HF19- The Rewards Coaster- The Thrill of Victory and Slow Agonizing 7-Day Onset of Rewards Depression

in #hf197 years ago

Nothing like a little MS Paint to help you explain how you're feeling post Hard Fork! So, we don't have a rewards curve anymore. We have a rewards coaster. It's pretty thrilling at the start, but it leaves me crying on the inside a few days later.

Point A: Creating your post

I checked my spelling. Looks good. Whales are online. It's not too late. Not too early. Made a funny title. Check. Newb friendly? Check. I want this to reach 3k... so I should probably talk about EOS, but I'm not ready to go there yet. I'm still kinda working on Steemit. I'll just talk about whale balls and Hard Forks. Shit looks good to go for a few hundred dank amps. Fire the big blue button. POST!

Point B: happy slappy whale balls

BOOM! Giant Balls straight up ahead!!! We've taken a full hit. Dank amps register a $100 upvote. WOOT. Call yo wife! Call yo' kidz! Erryone is gettin' paid up in this bish! Trending here we go!!!!!!!!!!!!

Point C: Holy shit another whale!!!

We've hit the thirty minute mark. We have not 1 but 2 whales on board. Holy fuck. We're rich son. Gonna quit my job. Slap my boss. Poop in the copy the machine. Who the fuck cares. You see them whale ballz hit! I never have to work again!!!!

Point D: wait... shit... ugh, I guess they didn't mean 100%

Ok, so whale 2 readjusted their ballz. It's ok. We're ok. Sorry about that sir. I can clean up the mess I made. I'll go talk to HR about physical conduct. Sorry. It won't happen again.

Point E: Hey did my post go down a little?

I mean, I'm not sure, but an hour ago when I was obsessively staring at my post and reading and then rereading my own post and the replies I made to the comments on my post I could have sworn that I was a little bigger than this... I mean. I checked on esteem and it doesn't look like anyone adjusted their vote... Fuck, I'm getting old. I think I'm losing it a little.

Point F: Nope, confirmed, where's my money Nedowski? Give me back my post rewards or I'll cut off your johnson

Yeah, you heard me. We're nihlists. We believe in nothing. Give us the fucking money. I saw my post rewards. I had two whales spray fat amps on my post. Now you're taking it away? That's bullshit. You had one job. One job. Send me the post rewards that I had two days ago. It's down like 15% what the fuck gives?

Point G: Why god why? Why did you take my post rewards? Why Lord? I'll be good! Pleazzzzzzzzzzzzz

How can this be. My posts. My fucking posts. I had so much in them. It's 20 minutes before they give me rewards and they're down 30%. Why god why? I was gonna elope that 24 year old secretary. I was gonna start a family. I was promised a free lambo. Now... Nothing. It's all gone. Why u do dis?

At least it appears to be regressive

What's that mean? It looks to be cutting about 30% off of all my posts. If you're making a dollar it'll cut off $0.30. That kinda sucks, but it was just $0.30. If you're at $1500 it brings it down to like $1,000. Same percent, but now it's $500. Maybe that's good for minnows? Tough to get a read on since I'm only now really starting to see it. I wonder if this is adjustment or the new normal. Ironically my posts are making more, but by the end it feels like less since it went down 33%.

What do you guys think?

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Mine have gone down for sure but I've got a ton of work to do to really create any kind of success here so I'm not losing sleep over it... I'm just going to keep learning, get creating, ride the roller coaster and enjoy the ride. Must be tougher when you're making money.

Nice gif. Look at you uppin' your comment game.

Thanks! It's fun finding them, like a little treasure hunt ;)

Let er Rip!
Thanks for posting this. We are all looking to our wits for the truth here; fact is NOBODY knows what HF19 will do over all, over time..

There were plenty of folks that had an opinion, and there were plenty of folks that thought it would be over all negative, even if it was an attempt at something positive.

But really, nobody knew, and they still don't.
Will be interesting to see, and hopefully, people like aggroed will help us find our way over time and make this thing really work!

at least keeping the dialog going of have we made a good trade or is autoposting 4X what happened before worth it?

