Help Fix Steem's Economy!

in #steem6 years ago (edited)

Help Me Fix Steem's Economy!


While most people would agree that something is wrong on this platform, many can't quite pinpoint exactly what the problem is. This is known as the Steve Buscemi's face effect.

steve.png
Me starting off with that joke basically means we're stuck with this as the thumbnail

Lately, I keep hearing a lot of complaints like:

  • People are far too greedy on Steemit
  • We have a problem of bad culture and need to educate people to behave better
  • Keep your hands to yourself you creep or I'll call the police
  • How the fuck can people just get away with self voting 10 times a day?

These are all misdiagnoses of the underlying economic problem which I've written directly below in bold so lazy shits can just read that and go straight to the comments.

Problem: Under our current economy of linear and 25% curation, it is roughly 4x more financially rewarding to participate in content indifferent voting behavior (eg. self voting, vote selling) than content reflective voting behavior (eg. curation). This has lead to a complete failure in our ability to function as a content discovery and rewards platform.

Now because it takes painstaking hard work and extraordinary talent to create high quality content such as this piece you're reading, many large stakeholders have opted to sell their votes to garbage ads or self vote their own rubbish. Supporting actual good content will, on average, cost you 75% of your returns in lost opportunity, and fighting against the rubbish on here will only set you back a mere 100% of returns. Thus, it becomes too expensive for many of us to not take part in the very activity that, collectively, is destroying this platform.

Imagine you had a community that introduced a new law which rewarded a person $1000 every time they take a shit in public. Would it be surprising to discover, after a while, that the streets were flowing in diarrhea? Would you try to rectify this situation by asking people to be less greedy? Or perhaps try to educate people to shift from a culture of shitting on the streets to one of, well, not shitting on the streets? Would there be a point in asking how the fuck do you even manage to shit 10 times a day?

Of course not. You'd change the law that rewarded shitting in public so highly. Similarly, don't be surprised if people engage in the exact activity we've decided to reward the most: vote farming (be it vote selling or self voting). Now, our approach to rectify this should be clear:

Mission: We need to devise and implement a new economic system that rewards the behavior we want with the most competitive returns while sacrificing the least in terms of trade offs.

You get the behavior you reward the most on here. The idea is to close the gap between content indifferent and content reflective rewards by incentivizing the former less and the latter more in terms of returns. @kevinwong and I prefer using a combination of measures (slight superlineararity, higher curation 50% and 10% separate downvotes) modestly, which together, should be strong enough to give good curation a competitive edge over mindless vote selling and self voting. Of course other measures are perhaps available, and they all have their trade offs. Some are really fucking bad ideas, and I might write about them another day.

It is quite frustrating to see the overall lack of clarity and urgency in terms of efforts being directed to fixing this problem that's completely undermining our platform over the past year. Focusing on UI or communities as a solution is like getting diagnosed with testicular cancer and deciding that the best way to treat it is by getting a nose job and your anus bleached.

The good news is that the failure of this system is entirely fixable; it isn't at all something inherent to decentralization or stake based voting, nor is it some moral or cultural problem. We can change the economics here to incentivize the behavior we want instead of swimming through our diarrhea filled streets.

If you believe something should be done to better align rewards with desirable behavior, please let witnesses and Steemit Inc know about it. Do it in person if you're attending Steemfest 3. Kevin will be there and he'll give you a private lap dance if you help us fix the economy.

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I've gained 20 pounds over the past few months just being depressed af over this.. so I hope you guys love an emo lap dancer who's a bit on the thicc side.. *wink wink*

I like kevin
kevin thinks my ideas are good

I don't like people who are not kevin
people who are not kevin think my ideas are shit

I also don't think your ideas are shit. :)

Do you think mine is?
I would prefer a curve which started as n^2 / exponential (thus flat), and then later changed into linear which would work against self-voting as well as excessive rewards for single posts.

@clayop had a similar idea.

yes I agree

in the other post by kevin we mention that the superlinear part can have a linear tail, which is exactly what we meant

it doesn't even have to be n^2 at the start. It can be even be as simple as just two linear lines joined together, one with a low gradient at the start and after a certain point it's continued by another linear line with a higher gradient. Honestly even something as simple as that will do

of course you'll still need higher curation and downvote incentives. They all have their downsides but the more you use of one measure, the less you'll need of the other measures.

The witnesses hate superlinear of any kind so this is not going to get through for now, but eventually we'll revisit it. Otherwise what's going to stop me from creating hundreds of accounts a month and ninja farming small comments all over the place? You can't downvote what you can't detect in a cost effective way, and any type of superlinear counters this last exploit that I can think of.

I didn't mention it in detail here mostly because I was throwing some jokes around. I should do a more serious write up at some point

... in the other post by kevin we mention that the superlinear part can have a linear tail, which is exactly what we meant ...

That's interesting ... even if I read his post, it seems that I have missed that part (or it was in a further post which I was not aware of).

Anyway, I really appreciate your efforts!

I think it's in there

ctrl f - linear tail, he just mentions it in passing and i remember reading it. We discussed it a lot and a lot of us, apparently you and clayop as well, reach similar conclusions. I'm not too focused about credit etc, there aren't really any rewards for coming up with the most creative or even applicable solutions. Let's just do something reasonable and change this economic system that's a complete failure right now

I don't think anyone thinks your ideas are shit. I think the main issues are just 1. how to achieve consensus on fixes, 2. how to prioritize fixes, 3. when is the appropriate time to shift focus to economic changes (e.g. post-SMT), etc.

"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully."

Steem was built for content creators. Early ppl from 2016 are now upset since their content is weak. So they think something is broken. Atm most value flows to real solid content creators. These ppl at a few thousand Steem will dominate this place in the future since they only focus on producing content.

They don't have time to complain every single day. They have a solid content strategy. 50% curation would be communism. Curation in many ways is leeching. It will be more automated in the future.

Atm most value flows to real solid content creators

Don't make me laugh.

These ppl at a few thousand Steem will dominate this place in the future since they only focus on producing content.

https://steemit.com/busy/@whatsup/https-steemitimages-com-0x0-https-arcange-eu-steem-images-2018-10-23-levels-en-png-i-love-steem-but-in-2-years-we-have-only

You can deny it all you want. At the moment video is currently what has the highest value. And they get massive value from dtube support. Text has less value by the market place. The chart you linked to is because of how Steem was shared out in 2016. Which means it will take a long time to balance it out. To people that want more Steem.

And they get massive value from dtube support.

And where is that coming from? Free stake from Steemit inc, if it wasn't for that dtubers would probably make the same amount vimm streamers make without the generous curation of @thejohalfiles and a few others.

Nobody wants Steem. No company is out there waiting to leverage on it.

At the moment video is currently what has the highest value. And they get massive value from dtube support.

https://steemit.com/video/@spectrumecons/7wmi1dqw

Might do you good to know whats actually happening.

I like a lot of what you're saying, and do hope the pendulum is swinging toward quality, but in addition to not being sure that's true, I haven't the faintest idea of what you mean by "50% curation would be communism"

But more to the point, not sure 50% is a fix, since it also wouldn't stop large accounts from upvoting themselves. They'd still get all the rewards, their author rewards, and curation rewards from discovering their own content. And if someone jumped on their content to get more of their rewards, well, they'd get those author rewards, and still part of the curation, too.

Someone correct my math if you think it's wrong.
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Resteemed...

Have been on Steemit for about 18 months... what little I know is that Both You & @KevinWong are very smart.

Thank You @Trafalgar 4 writing this straight-forward, simple to understand Post.

Cheers !!

Proof of Calories.

haha :D

@kevinwong .. I can't wait to watch that private lapdance on stage when they air the SF on youtube hahah
peace!

Is there any other kind...????

Aren't most lap dancers some variation of the emo variety? Thicc is a bonus, though. 😁

Thanks! I’ll chime in later if I have recovered from feeling sick talking about it..

I can recommend the potato diet !

I just became depressed af to find this 6 months later so I can't resteem it anymore. But it's good to go back to your profile and finding this linked to your latest article @kevinwong. Come to Vancouver. I'll hook you up with some curvy friend of mine, she'll make your depression evaporate quick af.

