Today we would like to present our proposed upgrades to the blockchain protocol for the next hard fork release, 0.17.
KISS, short for Keep It Simple, Stupid, is the guiding principle behind most of the proposals. Simplicity is important for any system looking to gain widespread support and consensus via user adoption. By making the system simpler we minimize the potential for failure, maximize the potential for optimization, build a stronger case for fairness, and can more effectively communicate the system’s value to new participants. With that said, if the system can work without a feature then we propose to remove it.
Encapsulation / Isolation of Key Consensus Components
A second theme in the proposed changes is encapsulation / isolation of functionality by minimizing informational and/or ordering dependencies between different components of the system. In principle all posting and voting is fully independent of the currency with the single exception of the final payout. Also, voting on one post is almost fully independent of voting on every other post. By making some subtle changes to how transactions are processed we can enable major performance optimizations and massive parallel execution in the future. We will not be implementing the high performance / parallel version until necessary, but we want to ensure that the blockchain logic makes upgrading to higher performance code possible without another hardfork.
Separation of Blockchain Logic from Interface Requirements
A major source of complexity on the blockchain is the implementation of consensus features designed specifically for steemit.com. We feel the blockchain should be a neutral protocol that is as independent as possible from a web interface. This will ensure that the blockchain is a fair, equal opportunity platform that can support many different kinds of interfaces.
There are many examples of consensus logic being dictated by an interface concern. These include: comment depth, payout period, and edit limitations. Many of the things we will be rolling back were originally introduced in Hard Fork 0.12 and were never part of the original Steem design.
Simplifications
Removing Over Posting Reward Penalties
During the July rush we experienced a massive influx of people posting as much as they could to get as many rewards as they could. In an effort to curb this “abuse” we implemented a limit on the maximum reward a post could receive if the post made more than 4 posts in the same day. In hindsight this change was reactionary and ultimately unnecessary. It has the psychological impact of discouraging engagement and adds unnecessary complexity to a system. In the spirit of KISS we feel this should be removed.
Single Payout Period
Steem currently supports two payout periods: 24 hour and 30 day. The 24 hour payout period is weighted by the time votes were cast and could be up to 48 or more hours in some cases. The 30 day payout period was designed to catch votes/readers who were not around in the first 24 hours.
Based upon voting statistics, the vast majority of the 30 day payout comes from votes cast in the first week. We also know that there is little difference between weekly active users and monthly active users, especially among those with meaningful voting influence. It is our belief that authors (and curators) will earn more by a single 7 day (fixed) payout period than the combination of 24 (variable) and 30 day (fixed). A single vote on day 3 is worth much more to the author under this system than a dozen votes on day 3 under the old system due to the N^2 weighting algorithm.
The original 24 hour rule was an example of allowing the interface requirement for “fresh/trending” content dictate the blockchain logic. Interfaces, such as steemit.com or busy.org, can use any algorithm they want to select articles to display.
Some may ask why we don’t recommend making the voting period infinite and/or allow multiple payouts. The answer is two fold:
- Limited voter/community attention
- Scalability considerations
Users will be able to cast votes past 7 days, but those votes will not impact payouts. There are many other technical benefits from this change that enable parallel scalability, but that is a topic for github discussion.
One final benefit of a 7 day payout period is a reduction in variance. Under the current model, those who post the same day as an extremely popular post get much less. By spreading it out over 7 days, the extremely popular posts have less impact on other authors posting the same day.
Comment Payout independent of Discussion
At one point we had considered dividing the top post rewards among the comments. In a past hard fork we modified the payout algorithm to pay all comments at the same time as the parent post. This creates a tight coupling and minimizes the opportunity for a comment to get rewarded, especially if the comment was posted shortly before the post was paid.
Under the proposed changes, all comments and posts would be paid exactly 7 days after they were posted. This means comments have more time to gather votes and late commenters have a better chance. This change also facilitates massively parallel computation by eliminating sequential dependencies among posts and comments.
Removing the Comment Nesting Limit
Many people have requested the ability to reply with unlimited depth. The current comment depth limit was driven by the consensus calculations involving parent posts. With the proposed change to make all comment and post payouts fully independent of each other, we can remove the nesting limit. At the very least, it will be up to interface designers to determine the limit rather than the blockchain.
Allow Editing of any Past Post or Comment
We propose removing the restriction on editing of past posts. It is a user-interface responsibility to show revision history and enable restoration of unintentional changes made by compromised accounts.
Normalize Payout Rates
Under the existing rules, paying one post changes the potential payout of the next post. This introduces an undesirable sequential dependency among posts that prevents parallel execution of payouts. The proposed change would ensure that all posts paid out at the same time will receive the amount of STEEM per vote.
Removing Proof of Work
In our last update we attempted to move to Equihash as our proof of work algorithm, only to be bitten by a bug in the library we adopted. For most of the last month proof of work has not be a factor on the blockchain. Now that STEEM has been launched and distributed, there is no security benefit being provided by miners.
The proof of work difficulty has never been a factor in determining the best blockchain for consensus purposes and has solely been used as a means of distributing the currency in a manner that complies with U.S. regulations . Now that the currency is distributed there is no longer a need to perform this function.
Our long term roadmap includes multi-chain designs that will further render proof of work pointless and unnecessary baggage. Removing it will allow us to focus our development efforts on features that actually do matter.
Remove Bandwidth Rate limiting from Consensus
In an effort to simplify the core consensus algorithm, we will remove all code relating to bandwidth restrictions from the consensus code. Instead, the same algorithms will be implemented as a “soft” consensus by the witnesses. This means that any witness can include any transaction they like and it will no longer be considered invalid by the consensus rate limiting rules.
Witnesses can then adopt a more flexible policy toward rate limiting without requiring hard forks. In particular, we will utilize custom (non consensus) operations to inform witnesses of revocable bandwidth delegation. This will allow large account holders to sponsor smaller accounts without having to fund the smaller accounts with Steem Power.
Bandwidth rate limiting is a short-term consideration and ultimately irrelevant to the long term consensus. All that matters long-term is whether or not a transaction was included and that gets decided by the witnesses. Collectively the witnesses have the power to rate limit accounts to prevent abuse and they will apply the same algorithm they are applying with release 0.16.1.
After the above simplifications have been made, there are a few new features that we feel will help the ecosystem flourish.
Multiple Arbitrary Beneficiaries to Reward Payouts
For any given post there can be a half-dozen different people who have a financial interest in the reward. The include: voters, author, referrers, hosting providers, blogs that embedded blockchain comments, and tool developers. Whatever website or tool that is used to construct a post or comment will have the power to set how rewards from that comment are divided among various parties.
This means that if you post via Busy.org that your post will share some of its rewards with Busy. If you post through the various phone and/or desktop apps then the app developer will be able to claim some of the rewards.
Independent Comment Reward Pool
Comments have a very different level of visibility and therefore get considerably fewer votes. In the past month only 1% of rewards were paid to commenters. Due to the nature of the N^2 reward curve it means comments are not competing against other comments, but against the top bloggers.
We feel that engaging more people in discussion and encouraging higher quality comments will make the platform more desirable. While relatively few people want to blog, many more are interested in commenting.
If all comments only have to compete against other comments, then more users can participate and comments can collectively garner a larger percentage of the reward pool. We are proposing that comments be allocated 38% (golden ratio) of the current reward pool and that comments be rewarded on a N log (N) curve with some to-be-determined modifications. This should work to allocate more rewards to those who contribute to discussions and drive community engagement.
Separate Market and Rewards Balance from Checking and Savings
Currently rewards are paid as micro-payments into the "checking" balances. These micro-payments suffer from rounding errors and add tight dependency on the order of operations between rewards payment, market operations, and transfer operations. In order to support the goal of encapsulation we want to treat rewards and market operations as-if they were independent “side chains”. User rewards would accumulate in a fund which could periodically be claimed.
This change would have the impact of users seeing their rewards every time they choose to claim them while at the same time allowing exchanges to replay the blockchain without validating all of the voting operations. Advanced implementations could process the votes in parallel to transfers and/or market operations.
By separating market balances from checking balances we can accelerate the market evaluations and allow the market to be processed independently from transfers. Like voting, the idea is to view the SBD / STEEM market as a virtual “side-chain” that can be processed in parallel as the system scales.
Summary
We feel that these proposed changes will set the stage for a more flexible, modular, and simplified protocol upon which many different participants can build. Like always, the community will have the final say on what changes are adopted and which ones are rejected. Please provide your feedback below.
Note: this is not the 2017 Roadmap that we have been working on. That document is far broader and more comprehensive than this 0.17 “next step” plan. The full roadmap will include plans for steemit.com and other user-facing features.
