Probably the most impactful thing I took away from @ned’s speech last night in Tokyo were his words on account-based voting.
I was intrigued because he mentioned this new tech/protocol only in passing, and then stated that he wasn’t going to go into full-depth on the topic because it becomes pretty technical.
During the Q & A session, however, I was able to ask about it and he gave a great breakdown of the system, and even claimed it was the voting system he had originally wanted to implement when Steemit.com was originally launched.
So how does it work?
Well, Ned’s explanation is much better than mine, so please do watch the video in this post, but that notwithstanding:
Account based voting is a system by which content can be judged in a manner much less dependent on “visualized perceived value” such as the amount the post has earned from votes, and much more on the basis of the wisdom of the crowd, and the inherent content/writing.
For example, many people will upvote a post just because it has a high payout value underneath it. This results in a lot of undervoted, high-quality content being lost simply because the author “isn’t popular” and doesn’t have high-powered accounts voting for their content.
In the new system @ned describes (for which he’s currently creating the white paper) SMTs (Smart Media Tokens) can be used within the Steem framework as a type of “sub-token” by which to create paid/incentivized roles within communities. Individuals known as oracles can set up guidelines in their own communities. This means that even payout systems can be customized and tweaked in virtually unlimited permutations.
For example, if I am part of a community that values individual writer accounts over massive group accounts, the oracles in said community can verify which accounts are run by individual authors, and afford a greater percentage of a reward to those accounts than to group accounts through voting and SMTs. If I am part of a running group, and everyone must run to, say, Tokyo Tower or participate in a certain event in order to receive a vote or compensation, oracles will be in incentivized positions to verify these things, and vote/create smart contracts accordingly.
In short, voting systems will be placed in the hands of the voters, as customizable smart contracts, with the Steem blockchain simply existing as a type of open playing field.
Basically, what this means is that communities can now decide how content should be rewarded, and not simply which content.
Pretty exciting stuff!!
~*~
(The video in this post is a Steemit exclusive, and remains unlisted on YouTube in order to drive traffic through this site. The @steemit-jp community set up a wonderful event, and I want to personally thank them for all their efforts. It was great to meet @steemitjp, @yoshiko, @kinakomochi, @sho-t, and many others. These folks are just killin’ it building a vibrant and robust community over here!!! Great job, guys!)
~KafkA
Graham Smith is a Voluntaryist activist, creator, and peaceful parent residing in Niigata City, Japan. Graham runs the "Voluntary Japan" online initiative with a presence here on Steem, as well as DLive and Twitter. (Hit me up so I can stop talking about myself in the third person!)
Great update @kafkanarchy84, in Jerry Banfield's most recent thread, this is exactly what I was talking about! Posters without high dollar earnings don't get paid or viewed as much. I like the concept of the SMT and sub-communities. So these guys are like witnesses. This is a great concept. This will de-centralize Steemit even more and spread out the rewards pool!
yes!!!
It was nice to meet you. See you again.
It was an honor to meet you. Thank you for helping me at the event! And for all you are doing for Steemit! Let’s meet up again soon ✌🏽
I'm all for new technologies. I just hope Steem doesn't go through a fork where there are 2 platforms. That would be discouraging to have to choose between media platforms.
Thanks for sharing! A link to your post was included in the Steem.center wiki article about Ned Scott. Thanks and good luck again!
Excellent! Thanks!
Wish I could have come up for that, but already had plans to go to Kyushu when I heard about it.
I'm starting to get the feeling that SMTs, Communities, and now the account based voting are going to make Steem irrelevant in terms of the relation of stake to popularity. Of course, Steem will still be required to run these SMTs, so any stake you have now should be worth much more in the future. But you won't have to hope for whale upvotes anymore.
Getting the same feeling here.
Man, I’d love to visit Kyushu sometime. Still haven’t madden it down there in 8 years. Hah! I did fly over it once, though.
How was your trip?
It was good, but rained most of the time. Great ramen, of course. Seeing all the steam rising from the ground everywhere is pretty cool, but at the same time kind of made me want to get the hell out as soon as possible before it blows up.
Have a nice holiday!
Could you just post some photos of your trip?
This new system of voting is still very abstract to me! What would be the reactions of those big fish and whales?!
Thanks! The reason I don't post much is because I'm working on other things. I'll be posting again soon.
There isn't a new voting system AFAIK. It's just that SMTs will allow people to create their own voting systems with their own tokens, backed by Steem. So there will be hundreds or thousands of experiments in the best ways to reward content on the Steem blockchain. So you could create your own KaminchanCoin and then create a website that uses the coin to reward people however you want.
Under these proposals STEEM would always be the core, most important token: a common denominator for all other contracts and tokens on Steem. There’s a section in the SMT paper on theoretical causes and directions of flow of value between SMTs and STEEM
Lol can’t you just start doing fireside chats everyday on dlive? We need more FaceTime. You’re not a coder in any way they say.
What about the community genius In sum?
The sum of the steem family f’ing DWARFS the employees mind power.
Broken record, but Better than what seems to be a top secret development process.
Open sourcery is more powerful than what we see here.
And threats of massive power coming.
I always like Steemify for telling me when the “boss” posts or comments.
EOS has a 1.5 million dollar hackathon.
Why can’t we beat that before it’s too late, and everything Dan learned here, causes the growth of a rival network?
Ugh.
