posts see very small rewards of a few cents on their posts, but they are legitimate, organic, and quality content. To cripple all these actions and shunt that value more toward whale votes & bid bot voted content is a negative. We’d effectively be creating a system where the majority of accounts are more likely to see decreased or even zero rewards, as they never see a large payout on an individual post.
I think we need to see actual numbers and a specific curve before we can judge this. There will be some cases where small interactions are inhibited but there are already some cases where small accounts can't by themselves generate a reward large enough to actually pay out. These are all tradeoffs.
One thing to consider is that if massive reward-mining operations are curtailed even somewhat, there will be a lot more Steem left in the reward pool and the sorts of small interactions you describe may therefore generate larger rewards, despite being somewhat inhibited by a curve. There are two parts of any reward calculation, one being the curve and the other being the total size of the reward pool and what else is pulling from it.
In some sense that is the idea since self-voting is the opposite of that.
The real question is one of degree. You don't want everyone voting for themselves (maximum spread across maximum accounts) but you also don't want too much concentration that doesn't help the value of Steem (that being said, very high value contributors with a large audience are indeed worth a lot in what they bring and give back, which is why such people are paid a lot on other platforms).
All that being said, curation itself doesn't necessarily encourage extreme concentration of votes. Once there are a lot of votes on a piece of content, voting for it will earn sub-par curation rewards. To maximize curation, you are better off finding something else that isn't heavily voted yet.
These proposals don't reduce incentive to self vote or delegate to bidbots at all. They increase those incentives for substantial stakeholders, at the expense of almost all accounts.
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I disagree. The curve change doesn't reduce the incentive to self vote or delegate to bid bots, and if that were the only change it could even make things worse. The other two changes (cheaper downvotes and higher share of rewards going to curation) do reduce the incentive to self-vote and delegate to bidbots. That does not necessarily mean they would solve every problem or even any problem, but its wrong to say they don't change incentives.
Yeah, that's why I do support it. Although, together with the adjusted reward curve, I believe it could make the "concentration of votes" too extreme. Especially combined with bid bot usage then.
I think we would need to see a specific proposal on the parameters of the curve. If it is too superlinear beyond the low end then I agree.
yeah it definitely depends strongly on where the main curve lays. If we penalize especially small votes (< 1$ or < 0.1$) but have it almost linear at everything above that might be a good way to avoid bot farming while keeping the rest the same for the vast majority of users. On the other hand if the main curve is around 10-50$ it would be more on the shoulders of the smaller users and lead to more bid bot farming.
@smooth, having read many of your comments over the years, I've learned to respect your opinion on these type of topics, so, if you don't mind, I 'd like to get your opinion on a proposed solution (by @bashadow) that I read higher up in the comments to this post, one that I believe could have a beneficial impact on voting behaviors.
Below is the link to that comment:
https://steemit.com/steem/@bashadow/re-steemitblog-improving-the-economics-of-steem-a-community-proposal-20190516t193202343z
I don't know if it's at all possible, or feasible at the blockchain level, but it seems to me that randomly picking a time within the 7-day payout window to reward as the highest percent curation payout per SP voted on the given post, and then "paying out concentrically" from whatever time is determined (eg if the determined time is 24 hours, then the account closest would get the highest curation payout per used SP and two separate accounts that voted at hours 23 and 25, both 1 hour off from the random generated number, would be paid at the same rate per SP), would be an effective way to remove the incentive to vote within a (small) time window.
I'd love to get your thoughts on this, assuming you can follow what I've attempted to ask.
I don't have an opinion on the 'random curation' proposal, but in general any proposal for randomness on a blockchain is an extremely difficult proposition. I saw one of the replies mentioned looking at the previous block hash. That works to a point, but isn't entirely safe or fair because the block creator can tinker with the block in ways to change the hash into one that subtly favors themselves or a collaborator and it is very difficult to detect this (particularly on non-PoW chains).
Anyway, I don't rule it out, I just haven't studied it enough to have an opinion at this time. There are some ways to properly address the randomness issue if it is really necessarily and helpful, but they are definitely harder than just looking at a block hash and you should be suspicious of someone who suggests that; they probably don't understand blockchains very well.
I had a feeling that it wouldn't be so easy to pull off. Thanks for taking the time to explain that.