This comes with the risk of vandalizing an account's entire history if the low-security posting authority or key is compromised. A popular service with posting key access getting compromised could do a fair amount of damage. It's true that currently the risk exists, but it only goes back for 30 days. Thinking long term, it's entirely likely that a service compromise could end up with vandalizing the entire posting history of many accounts going back years.
For this reason, I'd like to suggest allowing edits going back to the beginning of an account's history BUT any edit made before 30 days would have to be made after an account "switch" is thrown with the active key. Such a switch could allow edits going back past 30 days (with posting auth), but could then be turned off at any time. Having an automatic expiration of say 24 hours on the switch may also be prudent, because many might leave it on.
Seems like a reasonable idea. Alternatively, a UI can allow a user to restore all of their old posts&comments.
I tend to disagree. Technically this will add much complexity and then likely harm system scalability. As mentioned in OP, make it as simple as possible. When active key is required for posting-related stuff, risk of being compromised will increase.
I think reverting recent edits can be done just as well with the posting key. The use case here is a compromised account that is then recovered by the owner (or possibly other use cases such as an author who just messed up editing the post and wants to "Undo"). After recovering the hacked account the posting key would have been changed, and then the reverts can be done using the new posting key.
The active key would be for a switch only. Not for making the edits themselves. On the web, the switch can be on a more secure page where there isn't any user-modifiable content.
It would probably be simpler to just be required to use your active key to edit posts that have passed their payout.
It would be simpler but the idea of a switch comes from the idea of segregating the active key from any place where user-editable content is located.
I'd like to echo and second this request, if I understand it rightly...
One of the highest perceived values to me personally of posting on Steemit is the promise / hope of blockchain immutability. I view the value of at least some of what I write to be durable and long-term, and I would like to think of Steemit as a place where I will be able to maintain a "legacy of thought" for anyone interested to continue to come and read into the future.
As I was reading this 0.17 change proposal, I had thought to suggest a "lockdown" switch allowing any author to permanently lock any particular post. Reading @pfunk's proposal here, I like it much better - assuming the security of my keys - because it behaves a lot like the current system (i.e. "automatic lock-down" after 30) while still allowing for intentional, key-access editing of earlier posts.
One of my uses for this "long-term" editability of a post is maintaining (on my own, using the current UI) of a Table of Contents that resides on the blockchain itself. My current workaround/hack has been to simply re-issue the TOC at 30 day intervals; with editability, I will be able to simply update the existing TOC.
To be clear the blockchain immutability is still there regardless of edits. When posts are edited, each old version remains on the blockchain. It is up to the UI to decide what if anything to show about that history, for example an option to revert recent edits.
Thank you, @smooth, for clarifying that for me. I suspected as much.
So, checking my understanding:
Does that sound about right? Thanks for helping me understand. ;)
Yes
Love single curation period idea! I posted something a while back expressing such hopes! https://steemit.com/steemit/@tingaling/steemit-7-day-curation-period-rather-than-the-current-quickly-passing-24-hours
See!? I told you it was just a matter of time. :)
The one change that stands out to me as a potentially bad idea is removing the four post limit/penalty. With auto-voting what it is today - and many of those auto-votes coming from large stakeholders - I think this would be a terrible incentive for anyone receiving auto-votes to post as much as they possibly can. This may sound like a good idea ("Alright! More content!"), but more isn't always better.
It could also reinvigorate the role of sock-puppets on the platform. This is something that hasn't been much of a problem lately, but could quickly and easily be renewed.
Just something to consider.
The market can adjust though. IMO, the limit is too arbitrary. And some folks are capable of putting out more excellent content.
When the authors that got votes from bots started abusing the power, the rest of community will likely stand out and start flagging, and it will ruin the author's rep. Given that we'll have 7 days to review, it's easier for the "good people" to react. I don't think a wise author will do so, unless she/he need quick money, or the account is compromised.
By the way, it's up to the bots to implement better voting algorithms. Most bots are voting for money, they have incentives to not vote for contents that will be mass-flagged.
With the cultural stigma of the downvote this kind of abuse hasn't been discouraged even with efforts from a minority. Your votes and Dans were the only ones that mattered and they were countered by other whales to keep the rewards high despite the abuse. I'm not sure those same whales will turn a new leaf if somebody like @ozchartart went from posting 4 times daily to 10+ times daily.
That you and others disagree and your point of view doesn't happen to prevail in one instance doesn't mean the system doesn't work. It works when stakeholders actually agree on what constitutes abuse. There is no objective definition.
That said, it also works to an extent even when there is disagreement, in the sense that incentives favor choosing content to upvote that won't be downvoted at all, whether or not the downvoters succeed in driving the post value all the way down to zero.
I will agree with you there. The risk of wasting voting power wouldn't be worth it when seeking ROI, particularly from curation, which is already not that high for most users.
The question is - what can be done when the abusers are actually the larger stakeholders, as was the case a few months back? The other large stakeholders mostly took no action. So, if there is no reaction and other stakeholders don't have enough power to make a difference, the abuse goes on unabated. I don't know what the solution would be, but having the post reward limits/penalties would at least be able to curb that.
What other back-end options do you think there could be that could address abuse vs. unwillingness/ineffectiveness to mitigate it on the front-end?
I would say the same stake-holders are still "pod voting" The accounts change, but the behavior doesn't. No changes to the system will stop a few accounts that vote for a handful of accounts each day.
Maybe the builders of the bots can build a feature where they can vote on some of their fav. accounts on odd days, and different accounts on even days.
Downvote, and it is still effective in shifting the incentives even if you aren't a larger stakeholder.
Consider a whale who has a choice of where to deploy one of his or her valuable and scarce 40 (full) votes per day. Choice A will get downvoted and Choice B will not. The incentives then favor B.
Unfortunately this isn't an instant gratification solution, but because it takes time for incentives like this to work, but they do work.
Is that whining I hear? Jk ;)
I have the same concern. We may need to allow more active downvotes on these types of contents.
Or, we could just avoid the problem as much as possible by not willingly opening things up for abuse. If users want to post more than four times, they can do that. They just won't earn as much. And chances are, if they're posting more than four times per day, the quality of their posts probably won't be that great anyway and probably won't be deserving of large payouts.
The four post limit/penalty doesn't seem to be a big deal in need of a "fix."
I don't think it discourages engagement. It discourages abuse - in the form of sock puppets and spamming. This is anecdotal, but I haven't seen many complaints from users who think that this needs to be removed. The limit doesn't mean that a user cannot earn - it only limits how much can be earned after a certain number of posts. With a stake-weighted system that can be and has been abused, I don't believe the limit is an actual problem.
You're right. We may ask this first; how many articles/posts does a professional writers create per day?
Not all posts are going to be (nor should be) professional writers. Approaching it from that angle impairs the growth potential of the system to reach a much larger audience from the start. There are many different use cases for this blockchain, professional writers being only one of them.
Am I the only one that almost peed when reading this?
lol, nope
I think the overall strategy of keeping it as simple as possible is ideal.
I would change the 38% down to something like 5% for comments.
Congrats on the decision to finally remove the 6 nest limit. :)
Here's my two cents about past posts: please allow people to comment on any past posts. For users who find a blogger they really like, then find out that they cannot add their comments to an older post, well, it's really weird and user-unfriendly. All blogging platforms allow this, so it's almost inconceivable that this feature is absent.
Generally the ratio of posting to commenting to reading on a site is sort of like an iceberg.
I am of the opinion that 50% would be even more appropriate.
Well, actually, the reality is that Medium has more readers than commenters.
So, far on this platform, reading is still the thing people do the least, despite the fact that this is a blogging site.....
With that, I'm up for any changes that will shake up the user retention issue.
Yes, that is precisely what I mean. If visitors/readers are 100%, commenters are 10%, and posters are 1%. That's true for all of these types of sites: Medium, Reddit, Disqus, et c.
Regardless of the rewards, we are always going to have vastly more commenters than posters. It's a lot easier to reply to someone else (even with a "hey, you're WRONG!") than it is to type something new and interesting into an empty editor box.
PS: Who told you this is a blogging site? :)
gulaabee havaee jahaaj
गुलाबी हवाई जहाज
I now understand why your username is sneak.
This is why ACTUALLY reading the content and commenting is just as valuable as creating posts if not more valuable.
I am a little weary on the removal of the 4 post limit. I think that will open the door for people to start playing the numbers game and put out as much posts as they can and see how many "hits" they get. I don't see this adding value to Steemit but decreasing it.
Agree with where you are going with that (though I'd prefer if none of these splits were actually predetermined). Likewise curation rewards. Think: posters, commenters, voters, readers.
All in all, thank you for your hard work and most of all, thank you for being transparent and bringing this out to the community as a proposal and open discussion.