No we dont. The proposal you guys are making is a really bad idea. Its bad from so many points of view that its hard to even start to point out the least bad effect this would cause.
There is only 1 fix to this. And that fix includes banning certain behavior. That will never happen.

I dont know if youre making this proposal with good intentions in mind but everything points to you guys using your position as whales to increase your ROI.
Youre using your position you gained by throwing around a few $ through curating to push a profit maximization change for yourself. I mean just look at the positive comments from the people that would be most screwed by this.
This is a tragically bad idea that would change absolutely nothing for the better except increase the current curators profit.
You dont want to adjust to the system. You want the system to adjust to you.
Its even more tragically bad since in principle its just "trickle down" in disguise....
You had dtube move towards 50% curation few months ago and it changed almost nothing in curator behavior. You still had dtube and Kpine supporting most of the quality content creators.

What youre essentially doing is cutting everyone else earning potential, wrecking bots, alienating passive investors that couldnt care less about curating (that by the way will always be passive), assuming large accounts have some kind of glorified talent in recognizing quality content, trying to grab more power for yourself (your right of course)...

You assume STEEM is just a content monetization platform when in reality its a token distribution platform.
The change to content placement STEEM could actually benefit from, which ofc doesnt require a such a radical change, is a STEEMIT UI design change, a bot upvote filter.

You disguise your proposal as a "lets fix trending", "lets make quality content win"..... and you know who will make good content win?
We will!

Me and Kevin! So give us more money.

If you want to do something for the platform, focus on marketing. I just hope this never passes or STEEM will literally go down the toilet.

You're the guy who once tried to tell me you were earning a 10% profit by spending 15 STEEM and getting 15.023 STEEM in return. I thought I'd start there.

You're claiming these folks have an ulterior motive, so I'd like to point to that link again. I have reason to believe, based on the things you said there, you have an ulterior motive. You're here to defend your approach where you purchase votes and hope to squeak out tiny profits. That comes first to you, and your content doesn't matter, it's just there.

By the sounds of what you're saying here, you don't want curators to come along and vote for your work. By the sounds of what you're saying here, you'd rather earn your .023 STEEM by pulling 14 meaningless dollars out of the reward pool with purchased votes, instead of pressing the vote button ONCE to earn MORE than .023 STEEM by utilizing your own SP as a tool to earn curation rewards.

A bot upvote filter would be like sweeping your kind under the rug at this point. If you're removing $14 out of the reward pool just so you can make .023 STEEM, you're wasting resources. That action of wasting resources should be downvoted and that $14 returned to the reward pool.

I have reason to believe you'd prefer things stay the same so you can continue exploiting the reward pool, so you can scrape pennies off the floor. The platform you want sounds like this to me:

I have a two dollar coin. If you would like to earn the two dollar coin, you must first give me a 10 dollar bill, then scrub my toilet. Then you can have your two dollar coin.

You contradict yourself quite often. Your actions speak louder than your words. You don't want to see people with SP earning more, yet you pay people with SP 15 STEEM so you can earn .023 STEEM. I think your head is screwed on backwards. You wrote a post, pressed many buttons and paid people 15 STEEM so you could earn .023 STEEM. Why not powerup that STEEM in your wallet, press the vote button once, help someone, and earn more than .023 STEEM?

@steemmatt applauds you:

You have some major balls, but this is the type of voice that opens eyes instead of kisses asses.

But to me you sound more like an ass kissing yes man here to apply spin and defend a few vote dealers and their goddamn Monkey Posts.

Anyway...
Have a good day. Was good to see you again.

Yep, that whole comment loses all integrity with the booster vote.

He didn't boost the original comment, I did for visibility, @lordbutterfly then asked me if I boosted it, I said yes. That will say he did no effort in pushing it to the top

You've actually done a fine job of demonstrating why actual curation is important. You bought this top slot and disguised it as popular opinion because you and possibly a loud minority agrees. No different than if this post was about Coke and someone wrote in to speak about their bad experience with Coke while Pepsi paid for top positioning. It's shady. It would be hard to take the Coke hater's views seriously.

I downvoted for the simple fact, the top slot only required $4 but I saw $12 next to the comment. Since the point of the purchase was to place it at the top, $8 was a waste of resources, so I returned a portion of that to the pool, giving others an opportunity to earn it. There's no point in wasting $8 and if people want to treat it like it's worthless, it will become worthless.

It's all transparent so there is no secrecy here. It's not shady since it's transparent. Anyone can go look who buys a vote or promotion. I did this because I felt strongly that it should have more visibility. Now since this boost of comment was something that was possible when I went to the promotion page I thought it would be no big deal.

It was done for visibility. Did it work? Yes it got more visibility and feedback. And I appreciate it. And yes I looked at it with some margins. A bigger numbers creates a bigger response. I wouldn't call it a waste since I think conversations on important nuanced topics as governance has value for the whole Blockchain ecosystem.

I also would call it a popular opinion since I would say if someone puts lots of capital behind something that shows a level of care for the platform. Since it shows some form of investment. I would call important conversations more valuable than any other thing. But I understand people have different points of views about governance and how they want things to be. You need a range of various people to create a balanced network.

I didn't comment because there was money beside the post. I've been visiting and reading this blog since it came out. It could have been down at the bottom, I would have said the same damn thing.

Part of what you're calling 'feedback' was you telling another member how to ask questions properly.

You feel strongly about it, you see value in it, but not everyone sees the world as you do. That goes for me as well. I see the world as I do, and I think it's shady. Just because I can see an employee helping themselves to cash out of the register, that doesn't make it okay.

I could spend $1 million dollars to buy a billboard slot and claim my hockey team is the best in the world. So what if their record is 0 wins and 20 losses? Because I spent money to say something, that makes it true? Because I spent money, that means I love my favorite hockey team even more?

Sounds more like the money is clouding your judgement.

Sometimes I think you're another one here with their head screwed on backwards. And I mean that in a nice way. I just don't know what other words to use to best describe what I see. Sometimes it feels like opposite day here and everyone is just acting weird on purpose because those are the rules.

P.S. I don't have time to sit here and talk in circles tonight.

It's not super transparent, because there are plenty of new users who have no idea what upvote bots are. There was a bot that tried to post about that, but it got killed. This is an odd war.

I'm just watching. I care, but I can't say I know what's right, and also everyone is really emotional about social media, so that's kinda scary.

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@nonameslefttouse - would just like to clarify a bit of a potentially misleading reference. While I do generally appreciate when people speak their minds without fear to try to spark change, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm giving them a standing ovation in agreement with their message.

Fair enough @steemmatt. I read it like, "Yeah! Stick it to the man!" I'll take the blame for that.

This place is getting better though. People are feeling more free to be open. No flag wars, no trolling. Even I'm being given a chance to speak and I know I can be a bit abrasive at times, nobody is shooting me down for being me, so that's cool, because I truly mean no harm, I just can't seem to mince my fucking words well enough some days.

Thanks man. In hindsight, it was a pretty dumb spot for me to make that comment, especially seeing how the dialogue blew up afterwards.

In the tone of a high school yearbook signature, "Don't ever change".

I like mince in pies and politics. But your words seem fine, even without the deliciousness that mince adds to meat.
God I can't wait for mincemeat pie season.

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Wow, this post had some funny points, but @nonameslefttouse your comment is even better! Seriously so many people simply get not enough returns for their bought bid botds, and they still keep doing it :S They'd easily earn more by getting curated once in a while. And it would be even better if there will be more curators or stronger curators.
For example I like that another platform allows self voting posts, but self voting comments is simply a waste (you get 1/4th the value), would it be so hard to implement that? And after 5 posts per day for the self vote value to drop drastically? You're not banning it this way, but you're making it less desirable :)

You dont want to adjust to the system.

You mean buying votes from bidbots as adjust to the system? They've been saying change the culture for months, don't see much result tho, just as the dtube 50/50 curation. DTube's 50/50 curation was a failed marketing too, few were really aware of that.

Nothing is wrong. This Blockchain is an open system. People have a range of different ways they can use proof-of-brain to earn more Tokens. People will be people. Nothing is wrong with people.

