Yesterday I released an article where I suggested that the Page Rank algorithm used by Google might be a viable alternative to the current voting system. Today I would like to add some additional insights that I have had.
Using a simple page rank simulator I played around with various graph structures to get a better understanding of the graph theory and behavior of Page Rank.
What I discovered is that in a world where everyone is equal, those who create links amongst themselves gain weight relative to those who do not cross link. I also discovered that those who give links without receiving lose direct influence, though they may gain via indirect influence.
Negative Weights don't Work
Using Page Rank you cannot have edges with negative weights, this means that it is not possible have your voting influence countered, especially if you are a bad whale.
Variation on Page Rank - Recursive Delegated Voting
Many people have been asking for the ability to delegate VESTS to other users who could then use those VESTS to cast votes. To really work well, it should be possible to redelegate your votes an infinite number of times. With delegated voting it should also be possible to "cancel out" someone else's vote with your own vote. This is already possible with bot wars, but with delegated negative voting we can bypass the network spam.
Scalability
This algorithm has many of the same scalability considerations as Page Rank. This means that each account would be limited in the number of accounts it could delegate to. Furthermore, there would need to be a minimal delegated amount.
Benefits
If implemented it would be relatively trivial to police vote spammers as well as those who would abuse the power of negative voting to silence legitimate voters.
Whales would be able to delegate their VESTS to other users who can use the increased influence to provide better curation and increase the value of the VESTS.
The Evil Whale Problem
We live in a world filled with evil whales. The power elite who control our economy and the printing presses are willing to risk burning down the economy to increase their power and wealth. Their interests are clearly not aligned with the masses.
While Steem is young and has significant upside growth potential and relatively little economic power, the easiest way for whales to grow their power, wealth, and influence is to work with everyone else. Once Steem achieves a level of entrenchment similar to Facebook, Twitter, etc, the whales can misbehave with relative impunity because everyone is "locked in".
It is critical that the masses of dolphins, minnows, and good whales, have the power to efficiently neutralize bad actors for the benefit of all. I am committed to building a system that empowers people who work for the benefit of all and disempowers those who attempt to work against the best interest of the wider community.
Conclusion
Creating a distributed, self-governing, mob that works reliably to allocate resources for the betterment of the whole rather than the individual is challenging. As the stakes are raised it becomes increasingly difficult to prevent abuse. Recursive Delegated Voting is a variation on Page Rank that might just do the trick.
I would like to thank everyone who has participated in yesterday's discussion.
Just take into account that the simulations you made was on past behavior where they didn't know about the new "page rank" algorithm you want to implement now... I don't take a position here... I am just curious how the community will adjust their behavior when they exactly know how the new rules are "working"...
PS Remember what we thought about the future of the "comments" on our platform and the "rules" we abandoned the last minute... without new rules and the comments are working just fine....
Not only are comments working fine, but there is a system in place to keep spam and trolls in check (although with the loss of @wang).
What other site has managed to accomplish this, while at the same time monetarily reward users for commenting with value?
I had begun to lose hope as a certain frequent "troll" started making my life miserable and quite a few others. I originally would have tried to rip him a new one, but through learning from Rok-Sivante's open letter to the hacker decided to put myself in the "trolls" shoes (however filthy they might be).
The next day the reputation system dropped and his comments were made invisible unless you clicked to see and his posts were greyed out. Absolutely brilliant way to work on a decentralized platform. He isn't silenced, but his vocal cords have been removed and he now has a whisper, which was the result of karma.
He still can slowly work his way back into a reputation that allows more people to see his content.
This is the opposite of what Twitter did with Milo Yiannopoulos Twitter Permanently Suspends Conservative Writer Milo Yiannopoulos. And @dollarvigilante hinted Milo may be coming to steemit.
This could be huge, since a centralized platform silenced someone for what I felt was a very minor tweet.
That being said, the way comments have evolved, I have confidence that the "page rank" algorithm or any other idea that gets rolled out in the near future will be innovative and solve the current problem of scalability and voting from a single account by distributing voting to trusted people instead of one. Because even if you can have multiple people log into one account, the many different voters will still use the same voting power of the users account (unless something else has been implemented).