I am personally good with most of them and a bit so an so (might need more time to think on) about:
Switch to 7 day payout instead of 24h
The simplest and most logical way to reward everyone imho would be indefinite, with a 24h payout cycle.
Removing the 4 posts limit, comment nesting limits and separation of posts and comments rewards plus multiple beneficiaries etc.
I think this adds a lot of complexity to the operations and might turn out to be very heavy computationally wise especially as we scale. Also opens the door to spamming by overflowing the blockchain with data.
What I didn't see mentioned in the proposal. maybe it will be in the roadmap
Reading through all the items mentioned, i think that a more streamlined (TL'DR-ish), layman description of the suggestions would be welcomed by the less tech savvy.
Ideally, I would love indefinite payout potential.
Perhaps 7 day initially, then 30 days periods indefinitely ..
I think it would incentivize content creators more to have the possibility for recurring income for those rare gem's of articles years into the future - especially considering future steemians signing up and finding classic posts from long before they joined..
Hey, @ausbitbank, I have had very similar thoughts, but my thinking has progressed a little...
If the reality of blockchain durability matches the promise, then the mere long-term availability of a creator's content is a strong incentive to blog on Steemit. As good or better than ongoing payouts for old articles would be easier access to those articles by new readers. I think that's more of a UI issue.
In other words, the lasting value of my "old gems" would be to attract new readers to want to keep coming back.
I want readers, not bots. ;) People that actually read and benefit from my content, and I think that a loyal and appreciative following will benefit me as an author even more than residual/royalty income from older articles.
It is important to not attempt to be all things. Multiple payout periods force all content to be kept "active" in consensus nodes which impacts technical scalability. It also requires all content to be kept active for review purposes.
Each day you are paid in STEEM, your long-term income comes from appreciation of STEEM. Employees don't go back to their employer asking to receive income from the work they did last year, last month, or even last week. Each day you are paid for that days contribution.
When the platform grows then you receive the compounding return on investment that will far outpace any residual revenue you would get from a post.
Don't all
comment_objectsneed to exist in memory (at least with minimal data of author and permlink) anyway? The blockchain needs to check whether a post operation has a unique author/permlink so that it knows whether it is creating a new post/comment with a payout period, or just doing an edit.So, we are talking about keeping maybe a couple more fields in
comment_objectsfor validating nodes. And if you compare that to the amount of memory full nodes need to keep (whether the post is archived or not), that additional memory overhead is very small.Memory access patterns for validating nodes are more of a concern, but I doubt most old posts will continue to remain active. And isn't this one of the advantages the ChainBase upgrade provided? That the database can support a much larger amount of infrequently accessed memory (since they remain on disk rather than in R AM)?
Also, I supposed it doesn't have to be indefinite. But archiving a post/comment after just 1 week is really short. (By the way, does archiving a post/comment mean that no new child comments are allowed? Because otherwise you still have the limited attention problem since new comments with active payouts can exist nested in the discussion thread of a months old post.) So what about up to 52 1-week long payout periods (which are only activated after the first payout if there is a new vote), and then a year after the post/comment was created, no new payout periods can be started?
You can compress comment objects down to HASH( author + permlink ) and check for existence, potentially using a bloom filter to detect non-existence. Memory access patterns can also be optimized.
The reality is that a single vote normally results in 0 payout and incurs a cost both at the time it is voted and later when it is rejected for insufficient payout.
We know that 99.85% of all votes (by rshares) are cost within 7 days. We also know that 99.5% of all votes (counted equally) are cast within 7 days. Actual usage shows that old posts don't get votes. In fact, we could get 99% of all votes within 3 days based upon actual data since HF 16.
This is a circular argument based on the current rule set (and UI). It can't be used to evaluate a different proposed rule set.
A similar (bogus) argument would be that comments only get 1% of rewards therefore rewarding comments isn't needed.
If it would be easier to find/filter "old" contend, then they would get MUCH more votes... The same would be true if the system would give more rewards to curators of posts older than 24 hours... So many gems not "mined" yet! Why throwing cement above our rich property ?
Old posts don't get votes because they don't feature. They are hard to find.
UI needs an advanced search page, by the way :)
Of course 99% occur in that time window.... who wants to waste today's voting power on something that will get paid out in 27 days at probably .001 SP?
if the technical stability is greatly affected then balancing the two (stability and a more streamlined reward approach) , 7 days would make more sense then 24h.
Still, some categories of users fall out of the employee range and fit into a more continual reward expectation: writers, musicians etc. and we might need to respond to their needs too.
On the downside, Trending posts algorithms need to be well thought and will bring their own downsides and benefits.
Edited to remove the 30 days reference which is proposed to be removed.
how will the 7 day payout scheme affect the daily trending page?
Not sure but I think the 2 would be independent.
ok thanks, that's what I think Ned said...
btw, get well soon!
Thank you! I already feel way better now that I slept all day.
KISS it, straight with indefinite and 24h cycle :):) That way it's simple for everyone and since 24h might be considered universally acceptable nobody considers it a downside as with the other timeframes.
It's true that I sometimes run into articles that are very valuable and were written a few months ago. We have writers around posting their stories. They can't be denied an effort reward after 30 days I think.
Long term rewards can be done via tips. Any individual vote has almost no ability to pay someone unless it works with many other users. This means that with the exception of a few whales, the long-term payouts would only apply to content that goes viral on steemit after more than a week delay. Possible, but unlikely.
We need tipping on steemit!
https://steemit.com/steem/@snowflake/let-s-get-tipping-going-on-steemit
There are GitHub issues for it :)
https://github.com/steemit/steemit.com/issues/401
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/690
This is a good approach. I think the calls for long term payouts would greatly subside with an effective tipping system.
A blockchain feature that makes sense for tipping is a change purse (with a user-defined max balance) that can be used to receive and send tips with only the posting key. Or alternately some sort of rate-limited tipping ability from the regular balance with posting key.
Perhaps with an automated aspect: if the payout is already made, you can assign a certain amount to be tipped by your simple upvote.
Then after the one week payment, let unlimited 30days payout cycles active...After mass adoption it would be very likely some gem-posts to attract several votes in couple of 30 days periods... Even not many votes would add up the rewards after months, years of the post existent.... After all the posts will be on the blockchain for eternity...
PS I guess it is vulnerable to abuse the reward pool, right?
Advertising could be a better source of long term revenue. Something for the future though, I don't think we're ready for it yet.
agreed.
This is a common misconception. The 4 post limit is per account. However, nothing prevents people from creating an arbitrary number of additional accounts (potentially thousands, and there are already people with thousands of accounts) to spam. Spam control is already handled by other mechanisms which are more effective than this one.
Also, even the 4 post limit doesn't prevent spamming with a single account, it just reduces rewards. Someone who wants to be malicious or annoying can still spam.
true
This post was about blockchain features, not website features.
true and thank you for pointing it out. I removed the Adds part which was exclusively website related. Other than that I consider all other items blockchain related.
duly noted.
I like it how you are making a distinct and clean space between blockchain (database / protocol) possibilities and presentation / UI features. This way you are making it possible for multiple interfaces to coexist over the same blockchain. Or even over the separate / side blockchains....
It shows vision :)
I'm excited about the independent comment reward pool. It will increase engagement tremendously and I believe it will do a lot to help grow the platform.
At the same time, however, we should expect to see many more low-quality and bot comments. The community will need to find a way to combat these spammy replies.
Downvotes. Downvotes for everyone!
Yes! I want to downvote those crappy comments. :-)
😂
Excellent update, thank you. There's a lot here and clearly the team has been working hard. We all really appreciate the updates and the discussion. I like that we're trying things out, testing what works and what doesn't, and we're willing to remove something we previously tried if it doesn't work out as expected or doesn't benefit us all as imagined. Being willing to be "wrong" is such an important aspect of gaining new knowledge on what ends up being "right."
Curious: any talk of changing the voting power? Initially Dan proposed a pretty serious change there and it was ultimately rejected by the community. Is that topic still active or is the future approach going to be voting guilds where many things get voted up automatically not by individuals but more so by bots?
I also would love to see changing the voting power revisited at some point.
I'm not sure this will please the main stake holders. It would be like taking their power away which was not in plan when they put their stake in.
What they are referring to isn't to take power away from large stake holders , but rather bots. Bots can vote all day every day and with a 40 vote soft limit it is impossible for any human with a job and/or life to compete with that. If we were to lower that limit then every human could use their full voting power and have a better chance at reaches the same amount of votes as the bots. I hope Dan and Ned will consider revisiting this idea as nobody is exchanging curation rewards for their authentic attention with the current system and that is a real fail for the attention economy. Those who pay more attention should be making better curation rewards than those (with the same amount of SP) who are offline.
Don't personify the bots - those are indeed humans with jobs and/or lives who are competing—by operating those bots.
