My understanding of your proposition is that you want to replace the current system of A% to author, B% to curators/upvoters with a three-way split of A% to author, C% to early-window curators/upvoters (lets call them curators) and D% to past-window curators/upvoters (lets call them upvoters).
So the only difference to the system discussed in blocktrades thread I linked earlier (1-24 hr window where all timestamps are treated equal) is the length of the window (there has been a consensus that 5 minutes is not enough for manual curators) and the predetermined rewards split (please elaborate on advantages).
My first thought is that it introduces a game where the bots calculate how much votepower should come at the begining of the upvoter window. As for the consequences, it feels like bots will be more effective taking value from regular upvotes while curators being mildly pushed towards safe bets (discovering a gem gets a huge part of curator share but the total payout will not be much inflated be the early-upvote bots so it is a bigger share of a smaller pie).
Thanks for the quick feedback.
I agree gaming can and will happen. Whether it’s worse than existing is unclear to me at this point.
Probably need to work through some hypotheticals on a spreadsheet.
An extra degree of freedom, all else being equal, probably does increase the potential gain from gaming the system.
However, providing an honest alternative to the current bot race for early votes might convince the vast majority to accept a guaranteed honest gain instead of wreaking havoc via early excessive bot voting.
Another advantage would be the whale bots could be programmed to intentionally avoid delayed upvotes to posts that have been targeted by bots gaming the system.
A battle of the bots, so to speak.
The latter bots would have a distinct advantage, by going last.
Could also allow content creators to reject upvotes.
Community friendly whale bots could help content creators identify which early votes likely came from bots so they can be manually rejected.
Any button humans can click, a bot can be programmed to click it more regularly.
The idea of having two pools is interesting, because a bot could only compete for one of them, but it is unclear for me that all the bots would stay in the same, over-competed 5 minute pool if there is another pool to hunt in.
I don't even like the idea of 'flagging bots', if we want different things we should propose different rules, not try to attach morality to certain actions - (ie 'asking people to be nice has been tried before' 🤣). Flagging is permitted, but it hasn't shown that it is a very effective way for changing people's behavior.
The question for me is 'Why do we hate bots'? Since a bot is just a way for me to do what I want more regularly - a bot is programmed by a human, and we want human votes presumably. If its because the bot is unfair and not everyone has a bot, then it seems that removing the competition aspect (as LEO did) would be the best way. Everybody gets 50% of their own vote, nobody competes, bots are no longer 'bad'.
Yes, that is exactly what we need to do (imho). The current 'problem' with bots is that they accumulate dozens of votes at the 5-minute mark for a post that might be complete garbage, but happened to come from someone who had some good previous posts. In other words, they add noise to manual curation, thus decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio. Delayed auto-votes can amplify the signal (because they have time to evaluate and filter noise from the genuine signal). In that sense, the bots become a resource rather than a liability.
If the bot playground is in the last 5 minutes (or the midpoint of the voting period, as I've suggested), then the bots actually have some really valuable information available to them, because the bots can evaluate the voting patterns of everyone who voted before them (and even cross-evaluating how they voted for others).
I would say there is, because someone can split their vote via separate accounts.
Also, I am not explicitly saying the delayed auto-vote plays no role in the early-vote pool. Although I didn't explicitly lay out fine details (because I wanted to focus discussion on the big-picture concept), my current thinking would be that the delayed auto-vote percentage might be around 40% (slightly less than a linear reward of 50%) with 10% going to the early-vote curation pool. That 10% would then be subject to manipulation by delayed-auto-voting bots (by splitting votes across two accounts, one voting early one voting later).
Thanks for the thoughtful analysis.
If I understand your analysis correctly, the biggest manipulation via self-playing with split votes is 50% curation reward instead of 40%, which is same as linear reward. If they want to go that route they can just early and late vote random comments and snag the 50%. Maybe that's not a bad thing? That being the case, police bots could easily search out those and dilute them. Or maybe let whales forfeit voting rights in exchange for 50% auto reward and 50% spread across all author rewards.
Some will still try to game other people's votes, but it seems to me that the incentive to do that goes down (relative to current protocol) because the late voting bots are contributing only 10% to the nonlinear pool instead of 50%.
What keeps a large stakeholder (today) from authoring a random comment via a separate account then posting an early vote from yet a different account, then posting a large last minute upvote.
Wouldn’t that gain the person 100% of his voted rewards? And couldn’t that all be done by a bot?
I am not suggesting that we 'ask people to be nice'. Rather, I am suggesting that we change the rules so that the differential in payout from 'gaming the system' is not much greater than 'playing nice'.
The other advantage of incentivizing delayed-voting bots is that those bots can play a significant role in flagging and 'calling out' those that aren't 'playing nice', ultimately leading to the shunning and thus exclusion of such 'bad' behavior. This power is accentuated if content creators are allowed to reject upvotes they suspect are being made in bad faith, thus forcing the 'offending bots' to merely play by themselves, in their own sandboxes (amplifying their own rewards slightly, but not adding noise to otherwise valuable curation efforts).