I feel that I need to take a stance right now, on why I believe that 50/50 is actually a good change.
For Steem. For the community. For us!
However, before I do that, I want to first go quickly into the meta-discussion
This discussion should have started differently
I can very much understand how many people (especially big stakeholders like @fyrstikken) must have felt offended when there was suddenly a spreadsheet being shared which looked like as if some witnesses had already come to a decision.
Nobody wants to feel left out, especially when there are hundred-thousands or even a million+ dollar involved, or if someone is just a lower ranking (still important) backup-witness or maybe just a regular user (also important).
While I had nothing to do with the publication of the spreadsheet, I do want to show my sympathy. We need to work on involving more people in conversations. Now, this doesn't mean we can involve everyone, but there are enough of Steemians being invested in Steem so that they should have a say & hear in things.
In the end, we all want the same thing, right?
Why 50/50
For those who are not aware what 50/50 means:
On Steem, the rewards of a vote are being divided 75/25. 75% goes to the author. 25% goes to the curator - aka the person who owns the stake/steempower.
What we (some witnesses & stakeholders) are currently thinking and debating about, but which is not yet decided (!) is the possibility of shifting this to 50/50. That would mean, of a given vote 50% would go to the author and 50% to the curator (stakeholder).
There are in my opinion multiple benefits that this change would bring, but most importantly it's this one:
Higher incentives to curate other posts
Right now, self-voting & vote-selling is quite lucrative. It is an easy & safe way to earn with stake owned in Steem. Whether this stake has been earned by participating on Steem or by buying Steem. (In that case, I completely understand if someone wants to earn with the investment. I mean, there are more than enough cryptocurrencies which pay out dividends. And we want Steem to be competitive, don't we?)
And the reason why so many people are rather doing that instead of curating is simply that the rewards are a lot lower (roughly 1/3 to 1/5). At best, curation is even with vote-selling, but it requires a lot more work than simply the first option.
With 50/50, by default, curation would be as lucrative as vote-selling. Maybe a bit less at first, however, curation can be gamified. With 50/50 this could be double the profit to vote-selling or even more.
Voting in a smart way would be rewarded and coupled with a downvote pool, shit-posts & its voters will have a very bad time.
Since 50% of the rewards would be dependant on the success of the post, voters would make sure to vote on good posts.
Equal Playingfield for Stakeholders & Content Producers
Besides that, 50/50 would also introduce an equal playing field for those owning stake and those producing content/contributions. I would love it if everybody were a good Samaritan. But nobody should be forced to be that.
If you have bills to pay and need to get the most out of your Steem investment (or crypto in general) without selling it, then you should be able to choose the best path possible for ROI.
The problem right now is that this path is pretty much selling-votes/delegating to bid-bots/self-voting.
However, with 50/50 - curating great content would be as profitable and even more.
And I'm pretty sure that more curation initiatives, instead of bid-bots, will be created with 50/50 (coupled with downvote-pool).
Final Words
Before I finish this post up, I want to mention that all my decisions are with the goal in mind to have the most positive impact on Steem.
And regarding the accusations that 50/50 would be bad for the Steem price: I have a lot of stake in Steem, so much indeed that I don't want to see the price of Steem crash.
Instead, I want Steem to attract more and more investors. Because those are needed to push the price upwards. If you want high post rewards, you need a high price and people willing to buy Steem.
If Steem becomes a landscape which is uninteresting for stakeholders, they will find other projects that gladly take their money.
And yes, Steem also needs to be a landscape for users to be interested in producing content/contributions/participating. Without all those amazing minnows & dolphins, Steem would be nothing. But right now, most accounts rather play with themselves, than with others.
There is simply no incentive for playing with others, rather than doing it for a warm feeling in the heart. But those are sadly not paying bills.
But 50/50 can change that.
Let's be positive and look strongly into the future.
Sincerely,
@therealwolf
If you believe that I'm of value for Steem, then please vote for me as witness. You can also set me as a proxy and I'll vote on great witnesses for you. You can learn more about me and my witness infrastructure on therealwolf.me.