Paying attention isn't what's being rewarded—it's surfacing good content. It doesn't matter if you washed your clothes by hand or used a machine.
Why should those with lives and families and a bot curator be paid more for surfacing content than people who actually read the content and also have lives and families but choose to be more attentive to the job? There's a reason people pay a dry cleaners instead of using the washing machine. But if we only care about cheap clothes (content) and would rather be lazy about the quality then use the machine.
Isn't the change @lukestokes is talking about the one where you could if you wanted to, vote 8x more with 1 vote and it would drain your voting power by 8x?
here's @sigmajin's post explaining the 8x thing https://steemit.com/steem/@sigmajin/what-every-user-should-know-about-the-upcoming-change-in-voting
Thanks!
there was a confusion about that as it doesn't allow you to actually vote 8x stronger. There was a post about it specifically but i can't remember which one.
Ah, right.
Did andu sell his account btw? :P
replying here due to comments nesting limit
yup, andu sold me the account. My previous one is @anduweb. Some KISS-ing right here, cutting off a couple letters.
:D alright thanks for the info! I knew andu from some time ago, was wondering where he went haha.
what a relevant issue ;D
Why not to make some steem weighted poll about each proposed changes with 3 options to answer: 1) agree, 2) disagree, 3) don't know?
Thanks to @xtar in Golos we have special poll site for that.
Even though I don't understand a word on that website, I would fully support a blockchain based poll feature.
Words don't matter). Number before brakets means number of voters, and number inside brakets is a summ of their Golos Power.
This would be a great thing to implement on Steem using Steemconnect.
Great idea that's been a long time coming.
That is way too much though. It's true that comments add value (more value than they are rewarded with now) and the very good comments should definitely be rewarded highly. But 38% of the entire pool is unrealistically high. A separate comment pool will increase comment quality but the posts that drive the discussion are worth far more than 62%.
Edit: I forgot. A separate comment pool will behave differently if there's a separate comment vote power per account or not. The comment pool idea works best with a separated comment vote power in my opinion. In this way, people with a lot of stake won't see voting on comments as an opportunity cost.
Also, there will probably be a lot more comments than posts. So comment rewards will end up much smaller and probably need a high percentage of the reward to be divided between so many comments.
Agreed, and comments don't benefit as much from bot voting. So when they are upvoted, it is a more accurate representation of their value.
So 38% is definitely not too much, it is just fine.
For the same reason I think curation rewards should get more than 25%
I played around with an idea that would increase %of curation rewards for certain authors Personally I think content is King and should be rewarded significantly more than curators. But we could increase incentive for finding the underdogs (new up and coming authors) by giving 50% curation rewards for upvoting someone with 0 followers and scale it to something limited like 1000 followers where the curation rewards are 20%. This would encourage competition between the advantaged (already known authors with a following) and the underdogs (new users who need visibility)
Agreed. I'm not even sure why there needs to be any specific allocation for comments. If you're commenting just for the sake of comment rewards, you're doing it wrong. That's not really "engagement." We already have a bunch of users who comment-spam on the platform. I would expect to see a lot more of that if there was a rewards pool just for commenting.
We also have a bunch of users who comment despite not having a separate pool for it. People who want to engage will engage anyway. I don't see much of a benefit taking away from posting rewards. Could it encourage more post engagement? Possibly. But I would lean towards more of a spam/bot issue and more tension from a lack of overall blog post rewards.
[EDIT] - As we can see on this post, commenting and comment rewards actually do work right now. I think this is evidence enough that we don't need separate pools and voting power for it. If posts are lacking engagement, it likely has to do with visibility and interest, not a lack of dedicated funds for comments. This seems like a "fix" to a non-existent problem.
Sometimes comments are more valuable then the original post ;)
True.
Sure. But those comments are usually rewarded. Why do we need a separate pool?
A 38 percent comment pool will drastically increase active users. It might Ben too high buyback it's worth starting too high than lowering . Look Arvind reddit all the value is commenters. It will also change the popular posts to be more conducive to comments
I agree that it's mostly a UI issue.
I think you drove over someone at 0:20
also what a classic "reply to top comment for visibility" move.
If the STEEM price hits $100, that's when @ats-david is "peacing out."
such a outstanding relaxed blogger–style… I have to vote up!
Agree. That number is way too high.
I've always been happy with payouts on comments as it is (at 1% apparently), even at the current price of STEEM. I remember receiving nearly $1,000 on some comments prior to 7/4. Were comments also receiving 1% prior to 7/4 and if so, won't we have that too look forward to as/if the price of STEEM climbs?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, which is likely, but I agree with pfunk that 38% is way too high.
Would a change to 38% mean that his current $4.28 earnings (on the comment above) on 9 upvotes be around $163 under the proposed change? That seems exorbitant for an opinion, not that I wouldn't mind those kind of payouts on comments again. ;)
But, what happens when the price of STEEM increases? Will comments be receiving $10,000?
Why would anyone blog?
I would setup a comment factory (some would argue I'm already running one). ;)
I believe we'll need a solution for scaling reward levels with price increases
We have one. It attracts more users to compete for those rewards.
Even with more users competing (I suppose you mean more posts or comments?) we will go back to over the top rewards. The outsized lottery effect going into $10,000 a post is arguably a good or bad thing - I'd personally advocate to not see it again. Consider all the adjustable variables - for instance, target votes per day - that can be adjusted to expand or shrink distribution.
Would it make sense to cap the rewards and distribute the excess yearly for example? So making good posts consistently in the low tide would be encouraged as well.
At 38%, even at current rewards, abusive comment spam would increase dramatically. It also creates an avenue of pool rewards abuse. Something like 5 to 10% at the most would be way more reasonable.
That would be way too low in my opinion. There could be 100x as many comments as posts and even if only 10% of them are worth rewarding that's still 10 times as many comments than posts with a much smaller reward pool.
Some posts are long enough already. Not everyone will want to read 100s of comments to curate them. Furthermore, unless it gets an upgrade, the Steemit UI isn't very efficient when it comes to posts with a lot of comments. I know my browser locks up if I view some previous @steemitblog posts, because of the many comments.
That's true. But isn't that a different issue? The site loads incredibly slow anyway and that's not because there's money to be made...
Besides you don't need to read the comments to curate. I would hope there would be no curation reward for upvoting comments.
5% sounds very reasonable.
Without a separate pool, there is already spam. Whether we want to call it "abuse" or not, plenty of users already upvote their own comments with trails, and larger stakeholders have often voted themselves - or every comment on a post. This new comment rewards pool would simply create another way for different types of abusers to abuse.
Something like 0% would be reasonable. There's really no reason for a separate pool. As I pointed out already - this very post demonstrates that engagement and comment payouts is just fine. If we want more engagement on regular posts, maybe we should work on attracting and retaining more users? That's the real issue here, not the lack of a comment rewards pool.
I can't speak for the voters putting comments over $1 but I am upvoting more comments in this post because they are important to reward for expressing their opinions about the future of Steem. I regularly upvote good comments elsewhere but not nearly as much as posts. And I often treat comment voting as a ranking mechanism rather than a reward one.
Yeah, same here.
What I'm really trying to figure out is why so many people believe that comment rewards are necessary for engagement. Go to every major social media platform and you'll find thousands, or millions of users commenting and upvoting other comments all the time...for no rewards. So, what is it that's creating the engagement on those platforms that we are allegedly "missing" here on Steemit (which I don't even believe is true)?
The answer: Users.
What is the purpose for creating a separate rewards pool for comments?
If the purpose is to increase engagement, it won't work. You need active users to do that. Without active users willing to engage, you're likely just going to be encouraging and rewarding spam, or otherwise meaningless engagement.
If the purpose is to just have a separate rewards pool, then what functional purpose does that serve? Why is it a necessary change for the blockchain?
What is the actual problem that would be fixed by this hard fork? The post says this:
You can't engage more people in discussion if you're lacking the "more people" part of the equation. Step one would be: Get more people interested in Steemit. If, after more people are here and active, the engagement is too low (which, again, I don't believe is true), then try to find ways to increase/improve it.
No it doesn't mean that, because voting behavior will change. Most likely there will be a lot more voting on comments and more comments being rewarded so the $163 would be split up a lot more ways. Also probably more comments (both good and bad).
You can not evaluate actions taken under one set of rules as if they would occur unchanged under a different set of rules.
Very True, I tend to only vote on the comments made to my posts, in hopes to gain readers, if there was no limit or a different limit to voting on comments I would vote on many more comments, being some of them to me add value to the original post.
I THInk there will be so many comments payouts will drop. On top comments but rise on mediocre comments
38% is high if only 1-2 comments are made but low if 100 comments are made!
