Background on curation reward problems
The last major changes to the author/curation rewards were made as part of the Economic Improvement Proposal (EIP) changes. The most significant of these changes was a separate downvote mana pool (to allow downvoting that doesn’t economically hurt the downvoter) and a change from 75%/25% to 50%/50% in the rewards ratio paid to a post’s author versus its curators.
Both of these changes were primarily intended to discourage two practices that had become quite common: 1) buying votes for posts from bid-vote bots (these were bots that you could pay to vote for your posts) and 2) self-voting of near content-less posts. Overall, the changes were pretty effective, so much so that vote bots pretty much went out of business.
I think it’s fair to say that curation quality did improve as a result of the EIP. The trending page has better articles and downvoting has curbed a lot of the worst abuses of “bad” whales upvoting crap posts for the author rewards.
But I also think most people would agree that we’re still far from an ideal system for rewarding posts.
The rise of auto-vote bots
The biggest problem I observe nowadays is the rise of auto-vote bots (bots that you give permission to vote for your account). These have existed for a long time, of course, but a lot of the funds that previously were invested in bid-vote bots have moved to auto-vote bots. The problem with this is that auto-vote bots are generally programmed to vote for a set of “known good” authors, instead of voting based on the contents of individual posts. So the judgement of post quality is far from ideal.
If automatic voting is bad for the network, why do large stakeholders do it?
Stakeholders allocate their funds to these bots because they want to receive curation rewards, but they don’t want to spend the time to curate. This might just sound lazy, but it’s more complicated than that.
Curation actually is very time-intensive. So intensive, the rewards just aren’t great enough to pay for the time, so the true manual curator usually does so for other reasons than the rewards. So, if you’re a large stakeholder that wants to hold the token, but doesn’t want to curate, you have four choices: 1) sign up with an auto-vote bot and collect your curation rewards (somewhere between 8-12% APR), 2) randomly curate 10 posts a day and risk those posts getting downvoted for bad curation (losing the curation rewards), 3) devote hours a day to reading many articles and curating manually, and 4) don’t vote and fall behind in Hive ownership versus other stakeholders in the first 3 groups.
Now, while it seems fair that people in group 3 should earn more than people in group 4 (after all people in group two are providing useful work to the blockchain), I think it’s clear that people in group 1 and group 2 shouldn’t earn more than people in group 4. I believe a lot of large stakeholders go through this same thought process, and if they care about an 8% return but don’t have time to curate 10 posts a day, then they decide the only reasonable option is to join an auto-vote bot.
Solution 1: pay manual curators like it’s a job
The problem with this solution is that it is just too expensive. At least right now, it takes most people too long to find a bunch of posts they like. And while large stakeholders get paid more for the same effort and should therefore be more incentivized to curate, they also usually end up being people who are already highly compensated for their time elsewhere (this tends to be just the nature of capitalist systems).
Solution 2: make it easier to find good posts
This is certainly a worthy cause, and we should invest effort in creating better tools for finding good content with less effort. But I don’t see this as a silver bullet solution to this problem right now.
Solution 3: lower curation rewards?!?
After thinking about this for a while, I believe this is probably the simplest near-term solution to the economic problem that is currently pushing curators to use auto-vote bots.
Most stakeholders know that auto-vote bots aren’t great for Hive as a whole. But it’s a form of tragedy-of-the-commons, where each stakeholder who doesn’t join in the auto-vote game loses out against those who do.
To break this negative economic incentive, I propose we lower curation rewards to the point where the potential gain from curation is too small to make it worth the negatives associated with using an auto-vote bot. This will bring the situation back to one where stakeholders who don’t want to spend time curating, but don’t want to lose out on curation rewards, don’t need to worry about this issue any more, because the relative loss between the two choices is small. This could even incentivize new stakeholders who previously have decided to pass on Hive or only maintain a small investment, because they didn’t want to play the curation game.
A side benefit: Solution 3 also lowers overall blockchain inflation
The Hive blockchain currently has an inflation rate of 8.5%, which decreases 0.5% each year (don’t quote me, as maybe it already dropped to 8%, I don’t know exactly when the change occurs). My back-of-the-envelope calculation leads me to believe that overall inflation will drop to about 6.5% if we reduce curation rewards by 75%.
Could this cause the return of bid-vote bots?
One potential concern, of course, is that this change could lead to a return of bid-vote bots and self-voted content-less posts. But the primary disincentives for these behaviors continue to exist from the EIP changes: 1) author rewards were reduced and 2) downvoting such posts became economically net-neutral to the downvoter. So I believe that a reduction of curation rewards won’t result in a return of these behaviors.
Will this reduce incentive to stake Hive?
Yes, I think this change will lower the incentive to stake Hive. The current high APR on curation rewards does act as a strong incentive to powerup Hive. So lowering the curation rewards will certainly lower the incentive to power up. But at the same time, it could act as incentive to hold Hive as a whole, since the more nervous investor can keep his holdings liquid without losing out as much economically versus powered-up stakeholders.