Here's my understanding (and I'm sure its not exactly right, though its close enough for us to grasp the concept):

All post and comment values are ESTIMATES based upon the seven day average price of Steem and/or SBD. Consequently payout amounts fluctuate with fluctuations in the 7 day average price. Additionally, the estimate is based upon your estimated share of a pool of newly minted steem that will be distributed at your payout time. The number of minted steem is fixed, but how that fixed number gets divided up among posters, curators, etc. varies. For instance, suppose there was only one post and one vote for that one post during the entire payout period. That one post would then get allocated ALL of the newly minted steem, making it hugely valuable. Because the algorithm that estimates your payout doesn't know exactly how active the community will be in posting/curating over a given period of time, it can't make exact predictions. If the community has been more active in posting and curating than the algorithm predicted, then the fixed number of Steem gets divided among more posters and curators than originally estimated. The algorithm is constantly updating the estimation, so when the community is very active this can cause reward values to be diluted slowly over time prior to payout. So...dilution is actually a good sign since it indicates robust posting and curation activity (which should ultimately lead to higher Steem prices).

But there's also this. The pool is draining. I think that's the shit part of the coaster. it makes sense. We can't triple the value of all the posts without a balance somewhere else. In this case we raped the pool for a week. Should normalize after this, but with the smaller poool. If it keeps draining that's a way bad sign that the math is all chronenberged.

I think both of your analysis are spot on.... @sean-king & @aggroed. Combine that with the fact that Bitcoin has been on the decline slightly. We can only wait and see what the long/ahort term effects are one month after HF19... If Bitcoin goes up ...then we'll see a little less than 30% taken off our payouts... sigh

When someone asks me what happened on payout day.

what happened gif.gif

Haha..yeah 🤣

Interesting illustration. Yep it pretty much summarizes how I feel post HF19 haha. But well I think it's because there are increasing active users sharing the fixed rewards pool as the hf19 is attractive, and that steem price has gone down lately. There's no hidden new mechanism for the adjustment post hf19 i guess, it's just how its been working all the time

when your in the same room with a whale

What I would give to be in the same room as a whale. Lol, there is an idea for a post, maybe I will write it. Dibs!

Do you think it is because so many people are getting paid from the HF19 and transferring that money off of steemit?

I can't tell yet. There's been huge price movements which effect the reward shares pool net value. It's hard to disentangle that. But I think this is different. I think it's inherent to the way the post calculates rewards.

Hey Aggroed. Great Post and great follow up from @sean-king. The indepth thoughts and analysis are great. I have always been one to take that analysis and turn it into Layman's Terms. The reason the pool is getting drained is a simple numbers game. What do you think the ratio was that everyone was upvoting at 100% 40 times a day or more before HF19? I'd bet not very many. Well, its a lot easier now AND more rewarding to max out your daily sweet spot of 10- 100% votes. That is spiking the utilization percentage by probly 100% or more and pushing down monetary rewards. I bet you this is the new normal and the only way to grow out of this is a spike in Steem price(investors), a change in voting behavior, or another HF. If we get a new large influx of minnows who don't want to invest or if Whales/Dolphins just continue to feed themselves we are going to have issues.

Yep. We may not have actually reached the new normal. Reward pool is down another 100k Steem today. I htink there's an equilibrium somewhere. I hope we find it soon.

It just hard to tell what happen until everything comes down.....Plus it doesn't help that ETH had a flash crash. That caused this minor correction we are in now.

yeah. A lot of weirdness is happening simultaneously.

I thought we were due for a correction...The flash crash just pushed that hand a lot faster.

Yeah I noticed the reward on all content decreasing significantly. This might be due to recent steem price drop at markets but it id nit dropped 30% so lets see when it will boost to $3 per steem

This comment has received a 0.13 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @cryptokraze.

@me-tarzan does a good track of the rewards pool. Could some accounts coming out of dormancy post fork account for the drain?

https://steemit.com/steemit/@me-tarzan/rewards-pool-i-have-charted-the-waters-for-you-june-27-2017

that's from the post. That feels like it explains a lot to me. Yeah, could just be the pool draining. That's probably not good.

Bro I just smoked and your post has me tripping.

I had heard a few people much more knowledgeable than myself on such matters state that the initial drop after the HF19 was expected, due to some sort of backlog or undistributed rewards. It may have had to do with the "whale non-voting experiment", but I may be mis-remembering.

Incidentally, I enjoyed the posting ritual as you described it. I am also checking and re-checking grammar, aligning post times, etc. It's quite a lot to keep track of, but necessary if you spend large amounts of time on the content of each post.

I don't actually do those things. I tend to just let'r rip and fix shit after the fact.

Ah, so this is fiction?

"I checked my spelling. Looks good. Whales are online. It's not too late. Not too early."

Well, I wrote it knowing what my minnows do. It's not fiction so much as pandering to my audience.