The phrase "Proof of Brain" in an ecosystem ruled by bots is Orwellian Doublespeak on a level which is almost comical. Almost a perfect poster child for George Carlin's skit on Euphemisms.

Brains are important!

Thats the point of view you have and thats fine. But.. if you were being really honest, though i dont agree in the slightest, you would say its "ruled by people using tools".
Id say that youre actually closer to Doublespeak then @phoneinf is. Obscuring the nature of what is actually going on.

Great. I see your points but responding wouldnt really add much to my overall argument. Basically id just repeat what i wrote above and in a few other comments and go in circles of repeating the same thing over again.
You seem a bit too "composed" in your comments for my liking so i think ill have more fun with Nonames. He seems a bit more fun... hehe. :D
At the end of the day, thats what its all about.
But thx for the reply.

You have some major balls, but this is the type of voice that opens eyes instead of kisses asses.

This post has received a 30.69 % upvote from @boomerang.

Oh the irony

The problem is that Kevin and Traf will make more money?

Responding with a 1 line comment to 300 word comment is a bit waste of time. The original comment goes very much in depth in how he looks at things.

His argument has a fundamental flaw: that big investors are not supposed to look out for themselves. That large stakeholders should not have a huge say in a "Staked" economy.

Hence the question. And there is nothing wrong with answering that question.

No he is not saying that.

He lays out his views in a long detailed way. Responding with a 1 line comment to something nuanced is disrespectful as the original commenter invested lots of time to create his thoughts down on paper. If someone writes a deep comment there should be an appropriate detailed response that use quotes from the original comment and explains things with some depth and consideration.

It's easy to try to pick small things from a long comment and try to lead things down to 1 specific path. That is easy to do. Life is more nuanced. So it needs to be handled with some care. And not lead stuff off topic. Since it shows that even if you would get a long depth comment back in return you would probably respond with a short one again. Which shows low care levels in expression. It tries to bring down a conversation to something overly short and too simplistic.

Some person investing a lot of time and energy to develop something proper won't take an overly short response serious as it will be a waste of time.

Oooo. This is what someone was talking about when they said you were trying to control how people comment.

Guilty. Sometimes I only have a few words to respond with. It's sometimes frustrated me that people go on for pages when I have something to say about their premise that would lead the conversation in another direction.

I wonder if we'll ever get past the gap between how we expect to be able to converse and what social media is capable of conveying.

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Why would you say that? I actually claim thats its completely understandable and expected.

trying to grab more power for yourself (your right of course)...

The thing is that when everyone else is paying the price, its important to speak up even if it means that Kevin might decide never to "gift " you again.

Seems it's better we all stay in the ditch than give people an incentive to reignite their curating fuck-o-meter which has a little downside of making whales richer.

I'm trying to see your angle here but all I see is prejudice.

The thing is that when everyone else is paying the price, its important to speak up even if it means that Kevin might decide never to "gift " you again.

Voting for someone's post doesn't mean you are gifting him or her anything.

You are one real prejudiced mf haha

Prejudice? Im not seeing any here. Re-ignite whose curation?
Freedoms? Fyrsts? Cmon.

Im not sure how you arent seeing this, but they want to cut everyones potential payouts by 25%. This means slower growth for smaller accounts and faster growth for large accounts. A gap will widen drastically. Also this essentially kills bots so you cant even empower yourself but are rather dependent even more on a few whales that want to curate.

Hehe. Its not about Kevin and Traf making more money. Its about what will happen just so Kevin and Traf could make more money.

And you believe Kevin and Traf have MORE to lose if their intentions are "not good" and these proposed changes bring forth behaviors that will make Steem more worthless?

This change wont bring any change of behavior. It will change the way the behavior is exhibited but it will stay the same. As it did always.
This change is incredibly dangerous because its essentially a aggressive move by the curator whales against the community in an attempt to grab more power for themselves which they can do, because "curation" has always been seen as a major strength of the platform and the 5-10$ they drop on your post has a huge impact on an individual. (wow someone gave me 10$ for something i wrote) Therefor you assume these guys can do no wrong.

Problem is that we moved away from the "gift" economy which is a extremely small part of the larger picture.

Not one thing that is written in this post can you hang your hat on and say: Yes this change will lead to improvement in this "area".

Not one thing would change for the better, unless you are a curator large account like Kevins and Trafs, then you would get a higher ROI.
Instead of creating a fairer distribution across the board, creating a middle class, they want to empower themselves to a higher degree.

They are essentially saying that by increasing their returns you will be better off.
That is wrong on so many levels.

  1. Passive investors will remain passive investors since not everyone cares about curation.
  2. The "potential" (and i mean this in the broadest of definitions) for new whale curators popping up from what we have now is close to zero, and the passive whale accounts actually openly admitted they would still look for passive income instead of curating.
  3. And the most important part... There just isnt enough curators to assume they would be able to cover current platform quality creators with upvotes, to justify a cut of 25% from author earnings for everyone on the platform, alienating passive investors and a move to 1.2 superlinear
    Curator behavior would not change and everyone else would take a huge cut.

You would be essentially increasing community dependency greatly on just a few large stake holders that already have a great effect on the gift economy.
This is ludicrous on so many levels.

Problem is that we moved away from the "gift" economy

Steem was never envisioned as a gift economy. It was and is based on directing rewards to those who contribute value.

Gifting can be done using the transfer function. That's not ever been the idea of the reward pool and voting.

Though I will say it wouldn't necessarily be an altogether bad idea to design a system around. But it isn't Steem.

move to 1.2 superlinear

Kevin and Traf like ^1.3 or ^1.2 superlinear (which they call 'mild' but I disagree) but very few others do. It isn't likely to happen, so perhaps consider the rest of the proposal without it as a more realistic take.

I might have expressed myself wrongly there, but STEEM being a "gift economy" is the idea being held by quite a few people which was the point i was trying to make.
The whole problem around all and any discussions that take this direction, i think stems from one single thing..

Value.

People have a different view of what value is.
On one side you have people trying to tell you what should and should not be considered value, what should be considered more or less valuable, and on the other hand you have people (and i consider myself in that camp) that say: "What ever you decide."

Well if they contribute good content AND make money, I don't mind. If they're making money at the net expense of Steem, that's bad.

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This is a pressing matter, reason why you had to wake up the sleeping dog. This issue has been a general problem that can't be fixed on the platform, the best place to savage the situation is at steemfest since Ned will be present.

You need to get already that steemit is not about content discovery.
It is about competing-for-eyeballs economy.

Under this paradigm steemit is alive and well and made a huge leap with HF20 recently

I can easily get behind the idea of 50/50 curation, that would encourage you to hunt for good content or join the best curation leagues since there's a chance for you to get great rewards with that.

I love the idea behind subsidizing flags, I've seen others proposing something more radical like a second voting mana bar just for flags, what's your take on this?

I would need to do some more reading to understand the impact of going to 1.3 instead of linear since I came to Steem after superlinear was gone and don't have any experience with the previous system.

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I don't know about the flag idea but I do agree with the 50/50 thing. The flag idea I think could encourage flagging for reasons of jealousy/envy rather than legit reasons. How would we prevent flag abuse?

The idealistic answer would be that users would only flag real spam and plagiarism but we all know that won't happen.

The ideal would be that this alternative mana bar for flagging is only a fraction of the size of your real real mana bar so it would run out faster so if you want to do positive flagging or bad flagging, you only have so much flags a day, let's say, 3 full flags a day or something like that, therealwolf released another post regarding this and he explains it a bit better.

I was just about to make a post regarding the flaws I've noticed with this platform. It seems to me that there is a perpetual motion machine of sorts in regards to "acts that get a reward", rather than acts that will benefit the community. Interesting post, and thank you for sharing.

thanks for reading
the problem is that the acts that gain the most rewards and acts that benefit the community the most should align
they don't, but it's fixable

Why doesn't Steemit Inc hire an economist to help with this? Or what about economists or students who post on Steem who can help with this?

Maybe an Economist also cannot answer this. Because you won't learn about a system like steem in school. This is a new ecology that did not exist before. Building it well is hard. We need to take responsibility, i believe. Thanks to OOP for doing something about it.

