Downvotes are necessary. On balance, what we had before HF 21 was much worse than what we have now. Votes were purchased with positive return on investment putting practically anything to Trending, which is a completely insane concept because no platform can survive paying people to advertise on it. Few people would sacrifice their voting power to combat that.
The reward pool is a common resource. It is owned by no one and users have influence over it in proportion to their stake. What happened to the pool prior to HF 21 could serve as a textbook example of a tragedy of the commons. Preventing reward pool abuse absolutely requires active policing. There is no going around that.
To be honest, I'd much rather see the content reward pool completely removed than to have it abused like it used to be before HF 21 and #newsteem.
Hello @markkujantunen,
thanks for your comment and vote!
I understand the positive effects of the after HF 21 changes to some extent.
But it seems to me that the rules about what is an abuse of the reward pool and what is not aren't clear!
There maybe some obvious abuses like plagiarism, spam and so on. But for instance in regard to programs like SBI or upvotebuilders they are seen by a few as also abusing the reward pool others seem to be Ok with such "upvote circles".
So where do you/we draw the line?
Is it already abuse of the reward pool if you upvotes content and comments of befriended accounts or does it start getting sketchy when it's simply a more structured approach like with SBI?
At least for @mmmmkkkk311 and his supporters SBI is an issue.
What are your thoughts about this?
Cheers!
Lucky
I think there will never be a universal consensus over these issues. This is, after all, a decentralized community of users. We can discuss and try to get people to agree on some kind of standards, though.
I downvote when I see blatant abuse like plagiarism or vote farming with substandard content (relative to the rewards). I apply stricter standards to what I see in Trending. I want to do my part to make sure that nothing that gets to trending has votes bought with a positive ROI. It's insane for a platform to pay someone to advertise on it.
I'm personally not into going after vote trading clubs or SBI because there is a lot else going on that needs to be downvoted. But I understand why that account goes after structured and impersonal, totally content-agnostic vote trading schemes such as upvotebuilders or SBI.
I think SBI is a mostly negative thing because it's all about buying votes for yourself and a little to a buddy. It's a structured self-voting scheme that has some sort of a very loose quality control policy. SBI votes would be better used by curating someone else's posts particularly now that the 50/50 split is in effect.
Thanks for your comment!
Interesting to see your reasoning regarding downvotes and the critique about vote trading and SBI.
I understand these arguments. I thought SBI was a great thing because of the fact that you enroll/sponsor fellow steemians. A nice way to show appreciation for the content and comments of others with longer lasting effects for them than just an upvote.
But I'm for a change in their upvote policy based on quality of content! That would be a really nice move and the critique part of being quality agnostic in their votes would go away.
Cheers!
Lucky
Not true. As far as I read it, the ROI is smaller than what your buddy gets.
Ok. But it is content agnostic use of the reward pool anyway.
There's nothing wrong with being content agnostic. We all used to upvote our friends posts by 100% and that didn't matter then, why should it matter when we let a bot give a small vote every now and then?
I don't see the reason to complain when the vote sizes never ever make anyone's post trend, or make them rich.
Also, it allocates a certain amount of votes on a weekly bases, and if the person only posts one post per week, they get a larger vote per post, than he would if he posted say 25 posts per week.
Concerning your idea about the bot voting for the most upvoted post... I don't see a reasonable way to allocate the votes to the most upvoted post if the users have different styles of creating content. Some only post one post per week, some do it more erratically. The bot needs to accomodate to that. And still it needs to be fair.
I think the way it does it now is as fair as it can possibly be, but if you have a better idea, please share.
If however there is a concern that the bot-owner will run with the sponsorships, one idea is to automate the bot via a smart contract, so that the funds will be only available to the bot and no-one else.
Lisäys: Kun joku käyttää terrorismia saadakseen tahtonsa läpi, ei sellaiselle paskalle anneta myönnytyksiä, koska seuraava terroristi vaatii aina pikkuisen lisää ja lopulta sille paskalle ei tule loppua.
Goodbye to Steem then? You forget it is a crypto currency, and the distribution of that cryptocurrency would become a whole lot more difficult if it weren't for content rewards.
I have no idea what else is a more democratic way to distribute crypto than via some sort of proof of person. But proving that would be a bit difficult, if not by writing and creating content that then would be rewarded.
If you have a better idea, please share.
What about every PoW out there? Bitcoin does not have a reward pool other than mining rewards and works just fine. A cryptocurrency does not require a reward pool like on Steem to work let alone be successful.
My point was that prior to the introduction of the EIP in HF 21, Proof-of-Brain on Steem worked so badly that it would've been better to remove the pool completely and just let STEEM derive its value primarily from its other characteristics such as how SP confers Resource Credits and how it has fast and feeless transfers, human-readable addresses, different keys for different types of transactions to enhance security and even an account recovery system.
Steem has no Proof-of-Person and anyone can create as many accounts as they like. In fact, it stands to reason to assume that the vast majority of the 1.3 million accounts on Steem were used as foot soldiers in vast bot armies used by large stakeholders to vote farm. Thanks to the sublinear curve, that sort of thing has abated to a degree because it is significantly less profitable.
The current system in place with the 2.5 full downvotes per day worth of voting power per account in combination with the 50/50 author/curator split and the convergent sublinear curve. On balance, that works much better than what we had prior to HF 21.
But it does. 21M reward pool for proof-of-work. That's exactly what it is, it's a distribution model. And that didn't work for Steem either, hence it was ditched.
Explain to me, how are the actual rewards to be distributed then. Since this system doesn't seem to work. There are these self-proclaimed heros making life unbearable for everyone who just wants to do their thing and not be bothered with these wars.
@mmmmkkkk311 is just jealous that his system didn't work and this other system seems to be better, as at the least it is more democratic.
But that doesn't answer my question. If this current system is broken as it allows piss-for-brains like MK carry out their little revenge campaigns without no recourse. What is your solution?