Hardfork 19 has been a great success, except for one potential issue. Anecdotally, I see lots of curators vote 10%-25% for others' post, but give themselves or their voting colluders a full 100% vote. Many do these for comments as well. This self-vote is 4 times as powerful as before, and thus, self-upvoting can potentially account for at least 4x as much of the reward pool as before. I say at least because they would vote others with a lower weight to save their much more costly VP, and thus more of the reward pool overall goes towards self-upvotes beyond the 4x greater strength. Many pointed out this abuse vector before HF19, but Steem developers and witnesses seem to have turned a blind eye to this potential issue.
I'm no developer, I don't know how to access this data. What I'm sure all of us would like to see is how the self-voting behavior has changed post-HF19.
So developers - we need some statistics. Basically, a chart that plots the self-upvotes potential payout as a proportion of all author rewards, daily, over time. If we can go back to earlier in the year pre-no-whale-experiment, that'd be ideal.
I hope to be proven wrong, but we might have an issue here. Of course, voters may choose to do as they please, but if significant amount of the reward pool goes towards self-voting, it could be detrimental or at least sub-optimal to the network.
Addendum:
Something else to think about. For a $100 upvote, it currently requires only a 125,000 SP account. That could easily reward themselves thousands of dollars per day, cashing in both curation and author rewards.
Edit - To clarify, I didn't intend this to be a discussion about the ethics of self-voting. We just want to see the effects of it. Most of the comments seem to be about how self-voting is acceptable or not. That's quite alright, but the end question here is - does this change in HF19 make Steem less attractive to new users?
I might be strange, but since HF19 I've stopped self-upvoting on comments/replies, which goes against the pre-HF19 advice.
I want to save my 10 or so daily votes for really good posts...from other people. But then, I'm here for the long haul and am looking for good authors to read over time.
I would love to think that most of Steem would think along those lines, but there'll always be people who want to cash in the money where there's an opportunity. I completely understand them too, and would never accuse them of any wrongdoing. Blame the system.
My strategy is different, I keep voting everything good I find at usual voting strengths and as a result my voting power is down to 5%. So even if I self-upvoted, it would not be worth much. Were I to vote on those posts with 10% strength, I'd save my VP at 80%, and then my self-upvote would be far more powerful. If everyone starts doing this, a significant portion of the reward pool goes towards self-upvotes.
Good point. I agree with you; I don't think everyone should have the same voting strategy as we're all here for our own reasons. I'm planning on holding back on votes for a couple of days except for stuff I really like so I can build my strength back up to have a greater impact - not that even my 100% vote counts for that much!
Directly on code, do you think self-votes and vote collusion should have reduced rewards? That is, constantly voting for the same user has decreasing rewards, or something along those lines.
Self-voting does often not be intended to cash-out, but to give the own post more visibility in the HOT section. Take a look how much posts are created every hour. It is more than fair, that someone uses his SP to give his own post a little push for more visibility. (Assumed, that his interest is in spreading his ideas.)
Yes, in this sense a useful invention. Those who have the power of the steеm are large, they can always be at the top of the comment line.
Of course I see also a problematic consequence of self-voting to get more visibility. The more SP someone has to self-vote his post, the more visibility gets it and therefor the more votes from other Steemians it can get. In German theres a saying: "Der Teufel scheißt immer auf den größten Haufen." (The devil always shits on the biggest heap.) In other words: Those who have lots of money are getting even more (compared to people with lesser wealth). But that's the way how capitalism works.
Needless to mention. Nothing wrong with self-voting even if it were a cash-out. The issue is when it commands a significant portion of the reward pool to the detriment of the network. To be clear, the issue here is not their motivations behind it, rather focusing on the end result and effects of it.
I'm curious to see the statistics as well, how much of all the rewards are coming from self-voting and how this has changed by HF19. Thanks for this interesting post.
Nothing wrong with self voting. When you bought SP you bought the right to get your comments higher up or make more chance to become hot or trending with your post. Thats the whole idea behind SP right? Getting more influence in the platform.
Obviously, and that's what I say in my post. However, if a significant portion of the reward pool just goes towards rewarding stakeholders, the platform would be increasingly less attractive to creators and newcomers, and that could stifle growth.
I think the rewards for creators are very good right now, I see many posts earning hundreds of dollars and some even thousands. Newcomers are important, but if they all get free money by signing up and without effort is not right too.
I think it is a very good motivation to show the newcomers that they have to create excellent content, or have to be very active in curation and commends or invest in SP to reach something here. As it is in real life.
Finally, for a valuable platform to be able to contain real value, people have to put money in. So why don't the investors / stakeholders deserve some rewards? As an investor I should never just buy Steem without the influence, because the inflation is way to high. I bought SP for the influence and possibility to make some money out of it. Steemit works because of a ballans between content creators and investors.
I upvote almost any post I comment on, most of my own comments, and any replies to those comments. I figure that has to be a pretty fair approach personally. & of course I upvote plenty of posts I have no comment for too, or any particularly great comment I see, but as far as the "selfish" behavior this is my approach.
You just described what I was thinking @liberosist . To be honest, the change of linear rewards and 4x voting power is not that efficient. For sure its the beginning and everyone seems to be enjoying their "high worth of vote" but it opened the room for selfish actions. I'm sure this happiness gonna end soon and people will start complaining what is going on. The happiness is mainly due to increase in pending rewards because of HF 19 update in my view.