The last time they had a person who understands economics in there, it was @dan, and his views were considered evil, and he was effectively smoked out of the company.

That's probably a reason why.

@dan isn't/wasn't an economist either. I agree he had more understanding than the current people in charge but an actual economist would be someone who focuses only on that problem.

There are economists capable of approaching these sorts of problems but it is a narrow sub-specialty, there aren't many of them, and they don't necessary want to work for Steemit either (although many would probably consult, likely at a pretty high price). I commented with some specifics on this sort of thing a while back when Steemit made a post asking for community input. As far as I can tell they acted on none of it (not just my input, all of it).

Anyway, just hiring smart people/economists with some vaguely related background would be good. Smart people can often come up to speed and figure out a lot. Part of that involves knowing how to navigate the literature and connect with others in the field. There is currently no one with any vaguely related background at Steemit as far as I can tell. Perhaps that is one reason they avoid these problems and work on things like SMTs.

I like both you and @kevinwong, maybe that is just because of my slight affection for Asians. I completely agree that the current model is not working, this place is festering of late and something needs to be done. A 50/50 split might be the best way to accomplish this.

However going off of your post, you have only looked at the economic model and neglected the social aspect of the platform. Your notions would be accurate if this were a purely economic platform, but there is much more to it than just that. It's the same reason billions of people are on Facebook without receiving a penny. The social aspect really should not be overlooked.
The social aspect is very powerful, but when it is smothered by self votes and the "me over everything" attitude, it gets drowned out.

If this was purely about money than I never would have stood up to clowns like bernie sanders knowing full well it would result in the loss of potential steem earnings. The same goes for many of the communities and votes that take place, people want to feel connection and Steem has done this in the past.

There is a lot to untangle with the current economic model but I think its important to understand there is much more than just the economic part to it.

However going off of your post, you have only looked at the economic model and neglected the social aspect of the platform

The economy has to work first. Otherwise to quote @dana-edwards elsewhere in this thread, "The ship sinks".

There are many different ways to work on social aspects, and many different sorts of social aspects that can find a niche. Facebook is very different from Twitter which is very different from Reddit which is very different from Steemit (which indeed may be very different from some future Steemit). These can all work.

Getting the economy to work is the first priority.

The economy needs to work, but it can be viewed in isolation without looking at the intrinsic value the platform creates. Steemit is more than just an economic system, what exactly that is, is up for interpretation. It is the first of its kind and the driving force for people to come to the platform is the idea of the economic incentive, but it is not necessarily the reason they stay, especially when seeing the incentives decrease as substantially as they have in 2018. The economy definitely needs amending, but so do many other aspects of this ecosystem

The economy still needs to work or the ship just sinks, at some point literally people can't afford to run the servers (not cheap), etc. It doesn't really matter what the motivations or intrinsic values are. The numbers need to work. (I'm not claiming we are anywhere near the point where servers would be turned off. We're not. But keeping tho ship afloat at a basic level is still always a consideration that trumps others.)

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First of all, long time no chat! I miss your musk.

Second, many people think you are just a clown here to entertain all of us. But I know your secret. You are actually brilliant! For close to a year you have been jumping up and down pointing to the roof that is on fire. You also pointed out exactly why the roof is on fire. But many have said "We don't need no water let the mothertrucker burn. Burn mothertrucker. Burn." (This joke was intended for the very small niche of 1980s House Music enthusiasts).

Now that the pleasantries are out of the way, because I am not Kevin, I think your solution has a flaw.

I completely disagree with the idea that making downvotes easier and cheaper will help in any way. I think that would be disastrous. We have already seen the vast majority of people use their upvotes to maximize personal, immediate profits. What makes anyone believe people will not use downvotes in the same exact way? Do we trust people to use downvotes to help the platform or to help themselves?

Two years of evidence seems to indicate that if people had cheap downvotes at their disposal, they would use them to increase their individual immediate profits. People will not downvote based on post quality, they will downvote based on the immediate impact on their personal rewards.

In addition, it will bring a level of negativity to the platform that most normal people will seek to avoid.

haha I don't think you need to be brilliant to see that rewarding content indifferent voting behavior (vote selling/farming) 4x more than good curation is a recipe for disaster. It's a surprise we adopted this economic model, and a bigger surprise to be stuck here for over a year.

You're right to be concerned about downvotes. Every one of these measures I've pushed for have trade offs. Ideally we don't want to take more rewards from content creators, we don't want the inequality of any suplinearity, and we don't want the drama, grief and toxicity of downvotes. The idea is to have a minimum combination of these measures that together, is sufficient to close the 4x gap in returns between vote farming and curation.

I'll focus on downvotes. I have a lot of concerns with additional downvote incentives, some of which overlap with yours.

The point you raised about directly using downvotes to benefit oneself is less of a concern if free downvotes are relatively limited. This is because unlike upvotes which can be directed to reward a specific account, downvotes can only be used to deprive an account of potential rewards. So if I have $100 of free daily downvotes, I can't really use them to direct rewards towards me very easily. The most I can do is throw them out indiscriminately on posts I have not voted and thereby indirectly have the posts I have voted to rise ever so slightly in value because I've taken the potential payout of someone else and throw it back into the rewards pool.

Now this doesn't entirely apply if free downvotes have a very high limit. If everyone is given as much free downvotes daily as their daily upvotes (which btw is what most witnesses support but I'm pushing against), then there may be sufficient incentive for larger stakeholders to collude and strategically place their downvotes in a way that significantly pulls rewards platform wide from other posts and pushes them towards posts from which they benefit. Overall this is not an issue with lower limits of free downvotes which I'm espousing.

There are further problems with downvotes. First and foremost, they just suck. Having even minor downvotes thrown at you feels terrible. Not only are they saying they think your content is shit (however right they may be here), they get to remove money that otherwise was directed towards you, making you feel worthless. Of course it gets a lot worse than that, imagine being a relatively small account and having some whale you've randomly ticked off decide to put you in a choke hold for a month. However bad that is, it'll get a lot worse with even with a moderate amount of free downvotes. They greatly contribute to toxicity and escalate negative emotions. I don't think the higher ups really appreciate this as they don't quite use the platform in a way that many of us do, as a social platform.

Compounding this is the fact that unlike upvotes, there are no real checks and balances against free downvotes. Higher curation rewards in upvotes should hopefully become the dominant form of income generation for stakeholders, and thus there's an economic incentive for them to be cast carefully with precision, as your returns are determined by them. There's no similar incentive to keep downvotes precise, proportionate and reasonable. I'm not rewarded more for casting the fairest downvotes on the entire platform. And given the emotional nature of them, they'll be anything but precise, proportionate and reasonable.

For a stakeholder that's using a curation bot or service and making their returns that way, there's little recourse against them if they choose to use downvotes irresponsibly. As they don't post themselves, they're impervious to retaliation and cannot be deterred that way. Remedying an abusive free downvote requires an upvote, which are costly. Free downvotes may serve to keep upvotes in check but the reverse isn't true as there's no such thing as a free upvote.

I honestly have a lot of problems with introducing this change. Nevertheless if it's a moderate amount, I don't see too much direct incentive to use them abusively. There's little to gain directly from abusing them other than if you're a sadist, and I do imagine most of it will be directed with good intentions.

The simple truth is 50% curation just isn't enough to make curation competitive with vote farming so we need downvotes to help, despite all its considerable flaws. Because I strongly believe that however bad they are, the utter failure of a content discovery and rewards platform in which we find ourselves right now is worse. If you have any other ideas with fewer detriments, I'm definitely all ears.

Good to hear from you again my friend

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Can you break down the math in 50/50 curation for me?
My problem is, it seems like 50% curation doesn't solve anything.
If someone is just using their stake to upvote themselves, they still will, right? Whereas they used to get their $100 vote as 75% author reward and 25% curation, now they'll get it as $50 author reward and $50 curation, but they'll still get it all. Adding previous voters doesn't really change the math. They'll give more of their curation to those folks, but be getting their upvote value.
So... What am I missing?

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Well something should be done, because this reward system is making people about as social as a Bobcat from Buffalo. Why don’t we just put it up for a community vote ? I’m pretty sure the majority would be up for a change !

honestly, at this point even if you disagree with any of my suggestions, you can't really make this place any worse unless you actively tried

We probably agree on what we want.