Great minds are working on this. From the hack, to the comment section changes, to the reputation system, developers have performed far better than I could have hoped and this is only BETA!
Hahaha I'm so glad they added images for comments, that makes this place golden sometimes XD
A bold statement, but I hope everyone can work together to achieve this.
Statement's like this one are the reason I spend half my life here now. Viva La Steemit!
Steemit is still flying under the radar, but if and when it goes viral there will be a social media war. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Wordpress, LinkedIn, Pinterest... all will suddenly looking to close the giant black hole that is sucking away their users. Preparing for a coordinated and well capitalized bad whale attack may very well be life-or-death in the coming months. Kudos to Dan for getting on this now!
Wow, scary thought! I am glad it is being worked on too. Maybe we can convert the bad whales that infiltrate from those other platforms! Maybe not ol' Zucky himself though. Would we ever want to limit the amount of Steem Power that can be purchased?
Well said, yes this is how I see it playing out also. At the moment its like preparing the armour before you know exactly the nature of the attack to come.
Steemit is the NAFTA of social media. Giant sucking sound.
You are creating an organised self-regulated anarchy system :)
I like the ideas that you came out with after yesterday's announcement.
Yes, the limits should exist to prevent thing to spiral out of control.
Limits both for delegating votes and for limiting or taming the bad whales.
This journey is becoming more and more interesting. I like it.
Thanks @dantheman:).
Looks like you are moving forward with this quickly.
Whilst I agree the bad whale problem exists and could likely become more of a problem as the platform becomes bigger, I think community vigilance will be key here as it often is.
We have already seen the community point out when things are inherently unfair or when people are misbehaving in a way that goes against the spirit of the platform:
We have seen successful campaigns to weed out those committing fraud, plagiarism and other methods to game the system and those that harm the community.
I believe part of this is because people on Steemit feel they have a personal stake in this platform. We all believe in it and we want to succeed.
I would never have said the same for Facebook even at my height of using that platform because to me Facebook was a faceless corporation using me and my fellow users to make money.
I never felt like I had any kind of say in what they did and I absolutely never felt like I had a stake in it's success or failure. If it died I would simply have moved on to a new platform.
That is what is beautiful about Steemit and what is most powerful about it.
As long as you and @ned and the team keep listening, evolving and incorporating us into the equation than we will be able to deal with all problems as they arise.
I look forward to the continuing evolution of Steemit.
Google Page Rank uses a recursive algorithm because correlation across a high, diverse and strongly connected set of referrers is needed to make spoofing hard enough and thwart sybil attacks. In the case of Steem, the cost of Steem Power is enough to prevent sybil attacks in voting.
There are also potential attack vectors like denial-of-service attack based on leveraging the cycle detection algorithm from a linear increase of controlled accounts, or vote "double spend" as a side effect of reallocating delegated voting power just after a graph rebalancing.
More details in this post
Maybe even add a feature, where you can set the % of how much you split your delegated curation rewards.
master yoda of steemit I want to be...
and may the upvote be with me... ^^
You are so wrong. :P I heard that in "Yoda voice" in my head as I read it. lol :)
this made me lol. take an upvote
hahahaha u won my upvote too :D
As I suggested in reply to your post yesterday, the more "invisible" this delegated voting thing can be, the better. If people could log in, go about their business voting on articles, and under the hood their account rank is computed based on these votes, that would be beautiful.
You've already done this with author and curation rewards; almost nobody actually knows how they work, but they work really well and highly exploitation-resistant.
One of the problems I find, is that people don't seem to be curating comments as much as they should. Which is the real meat and potatoes which brings more engagement to the content on steem.
I wrote about it just last night but I scrolled off already. :)
Great post I hope developers see this and put some of these ideas to use!!! Check out my idea to advertise for Steemit:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@acassity/snapchat-steemit-geofilter-live-in-salt-lake-city-at-the-city-creek-mall-1st-geofilter-of-many-planned-to-come-for-steemit
I like your idea, but I don't think this is the right place to advertise your content. It's kind of link-spam if your comment doesn't really have anything to do with the topic brought up by the OP. I'm not saying that is your intention, but it does take away from the conversation.