@lexiconical Thank you for the this link. It's interesting to read after this post.

Dude you have just pulled in over $200 - but buy a Nissan GTR not a Lambo!

It's from a previous post. My last steemit tips was a sarcastic f4f slam and used free lambos as a prop.

I know what you mean. I am really new here but still noticed what you are mentioning. Some $10 comments are now worth $7 and a $23 one is now at $16. Since I am so new here I dont know if its normal, if its something related to HF19, if its because of the big crypto crash from this weekend. I dunno... I´m here to read the older members opinions since this topic interests me a lot.

Lets see how things go... Thanks for the great read @aggroed

Pretty sure it's baked into the code. It could just be a HF18-19 adjustment. It could be the flash crash. A lot of variables all at once. Just recording my observations.

Lol, nice rollercoaster of emotions first you quit your job then you poop in the copy machine ans then quit steemit when the reward gets down %30 !!!

Nice way of demonstrating it bro, educating someone in a funny way is always fun :)

WATCH OUT FOR THEM BAAAAAALS !!!!

It isn't funny watching the money I earned on my comments go down in value. I'm glad it's really small to worry too much about. I sure wouldn't want to lose $500 on a post.

Thanks to your beautifully written posts, I'm learning a lot about the crazy Steemit train! We Minnows will get you a lambo for all the work you do for us. :)

Free lambo! F4F? UV my post on dolphin coks!

This was a very very fucking good post man. I am a minnow and I'm losing allot of my rewards. I made my rant about it, so i guess this fork doesn't give a fork who you are it is taking your shit! I thought this fork was designed for minnows like myself? Well we'll see about that? Anyway great post thank you fro sharing!

I'm frustrated. I've lost a s*** ton of money because I've earned probably more this week than I ever did before now a ton of it is gone.

@aggroed I am loving the humour and the writing style, this is totally up my street. Being new on steemit, I don't know who to follow but you are definitely going to be one of them, with lines like "I was promised a free lambo. Now... Nothing. It's all gone. Why u do dis?" how could I not? Lol.

I also thought it was due to the price of Steem being down. Even thought that at least when the price goes up again, so will our rewards, but from reading your post and the comments, I'm guessing I was wrong.

And the post of the year award goes to...

@aggroed

You really summarized what many of us see. I am just happy to post atm. Especially when I get to review beer (Steemians are the best!)

People now just look at your post and don't upvote that's the change i felt has happened after hf19

yeah. it's like minnow on minnow non-participation now.

I haven't even gotten through my first 7 days so see what will happen, but I know all my posts have gone down since they were first made and it kinda makes my heart hurt but I will just keep posting my heart out and let the chips land where they may. Thanks for this, it made me laugh...you nailed it!

Here. Have 23cents for that comment. Too bad they'll be 15 cents by the time they get to you.

LOL Thanks! :D It all adds up!

If you are active it definitely does.

I think I might be a bit manic...might have to tone it down a bit lol

Aww man... When the fork hit the table, and a couple of my posts skyrocketed to $90+, I almost shit myself... Then by the time they paid out, they were around $60. I ended up with more than I would have pre-fork, but I thought I had won the lottery!

yeah right. You did, and then it's like you got taxed on it... GIMME DA FUCKIN' MONEY NEDOWSKI

My post went down from 90+ to a mere 50! What! :(
#sadminnow

No soup for you!

That's the highest I have :(

Rewardpool is getting smaller. Maybe hf19 is bad for the health of steemit......

Well it was certainly n00b friendly, but yeah what a ride...

Holy shit I was legit about to write an article saying the same thing. I have noticed all my posts post hard fork decrease about 30% from their initial high. My only explanation is that we are creating more content and that is draining the delegated % of the rewards pool specifically for us.

I am glad you wrote this post, hopefully we can get some answers buddy.

Excellent post @aggroed. I love this part: "... Holy fuck. We're rich son. Gonna quit my job. Slap my boss. Poop in the copy the machine. Who the fuck cares. You see them whale ballz hit! I never have to work again!!!!"

Great post :)

I definitely know what that is like... lmao

Hahaha this is literally what I have been feeling the last few days. I have been quite excited about my postamd then slowly realizing that it's not quite as big as originally promised. Still happy as hell to be getting upvoted, and my content is being read and consumed by some in the network, but just a bit of a gut punch when you see your rewards slowly declining day after day. I know I can get used to it over time, but now it feels like I'm being taxed a little bit at a time🙄

I'm learning so much from your post.
But see something strange here: Viewed by 95, upvoted by 112! How's that possible?

streemian. people auto vote on others. Steemvoter. A couple of tools.