But the problem with presenting this stuff is that it needs to be presented in a way that states how the changes would affect the STEEM price and value.

For instance, it would make sense on surface level that an appealing Steemit would onboard more people into the ecosystem. Of course, these people should also be such that they would buy STEEM and power up. I think there's still work to be done in regards to incentivizing that.

But my point is that merely stating how it'd be cool to have an ideal ecosystem where if you work hard and produce good content, you'll get rewarded probably won't cut it because most of the big shots are only looking at their profits and profits alone.

So, it needs to be sold to them in a way that makes it clear how they would benefit financially.

Not saying it can't be done.

Most people should be expected to be looking after their profits. Steem should work under that assumption or something is broken. To try to make people not look after their profits isn't going to cut it.

This is true. Obviously. But people looking after their profits and figuring out a Steemit that onboards people and the added purhasing of STEEM, aren't mutually exclusive.

Easier said than done, though. And I'm not one to claim I have easy answers. I think whoever does, is wrong.

If Steem doesn't work economically then the whole ship sinks. Everyone knows that much.

Everyone knows that much.

You wouldn't get that impression that from reading a lot of these comments. Or at least I often don't see it. Many are simply focused on "their" post rewards, or things like not making people feel bad by getting downvoted*, etc. and don't consider the bigger picture or think it matters.

* I'm not saying that people feeling bad is entirely insignificant, but when the question comes down to one of working vs. not working economically, that matters more, and no matter where you come down on this question the problem is that I often don't even see people willing to ask it.

Yes. But what's the best way to make it work economically? People can't even seem to agree on what Steemit is supposed to be.

There are people like me who would like it to be a content publishing platform where creators and curators get rewarded, instead of the content enriching Facebook and Twitter.

And then there are those who place no value at all on the content and social interaction and want STEEM to be reserved for apps.

I think if we can successfully align good content, even very roughly, with rewards and exposure, we'll likely be one of the most successful platforms out there as we offer a very direct way for creative content to be rewarded, which is lacking elsewhere.

This would also draw non content creators here just by virtue of what we have to offer in terms of content. Hopefully this will all translate into a larger ecosystem and higher steem $.

Whatever the case, having a completely dysfunctional content discovery/rewards system can't be helping our price, even if market behavior is sporadic and random in the short term, I believe it reflects the underlying value and utility of the platform in the long term. A working content discovery and rewards system is more valuable than a failure of one.

More can be improved too. The promoted section for example is being wasted when it could actually do something helpful for the ecosystem. Ads could be built into Steem UI and then people wouldn't have to buy exposure by other means.

I suggested it once that the promoted feature could be changed in a such a way that the SBD used to promote a post would just push a post up to the trending page.

So, let's say I put 50 SBD into a post. That 50 SBD would show as $50 in the post payout. And so on. There are people who put a lot of money into promoting their posts, even though the gained benefit is rather low.

This SBD getting burned wouldn't exactly hurt anyone. And it would give a reason for someone like me, who isn't that big of a fan of handing money to the bot owners who are partially responsible for turning Steemit into the anti-social media, to promote my posts to the trending page more.

Here is my old post about it.

Are the right intentions for fixing Steemit behind these ideas? You're very smart with economics, and a great writer, but you've mainly applied these talents to your 3-pronged voting ring. Something doesn't add up. I ran the numbers in 9 directions, and the staggering amount of dollars exchanged amongst your accounts (enough to qualify a new whale) makes it difficult to understand your intentions here.

Priorities on the system and economics are great, and I support that, but if they're also weighted in with caring about the community and social impact. This leadership behavior decays the quality of Steemit. If big money does it without resistance, then others feel it's fine to do so, and said shit storm ensues. Blaming the system can only go so far. We’re responsible for each and every action we choose to take.

If your proposed changes are adopted, how your your behavior change?

We all want Steemit and Steem to succeed. Thanks for your time.

Even if I had made twice as much vote farming under the current system, it wouldn't make up my investment being down $4m from its heights. I doubt freedom's vote selling has made up for the $40m he's lost, and this basically applies to every large stakeholder participating. This is partly due to a crypto bear market but partly due to a completely dysfunctional platform.

We want to change the system to align selfish profit maximizing individual behavior with behavior that will benefit the entire system. It's true that many stakeholders refrain from vote farming: some are too wealthy to care, some risk losing more in lost reputation if they're leaders in other communities/projects, some are lazy, and some are truly just nice altruistic people. But what you don't do is design an economic system that relies on overwhelming altruism and fails in its absence. We don't ask people to be less greedy, if that had worked, this economic system would be doing wonders by now. People generally aren't in crypto to be altruistic.

The idea is simple: have an economic system that doesn't reward vote farming 4x more than contributing to the system through good content curation. Make it reward the behavior we want to see on here as competitively as vote farming. So we increase curation, but we can't do it to the point where all incentive to produce content stops, so we try to make up the remaining difference in other ways like increasing downvoting incentives by making a certain amount of them free.

How will these changes effect my own behavior? Great question. Instantly I anticipate all these farm posts will be knocked down to shit from downvotes which are now free to cast. And they don't need to be knocked down to 0 to deter me, just 30-40% and I'll go looking for quality content to upvote because curation now pays 50%, and if I do it well I'll likely get even more.

But not just me, everyone! The idea isn't to kick the shit out of me or kevin or haejin or freedom or any other stakeholder for the crime of pursuing our rational self interests under a broken economic system and losing everyone, especially ourselves a ton of money in the process. The idea is to fix that economic system so it compels us to behave in a way that contributes to the system if we want to maximize our individual returns. Farm posts like mine will be hit by downvotes, bid bot posts will similarly be hit. Curation will become the dominant form of returns of stakeholders. Content creators will be happy because they're now truly getting the rewards and exposure good content deserve, because people like me would vote of them as it gets us the most money now. And 50% of a huge pie is a lot better than 75% of next to nothing for the authors.

I don't want to vote farm because it's boring and it's shit. I haven't wanted to ever and have been speaking out about the economics here since the start of the year. But I can't afford not to if it just means losing stake to those who do, and it's not their fault either because this economic system is insanely stupid and they're likely just in the same position as me. If you want to truly change this system, it's obvious: don't reward vote farming 4x as much. Reward the behavior you want to see most on the system with the highest returns. It really is that simple.

Edit: why would I be attempting to introduce any changes for so long if I just want the good times to go on, as some have been implying? It's not like any other system can reasonably lend itself to higher mindless vote farming returns.

I've read a lot of your stuff on this topic and this single reply is probably your best piece of respectful writing geared towards and relating best to those with alternative views. Thank you very much for taking the time to reply in this manner with some empathy. No one wants to be told they're wrong for their beliefs, so a neutral reply like this helps me refocus and stay on the platform when hope is low.

While I'm annoying on this out of passion for an alternate side of this, I care equally in my own way. Regardless, the tone and eye-to-eye approach reply helps me understand better through your eyes. Everyone has different motives and pain points.

I'd also like to point out that no Steem has been lost over this bear market/downtime. It's been made in buckets for many, even if not at an optimal return rate. I suggest considering the adage that you don't make a win or take a loss in fiat value until you hit the sell button. This is just paper value at the moment and it will return to previous heights over time, and then higher. We've all lost the same % in value, but I understand that millions of dollars vs my scale is a different type of stress/pain point.

Thanks again. Really.

Yes, just to reiterate, I want to implement changes that make it no longer competitive to vote farm or sell votes. So people platform wide who engage in such brain dead activities, including myself, become economically compelled through eating free downvotes to do something that contributes to this place, such as curate effectively, whose rewards I want to see increased. I've been advocating for this since the start of the year.

I really thought this was super obvious, but if not, well that's what I've been trying to do all along. I can't lead by example in a broken economy. It's too expensive and too ineffective. I'm promoting sensible economic changes that'll put a stop to all this rubbish I'm currently forced to take part in.

