I don't know how to phrase this diplomatically, but I think your issue is that you were benefitting from the system, but now are not.
There is a fixed pot of steem that is generated by the blockchain every 24 hours - about $200,000 worth I think at the moment. If one person gets huge rewards, everyone else must get tiny rewards (as in $0.05 a post, especially if it's a growing platform and lots of people are posting. If it has gone from about 5000 users to 70,000 users it is not possible for a handful of people to continue to earn huge amounts and everyone get even less, because remember it is a fixed pot of steem. Something had to give.
The devs made a small change - they allowed the whales to choose on a sliding scale how much their vote would give. Before their vote was huge and they could only give 27 people a massive amount and lots of people nothing. Now they are trying to distribute the funds much better.
In addition, as the platform has expanded new writers have come in. The whale bots curate based on profit. If they've removed you from their list it is because they have found another more profitable writer to upvote. That is the nature of this platform.
The amount of Steem is fixed, the value of Steem is not. If Steem grows to 70k users, the value of 1 Steem will be higher and even so will the total reward pot of Steem in USD be higher.
Why dont start to pay a max. payout for each post, lets say 300$ for example.... more people would benefit at the end, guess it will be way more fair for everyone.
I didn't know about this modification, I had seen mention, but not a clear explanation. It may well be that I am wrong about curation rewards and they can become a net value add. Possibly some kind of ranking that modulates how the whale can win them would eliminate abuse potential, making it really a proper competition to see who can see the best stuff early on. The goal of developing with this AI algorithms to pick this then would make more sense.
Anyone who has more than 30,000 Steempower can now select how much to give - say 33% instead of the full value of their vote. That's why the really big single upvotes have stopped and you see a lot of smaller amounts given.
Yes it was added a few weeks ago to the Web GUI but was always a part of CLI based voting. When you use the CLI you give a percentage to indicate how much of your vote weight you want to give at the time. For the GUI it only applies to high value accounts from what I have ascertained (don't know the cut off) - they have a little slider like a volume control to decide how much they will give each post.
There is a minimum vote weight accepted by the blockchain at all to prevent spam. If you have low SP and you you reduce your vote power further with a slider your vote won't be acccepted at all.
Very interesting take. If the price is right and the people want to get paid more, maybe some sort of affiliate marketing or advertising system could be set in place. Money will not appear out of nowhere and people want to invest in something that has the potential to have many eyes on it. I hope that steemit is never publicly traded because that will kill the community and instead focus solely on the bottom line.
People also need to realize that since steemit is based on user content, those with a large stake want steemit to succeed. If the whales decide to vote on content that others feel is not worth the price they may move away where content is rewarded more for substance and that will make them lose a lot of money as investors.
The pot of steem is fixed in a 24 hour period. And in dollar terms the amount distributed in any 24 hour period depends on the price of steem.
At present about $200,000 worth of steem is being distributed to 70,000 users. Of course not all of them post, I think Ned said 21,000 posts are being produced per 24 hours. If it was distributed equally, each post would get about $9.50. Of course the distribution is not even, it is done with the Pareto principle.
A month ago, when the price of steem was four times what it is now, you had $800,000 worth of steem distributed in a 24 hour period amongst a lot fewer users. I think it was 30,000 users at the time.
It is simply arithmetic - if you are distributing a fixed pot amongst a lot of people, then everyone must get less. If you are distributing a shrinking pot amongst even more people, everyone must get even less still.
Stellabelle was moaning that she wasn't getting paid the way she was when steem's price was four times what it is now and it's users were half. She's effectively arguing she should earn the same as she was and everyone else should sink to fractions of a penny to pay for it - in other words she wants a higher % of a shrinking pot to maintain her dollar amount and by definition she wants every one else to take home zeros to pay for it. That's a dodgy attitude to take particularly as she's couching it in terms speaking for the majority, LOL.
If you want individual posts to earn as much as they were and an expanding user base, then the price of steem must rise proportionately to pay for it all.
You achieved #1 ranking, you've earned an enormous amount here, and now you're throwing a tantrum and declaring that actually you've been just hanging out at a party in a drug dealer's basement. I'm sorry for any pain that may have come your way, but this approach seems unnecessary.
I don't really think it matters whether she's made big money or no money. If there are safety issues, then they need to be addressed. It often takes someone who has standing to truly draw attention to a problem. So good on her for speaking up.