Something between prison sex and a tornado taking all your shit. I just don't know where exactly in between it is

Let me off the coaster, I think I'm gonna be sick ;-)

It hurts a little on the inside right?

haha great post.
keep it real and upvoted by @cryptomydollars

I honestly cant tell.. mainly because my posts are in the cents or dollars, so you know.. it probably gets reduced? but maybe just gets rounded back up to the nearest cent?

Is the payout reflective of the dollar value of SBD and Steem? When you see the amount it doesn't show SBD or Steem so it makes me wonder if that is the case but honestly I have never looked into it. With both going down then it would make sense.

Also is there a set reward pool that each upvote gets a percentage from? I assume more is released in each block but if each of us is given more to dish out then that would slowly balance and lower as more is given.

My guess would be both. I should probably research this before just throwing out ideas. 😁

Yeah. Instead of listing your rewards as a sum of your S/SP/SBD they just aggregate into USD, but you're obviously not paid in dollars. It's just listed that way so they don't have to display 3 units.

There isn't a set rewards pool. It's a very fluid thing. It's made up of new steem generated by inflation and the price of steem and how much voting is going on and some other shit. So, it's a calculated thing, but it isn't set. It's highly dynamic.

Maybe saying it was set is the wrong thing. I meant that at any given moment it could be calculated. I assumed it was fluid but it isn't infinite (is it??). I was just wondering if the reward we see are a percentage of that amount and it is somehow tied to it. I would assume (again, could be missing the boat) that there is a percentage increase that could be determined for the reward pool and if we are upvoting as a community at a higher rate than it grows, we could be devaluing our own previous upvotes before payout without realizing it. Prior to HF19 we didn't have the collective power we have now so it seems to make sense on the surface.

Yeah, there's another comment about the reward pool draining. Maybe dolling out thousands at a time wasn't good for the overall poool and thus the decay.

I've had a couple good posts, but I keep seeing the rewards going down while waiting for payout, and I cry a little on the inside.

Yeah. Who shaved my post reward (balls)?

Definitely seeing it - at my level we are talking about a pretty small pie - but the pie does shrink nonetheless, and I think 30% is roughly accurate.

Then again, I'm frigging thrilled if I break ten bucks, so at this point I can hardly complain.

You think you're makin' more after we got forked?

Oh man - the day of the fork everything roughly tripled in value. My most popular science post shot up to 120$, which blew my mind. That SBD is now randowhale SBD - so I randowhale and whaleshare each new post to get it hot - and that alone will usually net more than 2 SBD worth - and then I'm averaging now maybe 8 -10$ per post at payout, taking into account a precipitous dive at the end.

Thing is I wasn't using randowhale or whaleshares prefork and I feel like I haven't gotten nearly as many views, let alone upvotes, since the fork. But I think necessarily I'm making more overall.

Views is what kills me. I've said this before all over the place, but honest to god, I just want to know people are looking at my pictures. Even if I do manage to keep some payout, it's a hollow victory, seeing forty upvotes to three views. I fully understand the benefits and necessity of long tail curation, but it's part and parcel of why in some ways, this is the most brilliant and technologically up to date ponzi of all time.

TL;DR: PLEASE JUST LET ME LOVE YOUR EYEBALLS

Couldn't agree more - it is frustrating - weirdly frustrating really, because two weeks ago I didn't even know this was a thing and spent this same amount of time playing Heroes of the Storm. And yet, you post a thing, spend a couple of hours on it, and you get miffed when no one looks at it.

But you're not doing too badly with views - especially if you consider that some folks are probably enjoying the primary photo content without even clicking the link. On mobile, they would see almost a normal sized version of the photo depending on the view they used.

agreed, and you know, I don't use my phone, so I never thought about that. I've been lamenting the thumbnail size in my head up to this point.

Right now, I've been asking people to come and look- not upvote, not follow- just look. I'm committing my heart to the chain, and I know it's going to take a while to get people into it. Asking humbly without expectation is the only way I'll get my views up, and if they're moved to follow, then we'll both hopefully gain from it.