If good curation pays just as well, and it's free to kick people in the nuts for vote selling and self voting, why would I want to engage in the latter? Of course there's no surprise that so many are engaged in brain dead vote farming if we pay them 4x more than if they were to do something good for the platform, so lets stop doing that! There's no hidden agenda here, let's fix this and turn this thing into a working content discovery platform that pays for good content as well as incentivize curation with competitive returns.

Shouldn't we somehow test before assuming that the proposed changes will indeed impact the behavior as you expect ?

"streets flowing in diarrhea" ? Man, you are a poet !
But take moment to consider what you wrote:

educate people to shift from a culture of shitting on the streets to one of, well, not shitting on the streets?
Yes, indeed ! Educate people ! Scold those who seem to not want to heed ! That is very different from "fining them $1000" ! The latter is about monetary incentives, the former about social incentives. They are complementary but cannot replace one another

Consider my rephrasing your mission, from

Mission: We need to devise and implement a new economic system that rewards the behavior we want with the most competitive returns while sacrificing the least in terms of trade offs.

to the following:

Mission: We need to devise and implement a new economic and social system that rewards the behavior we want with the most competitive returns while sacrificing the least in terms of trade offs.

The implicit argument: it's very hard (perhaps impossible) to devise a better system while reducing everything to the economic dimension only; while, although complex, we stand a chance of managing to create one by leveraging the basic needs of human people to feel safe, to be loved, to belong to a community, to learn and be admired for what they do and what they know (all of these with a certain link to monetary rewards but not a full 100% hard link)

You write further down:

Focusing on UI or communities as a solution is like getting diagnosed with testicular cancer and deciding that the best way to treat it is by getting a nose job and your anus bleached.

But frankly this is just your opinion and let a full body of scientific research in social sciences and economics tell you: you are wrong, it actually works. See for instance Mark Granovetter

even in market societies, economic activity is not as disembedded from society as economic models would suggest.

Or Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational". Or many other

@trafalgar,
No doubt 10 posts a day is a really painful sh!t! But I know you do and it's hard to do for others! Exchanging votes like a lap dance, you scratch my back I scratch yours, could reduce it by little! But not totally! I think it's better we get STEEM POWER Limit per day!
I mean your daily vote power you can utilized in 1 vote or 10 votes! It's not a matter! Until you keep STEEM as Power you can spend your daily reward without a doubt! COz, it's your stake, not mine isn't it?
Trafy, don't tell me now I should be at Steem Fest 3 and will lap dance with Kevin!

Cheers~

You know you want to. Go on say it..don't be shy

At one point I made 6 posts a day on average. I don't do that anymore. Some people thought Steem was better with a 4 post maximum. When they switched it to unlimited posts a day I actually warned against it. They didn't listen, so I posted 6 posts a day on average and people then complained I post too frequently.

The lesson is there will always be complaints and every economic change presents a new set of tradeoffs. When things were capped at 4 posts a day the posters focused on longer more detailed posts. When they removed this, the shorter posts became a thing. When they switched the economics again we ended up getting memes.

The economics do seem to determine the behavior of the participants on Steem.

@dana-edwards,
Personally I hate to see more than 4 posts from a same user per day!

Cheers~

I hope never to see the 4 post limit again. Without the masses, the price of STEEM will never go up by orders of magnitude and you can't expect the masses to write "longer more detailed posts". The four post limit could kill DLike, for example. We want a vast variety of types of content on the blockchain.

It's not so much about creating the blogging masses but about attracting the masses as viewers and participants in the ecosystem. Not everyone should be a blogger. SMTs promises to help but could be over 6 months away.

I'm not against putting back the 4 post limit on blogging. The main issue with blog posts is they can only collect rewards for a short period of time which also means discovery is harder. If you post high quality content often then chances are only a small percentage of your best content will be discovered. If you post just random stuff you get the same or similar rewards so what is the incentive to post high quality content consistently?

I don't know the solution but I think we need to try.

I don't see Steem the blockchain as a mere blogging platform at all. To do so would be incredibly narrow-minded. Sure, you can implement a daily post number cap at the front end level but such limitations have no place at the level of blockchain rules, in my opinion. Why? Steem should be a universal content delivery platform with rewards, open for app developers to develop any type of app they can possibly think of.

By the way, the payout window limitation has already been worked around with Steem Forever.

See: https://steemit.com/steemhunt/@d-zero/steem-forever-reward-any-post-older-than-7-days-in-2-steps

It's about time someone explained this shit in such a shitty way that it actually made sense.

Glad to see you guys are not letting this issue go away and are bringing it to Steemfest with you, that's what we need.

For those who don't know yet, I've been working on a UI level solution to this problem myself as I saw the issue and how no one wanted to fix it.

So if you want to support organic content discovery you could always check out https://steemliber.com/ - you should now be able to vote on posts and comments + comment on posts. There's lot to be done still but it's already in a working state for those who lurk and just want to support normal steemians who don't want to use their money to gain a spotlight on them.

Of course fixing the underlying incentives is what I'd want to see happen most, this is just temporary minor band aid that I saw myself needing also as a curator and investor in Steem ecosystem.

Your post just happens to be at the #1 trending spot there btw :)

I’m prepared to eat 10k calories a day with ex-lax and cover the streets in shit for my rewards.

Kill all the bid bots, and make a team of curation to reward others. This place will be able to retain people, only if balance happens over a period of time. And only whales can build that culture. Right now, we are a community with completely opposite culture.

These requests aren’t anything new (except the downvote thing). They have been publicly made for a very long time. Unfortunately, it looks like full linearity is here to stay and there appears to be no desire by our protocol gatekeepers and overlords to adjust the curation split.

For some background on how long I have been “officially” asking for these changes, you can read these posts and some pretty good discussions that ensued as a result, particularly in the second post:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@ats-david/on-curation-rewards-and-their-necessity

https://steemit.com/steemit/@ats-david/make-steemit-great-again-fork-this-place

https://steemit.com/steem/@ats-witness/block-change-you-can-believe-in

It should be noted that the reverse auction ideas in the second post have just recently been implemented in the last hard fork...18+ months after that post. Still waiting on post/curation reward parity.

It’s the rationale for 50/50 that most people miss or won’t acknowledge - that non-bloggers are the demographic that we ought to cater to when it comes to incentives. It’s a much larger demographic and the more promising chance of “mass adoption” and consequent (potential) capital appreciation.

I certainly agree with your views and recognize that you were one of the first ones to spot these flaws

I am very much sharing your frustration, and have been for about 8 months, but it sure as fuck is growing

i think HF20 includes that self vote is worthless

Self voting isn't a problem. It's only a problem for whales who totally abuse it. Ideally if people sell or delegate their voting power then the self voting problem becomes irrelevant. The reason people self vote is because the profit avenues are so limited.

I think rather than tackle symptoms why not focus on the disease? What is the problem in the incentive structures that make it so profitable to self vote vs to do other activities?

No, sadly, it doesn't. It punish the self vote in the first 15 minutes. In the past if you self voted in the first 30 minutes, you received both rewards, by author AND by curator, so now you only receive the curator reward

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I tried to fix it... And all I got was a -11 reputation :))

Now where's that lapdance?

You'd be given a double treat. Two wongs will make it right.

Hahaha

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The shitting on the street example might have been a bit extreme, but it's true. We can't expect people to behave the way we want them to, if we don't give them the right incentives.

When it comes to the decision, I will be all in favour of a higher curation reward and seperate downvote pool. Now, I'm pretty sure that these things probably need tweaking, but the current economic system doesn't work. And we can't force people to behave a certain way, if the rewards don't align.

The majority of people will always have their own self interest at heart to an extent. If people get rewarded for being selfish we can't be surprised when they become selfish.

If it pays to be selfless then it's a win win on both sides. The question is how to get that balance right.

Life rewards the selfish animals. Why try to go against nature?
People are going to look after their own best interest as expected. That's not a good argument for why Steem isn't working. Just like mining only works because miners are selfish.

But for the long term future of the platform we will either need more people to be successful or STEEM to be more valuable. People will always be out for themselves but if we can align it to the benefit of everybody then it would be a better system.
It's not sustainable for just the 1% to be earning from it, that's why people are pushing for a different system in the first place.