And I used to do the same thing, because it is hard to gain traction with a small influence, so I am not trying to badmouth you at all. But think if everyone did that with the ideas they had (whether good or bad) how much less valuable would the comment section be? Sometimes you can add a link that is relevant to the convo and that's good, but I don't think this does.
Also for links it looks a lot better if you put links inside brackets the name you want to appear inside the first [] followed immediately by website in here () @acassity link
I found this @acassity guy spam posting this into a lot of other people's posts. I down-voted it in a few posts where it was completely off topic, and he retaliated by going to my blog and downvoting my content :(
A real asset to the Steemit community we have here...
That's strange since he has a high reputation, but I'd try to bring it up to someone with a bit more influence, but I will note that you were treated this way
I was surprised too. Thanks :)
"I hope developers see this", I chuckled.
I just want to say that I fully support delegated voting.
Many of us try to contribute for the benefit of all, each one of us in our own ways, with both success and failures but it doens't matter.
But if there are some who like curating and reading and spend their time ans energy on the platform, it could be a great idea if some whale is busy that they can delegate their voting powers to other people.
Anyways, thank you for all the work in trying to bring us this distributed system and maintaining it!
Agreed some people like creating, some finding/promoting. There is room for many types of people here.
Hopefully a decentralized marketplace can be implemented so and those that neither like blogging or curating can still sell items at extremely low exchange fees unlike ebay. The reputation system should keep people in check and prevent abuse.
Its all great, but how will you judge on who is the good guy and who is the bad guy?
I mean its not as simple as it sounds. Especially by keeping the tag "freedom of speech"
The concept is that this will be done by the masses of good guys.
What about masses of bad guys?
Bad actors are usually isolated, not a mass-movement. If the majority is populated by bad-actors, we have way more serious problems in our hands than how to share rewards etc.
I still dont get how you get to decide who is who
@alexgr I'm not convinced about the isolation of bad-actors. The world is full of gangs and organized politicians.
we need a Day of Whale Silence. it can shows how system work. While we can taste of whale taste)))
In this system, we, the people steemit, will live comfortably and well. Thank you for making the system better!
The algorithms you are implementing are akin to solving humanity's problems! Can we share resources equally and appropriately? This is the dawn of a new age!
I lock forwoard to an more fair and great volume on post votes. I think this project you thinking out now could be a great opotunity for steemit. I think also a part of the develoing could be hard in the start. But i hope you figure it out.
I am glad to be an early adopter of this, and join the journey thru developing and beta.
Keep up the good work, i realy like this project.
I have drafted a more detailed proposal based on my ideas outline in the first post. Take a look and let me know.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@mrosenquist/steemit-proposal-for-developer-and-community-evaluation
But the question arises, who will decide what is useful and what is harmful for Steemit? And if those who decide make a mistake? What if one whale will offer a better solution than the hundreds of dolphins?
Those who have the most to lose have the most say. There is no other way.
I don't want to get too philosophical, but the problem is a good leader. You can't replace a good leader with ten bad. It won't work. You can't replace a good doctor ten bad. It is not equivalent replacement.
I would have thought about the criteria of a good leader. It would be right, in my opinion, to develop a system of symptoms, which can give a numerical assessment of the quality of leadership of the person.
And it would be right to think about the system of education which can make good leaders.
You have to make one good doctor. Ten bad doctors do not help. How to separate the bad from the good doctor. Here is what is in my opinion a significant issue.
What good is democracy if the people choose bad leaders. If people are not able to distinguish good leaders from bad. If you don't think about it, all the problems of the existing social system will appear here.
But it turns out that the power will be in the hands of a certain group of rich people. What is the difference with current social system? Nowadays in modern society the power belongs to the group of rich people who are corrupt and ceased to think about the interests of the majority. Steemit will give power to another group of rich people. How can you be sure that they will not act as irresponsibly as some of the current leaders of society?
