With the recent hardfork we saw the number of ideal 100% votes per day get lowered, but also at the same time their power was raised substantially. Ultimately this was implemented in order to make newer users feel like they were actually contributing to the system by having an actual impact on the dollar amount. It succeeded in that regard, but ultimately I think it was a step a bit too far in the right direction that ends up centralizing the system more than it should.
The biggest problem we had before the hardfork was that because the ideal target number of 100% votes was so high, many people either didn’t bother even voting, or left the site because they could vote even a penny. While I agree this was not ideal, we definitely saw many accounts grow during this period and many more people actually were making money off their articles. The only real problem it created was an inflated steem dollar price way over the pegged amount. The hardfork has definitely fixed the peg problem, but I fear now it will push it too far in the wrong direction.
The good thing about having a large amount of votes per day for people who were invested was that we could support a larger amount of audience and it heavily incentivized against lazy curating. Right now instead of seeing many people spread their voting power out, they are all incentivized to vote on the same 10-20 people every single time they post an article, leaving many people out of the loop now. People, who are creating good content and deserve to be making more than pennies.
While the small ideal voting target doesn’t mean people cant spread out their curations, it does mean that many people simply don’t have to put the work in. I have always been of the thought that the ideal target amount should be at a level where most people have to work to reach, ultimately rewarding those who put the effort into voting, more. I personally save a majority of my voting power for the people who comment on my articles in order to help spread the wealth. I don’t think that is currently happening now.
This is coming from someone who has actually benefitted from the hardfork, but I don’t think it leads to long term survivability within the platform. I would rather see the money more spread out and have the ideal vote target at an amount that forces people to actively curate. Personally I see this target at somewhere between 20-25 votes per day. I think this amount is a healthy medium for many people on the platform who still want to see their votes have power, but at the same time, be given the change to succeed. I want to see a plethora of content, not just the same 10 people on the front page everyday. Incentivization is the most powerful tool that the developers have, so by incentivizing people to all upvote the same 10 people, were doing a disservice to the platform as a whole.
Thanks to @Elyaque for the badges
I agree with you in the short term - we've all been caught off guard by our newly powerful 100% upvotes.
I think the community is starting to catch on though - in some cases, this actually enables us to support the newer / under-appreciated authors. When I see a quality post with less than a dollar of upvotes, I can crank my vote to 100% and provide 40-50 cents - while hardly a huge payout, it's a notable difference compared to my previous 100% vote of 5 cents.
Depends on how the community uses it. I could definitely agree with you that a sweet spot might be a slightly less powerful 100% upvote, maybe half as strong as currently set.
I fully agree with you. I am not long on steemit, but I definitely liked the platform before HF more. The voting culture especially on the minnows level was different and more encouraging. Now we have a hard time and have to be very patient.
Patience does make for great quality. I agree it can be discouraging and hopefully the developers and witnesses are reading comments like these to find improvements.
Without patience this is just a pile of rocks...
Balanced rocks and photo by me
Thank you for the encouraging photo. :-) ;-)
Absolutely! I love to help others achieve wealth and happiness. It all comes back around.
Lots of issues rising due to HF19 I believe. I can't count how many people have come to my posts and commented how much they loved my work yet didn't upvote, or the worst yet the ones that did comment and say I am sorry I can't upvote you because I am out of voting power. I literally have not changed my writing content, still have the same influx of growing followers and commentators but I was doing way better payout wise preHF19 vs what has happened here now a couple weeks later. I also run Steemit Blogger Central and have an army under me in a way, yet averaging from $100 posts to fighting to make $2 a post the last 2 weeks has really making me wonder what is up with Steemit lately.
The effects on me are this, less drive to curate content as often, a bigger push to help others in my project than myself (that being a plus), a huge negative for me though is seeing meme posts make $50 earnings and I sit for hours on top of hours doing research and tighten up my posts for readers...that alone has me questioning HF19. Its going to get a point I think that this voting issue will end up reaching to the top, hit us lower to moderate guys first but there is buddy systems forming with upvoters and in time it could spread out. This concerns me as well...centralization forms that way with groups forming to horde up votes. Personally I did make a good run with Steemit for a guy just banking back post earnings and near 1000 SP in a month but how long should it make sense to scrap $10 a week for the family? Not too much more sense to me personally and why I may cash her out if it doesn't change and move onto trading again. This is something Steemit should be concerned with because that is how everyone I know in here is talking lately. Luckily I am in this for the long term and have a project to keep me active but your points are scary valid on the situation and more so with the lower crowd who keep telling me they are about to call it quits, think we are going backwards here all the sudden
But that is Bullshit., They just are not at 100%, but the are not out of voting power.
i've seen people running out of voting power , new people like me that keeps liking / upvoting things there is no fail save protection on liking / voting people do run dry and leave because they don't understand why .
