Going on Steemd.com greets us with a link to the next hardfork for Steemit
https://github.com/steemit/steem/releases
This hardfork is scheduled for 2017-07-26T15:00:00 UTC (11:00:00 EDT).
Issue #176
Each root level comment has a reward weight which impacts the end payout of the post. We are targeting 4 posts in 24 hours. Your first 4 posts in 24 hours will not be penalized. After that, they weight is decreased from 100% based on your average posting frequency. Having a frequency just barely higher than 1 every 6 hours will have very little impact, while spamming will be penalized heavily. This change is aimed to increase the quality of content at the cost of quantity.
Issue #177
Each discussion goes through a two stage payout. The first one is nearly identical to what currently happens on a new discussion except that we are weighting payout times by 12 hours instead of 24. This should cycle through currently trending content quicker. There is a second voting period set to 30 days after the first payout. This should help posts that don't have immediate viral success accumulate votes and have more consistent payouts in the long run. After the second payout a discussion becomes "frozen". The discussion is no longer editable and new replies are disabled. Users can still vote on comments in these discussions as a "nod" to the author without costing their posting power or awarding reward shares.
Issue #178
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding liquidity rewards. We are refraining from making a judgment at this point but want to spend more time reviewing their impact. We do believe that in their current form the liquidity rewards are simply too much for the value thy provide. As such, we are temporarily disabling liquidity rewards until we can design a better solution. In the meantime, a transaction fee free market should be incentive enough for users to continue to use the Steem internal market.
Issue #179
The average block size calculation is too high. We are reducing the minimum block size limit from 128k to 64k and changing the average block size threshold from max_block_size / 2 to max_block_size / 4. The net result is that the average block size threshold can be 4 times smaller. If witnesses chose to vote this way, it will make triggering transaction bandwidth limits easier, which is currently not applying except in the most extreme circumstances.
Issue #184
Fixed a bug in the cli wallet that incorrectly allowed the wallet to attempt to broadcast an update account operation from a locked wallet. The broadcast would fail but created a poor user experience.
Issue #186
Added recovery operations to account history so they can be tracked more easily.
I really like # 176, which should greatly help with spamming !
178 however, risk being most unpopular at the moment, since liquidity rewards will be disabled temporarely.
I have high hopes for this fork and new version , let's not forget that Steemit is in BETA :)
STEEM ON :D
Issue #176
Wait so you're saying that anyone commenting more than 4 times a day will be penalized? Aren't you completely missing the social aspect of social networking by doing that?
Wouldn't a far better option be to give the people trying to use the discussion board a few more tools to regulate our own discussions?
If you make this once every 6 hours, you'll encourage people to just setup bots that spew random garbage every 6 hours and you'll discourage legitimate discourse.
Rethink this one, it will erode and destroy the value of the community, by discouraging us from actually acting like a community. We'll have to ration our comments out and the feeling of being utterly alone and shouting into an empty room will just be enhanced, because no one will feel like they have liberty to speak.
You want to stop abuse, give us more tools, not more rules.
I understand why they would do that implement 178. Does that mean steem dollars will be stopped as rewards or steem power for a while? I thought the former. And 176 is a great idea instead of limiting a certain level of steem power to have unlimited posting rights, to only have six and the lose weight is a brilliant solution. They are implementing a great solution imo
It's asinine to penalize conversation on a site where we're supposed to talk, connect and hangout.
What this really means is that every time you talk, you will be penalized whether what you have to say is appreciated by your audience or not.
This will have a complete chilling effect on the entire site and will cause the place to fill up with timed bots that show up to spew random garbage just so they can collect a fee.
#176 is the literal equivalent of doing this...
I'd rather see 6 well thought out posts a day than 20 memes, YouTube videos with no original content, and copycat posts of Trending posts. You aren't limited in what you can comment on and if in fact you are correct then it doesn't have to be a permanent solution. I'm OK with it at the moment.
You really don't understand do you? The bots aren't limited in this regard. You already cannot run a bot by the rules as I understand them.
However there can be unlimited accounts. However many accounts you have social media accounts for. As long as that stands, bot herders will just game the system to make more bots which will make for more bots posting less frequency, making them harder to detect and that's sort of the point I'm getting at.