And there will still be good reasons for people to power up their Hive: the ability to influence Hive governance and the reduced inflation impact on powered up Hive (inflation paid to VESTS).
Other consequences: expect less votes
Another aspect of this change is a likely decrease in the number of votes cast for posts. My best guess is that the majority of votes are currently cast by auto-vote bots. So we can expect the number of votes cast to drop quite dramatically with such a change, and to someone who wants to inflate activity metrics, this may be considered a negative.
But I don’t think we should focus on false forms of activity of this sort. Too many blockchains play these kinds of games, but I hope that here on Hive, our focus is on providing useful services for our network participants, not gaming metrics to distort reality.
OK, if you’re still with me on this, how much lower should curation rewards be?
It’s a difficult question to answer, because the answer revolves around human behavior.
Obviously, we could simply drop curation rewards entirely, and I think it’s fairly clear that auto-vote bots would quickly go out of style. Another plus of this approach is that it would also eliminate the need for the blockchain to compute and report curation rewards. On the other hand, this would eliminate one of the few current gamification aspects of the blockchain (competition for curation rewards).
My initial thought is we should cut curation rewards to about ¼ of their current amount. This would bring the reward down to 1-3% APR for most curators. I suspect this would be enough to encourage stakeholders to look at the big picture, and stop delegating their votes to vote bots, allowing manual curation to dominate.
Feedback wanted
All of the above is an attempt to analyze and predict human behavior. That means it’s easily subject to error. I’m not certain that the proposed change will work as intended, it’s just my current opinion on a simple solution to the auto-vote problem. So I’m not wedded to this idea, and I am open to other solutions, as long as they don’t involve a lot of programming work (unless someone else wants to code it cheaply).
In the same vein, I’m OK to leave things as-is, if most stakeholders think that the issue I’m raising isn’t a problem worth worrying about. But all feedback is welcome, as I think it’s an issue at least worth discussing. If there seems to be enough interest in this approach, I can create a pair of proposals to more accurately measure stakeholder opinion about it.
The issue here is that to a large stakeholder there are virtually no negatives to using an auto-vote bot. It's completely free, takes all of a couple minutes to set up, and you sit back and collect the rewards. So if the curation rewards are anything at all, it will still be worthwhile to use auto-vote bots. So, primarily for this reason, I don't think reducing curation rewards will have the intended effect and wouldn't support that change.
Another option I have been thinking about (which is more work) is to allow people to opt out of the voting game and just earn a straight return on their HP. So we divert a portion of the current reward pool to this new HP staking reward fund or whatever it's called, and people can opt into that if they want, and if they do then they cannot use their stake to vote on content.
The returns from this would depend on how much HP opts in to receive the straight staking rewards, since it would be splitting up a finite reward pool between all of the stake opted in. On the other end, users who choose to keep their HP voting will see their vote values per HP increase significantly due to a large amount of HP no longer participating in the voting/reward pool. So users will arbitrage both sides until the system hopefully comes to an equilibrium.
Basically, the system allows the HP holders to collectively determine the best APR on staked HIVE vs vote value in a free market type system.
At the end of the day, I think all this boils down to whether people think auto-voting is good, bad or neutral. From comments so far, seems like not many people mind it, and some like that it encourages staking versus holding liquid Hive. I don't really like auto-voting, but there's certainly other issues I'm more interested in dealing with, so I think I'm just going to table this proposal, since it seems to fall into the category where fear of the unknown outweighs the view that there's potential for improvement.
I would really like to look into how we can make things fairer for the small vote counts. If I am correct, vote counts under $5.00 are penalized in that the amount rewarded is less than the theoretical value of the upvote given, and that the opposite occurs on vote counts above that threshold.
In my view, upvoting comments is at least half of what a social media should do.
I notice a clear lack of upvoting on comments, and I think it is attributable to the fact that you get less reward than you would if you just looked for something crossing the $5.00 mark, regardless of whether it's good or not. (As people know, I vote comments anyway, because I think they are extremely important - engagement is one of the keys to success and it needs to be rewarded - all the well knowing that I'm actually hurting my ROI.)
Comments would also be more difficult to create curation trails for, I would think, if not impossible, thus dealing effectively with part of the issue.
If we were to go one step further and reverse the reward growth as the count grows on the larger vote counts, that would also further thwart the curation trails, again, I would think.
The long and the short of this would be not the elimination of curations trails, but a reduction in their profitability - meaning that they would still be an option for those who don't have the time. However, those who do have the time would have much more incentive to manually curate.
I think offering an opt-out staking option would completely defeat what HIVE is meant to be. Everybody would opt-out (except for a handful of diehards) and we'd be just one more staking cryptocurrency among hundreds.
For more than one reason, the most important being to foster community, but in this case to combat autovoting, I think the best way to address the issue is a dual approach that makes the small vote counts fairer while throttling down the rewards of the larger vote counts at the same time.