Ah, see, there is the difference.
They don't run out of voting power (which is afaik impossible), they just run very low and don't understand why.
the system is to complicated for the below average users
@lennstar I actually looked them up on steemnow when they said that, actually they were being honest the 2 that did tell me that, they got down to around 5% so to me that was 0% enough lol. What is going on is people that are new are not aware of the tools out there enough I think, not keeping an eye or grasping how fast that runs down now after HF19. That recovery time is slow to when they drop out so hard on it. Personally though I could care less where my earnings come or go, if it keeps getting bad I will just return to trading coins, buy a little Steem here and there to make up for the downfall going on with my profile lately and hope eventually people wise up on better ways to upvote.
In the end its all about what people choose to do with this, if they want great content then they will upvote what they feel is great content, if they just want to make this about making money alone then I suspect the content creators that do work hard will be hit and miss on truly getting their due values. Personally I am fine with Steemit and HF19 has a few flaws but positive sides too. Its all BETA still so everyone just kind of needs to go along for the ride if they are in this for long term.
No they actually run out! Newbies don't have that feature of setting voting power and if you're new and vote 10 times in like 1-2 hours you're out COMPLETELY!
As a minnow digging for gold I find it difficult to choose who to upvote and who to just pass by. While it is impossible to have zero voting power, what good is my $0.0001 vote to anyone?
There are many more minnows than whales, and this is a good thing, but the minnows should at least have the ability to give a consistent $0.01 upvote when they see something worth the vote.
Before the HF I was DOUBLING my payouts every day! A week after the payout, if I'm extremely fortunate, my posts and thoughtful comments make around $1.
The atmosphere has changed from this
To this ...
Image credit Giphy
We all just have to hang in there, its all about 2 options, are we in this for the long run or short term. Me I am in this the long run, I may have worded my comment where I seem to be about to quit but I am meaning its the users I talk to lately threatening that, me I mine so when its slow here I just run off and do other stuff, do get a little less active but you have to kind of weigh what is good for your personal gains and not. Right now this went from full time here to more of a hobby at the moment. But i have a project called Steemit Blogger Central and that is my full time gig. Honestly its just a growing pain right now, any HF will do that, few tweaks, little education on the usage from the new people and they will turn it around.
It would be nice to see the votes spread out a little more evenly that's for sure. Although it does feel good now that my vote has a value lol I have mixed feelings about hf19
I suggest if the voting slider includes how much estimated vote power you have remaining, people would be using the slider more often and more carefully.
I agree, the problem (as I see it) HF19 tried two things at ones:
They should have done one before the other, so they could monitor the behavior of voting / curating better!
But now we're here, so I guess the best way forward is indeed changing the voting to 20 votes and reduce the Voting Power to 50%.
I fully agree on this and am hoping the next hard fork would be for the better as well. There will always be people jumping hoops and trying to rig the system, and one hard fork doesn't fix it all. It's one drop at a time to fill the bucket. Hopefully the next hard fork takes us further unto steem becoming a better platform.
Exactly. That's what I keep saying to people. I've invited a lot of friends to Steem and when they didn't like what they were getting from their posts. I told them it was way worse before for people who have less Steem and they just have to be patient because Steem gets better and better because of the consensus in Hardforks.
Thank you again for reminding me. :)
This is the biggest issue that I see right now along with the fact that some are upvoting themselves almost exclusively. Or the circle jerk groups that are essentially doing the same thing. The idea was right but didnt work out well.
I agree with your thoughts.
I also think it might be great if we had a separate flagging power. I wrote an article on it earlier tonight. That would allow us to flag out some of the spam in places like the "Business" tag in Trending, without using up all our voting power in a negative fashion that helps no users directly (beyond the reward reallocation) and nullifies curation rewards, does not build followers, etc.
A separate power for flags would be an awesome idea. We should also require users to have a minimum reputation of 50 to flag a post so that they understand what the community values and what it does not. That would reduce flag abuse and make flags more "fair". It would also reduce "revenge-flags" because the person being flagged would lose the reputation needed for a backlash.
I definitely think Rep could be used here effectively, too.
@calaber24p this makes alot of sense, I know somewhat understand why some great content blogs make cents. hopefully the correction is made and things move in the right direction. Thank you for keeping us informed!
For new on the platform is not easy to get known and get upvote no matter if your blog is good or not
It is a great article sir.. very helpful information.. thanks for sharing.. keep it up..
@calaber24p this comes at a time that I am very curious to know how steemit really works. thank you so much for sharing.
