I'm going to assume these are suggestions for the upcoming HF17 and the the future.
1 – Change the voting algorithm.
This is surely coming in the future. I agree that this is an urgent matter though - there's no need to do a trial run with the Comments pool and wait for the next fork.
2 – Treat blog posts and comments the same.
While this makes sense for Steemit or social blogging frontends, maybe Steemit Inc is looking at an opportunity for a Disqus-type competitor where the Steem blockchain would host comments on websites of various kinds. Splitting the comment and blog pools would be a necessary pre-requisite for such a solution. This would also explain the lack of curation rewards. Of course, this is just speculation.
3 – Increase curation rewards back to a 50/50 split with post rewards.
4 – Adjust the reverse auction to a much shorter time frame.
5 – Send the auctioned curation rewards back into the curation pool.
Agreed on #4. Not sure about #3 and #5. #3 may be extreme and #5 may be contradictory to the system. While we are at it - I do feel the algorithm is too biased towards frontrunners, discouraging late voters. Also, the voting power decay is too biased towards accounts making hundreds of votes every day (bots). The decay should increase beyond a certain threshold instead of slowing down. I would guess both can be adjusted relatively easily.
Splitting comments and blog pool is not necessary. When creating a comment pool you achieve nothing, influence disparity will still be huge and you won't solve scalability either as you would need a whale on every single site using disqus ( steem version).
A website owner wanting to integrate steem version of disqus will look first how it is going to benefit his existing userbase. If everyone of its users need to buy $10 000 to be able to send a few cents to each other he is not going to bother implementing it.
Steem will have many different use cases, you can't just create features to accomodate each of them, what we need is a solid base where everyone can implement steem regardless of what product they want to build. In its current form steem doesn't make sense for websites to integrate as it won't benefits their user base.
Thanks, good points.
This was the reasoning from their initial proposal from @steemitblog:
To me, it simply appears that the focus is driving engagement on Steemit.com. And I would imagine that if they wanted to create a separate pool to be used on different sites strictly for commenting on non-STEEM/Steemit content, then they would probably need to create a side-chain for that, wouldn't they?
Aha, I remember that bit. Seems like a while ago! Fair enough, their stated intention is clear.
I don't understand the technical workings behind the scenes at all, but I do think they are working on something called "multi chain fabric". Not sure if that has anything to do with it?
The vote power decay is a very important and tricky tradeoff between mass voting (with slower/flatter decay and people feeling like it is a big deal every time they place a vote (due to rapidly declining vote power) and therefore need to be extremely careful with every single vote. I think the current tradeoff isn't terrible (it was reached after trying a faster decay and finding it problematic). It could perhaps be adjusted to be a little faster but shifting it too much risks turning voting from an enjoyable expression of opinion into a scarcity calculation, or even a perceived source of "punishment" for casual users.
Sorry, I didn't communicate that well. All I meant was "The decay should increase beyond a certain threshold". We can follow the same curve as it is up to a certain threshold. Let's say, 100-200 full strength votes - some amount which is clearly beyond regular curation behaviour. Beyond which, you only have vote spammers - whether bots or human - the voting power can decay fast. I'm sure you have seen there are bots which make 500-600 votes every day; this will penalize them without affecting the regular curators. In fact, they will have more R-shares allocated back to them, recovered from mass voters.
This is what I mean, if you excuse a layman's drawing -
Currently high frequency bots are all voting with arbitrary percentage of weights. Even if they can't vote with a percentage, actually it's not hard to get around a fixed limit: just split SP among several accounts and vote one by one (round-robin), or always vote with the account which has highest VP (best-first); when it's needed, vote with many or all accounts at same time.
Good point. Superlinear penalty probably would not work.
It's not about the number of votes, but voting power. So it doesn't matter if it's 100 votes at 100% or however many at 10%; after a certain threshold, the voting power would decay faster to penalize for vote spamming. When I said "100-200 full-strength votes" I really meant "100-200 full-strength votes or equivalent at other strengths". This may not reduce the number of votes - true - but it'll reduce influence/Rshares from high frequency bots.
Of course, you're right that they can just split SP among several accounts, but they are already doing that. This will just make it harder to do so. Today there might be people spamming with 500 votes at X% with 10 accounts taking their VP down to 20%; now they'll need to make 100 accounts. It'll be a deterrent.
High frequency bots don't have high influence/rshares. It's a trade off. You either have high frequency (voting on more posts), or high influence/rshares on less posts, but not both. There is only 20% VP regenerated everyday.
Since everyone can create accounts for free (registration fee is deposited into new account), number of accounts is not actually a barrier for bot runners -- they're already scripting everything. Sure it will need some work/efforts, but it won't stop them.
//Edit: forgot this: in current code, there is a penalty when calculating VP regeneration. The penalty is larger for voters with higher frequency.
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Today you can choose between high frequency and high influence. There's little penalty for high frequency votes, or more accurately, extreme drainage of voting power. That's all I'm trying to say! By penalizing unreasonably high voting power drainage more, we can weed out the bots and vote spammers. It'll also encourage bots to improve their algorithms and vote wisely.
(Personally, I don't have any problem with bots, but it's a major issue for the community)
Imagine you decided to just say "fuck it" and started downvoting everything that came down the line. Or upvoting your own comments. Not like 40 like 200 or 400 or something in a day.
Yeah, you would pay on subsequent days down the line because it would take you 5 days regain your full power and start over. But on that one day where youre voting like a madman, you would have far more influence than you normally do.
someone like blacklist, for example, or asshole, who is only here to be a nuscience, can concentrate their nuscience-ness all into one day, by mortgaging their voting power on later days.
Im not sure im entirely convinced that any more penalty than the normal degradation of your power is necessary, but i think thats what liberosist is getting at.
Your reply is a bit confusing for me.
I understand that you want the system to be better, so do I. So we're discussing the "how".
My point is, high frequency bots already gave up influence. You want to punish them more by setting a limit on frequency? Then they'll split to several accounts then vote less frequently with each account (each achieve a "normal" frequency), but in total the frequency is same as before. So your "solution" will result in neither more nor less vote spamming, aka useless. I'm sure bots are always improving their algorithms, that strategy I just mentioned is a possible result of improvements. You keep saying that bots should vote less but vote wisely, but I'm afraid that the best algorithm they've got (after improvements) is to vote more. So, if we want to address the bot voting issue, we need to look for other solutions.
On the other hand, if we want to address the influence issue, better focus on the whales, the curve.
Yeah, you are probably right that some sort of increasing curve would work. I just want to avoid regular users experiencing severe or even easily perceptible penalties with normal use especially if voting on comments becomes more popular, or the UI is changed to encourage more voting (for example, by removing the visible delay). I offered the thought exercise once (when reducing the daily vote target was proposed) to consider how people would vote if the vote target were changed to 1000. I believe people would vote even more freely than now, and more comments would get votes. That would probably be a good thing, not a bad thing (ignoring unintended consequences).
IMO, this is the biggest problem with curation rewards at the moment. I don't think there's a good way to fix them without fixing this first.