It definitely is bizarre, but I suppose we just need to look at it as (and forgetting that of course, money is a motivator) when was the last time you put something out there that you worked so hard on, and felt so keenly connected to? That you spent hours on, watched with bated breath, hoping just to hear that it moved someone else? This platform is pulling stories and photos out of me that I took just because, and now that it is, I'm getting to reanalyse and relive all of the reasons I really did it in the first place. It turns out, nothing is just because :)

yeah, the views and upvotes is a killer. I think that's 40/10 vote related.

Yeah - I do wonder whether that problem might be ameliorated by getting rid of or limiting certain self-upvoting capabilities - although I have no idea the degree to which whale/dolphin voting power is systemically being used for that purpose as opposed to upvoting other people's content.

Yeah. I'm working on the autovorotic problem around here post HF 19. Gimme a few days.

upvote and lol for "autovorotic"

Well now that better explains why our post rewards came down so fast in a couple of days - damn that fall at point D! I also thought that the recent decrease in rewards had more to do with the drop in STEEM and SBD prices.

At any rate, we're still sitting much prettier following HF-19 than after HF-18 - gotta always think glass half-full! ;)

Yeah. As I said I think my post dollars are up, even after the 6 agonizing days of watching them fall, but it's a mental thing. it's like your boss says you'll make a thousand dollars on Monday and then each day after you work he tells you that the amount is going down.....

Lol or maybe he doesn't tell you at all until you finally get your paycheck and your jaw drops as you say "Say whaaaaaaat?"

Still, HF-19 was a step in the right direction, especially for the minnows who I see are rising quite well in reputation score now. Thanks for the helpful MS-Paint graph @aggroed!

yeah. well 8 hrs of work right there. You know. Took forever!

Wow well done - more for actually producing something useful and aesthetically pleasing with MS Paint! Haven't used it since I switched to a Mac yet I haven't found a better substitute on the Mac OS lol

So, you get slapped with the whale balls and then the effect of the slap disappears over time !!
maxresdefault.jpg

yeah. And it leaves you empty inside.

My posts all shot up from .80¢ to over five dollars, some even kicked up over 20$, but they are definitely waning. But not back to 80¢ so I'm happy 🐒 Great post by the way, I could almost here the ocean ;)

How'd the ocean come into this?

The whales, sea?

Sorry, this dad thing comes with a sense of humor I did not expect.

The reduction in rewards paid out - the regression. I wonder if Steemit is collecting a commission or something. I am not real happy either. HF19 is not made for wimps. Perhaps they did this to sort to do some spring cleaning. OH BOY!!

Yeah. I think it's equality for minnows and enforced manual curation. Not sure I like the second part. First part has some issues too now that we're seeing some reward pool drain.

Wait, you make money on posts?

I know exactly what you mean. My post wasn't getting nearly as recognized as they were before. And when I keep looking at it, it seems to decrease a little every time. Granted I'm only earning $4-$7 a post, but I feel overall, I'm earning less. I will say I've noticed a smaller payout from comments this week vs last week. I think because everyone went on an upvote spree last week and drained all of their power (since they were used to voting a lot), so they barely had any for this week, and now they're rationing. Just my $0.02.

OH SHIT! OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT! You blew my mind. You fuckn' blew my mind. Post coming!

Hahaha good to know! Looking forward to it!

I want to poop in a copy machine; I love giving everybody shit!

I've just stopped looking at rewards for now; it's confusing, and I only want to fondle balls for fun, not profit :/

You my dear. Are adored.

LOL i made a post of this too... I think this is because people are doing more posts with the same reward pool payout have to drop... Not sure though... It is not good for us minnows either, we will end getting 0,1$ in all our posts, just as we did before HF19, but only with less upvotes than before... Whales are now voting with 0,01% voting power which is awful, we are getting basically the same rewards than before...

Yeah. I wish someone had publicly warned that this wasn't the cure all people thought it could be. You know, by prominently posting in promoted a few detailed posts about potential problems.

There where many people warning, we still have to wait and see how things evolve... It all depends on how the users react, and they are reacting poorly...

Very interesting indeed! I enjoyed the flair! Looks like it kinda evens out. Or maybe it was an up and down week for Steem? But I don't think so. I guess we will hear from a number of people on this in the next few days!

Great post ~ I love your humor, @aggroed, I am still smiling as I respond to your article :)

I am also not sure what is going with the roller-coaster...but I am definitely having fun and appreciating sharing good vibes and love with everyone along the way <3

Thank you & Happy Steeming!

Namaste

yeah it's fun. Sorry to see the rewards pool drain. That's sadness.

Yeah, it is sadness...but I suppose it is part of our growth process <3

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