Please don't get me wrong, Dan. I ask these questions not because I'm against you, but because I want to make Steemit more perfect.
The difference between the current social system and Steem is this: in Steem power is closely related to responsibility, which means those who have power and abuse it act against their own long-term interest.
This close link between power and responsibility is not perfect here in Steem, but still much better than anywhere else.
A man may be mistaken in regard to his long-term interests. Isn't it?
A small child does not want to learn, he wants to play. But in his best long-term interest to get a good education. However, he does not understand this. Because of the foolishness we sometimes act against our own interests.
No one wants to deliberately act against his interests. But due to foolishness (and therefore mistakes) it happens. Do the leaders of Steemit completely free from making mistakes?
Why is it better?
This is true but it has nothing to do with Steem. No system can protect you from human mistakes when intentions are good. All we can do is align the interests of those who have power with the interests of the whole system. And this is what Steem does. There is no other way.
As @dantheman has said: those who have the most power in Steem, have the most to lose if things go wrong. This is not necessarily true in other economic systems, e.g. corporations.
The difficulty is to determine what is good and what is bad for Steemit. This is the difficulty. It's like in medicine. One good doctor can prescribe the right treatment, while ten bad doctors will prescribe wrong. But if they have the same power of voice, the patient will not recover.
So if a hypothetical "evil cabal of corporations" wanted to make their bad whales to subvert the system, there is no recourse, right? We just have to live with the 'might makes right' system?
If I am not mistaken some weeks ago you made the point of corporations buying in and advertisement, sorry I can't recall what exactly you said, but essentially you expect that there will be some future actors with deep pockets that will then be able to exert their influence. It seems like that eventuality needs some way of curtailing it's potential for harm. And if that is the case, then perhaps the notion of "Those who have the most to lose have the most say" needs to be adjusted in some fashion.
Considering this platform, if it lives up to it's ultimate potential, can disrupt the business model of so many industries, the possibility of just such a subversion is probable. It's not even illegal (not like that would prevent them anyway).
I understand that there is more to the algorithm than that statement, but it would seem that we can't be married to that idea as an immutable fact. There is the possibility of there being some other way.
It seems that any overt advertising would not get upvoted, and get forgotten. Unless a swarm of millennials join, then it might begin looking like mypace. Doubt it. But deep pocket influencers could put out disinformation.
"I am committed to building a system that empowers people who work for the benefit of all and disempowers those who attempt to work against the best interest of the wider community." Music to my ears!
I am curious, what is the definition of a 'bad whale'? Someone who powers down and doesn't care about growing Steemit?
I feel as though I am a very kind very active person in the steemit community, yet there is no solid hierarchy to compare myself too, which is why I do not. I love steemit and ill keep posting until my brain cup runs dry. Viva la steemit!
Looking forward to the growth of steemit! Cheers mate!!
This could actually work, but its all about selfishness of individuals, so if we can overstep this could be great
Nice post. Follow you
I think blue smile have to many hands..
Well done, thanks for tale care about problem of Evil Whales.
Steemit is a mechanism, which live and rise by users, but it need some effects by creators. Please, ahead with that, and dont forget to listen all of users!
Nice update.
"We live in a world filled with evil whales...."
@dantheman you sir, are not one of them.
I was late to the discussion on yesterday's post so I'm glad I saw this early. You make some great points
This I believe is one of the keys to really getting Steemit to work in general. I see this platform accelerating in growth rather quickly and without a stable and scalable solution it would collapse very quickly. limiting the number of accounts delegated could help solve part of this problem. Leading into delegated voting which I think you need to expand upon a bit more.
good luck!
Pure joy to see how everybody is working so hard for improvement but its kind of hard to say who are the bad and who the good guys? I can only figure that out by myself and this is very subjective.