A downvote pool would require significant development resources and is also the most controversial change. I'm not for a downvote pool.

you need to join the slack chat, i think ned was asking for you at some point

they're talking about giving everyone 100% free downvotes, meaning as much free downvotes to a stakeholder as their upvotes

I'm trying to push back, I support better downvote incentives but that's such an extreme change. I think almost all of the witnesses are in favor of it and i'm losing ground

Check out the table here https://steemit.com/witness-category/@cervantes/witness-consensus-status-to-fix-the-actual-steem-s-economic-flows-eng

And one of my replies https://steemit.com/witness-category/@trafalgar/re-smooth-re-trafalgar-re-cervantes-witness-consensus-status-to-fix-the-actual-steem-s-economic-flows-eng-20181028t032506881z

smooth is probably one of the ones who are more receptive to my ideas than any of the others too

Nothing quite like watching our ceo jump the shark,...

"The shitting on the street example might have been a bit extreme, but it's true."
No, it's not "a bit extreme", because the author of the blog post used the "public" word, not the "streets".
That doesn't necessarily mean "streets". In fact, it could also easily mean Steemit.
When people are commenting a spam-like comment under other people's posts, and self-upvote that comment instead of the original blog post, and with more amount than the pending payout of the original blog post have, then that is equal to "taking a shit in public" in my opinion.
A lot of people are too greedy and too selfish on Steemit.

Well said.

With SMTs we might be able to put our own rules that could be our salvation. But I am not sure how it works with how much Steempower you need to create many tokens. If people need a lot of SP to create tokens then it sucks if they have to buy Steem with the current economics.

The way rewards are distributed is not what is ailing steem.

Personally, I think you'll be shitting in the streets until SMT are released as I don't think the desire or priority time to 'toy' with the likely broken model is there.

The hope is that one day we can all run barefoot without brown squidgy stuff between our toes. And when that happens, I'm looking forward to more comedic writing from yourself.

Cheers, Asher - still not taking a shit in his own office or the streets he walks down.

Sometime around this time next year we might have SMTs and communities. Who wants to hold Steem and wait? What could the price of Steem be 6 months or 10 months from now? The concern is maybe we wont have enough time to wait for SMTs.

Well, I will be.

What can get worse here before then? I think everyone has set their stall out accordingly in relation to how much they wish to defecate in their own office, or not.

Prices will follow general trend, so i'm not going to concern myself with that.

So i'll keep my 'hand-to-mouth' power-downs rolling, and continue what I've been doing the last year or two.

If prices follow "general trend" then why bother providing utility? Just speculate on trends.

Always speculate on trends, but also speculate on new tech / ideas. I'm here because I think SMT can be something big.

bang on!
And I have no idea why anyone buys votes.. it just makes no sense at all... I just wrote a post about this today:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@solarwarrior/voting-bots-could-please-someone-explain-to-me-why-this-makes-sense-for-the-vote-buyer

it makes sense if you want to advertise.

It makes sense because:

  1. If people ever stop buying from them (or even just slow down), the votes become immediately profitable, at which point it makes sense to buy even if you don't care one whit about the advertising.
  2. If the votes are neutral or have a tiny cost (the usual case), then it is very cheap or free advertising, which might get you some more votes. It doesn't have to get you many.

"Imagine you had a community that introduced a new law which rewarded a person $1000 every time they take a shit in public. Would it be surprising to discover, after a while, that the streets were flowing in diarrhea? Would you try to rectify this situation by asking people to be less greedy? Or perhaps try to educate people to shift from a culture of shitting on the streets to one of, well, not shitting on the streets? Would there be a point in asking how the fuck do you even manage to shit 10 times a day?"

This could not have been better said.

I agree with your sentiment but, with all due respect and admiration, is your verbal diarrhea not proving your sentiments to be a little hypocritical? I am not a sunday school teacher friend but, do we need to express our views in such low based language? Is it too much effort to try and find a more suitable alternative to the 'f' word? Or the 'sh' word,etc. I was taught that it is simply a sign of laziness when a person uses a lesser value word. Love you holm and I challenge you to try and think of a more explanatory, and agreeable, adjective/adverb when trying to get a point across. You may be surprised at just how many improved paragraphs occur as a result. And, at how much more attention you receive from those who matter! I too used to use the f word regularly until I realized that it rarely brings a positive response from any quarter of any note. Try a better word and learn at the same time. And please receive this in the total non-hostile manner in which it is intended, for I am not being critical, only sensitive.

I hope you realize that what was written in that statement is a direct quote from the post above and not from me. Nonetheless I love the way its expressed because it challenges and provokes a bit our situation.

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I am on the side of the 50/50 algo which used to fill me with fear but I now realise would/should encourage more curation and intelligent curation.

I still have some concerns about superlinearity no matter how slight unless it was offset by some type of plateau after a set percentage or amount where it became slightly negative. Is that a thing?

Don't ejaculate with delight at the following drawing. It's scary in its intense beauty. Red is the model I am wittering on about above

1540628095-picsay.jpg

The reason I think of a bell curve type thing is so that users who use bid bots for example did not take advantage of the slight superlinearity to gain even higher profit by stacking bot votes

people need to fear the term 'superlinear' less, we're suffering from n^2 PTSD
as smooth pointed out, even having a dust threshold is some form of superlinear

slight superlinearity can be something as mild as a straight line to a point, say around $5, then another straight line with a higher gradient after that. What this will do is make hiding your vote farming/self votes under a certain value very unprofitable, and you might as well make more by curating (50%). It's a leak we'll have to plug one day in an otherwise working economy

there's no need to hide your vote farming now because the economy is broken and our entire ship is submerged underwater. But once we patch her up, sooner or later we'll have to consider it

a 50/50 split would do shit.

its gonna make lower content creators like me leave, and give incentive to bot makers the more.

dont try to fix a problem by cutting the head off.

50/50? thats death to a lot of communities, heck, it would just mean that more people delegate to bots, since they have the highest SP here and they get paid higher for their delegation since bots get a lot from curation reward

not to mention, it would not affect the fact that I can open alt accounts and still pull all rewards to myself.
steemit inc should create an account or group of accs that's officially for promoting posts and all these bots makes should be kicked off

I still think that posts that are heavily botted would actually benefit despite the 50/50 split because they would stack more and more paid votes onto a post to take advantage of that slight superlinearity.

But it is beta, I'm game for trying anything. That's what this phase should be about

Perhaps the promoted functionality of Steem should be developed out? People shouldn't have to use bots for advertising. It should be built in.

People aren't really using those bots for advertising you know. Mostly the bot votes nearly pay for themselves. Occasionally they are even at a net profit (negative advertising "cost"). Its advertising in a very, very vague sense, but cheap/free advertising.

The reason those bots exist is that every paid vote funnels rewards out of the reward pool and back to the bot (mostly back to the delegators). It's mostly a scheme to disguise and automate self-voting.

But there's no profit in using the bots, though. The only advantage you get is the potential whale vote you can get by having your post visible on the trending page.

That's not true. I bought votes daily for burnpost and sometimes they were net profitable. Not usually, but occasionally. Mostly they are break even or a small negative which as you say can be viewed as advertising but it isn't the total amount paid for the vote that is advertising or anything close, it is a tiny fraction.

I world be much happier if the promoted feature worked somehow so that there was visibility over that which was promoted

it's not the most necessary part for now

it's only problem in an otherwise working economy where most rewards are going to half decent content that people will try to hide their vote farming by spamming 10-50c posts over hundreds of accounts etc. as this would likely beat out curation in returns

but we can worry about that once we get to a better economy. 50% curation and extra downvotes are essential, although I think 100% separate downvote pool is far too excessive

but really, anything is better than what we have right now unless you actively try to screw things up

Agreed, anything is better than nothing.

Too late. I came, I saw, I came.

there are too many of you clowns with feline avatars

Last thing that's left of Steem :p

I think that's what I drew ;0D

The Writer/Artist himself.

Bravo!

It's the latest thing yo?

Did that make me sound street?

Nope. It made you reply your own comment xD

Haha I noticed!

And here we see two wild cats in their natural setting; a heated face off for acquiring control over the territory.
Find out what happens next, right after these commercials!

This show is brought to you by, @comedyopenmic.