So the solution to this would be its a variable number that get increased (max 38%) when the commenter’s are more, and to avoid spam comments it should be weighted/related more to the HIGH SP commenter’s (so it increases if total SP from accounts that participate are increasing)
I can't tell whether 38% is too high or not. However, I'm confident that it should not be implemented as a step-change. Phase it in over the course of a couple months. Better yet, develop a dynamic mechanic of some sort that allows the comment reward fraction to vary over time.
I agree that a dynamic function would be best but I don't agree that a phase in a good idea, in that it will be difficult to tell whether it actually has any effects (good or bad) while the usage of the site and other things are changing over a period of months. Better to try something more visible and it if it causes obvious problems it can be revised.
I see your point, and I guess a step-change wouldn't be a huge catastrophe. Here's a nice blend of the two: ensure that the hard fork and payout rules affect only comments posted after the hard fork. Then we get a nice 7-day period for the changes to implicitly phase in.
Absolutely. This is more critical to supporting comments than a separate reward pool for comments (although I support that too). There can be different parameters for each vote power tracker too (the parameters determine how many votes to cast per day to not waste your full voting potential).
I also think the number is quite high and I'm worrying about new types of abuse using comments. But this can boost new contents market, e.g. SteemOverflow, where comments/replies are more valuable than posts.
There's an argument to be made that, in addition to the other benefits of raising the comment reward pool to that level, there is value to be gained from the act of exposing the types of abuse that will emerge at 38%, as well as seeing if it is in fact true that abuse will emerge. It isn't until they see the abuse that they can develop systems to counter it. One simple solution to a torrent of comment abuse would be simply lowering the percentage. But again, this assumes that the abuse will come, which is not 100%. Of course, no matter what percentage is suggested there will be some people who think it is too high and some who think it is too low. I think we will only find out by experimentation. I highly doubt 38% is the magic number, but it might be better than what we have now. It is definitely true that experimenting with the number is better than not.
I agree, the number may be to high, but if the votes on comments no longer took away from my main voting power I would vote on more comments. Making more reason for a considerable payout. I think the lack of comments on some posts like mine is simply due to lack of a possible reward. I have been told I make great points, but to few want to spend time commenting since to some people there is no value to comment unless there are votes on the main post that will make the comments count for something.
This! Rewards would stimulate discussion. It would change the rhythm of interacting in a good way. Some of my posts were helped a lot by discussions.
Probably a better solution to excessive abuse would not be changing the number, but changing the structure (of something, possibly UI) to address the abuse. That is not to say I think 38% is the "right" number because I don't, but it's a reasonable experiment.
We can cross that bridge when we get there. Steem isn't there yet.
Flagging for being a repetitive bot. =b
Does not compute
This is a similar circular argument to the one I called out Dan about (and you upvoted my comment there). Steem gets to where it isn't now in part by broadening the rule set to be less narrowly focused on a particular type of post-centric content (and long-form post-centric at that). That will open up the incentives for other types of content and engagement to (potentially) flourish. I was personally involved with an effort to try to spark interest in comment-centric engagement which didn't go anywhere for a variety of reasons but lack of rewards and voting power for comments was one of them. I'd prefer to see a mechanism where rewards flow to wherever there is perceived value and engagement, whether that happens to be posts or comments without any specific quota on each but given that isn't happening now this seems like a reasonable experiment.
I see your point there. I said what I said above because I haven't seen any development towards a comment plugin for Steem yet and haven't perceived much demand for such a thing yet. I think that kind of thing will be viable with much less than 38% of the rewards.
Separate comment vote power is an interesting idea and is something to ponder.
I think 38% would be too high at the current level of engagement. However, with the separating of the reward pool, it's reasonable to believe that we will see significantly more high-quality comments. Steemit badly needs more readers and commenters, and I think 38% is a good place to start.
Although I agree with the proposal, the funny thing is I get way more engagement on Steemit than I do on other platforms despite lower views. I get comments on pretty much all my posts, even shitty low effort ones. The median for comments per post is on any given day usually 2 (sometimes 1, sometimes 3), the mean hovers around 5. Source: http://steempunks.com/charts
Occasionally a post is trending and stands out for lack of engagement, but generally there are loads of comments on the top posts as well, given that we have merely 1500 active users per day and that probably includes vote bots.
In comparison the vast majority of my tweets go unresponded to despite having been on the platform for years. When I make a reddit post, I'll be lucky if I get any replies.
That's not too much IMO. Remember that the 62% goes to the very few bloggers while that 38% is split up amongst many many commenters.
Also, think of the value for social networks. Ever been in a Facebook debate? I have seen many rebuttals that deserve to win a Nobel prize compared to the crappy original status update!
Maybe it's also forward thinking to increase engagement when comments only are added on standard websites/blogs that exist outside of the blockchain. A larger pool would make them more attractive than FB or Disqus comments plugins. just my 2 cents.
We can cross that bridge when we get there. Steem isn't there yet.
I don't know this is a problem. If there isn't enough voting on comments, then the value of a vote on a comment will be higher than the value of a vote on a post. This should reach an equilibrium even with shared voting power. I haven't thought a lot about the behavior with combined or separate vote powers. There are probably indeed some important differences, but I don't think separating vote power is clearly necessary.
I'm not so sure about the 38% reward being too high, it would greatly increase the social aspect of the site. Currently we have lot's of autovotes, it's not unusual to see posts with hundreds of votes but under 30 views, rather common actually. Commenters actually read the posts and engage with the user, without any user interaction can we call this a social platform? So in my opinion we should try 38% first.
I also agree that 38% is way too high. Try 10% first.
I fully agree with this! I was actually about to say the same thing.
I agree a separate voting power for comment would make more sense.
Also what about trying the separate pool feature with 2% and not 38%. This would already double what the rearws are right now.
Let's not forgot reddit commenters are super happy with 0 reward and it's in the top 10 websites with crazy engagement.
Yeah - I see posts on Facebook with 50 or 100+ comments all the time. None of them are receiving comment rewards.
The problem is that we have a very tiny amount of users. Of course we're not going to have much engagement when there are only a few hundred actual people engaging on the platform every day. They're trying to fix a problem with the wrong solution.
I get your point and I agree.
Maybe at this point in time the increase is needed, this could be reduced at the proper time?
I don't believe so. We need more active users, not more rewards schemes for the tiny amount of users that are currently here.
Overall....OUTSTANDING direction, simplifications, and some improved frameworks.
Thoughts:
And as always, thanks again for your continued work to make the platform better. I appreciate everything you guys/gals are doing and the fact you engage the community on future change proposals!
Because our usage statistics indicate that this would account for 0.85% or less of all rewards. Also see my recent blog post "Building Lon Term Value from your Blog" for the real answer to long-term rewards.
Yes, but you are conforming to the current metrics and not the desired end-state.
I have a more detailed post on this concept: Advocating for Long Term Steemit Payouts https://steemit.com/steemit/@mrosenquist/advocating-for-long-term-steemit-payouts
The comment reward will bring massive engagement. I believe this along with the arbitrary beneficiaries rewards will be a game changer.
You're right. But your posts have a lot of engagement already, ha ha.
Nice, I'm stoked about a lot of these changes but mostly the 7 day payout period.
I could see this leading to a far more competitive SBD promotion market, as people have to compete for visibility over a week timeframe instead of ~24hrs .
This is something that I've been thinking about recently - I made a tool to help judge promotion costs .
Todays rates
I'm also really happy to see more rewards going to commenters, and splitting post rewards between multiple parties should lead to some interesting opportunities for collaboration between steemians.
Theres a lot to process here, but first reactions are super positive and I can't wait to see the rest of the roadmap. Thankyou for all your hard work team :)
Hmm, and what about comments promotion? I think, that in posts like this (heavily popular) comments promoting seems like a quite desirable feature to use.
Oh cool! I didn't think of the effects this could have on the Promotion tab! Nice catch!
Finally. Thanks steemit team! I think this change will be one of the best ones on our road to mainstreem attention!
Great updates/upgrade suggestions!
More rewards for commenters, I've been thinking this for a long time. Not everyone can put together an article, even subjects they know about, and/or some don't want too. Everyone can comment. This will be big.
Yes, that's exactly how I feel, I am not a good writer, but somehow I think I do make good comments, even though I do think 38% is too high.
It probably is high..., but with the low Steem price, and trying to get the masses in, I can see how they want it high right now.
I am more of a commenter myself.
Anyone thinks that the "Mute" button will be used more often, at least on Steemit? Posting often and with stuff that's not so relevant would cause perception of "time-wasting" to rise and regulate itself through more mindful following / muting.
The down vote should be used to discourage behaviours you consider bad for the platform.
Yep, but I think the market would account for it. If folks abuse the privilege, then they get muted and their payouts decrease. If they provide 6 great articles a day, then more power to them. Not many are capable of that though.