I made some $$$ for about 1 week after Hard Fork but now it doesn't seem to be adding up
SAME
Hi @calaber24p, I agree with you. I'm a newbie and what I have seen so far is that it is really hard to get noticed. It's also a bit frustrating to see that lots of the high-yielding posts are either re-blogging news articles, cartoons or one-liners (or a combination thereof) instead of good and original content. Would the upcoming hard fork 20 fix this to some extent or is this just tackling the duplicate account issue?
I'm still a little new here but I had the same thought when 19 came out. I'm definitely more discerning with my votes now as I have only a few to go around. That's okay. I still like it when someone reads what I wrote. Even if they don't UpVote. I guess that means I'll have to try harder next time! Good post.
A very astute observation Mr @calaber24p it appears that the motivation has moved to profit over quality of information. I have noticed this as well with some very good articles I felt were worthy of a good showing bringing in less than a buck on several occasions. It has led me to the exact same conclusion that the only thing that seems to pay very well on steemit is curation of those who get all the upvotes no matter the value of the content. It is as if content is irrelivant as the old adage in; "money talks and BS walks" stand true once again.
I am not sure what can be done, except that we keep trying to support and promote the worthy content as such the case might be. So good job at making this known and hopefully it will have a positive impact on some very talented writers as well as adding some awareness to this problem.
I am seeing a lot of the same things. I have seen a lot less interaction over the last week, and my posts are thorough, unique, original content and I just am kind of surprised after having such good interaction the first week or so I was on here to seeing such a rapid decline. I hope to see some new concepts for H20.. But as I always say, I am hopeful if we all just keep sticking with it and building our SP and friendships here, we will eventually get noticed for our good content even if it doesn't feel like it right now. My followers are going up - so hopefully more interaction will too!
This is definitely a problem with more and more people joining the platform and creating more and more quality content. I personally like to browse and upvote that content but I now have to be concerned about my voting power.
But isn't that practice (if widespread among the high SP individuals) what leads to
People save their votes for their "loyal" followers instead of just objectively voting for quality content.
I hope my followers not only understand, but appreciate that I'm trying to stay true to the stated purpose of Steemit and upvoting quality content wherever I find it. I hope they don't get upset if their comment didn't earn my upvote today, keep at it.
You make a lot of sense here. I have personally experienced a drop in activity since hf19. And I can't help noticing my peers buy their whale votes in order to make it worthwhile. I have also noticed the plethora of services offered to buy influence. It is the same story over again, the rich get richer and the poor stay poor. The increased "influence" noobs was supposed to get with hf19 is a short lived one. The votes cast in one session quickly drains the power to such a degree it is pointless.
What is needed is more influence from day one and less influence to those who can be described as gods under the current conditions.
I'm not complaining on my own behalf, but the long term growth will die off without motivated recruits. And if I don't see a real incentive for noobs to join, I'll be gone before everything stagnates.
My thought is, "Communities" in the next HF will radically change the game here. A lot of voting could be confined to niches, and the big earners, who produce generalized content, will earn less.
Reassessing the ideal vote strength after HF20 should be interesting!
I'm new to Steem, but I've read the whitepaper, the wiki, and dozens of posts before signing up. I think your target of 20 to 25 votes a day is about right... I do however suspect that the same people aren't always landing on the trending tab because of financial incentives. That's definitely a part of it but it's also that they're the only ones that produce quality content that you might see in a magazine or major media site. There's a very low barrier to entry to sign up here and unfortunately the number of users that can write compelling content is the minority. Which isn't a dig against Steem users, it's just the reality that producing content that is popular is hard. It's a skill that takes time to learn.
This is a push me pull you kind of problem. We have INCREDIBLE bloggers like @papa-pepper and @jerrybanfield who stick on the trending and hot pages because they are incredible. However we also see people who buy their way to trending either by "Powering Up" with outside investments or using things like @randowhale. Beyond the paid path to trending, there are people who copy-paste valuable content and make it to trending (raking in a few hundred dollars at a time) until they're "caught" by @steeemcleaners then they just dump the account and make a new trash account to keep going.
Can you go too far in the right direction?
I don't know fully, but I have seen bit changes.
I only joined about 2 weeks ago. I was only here for a couple days before the hardfork. It does seem like a few people are reaping the major benefits. I am not against this - I don't think anything should be super easy. I am under the impression that it took those whales a lot of time/effort/ or money to get to the point they are at.
Also, people seem to be fixated on more users. Won't that make it even harder to make any meaningful rewards as a minnow?
Hopefully developers will take notice and correct the course. This is the power of decentralization and capitalism- corrections through experimentation and "invisible market force"! :)
You make some good points, they could have made it around 20 votes per day instead of changing it to 10 directly from 40.
I agree that the spread has been pushed into a more "focused" vote, trying to get those golden 10 in on the posts that voters feel will make the most "reward".
This has resulted in a lot more "bot-voting" and "vote-by-proxy" which is great for people with established audiences and good content but horrible for undiscovered talent because people aren't reading and curating, they're following curation "trains".