I am more in favor of "Quadratic Reward Curve". This linear change is not creating enough "equality" in my honest opinion. The only difference is that, our vote is now worth more than before. You'll see mostly those people trending well who have huge SP (and who could vote first for themselves for $300 or something) then some whale bots will come and up-vote after 10-20 minutes and hurray, they cross 1,000$ in matter of an hour . How fair it is!
Anyways, these are my thoughts. I wish this update could reset to previous one which was far more attractive. You had chance that a whale will come and vote then your post will fly. Right now you need 5-6 whales to vote on 100% voting power which is unlikely for anyone to expect (except as a surprise)
You'll see number of views is decreased therefore, the number of votes are decreased. Intention behind this update might be great but honestly from the way it looks like currently, it's not working that well. And man believe me, it could really harm the community. It also opened the room for circle-jerk.
Day-by-day report of some data:
https://steemdb.com/labs/hf19
The page takes a minute or two to load (it's crunching a LOT of data) if it's not already cached. It displays voting by date, the total number of votes, the average weight of votes, the total number of self-votes, and the average weight of self-votes for the last 30 days.
The data will only update once a day or so.
Have you tried http://asksteem.com?
@thekyle
I spoke about this in a post of mine about selfish minnows.
It's even worse when people will upvote their own comments on your post, while neglecting to give YOU an upvote.
I would be curious to see the actual data on these types of behaviours.
Most of us can only vote with 100% voting power or don't vote at all...
That will change at 500sp.
I'm just not there yet...
For new users who don't want to buy Steem but earn it, the slider should pop-up at around 100/125 SP!
IF you use the steemvoter.com you can lower your voting power on your auto votes.
To be fair, it's not just minnows, and I don't blame anyone for doing so. As always, blame the system.
I think part of it comes from not having a slider available when you are publishing a post.
Good point, but I doubt it'd make a significant difference. Those who really don't want to vote themselves at 100% can simply vote after the post is made.
Agreed, but right now it is an easy excuse. If we made it easier to lower the VP I think more would.
This would be a great idea! I think it would solve some issues! A few times I have not upvoted my post and done so later on (but at 100%) :/
I 100% agree with this. It seems like views and votes have actually gone down on individuals posts.
I have no data, but from the small amount of browsing I do, it seems like people have been upvoting their own comments more so than in the past. If people do this that is their choice, but by doing this is this causing more harm than good?
I have noticed that as well, hence this post. It could be harmful and make the platform less attractive to new users. Depends on the data, and that's what I'm requesting here.
allow self vote but cap incentive at 2 cents and not more than that.tweak algorithm accordingly so it serves the purpose of visibility but will not be detrimental to the network
It's something to think about, were just a few days in.
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This is interesting. I am brand new here, and I have been declining to upvote my own posts majority of the time simply because it seems tacky haha. I get there is a monetary incentive here, but we gotta have class right?
When there's an opportunity for making big $$$, all class goes out the window :) And who could blame anyone to seize a lucrative opportunity?
agree!!!
It is a thing to give a serious thought about.
Good post. Usually, there are unseen consequences when changes are introduced.
I think some of the whales and dolphins have put in a lot of effort and actual money and so they are compelled to vote for themselves sometimes to reward themselves. I think most people are quite generous in here and they vote for others a lot. I see a few self upvotes here and there but I think they are still quite low
They were very low earlier, and now I see more of it. Whether it's enough to be a problem is what we want to find out; hence the request for data.
@liberosist I was wondering after the Fork, is there still a curation period where if you vote on a post really fast after it get launched you get less rewards? Compared to after 30 minutes...
That has not changed, it's still the same. You get 0% curation rewards at 0 seconds after post is made, up to 100% linearly at 30 minutes.
@liberosist Thanks for confirming this
Creative post!
God job!
Nice post...
I think anyone who don't upvote themself 100% , They can do it later, and i heard that the best time to upvote is about 30minutes after the post
comes great power comes great responsibilty. i guesz in some cases here not really applied.
as you said, it is up to them to do the self vote, as it can generate so much money.
we could hope that the developer will hear this issue, so that they will improve on the next HF
i think that self-voting is acceptable.
but we need to vote for others.^^
balance is more important ...any of time
thank you for sharing~
So maybe you need to cancel the vote for your own comments?
I'm not gonna say how I feel about it. But I would love to see the stats and see how much difference there is if any for that matter. Uovoting there own content helps give it visibility. It can be pretty hard to stand out among the crowd right now. Especially if you are new to the platform and don't have a reputation or following yet.
Not that I pay much attention to the intricacies of the steemit reward scheme, I to have noticed a shift. I've not as yet upvoted any of my comments and don't intend to in the foreseeable future (I'm usually around 30-50% VP anyway lol). Perhaps those like-minded may continue to stay on the straight and narrow for the benefit of the whole?
I dont think it makes much of a difference. Nobodys gonna get rich just posting B.S. so that they can vote for themselves. People will vote for themselves and whatever catches their eye as well. For it to have any effect, they would already have to be highly effective here as well; and then if that's the case then I guess they've earned that perk. Since everyone's playing off the same set of rules its not realy an issue. Tho, I'm certainly not putting down your suggestion. I'd like to see the stats too!!! I have a few upvotes on my comments that I put there myself. I had thought at first it just seemed classless; but then when explaining how this worked to people who had not seen it yet I used my own comments as examples. As a general rule I dont think its the most tastefull approach.
Tagging @arcange @penguinpablo @ontofractal - I hope you guys don't mind. There's considerable demand for these statistics.