Nothing is flawed about number of votes being meaningless. If you have been on other sites with rampant purchased followers and sock puppet bot voters you should understand this. IMO the biggest flaw is that the count of votes is displayed at all. Voting power = SP, not vote count.
@smooth In a sense, you're correct, only invested users should have meaningful weight on content curation; however, keep in mind that the stake now may not accurately reflect user investment. In the long run, the rewards system is intended to align SP distribution with reputation (people who provide real value in the system outweigh trolls), but that self-balancing effect might be too slow. Eventually the number and quality of whales will be quite large, and they'll have sufficient bandwidth to upvote all kinds of good content and downvote the crap, but right now we're still working on attaining that level of decentralization in the content curation.
It appears that the decentralized social media competition is now on, and if Steem is going to survive, it needs to keep up. Part of that might be figuring out how to grow valuable users' relative SP faster. One obvious way to do this is to decrease the degree of dilution mitigation SP holders enjoy, which will require SP holders to create comparatively more value to maintain their slice of the pie, and instead allow the high-value minnows to grow their relative stake faster. I'm not saying this is the solution -- I haven't put enough thought into it -- it's just an idea off the top of my head.
@stellabelle is pointing out real problems. Let's not let our excitement about Steem lull us into complacency; we need to fully understand these problems, and act to resolve them at their roots.
Designing a content publication platform with an economically-driven curation model is still an open problem. Will the current algorithms move the SP distribution in a better direction? I don't know what an ideal distribution would look like, but certainly some distributions are better than others, and we would do well to figure out what makes for a better or worse distribution, and ensure we're moving in the right direction. Even if the current algorithms are moving in the right direction, are they moving fast enough? If someone else can create a competing platform that moves in the right direction faster, they should rightly eclipse Steem, as that would be a superior solution.
I like Steem, though, so let's try and beat 'em to it.
@modprobe, my comment was narrower than that. I'm not suggesting that there can't be improvements, only that raw vote count is meaningless and has been consistently and rampantly abused on every other such platform, and those are platforms that don't even award money. With direct monetary incentives the abuse would be even greater.
So I agree with the broader issues you mention being considered and explored, I just disagree with statements made on the basis of "how many votes".
As a redditor for 5+ years, most votes are bots and the number is meaningless. This is the same on Steemit and I completely agree with this. Engagement is another story though -- there could be some economics built into posts that drive engagement (right now there's not).
This is where my ideas about groups and integrated chat systems helps. Especially the latter, because it is a place in which like minds can interact in real time and spin off ideas, or even just to organise external activities that base their economics and accounting, and put their marketing, on the Steem blockchain.
This post is past the initial reward period, and I didn't actually specifically write it just for rewards, I wrote it because I want to help people understand Steem:
If these principles are refined, expanded, and integrated, I think the solution of engagement is solved. A lot of what drives engagement cannot be directly integrated into Witness nodes, or easily quantified, and the mechanisms of users using Steem as their Department banking system and investment pool gets around this issue, so you can market, bank and account your little enterprise's activities, and by the simplicity of also doing so, the integration of Steem into the enterprise's accounting and fund management system, will naturally anchor more vested and held funds in the platform, where it continues to maintain the ability to scale up and keep rewarding good ideas and good content.
The problem is attention scarcity and limited means to delegate the human attention resources (human computation) in an orderly fashion. It is in this area that Synereo will excel with their design while Steem can adopt delegated human computation but it's not currently designed for it.
The reward system itself is fine, but there needs to be more human attention, from a greater variety of minds, to distribute the Steem Power via curation. Randomization can help provide for that variety of minds.
Maybe the function rewarding sp is too steep. I believe the function is based on squaring, why not based on a smaller exponential. Bots are not a problem unless not armies are making worthlessness ostensibly of over. Dollar or two. I honestly don't think this happens . If it does just penalize by the percent of votes that go to the same author like the thirty minute rule. If 100% of votes are one author then voting power drops to 1%, if 50% then 50% and if 1%?or less go to same author you get 100percent voting power.