It's a give and take
If you're after the curation reward you should curate for ROI. If, however, you're here to see the community grow and to see new talent flourish, you should read a whole lot more and curate for value.
That's my two cents...
Photo by me. Reuse permitted as long as you don't rename the file
I also upvote many comments as well, and while I still find myself often tweaking the ideal "vote weight" for my voting habits, I've found the slider to be rather indispensable in "dealing" with the HF19 changes.
A big part of the problem that I see is that the slider is not available for those with under 500SP. If smaller users (say, 50 to 100SP minimum) could also adjust their vote weight as they become more familiar with the platform, that may also help balance things out a bit more.
Imo it just goes to one thing. Make a vote slider and let people choose the overall general voting percentage given when casting. Just a general "I want my votes to use 57% of their casting power" and set it there. If people leave it at 100% it stays like how it is now, if they wanna change it let them.
Maybe I'm out to lunch here but it seems simple to me, let the people choose themselves what works best for them.
There is a vote slider, you either have to be a dolphin (1mVEST) or higher, or you can use http://www.chainbb.com
I was a dolphin, that's for individual votes is it not? I'm talking about a general slider not the one for every post. That one is absolutely useless.
So just to double check the slider you're talking about is the one for every single individual post right?
Yeah, I misunderstood what you were saying. Now I see you want a general "default" vote. I think best coding for that would be for the post slider to "stick" where you set it so you could still vote higher or lower on each post individually.
Maybe even a text box in your settings to set "default vote" and your individual slider would always start there.
Yeah! Exactly! Now there's an idea. Sounds like you're a coder as well so you probably have a much more educated opinion on executing this than I do.
I just feel like this issue is so minuscule. It seems so simple to me, let the people choose their own vote weight.
You hit the nail on the head, I could not put it better
Today I have 550 followers. I noticed that out of 550 I only get a few clicks. I wonder if there is something missing. The hard fork was good for one day for me. the first day. that was it. after that, unless @librosist see it, I am getting $.25
But, who am I to complain. I never posted anything on youtube or FB and expected money I just knew I wasn't getting paid.
So will someone explain what is hardfork 19 ???? it is jargon to me.
thank you so much.
I agree with too far, I just hope we didn't fall off the edge
I have similar thinking with you. I prefer give priority to give steemians who leaved comment on my post also steemian who give only vote for me, because they are true follower for me so I must appraciate it. Also I give vote for potential newbies and authors. Nice posting.
It's hard to see how a financial reward, however small, can be attached to curation when the average person on this site doesn't really know much about how it works and is just randomly upvoting whatever takes their fancy. I appreciate the opportunity to be paid for this menial task, but it seems that unless you know how to game the system you can't make anything resembling a wage on Steemit, and the few dollars you make are not worth spending your leisure time on, when you are just trying to relax after your "real job".
I've posted about this issue several times on the platform. But Steemit's #1 goal should always be to encourage new users to get to a "middle class" level on the platform, rather than helping popular authors make even more money.
The quadratic voting system is doing exactly the latter one, and it's for the worse. The issue is that they actually think this is a "good thing" and that popular users should get a disproportionate amount of the rewards.
I think that's a big mistake, and it will only encourage the majority of new users to dump the platform in the long-term. Plus, it will give Steemit a bad image outside of the platform, similar to how Digg got the reputation that it was "gamed", so people started moving on to Reddit, a much more democratized platform in comparison. Right now, the Steemit founders seem to be moving in the Digg direction, rather than the Reddit direction.
minnows having hard time wats the solution in current scenario?
I dont think so that Steemit can ever reward the deserving.. because the same happens in life too ;)
I have not changed my voting habits at all since the hard fork. I still vote about 70 to 80 votes per day on posts and comments that I like.
I think you are right here, well thought out.
What you don't mention is that because self voting now pays more and we have less of our own votes going around, more people are "defecting" to self voting.
I think 20-25 votes per day is a good target too.
😊
What a splendid and reasoned article. I completely agree. Unfortunately we are seeing less voting and less interaction and people sticking to the people they know for votes.
I think, due to the fact, that is very slowly recovering Voting Power to vote have become less.
What do You think, should we not lower the threshold VESTS from 500 to 250, so we, beginners, could adjust the Power of the Vote?
Thanks for the perspective. Yes it does seem the same people are always at the top with their photos and recipes.
I can say I am not putting in long hours writing and researching articles these days, like I was. I believed good writing and good content would rule the day. Money shouldn't be the driving force, but it is incentive to continually produce good content. The biggest change for me was being able to upvote those who took the time to comment. I read and commented a lot and I often run out of $$ to tip comments and replies. Especially good articles with only a few views.