tl;dr Summary
Besides the existing voting power decrease, halve an additional new voting power for revoting on the same authors again and again, and let the new revoting power recover very, very slowly. Details below.
Steemit's Strengths and Weaknesses
I am a big fan of Steemit, the Steem blockchain, and the Steem tokens. To my mind, it is probably the only Cryptocurrency that is really backed by something, namely the entire Steemit community. Many users put there heart and soul into their posts. For example, I am a fond reader of many #steemstem publications and amazed how much time and effort authors spend on well-researched science and technology contributions.
Yet, without doubt Steemit has its dark sides as well and does not run without friction. There are some issues that come to my mind such as:
Bid and voting bot abuse: Some users promote quite dubious content using bid bots. As a consequence, whether the trending page is nowadays a useful feature is intensely debated.
Reward pool abuse: Some whales are just using their voting power in upvoting circles and self-promotion rather than helping to discover good content.
Frustrating first steps: Being a minnow can be very, very frustrating at times. Just putting days of work in a well-researched article may give a few pennies without a proper follower base.
Proof-of-brain, Bid Bots, and Circular Voting Patterns
I still believe that the Steemit proof-of-brain concept -- i.e. the hypothesis that rewarding user contributions and user curation with tokens will facilitate content of social value -- is or can become a reality again. For my part, I started an initiative or rather developed a project called @trufflepig. A curation bot that searches and promotes undervalued content (free of charge, the little fella is not a bid bot). Besides digging for Steemit posts that deserve more reward, he publishes a daily top-list about how the trending page would look like without bid bots.
These top-lists have started a discussion if bid bots are in fact useful. The argument goes as follows: Bid bots democratize the hot and trending sections as they enable everyone (with the right amount of pocket money, of course) to get their shiny posts up there. Thereby they fight the circular upvote rings that regularly appeared at the top before the advent of the bid bots.
This is a valuable argument and made me think about how I could improve @trufflepig's no-bid-bot-top-list without promoting the circular upvote patterns. Instead of improving @trufflepig directly, I had an idea about how to improve Steemit's voting algorithm in general. To my mind a small adjustment of the voting rules may tackle all three of the above listed problems to some extent.
The Proposal
For simplicity users voting are called curators and the users receiving these votes are called authors in the following.
Besides the existing voting power that decreases slowly with each vote and recovers quickly by 20% each day, a curator is assigned an individual voting power per author. Let us call this special voting power revoting power. The revoting power is halved after each vote casted by the curator on the very same author. Moreover, the re-voting power recovers much more slowly and re-doubles only every n days. For now let us assume n=28, i.e. 4 weeks, but the exact time span needs to be discussed in more detail.
Effectively we have now three means of weighting a vote (instead of the current 2):
Voting Weight: Can be chosen manually by the curators; effectively chosen only by established curators with at least 500 Steem Power who can use the Steemit voting weight slider (yet, in principle everyone could via the Steem API).
Voting Power: Drops by 2% for each full vote and recovers by 20% in 24 hours.
New Revoting Power: Author specific voting power that halves with every vote on the same author. Recovers slowly by doubling every 28 days up to a maximum of 100%.
The total strength of a curator vote is the product of the three weightings: voting weight * voting power * revoting power.
For example, author @alice publishes a post that curator @charlie likes. He upvotes it with 100% weight at 100% voting power and 100% revoting power, giving @alice effectively a full 100% strength upvote (100% * 100 % * 100% = 100%), the highest he can do. As a consequence, his voting power decreases to 98% (the current system). In addition, his revoting power on @alice is halved to 50% (the new adjustment).
If curator @charlie voted again on another article by author @alice with 100% voting weight, he would grant her a much smaller total vote strength, namely 49% (voting weight * voting power * revoting power = 100% * 98% * 50% = 49%). As a consequence, his voting power would further decrease to 96% and his revoting power halves to 25%. His voting power would recover in about five hours. To recover his revoting power on @alice, @charlie needs to wait 58 days to have it recharged back at 100%.
The most important part is that revoting power is author specific. For instance, if curator @charlie decides to vote on author @bob's new article after his two votes on @alice. He would grant @bob a much stronger vote with a total strength of 96% (voting weight * voting power * revoting power = 100% * 96% * 100%).
Details are to be debated. For instance, the lowering of revoting power could be stopped at 6.25% (4th halving) such that hardcore fans of a particular author can support her or him no matter what, but at the expense of sacrificing a lot of influence. Also the doubling time to recharge could be variable such as 28 days to recover from 50 to 100%, but 7 days for any smaller recovery.
Implications of the new Revoting Power
What are the consequences of this new revoting power?
Circular upvote rings are punished: Whales upvoting each other has almost no effect since their reciprocal voting strengths quickly halve with each circular upvote and recover too slowly to abuse the reward pool.
Self votes become less useful: Revoting power also applies to self votes. Hence, authors may only vote on their own posts effectively once a month.
Bid bots lose influence: Authors may only use a particular bid bot every month, since each bought upvote halves the bid bot's boost on any of the author's posts. Thereby, the overall usage of bid bots will be reduced.