The squaring function of SP is largely a misconception. SP is linear-weighted between accounts. 5 accounts with 1 SP each voting on a post is exactly equal to one account with 5 SP voting on a post. The squaring comes into play when comparing posts against each other. A post with only a small amount of SP voting for it gets essentially no reward at all, and the reward rapidly climbs as the amount of SP voting for it (whether from one person or multiple people) increases. This is useful because otherwise you would have thousands of spam posts getting paid each just getting a few votes from each of those thousands of bulk accounts that @alexgr just posted about (vote limits per time does not work there).
Correct and the answer is to decentralize curation itself. The owner of the Steem Power only wants the profits, they don't have to do the human computation if they are willing to accept half the profit.
And you can build SP by writing good material. Which also qualifies you as a quality voter. I think the curation rewards system adds nothing but we will see whether I am right and this becomes commonly agreed.
We already have content arranged in order of number of votes. We only need to look at the Hot page. This page often shows posts with spam votes so of course the trending page ends up being better. But from what I can see at the moment it doesn't look like the posts that are getting the most votes are not getting enough payout.
I'm pretty sure the Hot page was reworked and no longer considers number of votes at all, only rshares (essentially SP) and recency. I could be wrong, but that was my understanding from what one of the devs told me.
I disagree, I think that the biggest flaws on Steem remain in the interface code, not the blockchain. On the blockchain my personal bugbear is the curation reward system and flagging, I think both need to be scrapped, because the first encourages vote-gaming and the second encourages reputation-bombing by people with a lot of money to instantly upgrade their vote downgrade power. Take these two things out, add a group management system for moderating membership, then create a distributed chat system that functions like a lower latency version of bitmessage.
With all that in place, I think that my idea that Steem is a transparent, public corporation, it's somewhat different from being just a social network or blogging platform, it becomes a literal, functioning, living breathing, ad-hoc corporation in which everyone involved is incentivised to add value to the platform and make it bigger and better. Well, bigger impact, not necessarily complexity or excessive execution time for code...
On the blockchain my personal bugbear is the curation reward system and flagging....the first encourages vote-gaming and the second encourages reputation-bombing
Exactly these are big problems.
Take these two things out, add a group management system for moderating membership, then create a distributed chat system that functions like a lower latency version of bitmessage.
I don't know if it would definitely work but it is worth a try.
One other additional thing that I think might help (and I know it is controversial) is rank all posts according to the number of votes only and not the payouts - it may even help to hide the payouts as others have suggested.
Obviously the biggest problem with this would be using sybil accounts to upvote your own posts to get higher visibility. If someone could figure out a solution to that fatal flaw it would be fantastic.
This idea of ranking could be added as one of the members of the list 'hot', 'trending', etc. 'most-voted' would be a good name. Because it is vulnerable to sybil attacks, it would not be in the top of the list.
Regarding payouts, I think they should show more information, not less. The estimated current value, plus the curator share/author share, and perhaps even the SP and SBD that could be awarded.
This idea of ranking could be added as one of the members of the list 'hot', 'trending', etc. 'most-voted' would be a good name.
@l0k1 Actually that is a good idea - and using an appropriate name that explains that it is vote based would help.
Perhaps also having some kind of reputation ranking of the votes would be useful - this would need to be based on some kind of percentage based mean. It would need a suitable name - I was thinking "Voter Ranking Index" but that is terrible!
Regarding payouts, I think they should show more information, not less. The estimated current value, plus the curator share/author share, and perhaps even the SP and SBD that could be awarded.
That could work too. I don't think people like hiding information and the other thing is even if it was hidden people could just use a tool to add it back in from the blockchain - I'm sure someone could just create a browser extension to do it. I didn't think of that until now.
I really don't think its flawed as I stated above, lets say you get 500 votes and 490 are from minnows those minnows have no weight value so you wont get much in $ but if you get 50 votes and they are all with much higher weight lets say over 5,000 steem power of course your going to get more $. That is the way i see it. the weight of the vote is what matters. not how many votes.
I don't know how to phrase this diplomatically, but I think your issue is that you were benefitting from the system, but now are not.
There is a fixed pot of steem that is generated by the blockchain every 24 hours - about $200,000 worth I think at the moment. If one person gets huge rewards, everyone else must get tiny rewards (as in $0.05 a post, especially if it's a growing platform and lots of people are posting. If it has gone from about 5000 users to 70,000 users it is not possible for a handful of people to continue to earn huge amounts and everyone get even less, because remember it is a fixed pot of steem. Something had to give.