Hmm, interesting proposal...
A few things:
Ok, that last one wasn't relevant, but the point is, communication would have to be key for this to go over smoothly. Lots of blog posts, lots of responses to comments, even the dramatic ones, lots of answering questions and concerns. If this were to go into effect, it can't be another HF20 situation where users felt betrayed and "sprung-upon".
Thank you for writing up a well-worded discussion about this, I appreciate it.
Not with this change alone. We also need a separate downvote-pool. Both of these features together and we would have more incentives to actually curate posts and to do it on good posts, as the bad posts would be downvoted.
Exactly. If you get 100% from 1$ or 66% from 2$ - which one is better?
Haha. Thanks man! There are a few big stakeholders whose vote I need to advance to the TOP 20, but until then I'll keep on pushing.
I actually wouldn't mind having some kind of QA with other witnesses, where users like you and others could ask us questions. (for example on the minnowsupport radio.) (@aggroed)
Or I would even be open for a debate.
Comments like yours is what keeps me going!
I listened to my first episode of the minnowsupport radio yesterday, and I can see that being an immensely valuable asset to this platform. No disrespect to aggroed, but I think that idea needs to be developed to it's full potential. I feel like having that sort of transparency be more accessible, and with wider distribution, would be monumentally beneficial.
While I think the intentions behind the idea of moving from 75/25 to 50/50 are good, I think there are some major issues doing this creates. The first is that authors deserve the majority of vote rewards. They, by far, put more effort into making quality content than do voters curating content. It's difficult, time consuming, and laborious to make a truly great post on Steem. It's very easy to vote on a post. This leads into the second issue, vote riding. Moving to this system could lead to people only upvoting posts with a large number of votes already, whether the content is truly that good or not, for fear they will get punished for voting on a less popular post. In theory, this exists right now as well, but I don't think it's as bad as it would be in a 50/50 system.
Overall though, my biggest issue with this suggested change is that authors deserve the majority of rewards, not curators. This doesn't mean curators can't be rewarded, though. Maybe a 60/40 system could be implemented to still give the authors more of the reward, while still increasing the reward for voters?
60/40 was my proposal, to first test such economic changes in a prudent manner.
hello @thecryptodrive. Sorry to bother here but do you have discord? I would like to ask you about our minnowbooster delegation and the chances of working out a weekly delegation on top of the monthly one.
Thank you
Join https://discord.buildteam.io and you will find me there.
I disagree. Contributors put in the time for the post (less/more depending on the contribution), but stakeholders actually put in the money. If Steem would go to shit, you could laugh about it and say "Ah, finally I can buy cheap Steem". I, on the other hand, would have lost a 6 figure value.
If it were actually about the work from curators and authors, I would agree. But curators are generally also stakeholders.
What came first, the chicken or the egg? Curators, who are also stakeholders, might bring in the money, but it is the authors who generate content for the platform, and therefore generate value. Choosing to reduce their incentive to produce content could see content producers leave, or reduce the quantity or quality of content they make. With out authors to generate content, and therefore value, you'd find it hard to generate value through curation when content is harder to come by to begin with.
Exactly.
Content creators are more valuable. Curators can be replaced with automated software. Content creators have access to limitless content. Stake holders does not have access to limitless Tokens.
Anything 50/50 is packaged up communism that sounds good on paper. How many Socialist/Communist states are currently winning? It never works in reality. Nobody is talking to the real content creators so they have no clue what it takes to be one. Also no real stake holder has made any real arguments to what @lordbutterfly has said. Why 50/50 will fail. Because it will.
If you replace curators with automatic software who will buy STEEM? The price of STEEM will drop to zero and nobody will earn anything. STEEM needs both creators and investors (curators), therefore 50/50 is fair.
Curators are barely humans. Much curation is on auto. Soon AI Robots and Machine/Deep Learning will take over that. The algo on YouTube is already doing this.
Humans or Robots will buy Steem. Or anyone else that is interested. Hell I buy up all cheap Steem. I want more. It's the good stuff and the future. STEEM can't drop to Zero since I will buy all cheap STEEM. Same as Bitcoin can't drop to 0. I will buy. I'm not the only one that would buy cheap and sell high.