More rewards for minnows: Content is much more rewarded than authors, because most curators will not vote for the same author several times in a row since the revoting power drops quickly. Hence, content and curation rewards are distributed more broadly among the Steemit community and will facilitate quality instead of quantity.
As you can see, the proposed novel revoting power may solve or at least tackle some of the most pressing issues this platform faces. This will perpetuate the proof of brain concept and increase the value of Steem for everyone. If Steemit becomes renowned as the go to platform for quality content, everyone invested in it will benefit.
Still, my proposal will not solve all of the issues.
Limitations of the new Revoting Power
Some problems or challenges will remain:
Costly and time consuming voting rings may still be possible by whales distributing their voting power among many accounts.
Revoting Power will not hinder vote selling. In fact, it may benefit services such as @smartsteem or @minnowbooster because votes of individual users are becoming more worth in the Steemit ecosystem.
The first issue may actually not be a severe problem. First, clearly abusive voting rings (these will be many, many accounts with almost no posts or comments) are easy to spot and can be flagged by curation bots. This flagging can be supported by decreasing the revoting power of flagging (reflagging from now on) much less severe than the positive revoting power. For example, the revoting power halves every upvote on the same author whereas the reflagging power may decrease by only one third on each downvote on the same author. Besides, new accounts do not come free of charge and pose an additional investment hurdle or risk for scammers.
What do you think about this proposal? Do you have any feedback or other ideas? If this proposal gathers some support, I will open a Github issue on the steem repository to see if and how this could be potentially implemented in the long run.
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A novel proposal that encourages real interaction and promotes a sustainable platform is encouraging to find. One has to wonder if it will gain any traction. It smells like something certain folks will be willing to fight against by any argument necessary.
That's very ok. I wouldn't expect any changes to the Steemit Blockchain without heavy back and forth. Heck, I'm myself not entirely sure that this would work, that's why I actually put it up for debate before making a github issue or something like that.
In the long run every Steemit member, and especially the whales, will only benefit if Steemit becomes a quality platform. Having a fortune of STEEM is nothing worth if no one cares about it and only a few active user remain.
Nice post, I will take the time to read it, it seems to be full of very useful information! Would already love to cooperate together. =)
This sounds like a smart solution, or at least a good basis to start with. Full disclosure, I use the bid bots. As a minnow starting out it seems almost impossible to build a following without getting on the trending page. And you can't get on trending without having followers to vote you there. It's a catch 22, and the bots let you break it. I haven't posted much yet, but I think what I have is quality content, and it would be great to not need the bots to get exposure.
That said, I do see one other flaw in this idea. New users with only a dozen or so followers would have an extremely difficult time gaining traction. Let's say all of their followers upvote one of their posts. A week later they could post the greatest content in the world, and it would be buried by new posts before anyone could see it. So maybe the vote weight penalty could be related somehow to the inverse of the number of followers. This would allow minnows to get exposure even with a small following (that could vote for them often), but once they get more followers they also get exposed to the vote weight penalty.
Well, I have used bid bots again and again, too, because they are the only way currently to get traction.
However, part of the reason that they are the only way to make it to the trending page is because they exist and everyone else uses them.
Moreover, I would beg to differ, this proposal would rather help minnows with a small follower base instead of hurting them. If revoting is punished, much less of the reward pool is distributed among whales and voting circles that abuse the system. Hence, much more money will be paid to regular authors and payout is determined by content rather than by follower base or upvoting circles. Similarly, in order to obtain curation rewards you need to search for good content (simply automatically voting on your default go to author won't suffice anymore), again this benefits authors that write good content instead of people with a huge follower base.
Great! Because in the trending page some posts with just a hello win more than 200 dollars, that's unfair,and that's harmful to the platform.
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This was really well thought out, and it does seem like an effective means to tackle the current perceived abuse of circle votes by whales, self voters, and bid bot, and vote buying. I say perceived abuse because I see it as debatable as to how bad such practices are hindering the economy of the system here. I have noticed several of @trufflepig's reports, which are awesome, have pointed out the trend of minnows and dolphins gaining more gradual influence over time, despite the lopsided power of whales circling their votes to eachother and the prevalence of bots.
Personally, I am not a fan of system changes that penalize the entire community from their current abilities, to hinder the actions of those who are using the same abilities in a way we disagree with. I do not provide a solution, other than suggest that people should continue to invest in and support their favorite authors. The majority part-time users prefer to support their smaller interest communities, rather than scour the feeds several times daily for a an author they have not reviewed before. I would rather not have to resort to rewarding random posts every day to earn a curator reward, which no longer has meaning to me as providing value of my interests.
Anyway, I think I may have an unpopular view on things, but I do like to support minnows with the vote value I am currently able to provide. It takes me a long time to trust an author to give them my continued support, and I don't give it every time with an autovoter. If others want to do that, I think that is their free choice, and they are also paying for it with real money to enforce their right to choose how to use that free will.
If there is a solution to improve their search page, and the tags feeds, so that top expert curators were revising those lists, I would be more in favor of this as an organic solution.
These are good points, especially I like the expression perceived abuse. I haven't added any data about the issues, that is true. And it is definitely worth to investigate this much more to put bid bot promoted posts into a perspective vs. organic good content.