The devs made a small change - they allowed the whales to choose on a sliding scale how much their vote would give. Before their vote was huge and they could only give 27 people a massive amount and lots of people nothing. Now they are trying to distribute the funds much better.
In addition, as the platform has expanded new writers have come in. The whale bots curate based on profit. If they've removed you from their list it is because they have found another more profitable writer to upvote. That is the nature of this platform.
The amount of Steem is fixed, the value of Steem is not. If Steem grows to 70k users, the value of 1 Steem will be higher and even so will the total reward pot of Steem in USD be higher.
Why dont start to pay a max. payout for each post, lets say 300$ for example.... more people would benefit at the end, guess it will be way more fair for everyone.
I didn't know about this modification, I had seen mention, but not a clear explanation. It may well be that I am wrong about curation rewards and they can become a net value add. Possibly some kind of ranking that modulates how the whale can win them would eliminate abuse potential, making it really a proper competition to see who can see the best stuff early on. The goal of developing with this AI algorithms to pick this then would make more sense.
Anyone who has more than 30,000 Steempower can now select how much to give - say 33% instead of the full value of their vote. That's why the really big single upvotes have stopped and you see a lot of smaller amounts given.
Yes it was added a few weeks ago to the Web GUI but was always a part of CLI based voting. When you use the CLI you give a percentage to indicate how much of your vote weight you want to give at the time. For the GUI it only applies to high value accounts from what I have ascertained (don't know the cut off) - they have a little slider like a volume control to decide how much they will give each post.
Ah, this explains why the multi-thousands rewards have stopped, and a lot more stuff is apppearing on the trending page.
If I may interject: why the discrimination, why do only "whales" get to use a slider?
There is a minimum vote weight accepted by the blockchain at all to prevent spam. If you have low SP and you you reduce your vote power further with a slider your vote won't be acccepted at all.
Very interesting take. If the price is right and the people want to get paid more, maybe some sort of affiliate marketing or advertising system could be set in place. Money will not appear out of nowhere and people want to invest in something that has the potential to have many eyes on it. I hope that steemit is never publicly traded because that will kill the community and instead focus solely on the bottom line.
People also need to realize that since steemit is based on user content, those with a large stake want steemit to succeed. If the whales decide to vote on content that others feel is not worth the price they may move away where content is rewarded more for substance and that will make them lose a lot of money as investors.
So grow the collective expected account values using creative development and marketing?
The amount of users on Steem has nothing to do with the value of each user on Steem. There is something more going on.
https://steemit.com/steem/@dana-edwards/are-we-over-valued-or-under-valued-on-steemit-a-steemit-blogger-is-currently-valued-at-usd25-878
The pot of steem is fixed in a 24 hour period. And in dollar terms the amount distributed in any 24 hour period depends on the price of steem.
At present about $200,000 worth of steem is being distributed to 70,000 users. Of course not all of them post, I think Ned said 21,000 posts are being produced per 24 hours. If it was distributed equally, each post would get about $9.50. Of course the distribution is not even, it is done with the Pareto principle.
A month ago, when the price of steem was four times what it is now, you had $800,000 worth of steem distributed in a 24 hour period amongst a lot fewer users. I think it was 30,000 users at the time.
It is simply arithmetic - if you are distributing a fixed pot amongst a lot of people, then everyone must get less. If you are distributing a shrinking pot amongst even more people, everyone must get even less still.
Stellabelle was moaning that she wasn't getting paid the way she was when steem's price was four times what it is now and it's users were half. She's effectively arguing she should earn the same as she was and everyone else should sink to fractions of a penny to pay for it - in other words she wants a higher % of a shrinking pot to maintain her dollar amount and by definition she wants every one else to take home zeros to pay for it. That's a dodgy attitude to take particularly as she's couching it in terms speaking for the majority, LOL.
If you want individual posts to earn as much as they were and an expanding user base, then the price of steem must rise proportionately to pay for it all.
You achieved #1 ranking, you've earned an enormous amount here, and now you're throwing a tantrum and declaring that actually you've been just hanging out at a party in a drug dealer's basement. I'm sorry for any pain that may have come your way, but this approach seems unnecessary.