50/50 is not fair. Who did most work? The content creator. So you want to leech from them. That would be an unfair deal.
agree with you both
Agreed. I easily put 10+ hours into many of my posts. I am not a dancing monkey and find the idea that someone benefiting from my research deserves the same payout. I will probably go back to self publishing and vote for my few favorite authors occasionally.
I see your point of view as well. I am leaning toward the 50/50, but what you are saying makes sense. I just don't know what the solution is.
I spend hours taking photos and writing posts, but honestly I only make 4 or 5 dollars from them. At the end of the week, I am making about the same amount of money in both curation and author rewards.
I guess on the upside I am just powering it all up anyway, but it would be nice to earn a bit more for my efforts. Of course, one should always improve their skills before expecting too much.
I just wish that something could be done to thwart the shit posting whales who hog the reward pool. It makes the whole project seem scammy.
The solution is Trust and Relationships slow grind build up and look at what you can leverage for gaining massive long term value.
The slow grind is all that you can do unless you feel like dumping 100 grand into the platform (Which I could do, but I won't until some of the finer points are worked out). So the only questions left after that are, what can be done to improve the system overall so that it is not so easy to game.
One big thing will be real Niches + Communities + Moderators. Narrative is trying to make this into a reality. This makes it into a more professional system. Like a digital job. People focus on specific areas and provides massive value in that niche. The roles are more clear. Look at Narrative's white paper:
https://www.narrative.org/assets/documents/narrative-network.pdf
Interesting, I will check it out.
Steem could get my investment back in that case.
I'm not completely sure what you mean with this statement.
I powered down because of crippled system.
I still don't get why you are not a Top 20 witness, I mean your way of communicating and spreading thoughts is just fabulous. keep up the good work @therealwolf 👍.
Thank you for the warm words!
That's a good point about stake that I hadn't considered - that a voter is more than just a reader, he is using his stake. It explains why larger accounts seem to want this - while my $200 stake is a lot for me, my investment is primarily my time and effort and not just what I can get my money to do for me.
I think you are wrong about incentives to play with others. Play is its own incentive, and putting a tangible reward on it can screw up the natural incentives of human interaction. Ever hear of the candle problem?
Hi there! Since you don't have any active post, I'm upvoting this comment as a "thank you" for participating in my #payitforward initiative. :-)
Thanks! (Guess I better get on my next post!)
Changing the reward system will not change anything on Steemit except the reward system. People are crafty and will find a way to get the best ROI no matter what the system is. If the ROI becomes too low, goodbye Steemit.
gInteresting take on the curation dilemma:
https://steemit.com/steem/@tcpolymath/proposal-move-curation-calculations-from-the-blockchain-layer-to-the-interface-layer
Any condenser (steemit, busy) can set themselves as benefactor and pay out the income to the voters increasing their curation reward. They can use different algos to distribute the rewards.
I read over your vlog learn what curation and author what different it..thanks today's i clear about it.. Also keep this vlog we are enriched our learning skill @therealwolf
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This is why I vote for you. You speak my language. ✌
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I respect to your (and others) opinions.
We need some changes in the Steem blockchain!
But, should we change just the curation rewards?
First, I would like to understand why Steem started with 75/25 instead of 50/50?
Steem can be improved in many ways (not just by curation rewards)
It didn’t start with 75/25. It started at 50/50. It should return to 50/50. We need better reasons to risk locking up our investments. Better curation reward incentives help with that.
Exactly.
I read @fyrstikken's post about this and now yours. I am at a point now where I am convinced that 50/50 may be the way to go.
Although it doesn't really stop shit posters from upvoting themselves from another account, it will certainly make things better for people like me who love to actually read and curate.
Especially since I am continually buying more SP yet keep seeing my investment value drop. With a higher curation reward it may help to offset that.
50/50 alone won't stop it, but in addition with a downvote-pool (meaning you would have seperate voting mana for downvotes), spammers could be easily countered.