It depends on the type of post. Long form blogging, yes, few will be capable. Other types of contributions, it may be easier. People can and will decide who to follow and what types of content they want to see. That doesn't mean all of it will necessarily get high rewards, but the rewards shouldn't be arbitrarily decreased based on a fixed quota.
Another way to look at lower rewards for people who post more is higher rewards for people who post less (since the system, at some level, is zero sum). Why give extra rewards for posting less? I agree with removing this rule and letting followers/unfollowers/muters/voters/downvoters decide what is best.
Agreed.
Agree. That is a better solution to spamshitposting than an arbitrary fixed limit. Along with downvoting as @beanz replied.
"Multiple Arbitrary Beneficiaries to Reward Payouts".
If this features can support third parties revenu model, it could be huge. If the financial interest can be a apply on projects like SteemQ or Thirsty Media or any Steem Projects targeting video or music producers, COuld we include song writers, performers, artists directly in the payout video or music discover payout model?
I support this proposals.
I though it was going to come to this :) , keep up the good work @dantheman and @ned you have your first startups formed :) I saw Thirsty's page the moment it got started @senseiteekay UPS, lol big ups , @pnc I'm following you :) so no worries there. I've been missing my updates on how the Thirsty is going.
The comment section of sites like Reddit and YouTube has always been my favorite section; that's where you find everything you were thinking while reading the original post or when watching the YouTube video. You almost always know that what you just thought of is going to show up as a top-rated comment there, so yes, increasing the incentive to make the comment section on Steemit more attractive and great - that I am all for. :)
and I thought that the white paper was a fun and entertaining read.
KISS...I got that part...
yup...good plane.
I'm new here so forgive me If my question is silly but how does steem prevent spam when it is totally free to transact?
Welcome, then!
Bandwidth usage is limited by how much Steem Power is in the account that is attempting to transact. If the bandwidth limit is hit, then the transaction will not be processed.
More specifically, we can treat bandwidth like BTC transaction fees. There is nothing in the Bitcoin protocol that necessitates transaction fees, but all miners require them. Similarly, we can have the witnesses track bandwidth for individual accounts and rate limit them without needing the bandwidth information to be a part of the consensus state or the Steem protocol.
I'm not a huge fan of this. It further concentrates power among witnesses (and by extension the largest SP holders) by giving them discretion to decide who and what transactions to allow and when to allow them.
If bandwidth allocation is defined by the protocol as a function of SP then witnesses who refuse to allow transactions within an account's defined bandwidth allowance are clearly engaged in censorship and abusing their position, but leaving it discretionary, all bets are off. Witness could create all sorts of arbitrary rules, including demanding fees as abit mentioned and without a well-defined protocol rule there is no standard to evaluate this against.
This is effectively taking a property right (fair share of system bandwidth) away from SP holders, especially the smaller ones.
Witnesses already have the power to censor like this. Consensus limits are only for overages - there is nothing stopping witnesses right now from censoring e.g. every post from @ned if they were to all collude - this is nothing to do with bandwidth rules.
However, as long as some honest witnesses remain, voting out the misbehaving ones is a straightforward matter.
Yes I understand the technical side of it. However, the political side of is far more complex.
You are introducing a rule that says that certain forms of censorship are okay. That is a very gray area and can easily be subject to great political conflicts and sliding interpretation.
The issue I'm raising specifically with regard to the property rights of all SP holders and their access to a fair share of bandwidth (which arguably provides the foundation for the entire value of STEEM) is that: a) large holders can have different interests from small holders, and b) what is "misbehaving" becomes vague and subject to a morass of political reinterpretation and influence games under this proposed system.
If large holders, and the witnesses they elect, decide for example that only people with more than 100 MV are allowed to make more than two transfers per week then small holders have no recourse. Or that only people with more than 100 MV can transact without fees. Etc. This can obviously be done in less blatant ways by witnesses and their large stakeholder supporters making smaller and more subtle changes over time with little scrutiny.
The simple and clear rule that blocking transactions that conform to the protocol rules is censorship and always considered unacceptable (except possibly pragmatically for a short time as a temporary bug fix pending a hard fork) is a clear line that possibly can be maintained as a core value by the community and stakeholders. I'm far less comfortable with a rule that says that blocking valid transactions according to witness discretion is okay under some circumstances but not others, especially when it implicates the core value proposition and property rights of SP holders.
Exactly. Perhaps we can also introduce a fee, then we witnesses will be rich!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
Haha! I do enjoy a good sense of humor, you get my witness vote :)
Offer people a stick of gum today or a pack at the end of the week and most people choose the stick of gum now. People want instant gratification. 7 days is too long to keep "average" people interested. If one payout period is desired, I'd be a happy with just the 24 hour payout period.
Love the comment reward pool and a lot of the other stuff seems great!
I agree, I think it could be bad for user retention as people want to test the site and turn their rewards into usd asap to see if its legit.
It took me a couple weeks to take the time to figure all that out anyway. I don't think it would make that much difference.
I'd probably pick the pack of gum at the end.
You're not an "average" person IMO (take that as a compliment). I'm trying to think from the perspective of average people, which is necessary for large scale adoption.
Lol. Flattery will get you everywhere 😂
Beanz is not the average person, but can think like one!
<3 All perspectives are worth knowing
Agree on that point.
I want the multi-pack
These changes, if all made together in a hardfork, would represent the largest change to Steem since the chain began. I think bundling the amount of changes (including the change to Chainbase in with the economic changes) in the last hardfork was a risky choice for the main chain.
Changes and their effects will be more understandable for everyone if they're paced.
Therefore if I were to lay out a plan of changes I would keep these in 17:
And defer these to the next or subsequent hardfork:
I understand the spirit of what you are saying, but clearly you don't grasp how the code is organized. Moving to a single 7-day payout period and allowing editing of past content are tightly coupled with the logic that must be touched to implement the top items.
Of the things that could be delayed until 18 I would say:
Alright, thanks for the clarification.
The bold is not really true. Economic incentives for clients, etc. is more of a longer-term issue, particularly given the low price of STEEM and accordingly the low total value of rewards (and in turn the value of the small slice of that a UI would receive). I'm not sure that the Busy team would prioritize implementing this in the first public release even if the blockchain supported it (likewise for other clients)
It's not technically needed, true. And like you say, I don't know if Busy.org would implement it from the get-go. I'll ask. Edit: According to ekitcho, it's not a big immediate priority, but they are counting on the change [as part of Busy's model].
In any case, this is one change that gives more potential to Steem as a platform sooner rather than later because there are front-ends in the works that would benefit and be incentivized by it.
No doubt, I think it's a great addition.
Agreed.
I agree with Einstein. Any changes should not make the operation too simple so as to attract those who would take Steemit for granted. It needs to stay just challenging enough to detract those who are not willing to appreciate what this platform has to offer.
In the spirit of KISS, we should consider making author rewards 100% liquid Steem. Those who wish to power up will still do so.
I think 100% Steem Power and let people power down if they choose.
Strongly disagree, both from a perception and usability point of view. Trying to lock in new users to an investment when they haven't asked for it (and quite possibly don't want it) shouts scam and Ponzi scheme, and makes it far slower and more complicated for new users to do a first cash out to convince themselves that this system is actually real. With 7 day payouts and then another 7 day delay for first power down this means 14 days (plus exchange delays) for a new users to see their first cent, and that's assuming their early contributions are even rewarded at all. Plus it requires them to learn more about vesting and unvesting.
Social media users and bloggers are not investors and don't want to be (at least not initially; once they grow familiar they may decide they do). They should be paid rewards in easy and accessible liquid tokens, not "shares of stock".
This is not the way to improve the STEEM price. Making the token (and more broadly, system, team, development effort, communications, vision, transparency) more attractive to investors (who want to be investors) is the way.
I'm going to have to agree with @smooth on this one, This is not doing much for acquisition of new users and retention. We have to remember, a lot still have to learn the "crypto" market too, not just Steemit's market and ecosystem.
Yes an Yes and Yes(@bitcoinparadise , @smooth) , @danteman I get the fact you want to see people grow the platform , but many will come for their daily bread and will live of the stories of whales.
make change possible , let people earn , not on the basis of trust me , it's good for you to make my platform great. but on the basis of this will spark a real change. YOU matter not your Power , Power grows as you do :) , that way you will have real community and leaders. I'm getting too philosophical for my own good.
Starting a new venture is hard , business is hard too, don't kick people into it , posting is a venture and Steemit has a business element to it, trust me if the people weren't here , no retention would ever come, the crabs that leave the bucket are free to leave because they are on top, the ones below don't have a choice.
Here it works in the reverse fashion, ones that leave are the most fed up , be it because of personal choices or platform issues. And the brave ones that stay at the base , supporting their community , get only to see the frying pan last.