Voting bots will likely be strongly deterred by both the addition of a certain amount of free downvotes from a separate pool, as well as more competitive rewards elsewhere in the form of higher curation.
It's difficult to say what the ideal level of voting concentration is other than describing it loosely as the level of concentration that would actually reflect the distribution of rewards if stakeholders voted honestly based on their opinion of the content, and that's precisely what we're going for.
I would actually join/create a community which downvotes "regular trending bidbot users" everyday with the few free downvotes... and I think others would, too. But I do also think, that more than 2 free downvotes per day would harm the ecosystem more than it would benefit from it.
I virtually 100% agree with you here!
The figure I basically had in mind was 25% (or 2.5) per day. Obviously free downvotes have their downsides (toxicity, abuse etc) but they need to be enough to threaten the status quo. I feel that anything between 1.5-3.5 might be a reasonable guess.
So as a self voter and a conspicuous one at that, i'd expect that my farm posts would be nuked to oblivion when these changes are implemented by free downvotes. Good. I, and others like me, will get the message loud and clear and would likely not bother continuing farming, especially when curation is paying a decent amount (say 50%). We will likely not like the fact that others (self voters, vote sellers) get to benefit while we don't. So we'll use our free downvotes to take others down, and paid posts will be pretty high on that list.
The idea is to migrate profitable voting behavior from content indfferent to content reflective behavior. Imagine if the bid bots are now competing as curation services - it'll mean we'll no longer have a proof of brain dead blockchain.
I am not sure if this solves the problem of bidbots and self-voting. It will be very hard to bring down a 200$ trending post when it is voted up 13 hours before payout, leaving you with just 1hour to downvote it...
I think bidbots will come up with some autovote function. Pay now, get voted 13 hours before payout...
Maybe (I am very skeptic about it) it is worth a try if nobody figures out something better. But I want a scheduled automatic revoke of these changes UNLESS the community votes to keep it.
That's not at all what you're going for. That's easy to create: simply eliminate curation rewards, and reduce maximum payouts per my proposal. The vast majority of accounts would hugely benefit from that - but that's not your actual goal.
What these proposals do is increase the profitability of self voting and bidbots for large stakeholders - and that's your actual goal.
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We are bringing this up now? I would rather just wait till SMTs and communities and let them implement their own economics.
They're not diverting dev effort and delaying SMTs or Communities for this, as stated. However I myself do believe it's of paramount importance:
I didn't think they were, I still think it should not be done now. Apart from the reasons mentioned that I think this should all be done at the SMT level within communities, I do not support a free downvote pool in any way. There is no chance it will be used responsible or reasonably. Bullies will downvote people they don't like day in and day out, because they can. This line of thinking is fundamentally flawed overall because people don't want to spend all day, every day, coming on here and searching through hundreds or thousands of posts to upvote "the best" each day.
They won't need to
the idea is to have the current bid botters become curation services that'll compete over better curation which should at least have a semblance of representing the contents appeal rather than none at all, leading to the dumpster of a front page we have now
SMTs may be here soon but it'll likely take forever (assuming we even survive for much longer) for any of them to get to a point where they'll command enough value and market confidence to test economic behavior. The implementation for these changes is relatively trivial (a week or so) and won't really affect SMT releases. But I don't think SMTs will be able to carry us out of this mess. I'm not that optimistic that I think they can mitigate the failure of the base economy
And you think flags/downvotes will be used responsibly or reasonably when they are free?
Why do you not work on SMTs???! Discuss this again when SMTs are out completely.
This is the start of a discussion - not a diversion of engineering efforts.
I think when smts are oyt this might be something optional when you create an SMT. But this is nothing for the Basecurrency. if you throw investors under the bus than other currencies will celebrate. and incentivizing holders is what steem needs. disincentivizing sending it to an exchange is what is needed. if you remove this passive income the steems which will be distributed might be worth 95% less. Then nobody wins.
Also, bidbots are great. Without them I would have left Steem already.
Yeah! I want to hear why SMT is not yet deployed
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May I recommend that the downvoting feature be removed? It is a completely negative and unnecessary feature... that tends to end up censoring and penalising anything unpopular. If you like something, upvote it. If you don't like something, move on!