Talking about Evil Whales problem, @dantheman you send me to the darkness here: https://steemd.com/steem-help/@oecp85/re-liberosist-mind-your-votes-an-investigation-and-guide-to-maximizing-your-curation-rewards-20160729t151659123z i just can think that you Thought that i´m a bot, but i´m not. you can check my activity no spam or something, please just take 1 minute to check it. please show me the ligth again.
man o man, your Reputation is 2! Out of interest, what was your reputation before you got flagged? Hope you can get back on track.
yes is sad, my REP was 5 before the update after the update drop to 2, even the new accounts start with 25 REP is really unfair. :-(
are you on rocketchat?
if not, signup and join #steemitabuse-appeals
ok i will, thanks for the info my friend.
It is requested dear @dantheman please remove the flag from my post as you flag due to two tags, I remove steemit tag but the first one steeimt did not remove try several time but failed to remove so please remove flag from my post link is as below.
https://steemit.com/steeimt/@shaheer001/the-world-billinaires-the-richest-people-on-planet-2016
I know it has been discussed before but I still think that we need to determine when flagging a post is acceptable. Should it be solely for plagiarism/spam or should it be what one person subjectively decides is good for the masses? Without first defining what constitutes abusing "the power of negative voting" as you put it, it is difficult to tweak the system appropriately.
Agreed. We need some clarification on this. I still think positive voting should be used for expressing likes (and not voting for dislikes) with flagging reserved for abuse of the platform.
It is going to be subjective and community consensus, always. There is no way to define "solely for plagiarism/spam" (or any other such definition) in a protocol. The protocol can provide the tools, but people still have to decide how to use them.
I know but we need to reach some kind of consensus on what it should be for - people consensus rather than blockchain consensus lol.
If I were a rival social media platform it might be in my interest to invest in Steemit and then act as a bad whale as a way of discrediting it. It's good to see there are proactive plans and community awareness to tackle issues such as this.
It looks like paranoia
Thanks for everything you do @dantheman!
Just wanted to let you know that my new post "The 40 anarchists you want to follow on Steemit!" is up, and you're on the list :-) You can find it here
nice
When will it be implemented?
I personally think page rank in steemit is not compulsory for curation rewards as the steemit itself have high page ranking and in google search any topic related to steemit tags or post title always show in front page.
I just posted an article and you pretty much negated my concerns. If you need guinea pigs I volunteer. Thanks for looking into this.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@dwinblood/two-sides-to-every-fence-the-voting-down-voting-saga-continues
Do you know how to shorten the links you post? I'm just trying to help people that don't know, because the length of blue sometimes drives me crazy (a little ocd) and I think a shortened url is way more appealing.
Put the name you want to see in []'s and the url immediately next to it within ()'s
Two sides to every fence
I know. Though I sometimes forget to do it. Though I actually do it old school. When I do it I tend to use actual HTML and an a href="" followed by a /a closing tag. Though sometimes when I am posting fast I forget. I don't intuitively think of the markdown method though, so thanks. :)
this is a nice overview of MD syntax. maybe it helps. Md is about the simples syntax I've ever came across.
also you can have a look at this site which is written in md, here you can find the underlying md file.
what games did you make? I only know scientific computing. Maybe someday I can broaden my perspective on coding =)
cheers
I made tons of games for friends and myself over the years. Didn't make any money on them. As to professional things.
I coded on the final Premium module for Neverwinter Nights by Bioware/Atari/WoTC called The Wyvern Crown of Cormyr.
I also then wrote all the horse scripts for the new horse system and a few other scripts for the final 1.69 patch for Neverwinter Nights by Bioware.
I've done quite a bit of modding.
I currently have a project called Wormhole Ventures which was greenlit on steam and I need to finish it and release it, but about two weeks after I found out it had been greenlit (after waiting 570 days) I discovered this place called steemit and I've been a bit distracted.
I am a Network Engineer by profession, I do the gamedev on the side mostly for fun, but it looks like I may be able to make some money off of it and who knows some day that may be how I make my living. That and steem. :)
Thanks for the links... I just need to USE it. The syntax is easy, you are correct I need to use it quite a bit and then it will be internalized.
I do both as well even in posts I wind up using raw html to format easily. can you escape the tags I always write them <img'>image</img'> when I try to help someone else but totally forgot if I could backslash them out in markdown. I'll look into it if you arent sure.