Don't put people in buckets and be careful with the liquid steem , many are hungry and many will get addicted.
Payout tokens are the most complex part of the system. While I see the need for all 3 tokens, being paid out in all three is very confusing. I would love to have the option to be paid in STEEM only as opposed to STEEM and SBD. I'm OK with the 50% power up as my own choice but I think powering up should probably be completely voluntary... If you want blogging platforms like Medium to adopt STEEM as a revenue system, well their users aren't going to understand why their $5 payout is locked away and can't be taken out in parts larger than 1/13. I think curation should still be SP only since you need to have SP to curate, so curators will already understand the purpose of SP. Perhaps comments could be paid in STEEM only while OP authors would have the option to be paid in SBD.
I'm beginning to wonder if we should keep SBD or not if we are to integrate with other platforms like Medium. If their userbase is not on steemit and they get SBD then when will they learn the speculative value of STEEM?
SBD for authors and STEEM for commenters would be easier to understand than 3 tokens for everyone.
But honestly if you want people to hold steem long term you need to create incentives for doing that. Right now curation isn't a good enough incentive because the vast majority of users feel that their vote is pretty powerless. At one point when the steem price was around 30c my account was worth around $2k yet my vote wasn't worth 1c on a new post. For somebody self employed who doesn't make 2k in a month (before expenses) I can't imagine how I can afford to compete by powering up. A person of my income is probably (possibly idk) the average user too so the masses are just not all the investing type.
I don't know if you have future power up incentives up your sleeve but I hope you will revisit the idea of reducing the voting soft limit or come up with some kind of solution for bot voting because that's the main reason I see my vote as powerless even at $2'000.
People seem to learn this but if it's a barrier to adoption it can be solved in the UI by displaying half of a post's total reward payout, minus projected curation rewards.
It would be the same. After my first whale upvote I called a friend to tell her I just won $300 on the post. She said brilliant what are you gonna spend it on and I said well I can only spend half of it and immediately lost her.
Now given that first reaction I took a different approach when telling another few friends. I said I won $250 that I can spend and a stake in the platform worth $250. That's when my friend who is a developer and should really be on steemit because he's currently out of work to work on his portfolio told me to be careful - that part about being made a stake holder made him think scam - which I still think is ridiculous but it's not unusual for people to think this way.
I never thought I would hear you say to remove SBD! :) What if it were marketed this way... all rewards paid in STEEM. Then you have a choice: Gain more influence by powering up to SP, or cash out/earn interest by getting SBD. This would seem to give the user a choice they can grok.
I'm not saying remove SBD. I still strongly believe in the value of it as a smart contract and as an introduction to cryptocurrency. But I would like the OPTION to be paid in STEEM rather than SBD since I don't really hold SBD for very long anyway.
I think that could work. But I would prefer if they added incentives for lower power ups. They don't even have to be monetary incentives. People go crazy about HATS on Team Fortress 2 and there are all sorts of games people will pay just for gimmicky things.
I strongly disagree as well, as I expressed in the Github issue that was made yesterday titled reduce post payout options to only two: 1) decline payout 2) SP only payout (default).
Many users take pride in their SP and wouldn't want to have to power it down. This also erodes the original concept and selling point of stakeholder participants, where people are more likely to treat half of their posting rewards as their reputation, their sweat equity into Steem by way of Steemit.
People will be forced on a powering down-track, potentially selling the other half of their posting rewards at the same time. Val mentioned that restraining steemit.com users from taking posts in liquid tokens would reduce downward pressure on the STEEM market but I think it would do the opposite. This has too much potential to make Steem Power become even less distributed.
I think @smooth's comment here and his comment on github are on the money:
I believe existing and potential Steemit users will not appreciate it at all.
If that were the case every newbie would have to learn more in order to use the platform rather than less.
This depends on your point of view. If you are aiming for short term profit, then KISS means liquid Steem rewards. On the other hand if you are aiming for long term investment, then KISS means Steem Power rewards.
People should invest when they are comfortable doing so, and have made a conscious and informed decision that this is the right thing for them, not by default.
Edit: Are you talking about the proposed forced 100% SP or the current 50/50 split? This comment is written referring to the 50/50 split:
Steem posting is a "free roll" anyway so I see no issue in rewarding people in whatever way the system is set up to do so. I think the system of making participants stakeholders by default is a brilliant one.
I was responding to the proposed 100% SP. We probably crossed signals a bit there.
The 50/50 doesn't really bother me as I see that the SP portion could be viewed as bonus points or as analogous to a portion of compensation employees may receive in company stock (though 50% would be high). However, even then I see merit in the position advocated by @riverhead and others that we should just let authors and users be authors and users, pay in liquid coins (ideally stable ones) and leave the longer-term investing and risk-taking to those who actually want to do that (of course there can be overlap).
As for Steem posting being a "free roll" that doesn't exactly fit with the idea of subjective proof of work or that those rewarded are paid for contributions that voters consider valuable. That sounds to me a lot like being paid to do a job, or selling a service, or something along those lines.
I was responding to 100% liquid Steem. I agree with your point
I think it's brilliant too. But in the name of KISS it doesn't make sense.
Simplicity is great and all but shouldn't be adhered to to break down the strengths of Steem's model like some kind of Blockchain Cultural Revolution.
We have to take it from the perspective of the total newbie. A token which you can sell for money is undeniably simpler than a token which represents influence and needs to be powered down over a period of 13 weeks to be withdrawn as money.
Are there any plans to implement filter on tags? Or it is all about website client side and has nothing to do with v.0.17?
That is all client side, tags are not part of consensus.
https://github.com/GolosChain/golos/pull/52
You guys are doing a great job, thank you!!! The proposed updates respond to a lot of functionalities required explicitly by the community over the past weeks, so I am sure the majority will highly appreciate them.
I am already a huge fan of the content reward pool - that will automatically improve the (constantly critized) view rate and encourage people to read content and interact. Really nice!!
One short question regarding the 7-day-payout-extension: will this have any influence on the curation rewards? If I am right, currently the curation rewards peak (highest rewards given) is around 30 minutes after publishing.
Looking forward to reading the roadmap!!!
I like all of the proposed changes!
how much? :D , why
I love that the main idea, make it simple, is embedded into one simple word;) I like all the changes, although I'm wondering how the 7days payout will affect the community - this seems to be the biggest change for the normal users.
The trending or hot pages can continue to be determined by algorithms that keep the content "fresh". Seven days as opposed to one allows people to get the up-votes from people who would have otherwise missed the day-long window.
My post that earned $20 roughly ended up being something like $17 after the 24 hours waiting period, wouldn't final payout decrease a lot if there was a 7 days wait ?
User expectations are extremely important. That should be fixed.
I think throwing the author and curation reward together on first view was a mistake. In the name of KISS it should be the authors reward that you see first, then when clicking to see the details you see the curation rewards added.
There is a GitHub issue open for it. It is going to be a complicated change to calculate the curation vs. author rewards in realtime though (on every active post). It is something that will need to be implemented at the blockchain level in order for it to be done efficiently.
https://github.com/steemit/steemit.com/issues/87
agreed
Agreed. And create the nice big pot for curation instead of the comments!
No the payout won't necessarily decrease based on increasing the payout window. It applies equally to all posts. On the margin there is no change. Price fluctuations may work in either direction (likewise vote changes).
A lot to digest, but so much goodness. I like the idea of maintaining a neutral blockchain that supports different implementations of the UI.
Fantastic update, I think I like most if not all of the changes. Most of these were community ideas at one point or another and all seemed to have strong support. Great job dev team.
Oh, I like this feature. It was always a mistery for me that I can't edit my own posts even if I found there typo or just want to update a broken link or something.
None of this matters if users keep leaving. They leave because normal account controls were removed, conversations are cut off at 6 replies, and voting\bots favor the developers\insiders.
Users will continue to leave if user friendly features are ignored and power is centralized toward insiders with each change.
Yes another point I was making , you got it right :). If the platform requires you to go school again most wont even think about it, It's good we are getting the best people , but if you can't make it off the ground what use will wings have.
Support growth and learning, creation and genuine curiosity and Steemit will soar, support numbers and money and people will leave, those who stay , you don't want.
If you make it hard to earn rewards and let only economists and "powerful" people give you value, you won't be the place where the best news and stories go , they will find their own place.
I saw a millionare yesterday and he makes the same amount clicking a button compared to me after I do two hours of writing, two hour of revising, 4 hours of comments and promotion and another day of the same.
Now who is a beast and who is playing for peas.
And how can we compare economically.
We can't.
But I see that he is here and has no money other than the Steem Power , so he believes in the growth and development of the platform and the ideas it cherishes. Or likes big numbers and is going to leave 3 months after he stops caring.