You’re right!
“Rival network” ... Let them rip off these ideas ... We would rip off theirs if generalized tech were an advantage... Any specific ideas that advance cryptocurrency as a community building tool we can easily add to Steem.. though I don’t believe SMT and OSMT concepts can be leap frogged
I’m not a coder but I have coded and understand programming, blockchain infrastructure and financial smart contracts well and can design contracts back from purpose allowing me to write these papers and see them implemented by those who do code
Ultimately, since steem is presented to the world as a social network/blog space,
Absent the ability to produce a single piece that the world sees, seems likely to destroy an otherwise great chain.
Absent the blogs, & the evidence of our inability to “reach out”, steem would probably be much higher on the market cap list.
X prizes.
Misterdelegation needs to grow a pair, and enable some worthwhile contests.
SteemX - because smts aren’t just going to uncover best sellers who need only a better token skin.
No risk, no reward.
We see very low risk.
thanks so much @kafkanarachy84 for asking this question and doing the video, I'm really excited to hear about this and wonder if the oracles are those that have set up existing communities already, I am all for people getting recognition for their content, this is really the way forward for steemit I think.
My pleasure.
Yeah, I was really encouraged by this. So much good content getting passed over just because voting on bigger account yields greater curation rewards, etc.
In practical terms, SMT's and Oracles give further promise to Steem's ability to bring about a 'massive distribution of wealth' never before witnessed by delivering the tools to encourage positive action in education, health, social welfare, history, art, literature, music, architecture, politics - all culture. The only question is do Steemians have the vision?
This idea sounds great because it sends it well now take care of the underlued content worries. But i want to ask a question. When he said smt communities what did he mean. What is the smt community? Or who own the communities? How does one get into those communities?
Well, basically SMTs (Smart Media Tokens) are coins that anyone can create within the Steem blockchain. It is basically creating one's own cryptocurrency. These SMTs can then be used in communities to do all sorts of different things. Anyone will be able to create their own community/SMT as I understand it. I posted a full livestream on Dlive of the whole talk if you want to hear him talk about it in more depth.
Thank you for your time. Though i would have loved to ask more questions about the communities. I wil like to know if the. What communities and how one can join one
Wow! This will surely be a welcome development. A good revolution. It is high time originality gets rewarded and good authors receive good pay for their hardwork. I'm so looking forward to see this being implemented.
Wow when it's this going to take place? I think if you ask me, this will reduce the high payout accounts favouritism, and increase quality content viability as well, plus other thing technical as well.
I agree. Based on his explanation here, individuals will become even more empowered regarding how they are able to assign value to content.
No set date for release as far as I know. He mentioned that the white paper should be out soon, though.
ah! thank you for the anticipated post on what the talk was about!! appreciate you sharing video, too (which I have yet to watch, but am excited to). ok edit: just watched it. very interesting... can't wait to hear more!
this is an interesting development/breakdown and it's crazy that he's in Asia talking about this, but we on the blockchain haven't even heard of it yet, haha!! Guess that's how these guys like to do things. It sounds intriguing, though we'll have to see how it plays out to see if that actually functions as intended.
I wonder how the communities will get along at giving people a more fair shot and not just following the money within these new subgroups!! very very interesting.
Does one have to create the SMT and community in order to be an oracle? so many questions! hahah! 'm sure the new white paper will clarify much. thanks Kafka! resteemed :)
All great questions. He dealt with some of that in the other portions of the talk, too. I was wondering some of the same things. If you check my DLive post from yesterday you can see the whole talk.
Thanks for commenting, and yeah, I agree. Very interesting.
Account based sounds like it's negating the motivation to power up and increase influence.
A notion I'm somewhat wary of, but will need to learn more about.
The thing is, though, it wouldn’t be a blanket, one-size-fits-all system. The base system remains, but communities can tweak and customize it as they please using community-assigned roles and SMTs.
Yeah, that's how it sounds. Oracles sound like micro witnesses in the SMT space, which is definitely cool.
wellcome @ned in our asia
A good friend of mine, @grow-pro has been working on SMT's and tracking the progression closely. I'm hoping he can chime in here and give us some more details. :)
im still waiting.
great, steemit was not complicated enough.
Who picks the Oracles? How do the Oracles set the rules? Could this lead to censorship? Starts to feel centralized when too few people have power.
I hope the first SMT communities will start out as subreddit-style communities on steemit and the identity verification part is verified on the blockchain, not via individuals verifying other individuals.
There could be an initial identity verification based on length of your Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc accounts by logging in with those services.
And then once verified, accounts could have equal weight in upvoting content.
Perhaps the top content producers should be able to tweak the rules, but it would be better if the community of verified users could vote on the rules instead.
Still, seems there's not a very big incentive to increase one's influence/stake.
i wish i want to meet with the boss @ned.
EOs is already off to a great start and I can’t wait until the official release to see where it takes off to
Have a good luck♥
Thank u for additional clarity. Although it is still not very clear
I don't really understand the technical side of things, but this sounds fucking good.
thanks for this. I hope too he changes the payout system. it doesn't make sense to me with the steem power conversion
https://steemit.com/steemit/@miss-j/do-all-bidbots-actually-make-you-lose-money-why-are-50-50-payouts-not-paid-in-50-sbd-50-sbd-worth-of-steem
Also, I LOVE account based voting mechanisms.