And yes no problem. I think it looks cleaner when scrolling, but I understand and sometimes wish the copy/paste drag and drop like facebook allows.
I prefer the formatted links though, and will try to remember. I don't know a lot of the cool markdown though I'll pick it up. Mostly italics bold and italicized bold which I probably over use the last. I try to do things like u and /u for underline and i and /i and b and /b and it doesn't work. So the mix of some HTML works and some does not, is still something I'm learning. Ordered and Unordered lists still work well. It's also been awhile since I messed with HTML much. Most of my code has been C# lately for game development, not web design. :) See steemit is making me dust off old skills, and teaching me some new ones. Thanks for your input, always appreciated.
EDIT: As for escaping tags... I keep looking for a codeblock or something like that but haven't really been able to pull that off yet.
EDIT 2: My most recent blog post I had formatted links and lists at the bottom... I'm moving up in the world. :P
scalability... definitely the hardest thing to work on.
Bitshares should handle heavier load than reddit is currently handling. This means that the base technology shouldn't have any major issues until the bot armies arrive. The difficult part is not breaking already existing features of the site that work flawlessly. If you add something new there's a chance of breaking some mechanic that used to work before, but may not do so after the update.
Another good post.
Google has kind of even abandoned PageRank to an extent. It worked well for a while and now it's a lot more complex.
I don't think Steem should or will follow in those same steps because Google changes PageRank due to the time it was in. We're now in a post-PageRank era because it doesn't work with how the world is today.
Voting is good but that can be abused and manipulated as well.
I really think a more complex method is needed even though it would be nice if it would be kept simple.
This is a good example of forward thinking, and it's nice to see a willingness to make changes for the greater good. In a true free market the distribution of power is never going to be equal, however, this will go a long ways towards mitigating the abuse of power by the privileged few.
Until the system is fully implemented as long as whales are not corrupt the system should continue as normal correct? The problem happens with scalability and potential corrupt whales in the future.
more or less, the system is fine today. We are simply preparing for the future.
With the implementation of this, how do you see the content payouts changing? Do you expect that more good content producers who are currently getting low payouts will start to get larger ones, as the voting power of the large whales is distributed across a larger group of voters? Will the upvote from a single 'whale' result in a smaller payout increase, since the whale's SP voting power is not all allocated to the single user's vote anymore?
read your two recent articles, a lot became clear about the process of mutual relations and distribution of resources on Steamit, I agree with you in many aspects. Unfortunately there will always be unconscionable people, on the other side their presence makes us change and progress, much has been done and I'm sure more will be done. It’s cool that you are not indifferent and let others know
my favourite steempic for you
Dragons have a weak point; their Belly!
Let us study bad whales and suggest solutions to this problem.
I already liked your post about google ranking yesterday, that was really interesting and I noticed how well steemit posts rank in google already as well. And now thank you for sharing this post today, steemit changes all the time and that shows how passionate and active the creators are caring for it, as if it was their own baby ;)
Even though you are new (I am only a week or so older), you already came in with the mindset that has made you successful.
I think we both see the changes that are coming and the potential to make this special that people begging for whale votes don't see. You got @stellabelle to notice your content too. Most people don't have that happen, so I can't say enough good things about where you are taking your brand.
That's not circle jerk BS. Just happy for a fellow slightly obese minnow.
You have the ability to change a lot of people's lives that will no doubt look to you as a mentor, and from what I have seen, you handle yourself intelligently and with integrity. Two I's that are incredibly valuable! If you ever need any help or wanna bounce ideas off each other for anything, feel free!
Nice to see your efforts! :)
Really like your ideas on how this platform could be improved for the betterment of all involved. We need a better way to grow and an equalizer so everyone can become empowered. I am just starting to learn here and it seems that the Wales are eating the minnows!
I just want to say I really appreciate the efforts at making this place a better community. I try to get out among the masses and do what I can to help, but I'm only one (relatively) small fish in this sea. I have a lot of faith in the ideals started here and I'm very excited to see how it progresses.