Thanks to @trufflepig, however, I do have some numbers at hand. So usually people spend about 15-20,000 SBD and 2000-4000 STEEM on bid bots each day. These are heavy numbers if you consider that only about 50,000 STEEM are added to the reward pool in the same amount of time.
But yes, this proposal would penalize everybody, or at least affect their voting behavior. Yet, if everybody benefits, I think this might be a worthy sacrifice.
Again, you have raised some valuable criticism, thanks! I hope this is encouraging for everybody to also point out flaws and errors in this proposal. I really appreciate this :-)
Yes, thank you for your positive perspective. I am considering adding a delegation to @trufflepig for your efforts.
Now you got me thinking about another approach to improve the blockchain, by having expert curators on given tags. They could be voted on like witnesses, and could gain influence and rewards if they provide valuable suggestions for worthwhile posts to be viewed in a combined feed of the tag they monitor.
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The entire voting power system is very confusing. I'm going to re-read this post and see if I can understand it. I've delegated a little bit SP because I'm not sure what I'm doing with my own SP. I've tried to follow steemnow and that helps a little. I have noticed that my small upvote of .01 will hit on one post and not the next, and then again a little later. I'd like to give every post I upvote a reward. Thank you for addressing this.
Currently your voting consist of two components the weight, as a minnow this is always set to 100% unless you use the Steem API directly or have a weight slider (activated at about 500 SP), and your voting power. The voting power drains by 2% with each 100% weighted upvote and recovers by 20% in 24 hours.
How much your vote is finally worth in actual Steem Dollars depends on the strength (voting power * voting weight), your Vesting shares (aka Steem Power), and the current size of the reward pool.
Basically, your vote vest is determined by
voting power * voting weight * vesting shares. The worth of your vote in SBD is determined by the ratio of your vests in comparison to all recent vote vests by other users.Details are explained, here, for example: https://steemit.com/steem/@yabapmatt/how-to-calculate-the-value-of-a-vote
My proposal is to add another factor, the revoting power that drops your voting strength by half for each consecutive vote for the same author.
I support this idea. However, I would suffer from it, because I get votes from the same people over and over again...thank you 😚 But I see the bigger picture. It really may help distribute the reward pool evenly. Maybe some high rank circular jerkers would even leave...no bad in that. Interesting thought experiment 💪
This is a good idea. I was thinking of something similar where it would cost you something to keep revoting, but halving the power seems like a less punitive solution.
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Interesting idea. It would completely change much of the economy of steemit, which basically guarantees that no whale or top-20 witness will support it.
I'm commenting to remember to come back when I have the time to read and process it all.
Let me tell you how Steemfiles works. If you vote up posts made by @steemfiles bot, you get space on the steemfiles.com website for selling digital goods. With this change, I would probably need to cut-back its capacity.
Proportionally, users who try to make up for their lack of steem power by voting up many posts would get less space, and those who have more steem power will get more space.
Woww, I was preparing a similar proposal for steem, but you won me in the race, hehe.
I like your idea, great contribution, the problem is that each author needs to have a revoting power for each user, and that could be very expensive in terms of size and timing. And we are near 1 million users. What do you think?
Ps. I will comment here when my proposal is done. I really like a way to stop (or reduce) abusing.
Well, you don't need to store the revoting power for each target author explicitly. You just need to check the account history of the curator in the last kth days (depending on the revoting power recharging) to determine his revoting power on a particular author. This should be feasible I guess.
Hi @smcaterpillar. I just published my proposal about this issue. I would like to see your opinion.
Steem proposal to reduce voting rings and self-voting
If you think being a minnow can be very, very frustrating at times what do you think live for a plankton (that's those below 1 million VEST, approx. 500 steem power) is like?
I think more rewards for plankton is even more important. Minnows have 1 to 10 million VEST and have already arrived.
Plankton create there account only to find out there upvotes are worth less then nothing:
https://steemit.com/steem/@krischik/seven-upvotes-and-no-payout
And payouts are almost always zero.
With the current system I am very worried that any newcomer will quickly abandon there account again for more small account friendly options like Minds.
Well, I should have been more thorough in my categories, I guess. I did not really care about the distinction between minnow and plankton (although I'm plankton myself then with only 80SP^^). But yeah. this site needs to become more newcomer friendly.
VEST is the important one and you have 164,537:
http://steemitboard.com/board.html?user=smcaterpillar
Excellent initiative, I see that I'm now following too many users as I have missed this post of yours during its first seven days on the blockchain (why is that even a thing ? why 7 days, why not 9 or 23 ?)
You might have missed this, one. But there's a chance to to vote in that instead: https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@jga/steem-proposal-to-reduce-voting-rings-and-self-voting.
I have to say, I like @jga's idea more than mine, his changes are less drastic, and he built a nice frontend to play with :-D
Thank you, I've seen that one (by accident) a few minutes ago and upvoted it.
The way I see it, momentum is gathering for a "reverse fork" letting the current steemit be "steemit cash" and moving forward to a real steemit, call it "steemit community" or "steemit social" if you will
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