I don't really think it matters whether she's made big money or no money. If there are safety issues, then they need to be addressed. It often takes someone who has standing to truly draw attention to a problem. So good on her for speaking up.
Fine, address safety issues.
Does the #1 ranked poster need to sh*t on everything on the way out?
She didn't say she was leaving.. she was pretty clear that she will be exploring the other system and writing about it here.
Nothing is flawed about number of votes being meaningless. If you have been on other sites with rampant purchased followers and sock puppet bot voters you should understand this. IMO the biggest flaw is that the count of votes is displayed at all. Voting power = SP, not vote count.
@smooth In a sense, you're correct, only invested users should have meaningful weight on content curation; however, keep in mind that the stake now may not accurately reflect user investment. In the long run, the rewards system is intended to align SP distribution with reputation (people who provide real value in the system outweigh trolls), but that self-balancing effect might be too slow. Eventually the number and quality of whales will be quite large, and they'll have sufficient bandwidth to upvote all kinds of good content and downvote the crap, but right now we're still working on attaining that level of decentralization in the content curation.
It appears that the decentralized social media competition is now on, and if Steem is going to survive, it needs to keep up. Part of that might be figuring out how to grow valuable users' relative SP faster. One obvious way to do this is to decrease the degree of dilution mitigation SP holders enjoy, which will require SP holders to create comparatively more value to maintain their slice of the pie, and instead allow the high-value minnows to grow their relative stake faster. I'm not saying this is the solution -- I haven't put enough thought into it -- it's just an idea off the top of my head.
@stellabelle is pointing out real problems. Let's not let our excitement about Steem lull us into complacency; we need to fully understand these problems, and act to resolve them at their roots.
Designing a content publication platform with an economically-driven curation model is still an open problem. Will the current algorithms move the SP distribution in a better direction? I don't know what an ideal distribution would look like, but certainly some distributions are better than others, and we would do well to figure out what makes for a better or worse distribution, and ensure we're moving in the right direction. Even if the current algorithms are moving in the right direction, are they moving fast enough? If someone else can create a competing platform that moves in the right direction faster, they should rightly eclipse Steem, as that would be a superior solution.
I like Steem, though, so let's try and beat 'em to it.
@modprobe, my comment was narrower than that. I'm not suggesting that there can't be improvements, only that raw vote count is meaningless and has been consistently and rampantly abused on every other such platform, and those are platforms that don't even award money. With direct monetary incentives the abuse would be even greater.
So I agree with the broader issues you mention being considered and explored, I just disagree with statements made on the basis of "how many votes".
1000 minnows probably couldn't move that post.... but then again 1000 views on youtube doesn't pay the creator either.
+1
As a redditor for 5+ years, most votes are bots and the number is meaningless. This is the same on Steemit and I completely agree with this. Engagement is another story though -- there could be some economics built into posts that drive engagement (right now there's not).
This is where my ideas about groups and integrated chat systems helps. Especially the latter, because it is a place in which like minds can interact in real time and spin off ideas, or even just to organise external activities that base their economics and accounting, and put their marketing, on the Steem blockchain.
This post is past the initial reward period, and I didn't actually specifically write it just for rewards, I wrote it because I want to help people understand Steem:
https://steemit.com/ascensionteam/@l0k1/steem-is-not-a-blogging-platform-steem-is-an-ad-hoc-public-and-transparent-corporation-let-me-explain
If these principles are refined, expanded, and integrated, I think the solution of engagement is solved. A lot of what drives engagement cannot be directly integrated into Witness nodes, or easily quantified, and the mechanisms of users using Steem as their Department banking system and investment pool gets around this issue, so you can market, bank and account your little enterprise's activities, and by the simplicity of also doing so, the integration of Steem into the enterprise's accounting and fund management system, will naturally anchor more vested and held funds in the platform, where it continues to maintain the ability to scale up and keep rewarding good ideas and good content.
The problem is attention scarcity and limited means to delegate the human attention resources (human computation) in an orderly fashion. It is in this area that Synereo will excel with their design while Steem can adopt delegated human computation but it's not currently designed for it.
So you can simply let whales delegate their voting power and the problem is solved. I outline it here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@dana-edwards/time-to-decentralized-curation
The reward system itself is fine, but there needs to be more human attention, from a greater variety of minds, to distribute the Steem Power via curation. Randomization can help provide for that variety of minds.