NO! dont change it! I plan to make a shitload of money by buying a heap of steem (and getting delegations if that helps) posting 9 posts a day of shit- upvote them 100% each and use a bot to respond to your comments. If you change it i will still buy steem but then id actually have to do what i enjoy - read other people's stuff, comment when i feel like it and upvote them to make money. Either way i will make money. Steem needs to align itself to suit it's best interests because i am looking after my best interests. I am extremely selfish i believe in putting on my oxygen mask first so then and only then i may be able to help others if i so choose to
50/50 would be fixing a flaw in STEEMs implementation of game theory basics on the expense of the authors. It has to be modelled carefully with more variables. Also should a direct self-vote simply be filtered technically (yes I know that's easy to circumvent with multiple accounts). "Stakeholders" are not bringing the value in, content and the network effect does. The usual business model of just collecting delegations and selling the power to the highes bidder or running a witness without running a public node, too - that's scrounging on the network and nothing at all better than the big not-so-social networks do.
Besser kann man es nicht sagen ;)
I have been surprised that this has been escalated so soon after the Hard Fork as we are still seeing all the impacts from that change which I still think have not been seen through yet. Yes, accounts are being claimed but how many are been onboarded? How many are getting proper support from the account creators? I think this is still the focus that is important as RCs have been a great addition and have not been leveraged. Let’s focus on new users and the proper way to onboard them and support them with RC delegation and then look at the rewards pool. I agree with your thought on how we need to attract more to the ecosystem but what after? I think this should be done first if not we will continue to foster changes that are not actually utilized... For the record, I do not oppose the change but think that it should not be the focus right now.
Wanted to ask you, what is the purpose of this witness voting?
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This have a good smell. Why we didn't changed that before, when some big players here on steemit rape the reward pool and suck the money out and didnt gives back to the community?
IF, we change this and use this new 50/50- than everyone who want to earn more, he have to upvote and comment more as now.
For me, I like this idea!!
Please wait with 50/50 until I'm a whale ;-)
Yes, I believe that higher curation rewards will be a positive thing. Just as you say, this will drive more folks to manually curate or auto-vote their favorite good authors with higher value rewards. This will also reward the folks that actually take the time to write good posts with a higher value number from those manual curation posts.
It may help shift the balance back to actual curation, rather than people delegating their voting power to bots and keeping just enough SP in their account for .01 or less voting power.
Manual curation that rewards the curators enough to spend their time on reviewing outweigh bot usage will be one of the most effective ways to help the shift back to quality posts instead of the one pic, 5 word shit posts that people bid-bot into three figure payouts. This higher curation payout will also encourage curators to vote at a higher amount on the posts they like knowing they will recover 50% as well.
Of course, the shit posters aren't going to like it, because their value goes down, and effort goes up. Isn't that the idea?
My vote (if it mattered) would be a resounding yes for 50/50.
K
Human behaviour won't change. Automation will increase in the future. Content creators only getting 50% will de-motivate curation. Since you know that if you curate most of that value will go to the curators that leech off a piece of original content. The original content creator invested more energy and did the largest sacrifice.
Therefore they should get the highest reward. There is no incentive to curate new content if most won't go to the real creator. If Stake holders doesn't trust content creators then the network is broken. Since content creators are the future. This would only make big stake holders get more wealth. And a Steem middle class would be further away from reality.
I agree that human behavior generally stays consistent for individuals, although varies widely among them. I do however disagree with your logic. Isn't it the curators votes that ultimately determine the value of the creators post? It may seem valuable to the creator, but generally rewards for just creating and posting are rather small. It is the cumulative upvotes from the curators that give the post it's real value by consensus, not just what the author thinks it is worth. Hence by giving more value to the curators vote, they will tend to vote more often and at a higher weight on the good posts, making them more valuable than the auto-voted spam posts. Or at least I believe that is the intent of the platform. It is definitely what is needed to help reduce the low value posts and keep people interested. If there continues to be an overwhelming amount of garbage posts, people will just leave the platform for something more interesting.