If you want to kill the bots, talk to people who make the bots and people who pay the people who make bots and the people who run the bots to find out why they are trying to game the system. You'll find that it's mostly to do with force multiplication and the fact that there are decent financial incentives for being a bot herder.
There are much better ways to stop the bots including simply not stopping them, but penalizing them severely when they are found and perhaps even compensating them when they are useful. Frankly @Wang was freakin useful to me, the devs should have made him first and that's the only problem anyone really has with him, he keeps voting for his owner and the people who pay his owner. Way too much weight based on the weight of your purse rather than the weight of your opinion.
If you want to fix the crappy content problem, it would be MUCH more useful to give us a downvote option for every single posting and it would be far more powerful if upvoting and downvoting power were based on how many followers you have, and or your legitimate reputation, rather than how much money you have laying about.
I realize that's a pipe dream. I agree we need a solution, but penalizing the people trying to play by the rules is not going to end well.
Shave the whales and feed the minnows.
Here's a simple solution that could probably be done in 5 lines of code without hardforking the engine...
Just make it so any reply should require a vote of some kind, either up or down, then change the weighting to be per capita. Do that with every post and this problem solves itself.
Have they changed it beyond needing to have a Reddit with positive feedback or a Facebook account? People will always try to game the system, but making it harder to do is a deterrent at least and having multiple accounts only benefits if you generate steem power and transfer it between accounts. You are right, but I still think that a reasonable limit of posts per day will be better in the long run. Not limits on comments and yes bots will have to be addressed as you said, but I don't think it will be as big a problem as you have stated.
I was under the impression this applied to content posts and not comments. If that is the case it will be a major drawback.
As opposed to right now where there is a huge and recent influx of users & bots making what I consider "shitposts" , beg for votes , or complain about whales not upvoting them ?
@weenis is a good example of recent poster of spam comments that contributes nothing (then again, he's either a badly coded bot, or doesn't realize that his voting power is practically nil)
I did however find the post where a user posted trying to flag weenie and weenie upvoted it, but it's true. I don't want bots to dictate content or curation. It's somewhat different if someone allows you to have your content upvoted by them, but that means you've earned the trust of someone and their reputation is on the line. Some people don't mind weenie and he or it is relatively harmless at the moment, but to have to scroll through many bot posts to interact with the original poster should not be in steemit future. At least is my opinion.
About @weenis I can't be certain, but I think both him and @Wang are owned by the same people / persons. They are both childish references to male anatomy and sound like names picked by some people I know. I see names here at steemit from forums and channels I hang around in and some of these guys are talented bot builders including the first guy who showed me how to build a proper bot.
But just like hackers, there are good and bad.
Some guys will literally build a bot to troll you just for the lulz. They don't care about the voting power. It's really, just to annoy you and there's no penalty, so why not? They can get paid for it? That's even better!
We need more tools, not more rules
If you know it's a bot and it's annoying you, there should be tools to deal with it. For example, downvoting them should cause them to lose actual money after awhile and once they are 0 they can't post anymore.
Simple rules like that fix the problem without limiting the freedom of speech this site claims to support and would also support the creation of useful bots like the tipbot at reddit or the crossposting / link bot at reddit. Or like the IRC bots, which give new users the rules and guide them through important concepts so we don't end up with an Eternal September on our hands once the flood gates open here again.
On a side note, speaking as a programmer I consider all of my bots to be my speech. I'm sure if you ask around you'll find plenty others who feel likewise. They speak for me, they say what I want them to say. Playing with AI is fun, I have a dozen IRC bots and 4 or 5 slack bots that do useful things in addition to trading bots that make money. They are nothing but force multipliers that make me more effective and productive so I have more free time to do things like post here.
I don't turn them on here because I believe I can have a more enjoyable time posting on my own. However it already feels like an empty room in here. People can't see what others are posting because it takes a whale voting to keep you up long enough to get the conversation started. That's a curation issue. I don't claim to be the smartest guy in the world, but I have ideas that could be useful and yet no matter what I do they never get enough eyeballs to matter.
I have ideas that could fix the signal to noise ratio here without changing a single thing about the site. But I won't build it unless I know that people will use it because it takes people using it in order for it work. I hope folks give it serious thought and help me pick it apart. I genuinely believe it represents a solid future for social media as a whole.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@williambanks/bot-warz-a-hybrid-approach