And we're back...

I disagree.

Focusing on UI or communities as a solution is like getting diagnosed with testicular cancer and deciding that the best way to treat it is by getting a nose job and your anus bleached.

This works.

Imagine you had a community that introduced a new law which rewarded a person $1000 every time they take a shit in public. Would it be surprising to discover, after a while, that the streets were flowing in diarrhea?

Sounds like San Francisco, sans the being rewarded $1,000 part.

With even more smug

or Johannesburg as well. I am guilty of trying to k.i.s.s. but believe that, by doing so, all does inevitably come into focus; and as well as keeping straight and 100% honest for, by so doing, the rewards will arrive timeously. Not knocking any of the advanced or, improved methods; just believe in one step at a time and faith in oneself. Time is eternal and will overcome all. Short cuts invariably turn into regrettable detours (when contemplating affairs of an eternal nature) and anyway, I enjoy the scenery. Let's at least also try and keep our cyber streets clean please! Brown is not the most endearing colour on the cyber pallet.

I love that this comment section is filled with rich discussion.

Supporting actual good content will, on average, cost you 75% of your returns in lost opportunity

Mind blown. Would have tagged @exyle but the mute button has suffered enough.

Kevin will be there and he'll give you a private lap dance if you help us fix the economy.

if you help us fix the economy

Now you know your mission between now and SteemFest

fixing the e c o n o m y

See you at the top 😎

Said this before and will say this again, Steem needs to actively investigate different models to improve economy and content quality.

I always upvote my own content, and I’m not greedy as I upvote other at a similar rate. I put hours publishing work just to be paid pennies while a whale claims hundreds for a sourced photo of a loaded pipe.

Maybe what we are seeing is a reflection of who we are as a society, and these depressing problems are a symptom of a desperate and sick global culture that can’t be fixed with an algorithm.

We have dumb celebrities and narcissists with power and influence, while hard working honest people scrambling to survive now and for thousands of years. At least steemit offers us a way to have financial autonomy after a period of daily effort, patience, and focus. what’s wrong with that?

I had some suggestions here on how to fix the economy, would love to read your feedback.

Buenas estoy totalmente de acuerdo con el compañero , lo que mejor se puede hacer es tratar de generar mejor contendió para que la gente que usas la venta de votos y todas esas cosas o solo por alargar algo de popularidad no están haciendo lo que realmente es el propósito, aunque soy nuevo en la plataforma creo que el propósito es llegar a todos y cada una de las personas con temas totalmente interesantes y sobre todo de ignorar menos y por cada uno de tus pensamiento conocimiento y cultura que impartas tiene una recompensa lo que pasa es que el dia de hoy estamos en un mundo la cual el egoísmo, la maldad y en solo pensar en nosotros llega a muchas personas (a no ver más allá de si mismos), y que lleva a eso a una mala formación de cultura y a no tratar de mejorar y todo porque por falta de comunicación y eso ha llevado a las guerras solo porque siempre quieren tener el control de las cosas cuando en el otro extremo del mundo la gente muere de hambre, sed, enfermedades y muchas cosas, a que llego con esto diran que esta fuera de lo que habla el compañero pero no es una visión diferente a la elaboración del sistema sino tenemos que hacer campaña o un sistema para terminar con los malos contenidos que las personas puedan hacer aunque siempre existirán pero siempre será una parte a la que no hay que tomarles importancia porque ellos por si solos se iran de la plataforma aunque tengan ingresos porque siempre buscaran la manera fácil de las cosas y eso es lo que siempre los lleva al fracaso, todas esas cosas que hacen para dañar la plataforma por su mala formación. Compartir tus logros y conocimientos aprendidos es la base fundamental de la plataforma que las personas cambien la manera de ver el mundo. Un gusto compartir un poco de este escrito muy buenas noches atentamente @miguelcubas

Good, I totally agree with the partner, what can be done better is to try to generate better content so that the people who use the sale of votes and all those things or just to extend some popularity are not doing what is really the purpose, although I am new on the platform I think the purpose is to reach each and every one of the people with totally interesting topics and above all to ignore less and for each one of your thoughts knowledge and culture that you impart has a reward what happens is that today we are in a world which selfishness, evil and just think of us reaches many people (not to see beyond themselves), and that leads to a bad culture formation and not trying to improve and all because of lack of communication and that has led to wars just because they always want to have control of things when at the other end of the world people die of hunger, thirst, disease and Many things, I come with this will say that this is what the partner speaks but it is not a different vision to the development of the system but we have to campaign or a system to end the bad content that people can do but always they will exist but it will always be a part that should not be taken into account because they will leave the platform alone even if they have income because they will always look for the easy way of things and that is what always leads them to failure, all those things what they do to damage the platform due to its bad training. Sharing your achievements and knowledge is the fundamental basis of the platform for people to change the way they see the world. A pleasure to share a bit of this writing very good evening attentively @miguelcubas

This is the reason why all my video remain at youtube. make no sense to move all here. Youtube at least promote my video . Here if you have no money , you are doom even if you got good content. Nobody care about good content . some say i did not talk or socialize with people . i like WTF?

Hello @ned!
What do you think about the dynamic system curation from 0 to 100 percent?

Let the author himself decide what percentage he wants to give.

What i want! To read good articles / see good posts that interest me and upvote them myself with reasonable reward system 40/60 ... 50/50 what ever works. I've currently trying different bots to get return but it's really not what i want. i will keep buying steem, power it up, and look for good content to curate. tell me which witnesses are in line with what i want and they get my vote. by the way no hurry in fixing it - steem just keeps getting cheaper - helps me lol

like me, you're basically betting on their ability and willingness to fix this problem some time in the future

Lol, the shitting analogy is stop on.

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I actually wrote something very similar and posted it just a minute after this post.

And looking at the comments, it seems many others are doing the same. Many of us are tired and craving better from this platform, to push interaction ahead of quick gains.

As for the UI: I've made countless posts in the past referring to how awful the site's UI is when it comes to searching for content, given the only content that can be found is in a sea of fresh posts or thrown to the top of a category from artificial curation. It's certainly frustrating to see absolutely nothing being done to try and improve content discovery. It's all just very lazy with a "Not our problem" argument from Steemit Inc.

Unfortunately I'm not going to Steemfest, but I think I have forgotten to use a free witness vote.

Here's to a better Steemit.

There is something being done about content discovery right now. Feel free to check Steeve and help us fine-tune the platform.

It is a work in progress, but we are trying hard. Guys are working right now on trending categories without bidbot votes being counted to the trending score, for example.

Communities have gone some way in rewarding certain types of content. The whole concept of "high quality content" is based on perception. I could write an article about dicks that's funny as fuck but won't count for shit to people at utopian.

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My penis is utopia... well, that's what the wife says.

Its either a very impressive cock or its very difficult to find.

And that's a sin. Penises are always glorious. What?

Heresy I tell you. They neglect the power of dick

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This is why the price is down.

Always knew we needed more erections.

Proof of Penis.

beautifully said, I especially like the shit analogue

You raise some valid points, but nearly everything you mention here is part of a fragile eco system. Make a possible improvement to one thing, someone abuses another...I really do hope the balance gets sorted, but most of us users are helpless to do much more then vote for a witness.
I'm not technical/smart enough to know how to instruct Steem inc on how to fix it, I just want a just and fair system.

From my little research about you @trafalgar. You have not been very active here and also you seem to vote more of those who are already successful on the platform, that is like self voting too and that is part of the problem of the platform.

Don't worry about how things are done here, it will fix itself.

Don't worry about how things are done here, it will fix itself.

I see the Steemit problem totally in the same light as with trading cryptocurrency or any other comodity. Is the value on the market rising because of the real underlying value? Not really - there's 95% (or even more) speculation (short-term) involved. People want instant rewards not a long term investion. This attitude is then replicated to the Steem(it) odd behavior.. That's what I've been able to observe in my short confrontation with crypto world. Anyway, I'm still determined to work hard (in my spare time) on building my reputation and SP, because I'm an optimist by nature :)
Thanks for a great article!

It is a cool initiative to try changing the current economic reward system. The priority should be after the SMT and see with other token life in action.

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