I am not sure that I like the 7 day payouts proposal. But if somebody could educate me as to the benefits of it (in lay man's terms), I think I might get comfortable with the idea.
Anyways, it's great to see you guys working so hard on determining the future path of Steem and Steemit. Really grateful to be a part of this community :)
It would allow people to promote their posts outside of Steemit. That, in turn, promotes Steemit. I'm not sure I like the longer payout either (would prefer having an an option to select one or the other), but we can try it.
I think it will give your post more opportunity to get rewards as long as people change their voting behavior to vote on content that is a few days old.
If nobody changes their behavior then there will be little to no change in rewards (other than taking a bit longer to be paid).
That's true. I hadn't considered that.
Interesting thought but only if people don't use resteem or if resteem is separated from the blog (I strongly support the latter). But this is a UI issue not related to the post.
"Removing the Comment Nesting Limit"
Oh god yes.... I think I just commented...
Something I would like to see, and I believe it has to be changed at the block chain, as well as steemit, is to add a link to a thumbnail image to be used in a list display of posts..
so far we have to do that ourselves, get a picture downscale it, upload it and place it as a link , you need entry level photoshop and html , then you can build a preset worflow and automate , it will take you 5 minutes for 3 images tops. I use www.steemimg.com for image hosting and the markdown guide should do the rest.
I think the first image is the thumbnail for the post.
And good idea on the sharing side, you have some ideas all I was thinking of were solutions and how to make it happen. But it's a interesting addition, I'm thinking it will come later , but sooner is better.
Thank you for the reply, however, you completely missed the point.
It is not that the first image is the thumbnail, it is the first image is used to create the thumbnail.
The first image (or the image placed in H1) is the one used for the thumbnail, and is run through a resizing script on steemit.com
steemimg.com saves, automatically, three sizes of your photo. One is a thumbnail.
But, the only way, currently to use the thumbnail sized image, is to place the thumbnail sized image as the first thing in your post.
Which will usually jack up the looks of your post.
I want to thank you for your laborious work. I wish the all creative achievements team. Thank you for such an informative article.
Instead of 38% to Commenting, why not 10% to commenting and 28% to Curation? We need more curation on this blockchain, not commenters, although more of each is better. @fyrstikken provides some good analysis on this, and we are in a situation where bots need to be created, and perhaps people following bots! Give 28% to Curation pool to get people reading!
Yes right, that is what we are missing here, I was going to say a reward for reading, but that is rewarding in itself and if you implement a change , someone is bound to game it , people would just auto scroll , spend time on a post , get the reward, comment pool should go to curation, but it's good as it is now as a author reward, I don't think it should be forced, people should share their thoughts freely , not for rewards and because of incentives. If you like a subject and want to express that , yeah do it . Most people find it hard. And most don't read so you get 30% comment content and 1% reward pool, because the people with the Power vote for posts and don't read comments, if they read the posts that is.
Trails would be logical to occur, since good people would follow good content and share their findings because it's helpful , but in this mechanical fashion, if you want people to read stop the race for rewards. :D impossible right.
hey guys, today when I finally have time to read this. I thought I should print it out as there is really so much discussion here. then I get this in preview:
holy xxxx! 98 pages!! it is longer than a masters thesis! I did not print, it would be un-environmental.
print it as a PDF and read it on your phone/tablet :)
I sometimes use Send to Kindle (if you have a Kindle) for posts that are longer and I don't have time to read right at that moment.
good advice! also seems a good excuse to get me a Kindle! :)
:D:D , yeah I love the helpful comments of people who don't know how good they got it :D ,
kindles are great , if he gets you one maybe you an work towards one for me :)
@andu , thanks for reading , giving you a follow :)
keep steeming and we'll all get you one :P (through your posts' rewards)
I am having some "oh God, change!" feelings after reading this post.
Good changes though, hopefully.
I flipping knew that was the deal with non sequential posts!! I will be glad if that is removed so we can have two at once without one being hampered rewards wise by it's better rewarded brother.
Hopefully what I just said made sense to someone
PS, I love steemit ;0)
Nice, remove PoW, 7day payout period , all nice changes. I suggest removing the reward value on a post or at least not have it one of the first thing people see on a post :P
For the most part, I don't have any issue with the proposed changes atm.
I think if we're voting on whether a reward should be higher or lower we should all be able to see the payout pending.
The behavior of why we vote on content should not be based on payout value.
I think it should for me at least. And if you look at very old posts from before the stigma was culturally attached to the down vote you'll see that that was how it was done from the beginning with the early adopters.
https://steemit.com/steem/@nextgencrypto/steem-price-speculation#@steemychicken1/re-justin-re-nextgencrypto-steem-price-speculation-20160424t183611137z-20160424t184359738z
It's an interesting history lesson :)
Yes this is a hard thing to see past. Most of our voting and behavior on what post ends up making it on a trending page is based on the rewards. That is what attracted us to this platform and separates us from other sites.
People are focused on the money, which is why we have sites like http://steemwhales.com/ and pages like https://steemd.com/richlist. It's great for statistical data but most people look to it to see how much Steem someone has or their voting weight. Not everybody does this but the behavior usually comes up as "this post got downvoted and lost half it's rewards thanks to @berniesanders." In my opinion the reward value should not get people upset. We are posting content to share that is beneficial to this platform and others but at the same time, we are trying to monetize social media. It's like a catch 22...
I agree with your assessment. Trying to monetize human behavior, well, it's never been done before that I"m aware of...
Well thanks @stellabelle,
I keep pointing out that we don't see the behavior on other social sites like you do on Steemit. On other sites, we only see the amount of likes/comments and the report abuse button is tucked away in an expandable menu. You don't hear people making a post about how someone downvoted or disliked their post. That information to me, should be the last thing I can see. It's a part of the Steemit ecosystem in order to function so that is why it is difficult to monetize social media but I think it is a necessary direction we need to take to incentivize content creators to prevent a widespread of false information and content.
We're going to get there :)
Also, now that the posts have come down to a reasonable $ amount, I don't think people get so emotionally schizo about it. When I see a $300 post now i think, "Nice work!"
you may be voting on whether a reward should be higher or lower. Personally, I vote for either the post was good and deserves my vote or not. I don't care what reward they are getting.
I think of it like fiscal policy. If this were a tipping system I would look at it differently, as they could have made 10K on a post but if I liked it enough I should still tip like everyone else. That wouldn't affect the rewards of other authors.
you and I are not going to find common ground on this... as far as I am concerned, the only influence you or anyone else has is by deciding it is a good post and voting or deciding it is not worth your vote. Not for you to impose your ideas of what value it can have.
I like the KISS strategy you mention. Just like the heart of a physical machine, basecode is more reliable / scalable / reusable when kept to a bare minimum of simple yet powerful tools.
Does this mean I will be limited to maximum proxy accounts/day or is it max proxy accounts that I can have?
BTW, if it max accounts then that would be great!
Good, the comment/reply limit is annoying and seriously discourages interaction.
Yessss! now I no longer need all my alt accounts to post! (oh, wait, I still need them to not make a salaad out of my blog list!).
I wonder how would that impact in the not-so-popular posts being buried under 100 posts in less than a few minutes.
Anything that encourages FEEDBACK and users ACTUALLY READING the articles is good, you should add a separate flag system for that too (perhaps deletion rights for the article author?). I've already seen a "comment bot" replying in english to articles in spanish (this thing of facilitating botting is really a mess).
Can we do something about the UI at steemit? I've nearly 40% of the laterals of my screen "white", a wider canvas perhaps? (or at least place some ad fields in there!)
This post is purely about Blockchain features, not the UI. We have teams working on each in parallel.
I think most people don't get this fundamental aspect.
I'd be curious to see how comment nesting is handled UI wise for more than 6 comments. I am annoyed I can't reply to a comment when hitting that limit, but even with 6, it's already very hard to keep track of the conversation.
Reddit is better on this, so far.
As abit commented, reddit has this done pretty well. Once you reach a maximum depth in the UI you can open another tree of comments from there.
Great proposals that totally make sense to me. Way to go!
Thank you! Resteemed
Only game changes. What about real features? Messaging? Escrow?
Escrow is fully functional on the blockchain. Anyone can create an interface and this post isn't about the website.
Messaging is best implemented off-chain and therefore is also outside the scope of this update.
Many of these questions will be addressed in our broader roadmap document.
We need a market built into the site! A market will remove a lot of sell pressure ( funds in escrow) and boost confidence in the token :)
I'm not getting it , but sounds like a plan :D , no really what do you mean , The market side is being hosted in another site , it's only blogs here , if that is the case why rush , fix the blogs , one sounds like a good idea after some base is finished , why add value on sinking sands?