Not even close. ;)
Maybe the function rewarding sp is too steep. I believe the function is based on squaring, why not based on a smaller exponential. Bots are not a problem unless not armies are making worthlessness ostensibly of over. Dollar or two. I honestly don't think this happens . If it does just penalize by the percent of votes that go to the same author like the thirty minute rule. If 100% of votes are one author then voting power drops to 1%, if 50% then 50% and if 1%?or less go to same author you get 100percent voting power.
The squaring function of SP is largely a misconception. SP is linear-weighted between accounts. 5 accounts with 1 SP each voting on a post is exactly equal to one account with 5 SP voting on a post. The squaring comes into play when comparing posts against each other. A post with only a small amount of SP voting for it gets essentially no reward at all, and the reward rapidly climbs as the amount of SP voting for it (whether from one person or multiple people) increases. This is useful because otherwise you would have thousands of spam posts getting paid each just getting a few votes from each of those thousands of bulk accounts that @alexgr just posted about (vote limits per time does not work there).
So content is not judged by votes but by the SP (steem power) holders.
Correct and the answer is to decentralize curation itself. The owner of the Steem Power only wants the profits, they don't have to do the human computation if they are willing to accept half the profit.
Content is judged by votes, but 100 minnow votes will not be worth the same as one whale vote.
And you can build SP by writing good material. Which also qualifies you as a quality voter. I think the curation rewards system adds nothing but we will see whether I am right and this becomes commonly agreed.
We already have content arranged in order of number of votes. We only need to look at the Hot page. This page often shows posts with spam votes so of course the trending page ends up being better. But from what I can see at the moment it doesn't look like the posts that are getting the most votes are not getting enough payout.
I'm pretty sure the Hot page was reworked and no longer considers number of votes at all, only rshares (essentially SP) and recency. I could be wrong, but that was my understanding from what one of the devs told me.
It's not votes count only that needs to be hidden its everything, dollar amount and author included,
I disagree, I think that the biggest flaws on Steem remain in the interface code, not the blockchain. On the blockchain my personal bugbear is the curation reward system and flagging, I think both need to be scrapped, because the first encourages vote-gaming and the second encourages reputation-bombing by people with a lot of money to instantly upgrade their vote downgrade power. Take these two things out, add a group management system for moderating membership, then create a distributed chat system that functions like a lower latency version of bitmessage.
With all that in place, I think that my idea that Steem is a transparent, public corporation, it's somewhat different from being just a social network or blogging platform, it becomes a literal, functioning, living breathing, ad-hoc corporation in which everyone involved is incentivised to add value to the platform and make it bigger and better. Well, bigger impact, not necessarily complexity or excessive execution time for code...
Exactly these are big problems.
I don't know if it would definitely work but it is worth a try.
One other additional thing that I think might help (and I know it is controversial) is rank all posts according to the number of votes only and not the payouts - it may even help to hide the payouts as others have suggested.
Obviously the biggest problem with this would be using sybil accounts to upvote your own posts to get higher visibility. If someone could figure out a solution to that fatal flaw it would be fantastic.
This idea of ranking could be added as one of the members of the list 'hot', 'trending', etc. 'most-voted' would be a good name. Because it is vulnerable to sybil attacks, it would not be in the top of the list.
Regarding payouts, I think they should show more information, not less. The estimated current value, plus the curator share/author share, and perhaps even the SP and SBD that could be awarded.
@l0k1 Actually that is a good idea - and using an appropriate name that explains that it is vote based would help.
Perhaps also having some kind of reputation ranking of the votes would be useful - this would need to be based on some kind of percentage based mean. It would need a suitable name - I was thinking "Voter Ranking Index" but that is terrible!
That could work too. I don't think people like hiding information and the other thing is even if it was hidden people could just use a tool to add it back in from the blockchain - I'm sure someone could just create a browser extension to do it. I didn't think of that until now.
@l0k1 - there's a WHOLE lotta win in those two paragraphs.
I really don't think its flawed as I stated above, lets say you get 500 votes and 490 are from minnows those minnows have no weight value so you wont get much in $ but if you get 50 votes and they are all with much higher weight lets say over 5,000 steem power of course your going to get more $. That is the way i see it. the weight of the vote is what matters. not how many votes.