To be honest nobody is giving meaningful upvotes for comments anymore and in turn few people comment in comparison to the " good old days" which is very sad for the evolution of a social platform
I do but to be honest, I hate social media. #HIVE is more than any other pile of crap #mssm Mainstream Social Media to me and always will be. I like not being censored, hacked, spammed, targeted by bots, flooded with advertisements or having my content disappear/ be deleted. Most users of mainstream social media don't seem to care about any of those things...
I find it hard to "engage" digitally with users here as much as I once did on STEEM for many reasons, but those reasons don't relate to upvotes, HIVE income or curating rewards. My lack of engagement is my problem and something I'm still trying to change my online routines around.... But to see an immutable blockchain platform try to gear itself towards capturing market share away from Squitter, FuckBook, PooTube, DikDok is such a limiting way of looking at it all.
I know for a lot of #hive users, this is really important stuff. Growth in their 'investment' can be the priority reason for them bothering to post or upvote anything here and they want to see more and more users migrate here (or at least integrate #hive into their daily social media addictions). I just don't see it the same way.
The value is in the content on here, the drawcard is the technical superiority of the hive blockchain tech itself and the tenacity to commit to engagement here is what I see the major struggle as.
I appreciate very much what you are doing for HIVE @blocktrades. Regarding the topic of this post, I understand perfectly the inflation and reducing it can be a good thing if done well.
However I am worried about the incentives of Holding HIVE and powering up, some solution like the one described by @yabapmatt seems better for me.
A lot of blockchains are marketing the STAKING REWARDS better than us.
A system for staking and receiving rewards (higher than what we receive now for powering up), could work for people who do not want to vote 10 times a day.
Yes, it's just more work, and I think its not much different, except it encourages staking just to receive rewards. Some people think that is a good thing, some don't. I'm not a huge fan of staking just as a gimmic to create scarcity, but I do think it does have usefulness for governance, as it tends to ensure governance is managed by long term versus short term thinking.
Isn't it ironic how 'staking' aka vesting was a fresh, new concept on STEEM and HIVE all those years ago and now it's absolutely everywhere in the crypto world.
Well the thing is you, and I've heard plenty others say it's "bad", but I never really hear why it's so bad. I honestly think it's a positive. The reality is as you said, curation is hugely time consuming, and there's a ton of stake that wants to participate, but doesn't have the time to manually curate. What is the actual material damage of this that you see?
I think things like curation trails saved Steem from dying for a long time, and I feel like it's still a similar situation here.
I think what we need most desperately right now is still more users and I don't think this will move us closer to that. I think it would have the opposite effect.
We're not talking about curation trails. Those are arguably still manually curated, because someone is reading the posts before voting, hopefully.
The "bad" auto-voters are the ones that just vote around 5 minutes on posts by a specific set of authors that are expected to generate content that won't get downvoted. It's bad because no one is judging the contents of the article in that case. Right now, variations of this type of bot are probably the most economically rewarding.
I think this amounts to the same thing economically as the proposal, but maybe it appears better on paper, because people don't perceive the inflation loss. I guess one difference is that the method you're suggesting still incentivizes staking versus just holding, if that's an objective. And you can "tweak" things more if you have a variable percentage, rather than just an outright reduction in inflation.
Allocate the inflation to the bank accounts. Give people ROI on the bank accounts. On top of this, Use the bank accounts for collateral in DeFi loans for creating HBD. Curation can be eliminated entirely it makes zero sense. People who want ROI will move to the bank accounts and everyone else that wants social media Hive Fives will stick with the reward pool.
We hope people listen to you!
The inflation to bank accounts is what matt is proposing, I think. It's been discussed as an option for a while.
The big question is whether a smaller reward for saving versus a higher reward for the near "zero cost" activity of allocating it to an auto-vote bot. Now this could make economic sense if downvoting or early voting started bringing the two options into balance for people who curate via an auto-vote bot.
Agree with this suggestion. Reduce inflation and divide inflations rewards as u suggest.
I've quite similar impression @yabapmatt
I found it hard to imagine how reducing curation rewards would stop all those users who are using auto-upvote bots from using them.
I'm also afraid, that many stakeholders will not only see value of received tokens dropping, but also APR dropping. Which may prompt them to exit their investments in HIVE tokens.
Wouldn't you think, that perhaps removing non-linear reward curve would reduce auto-upvotes in current form?
Yours, Piotr
I feel if we drastically reduce curation we are going to eliminate any incentive to power up. The majority of users already power down and sell as fast as they earn it. Very few will lock up any significant amount to just vote witnesses and proposals.
You are trying to encourage manual curation, but this would reduce the incentive to do it. To manually curate with any decent amount of stake is literally a full time job unless you just drop large votes on anything half decent you see.
No matter how altruistic you are, it's very difficult to justify spending 4-12 hours a day reading and voting content you likely have zero interest in the first place. That's how long it would take to manually curate with a sizable stake.
Reducing or removing curation will encourage those with stake (or access to it via circle jerks) to create more shit content to take more of the author side. One of the reasons there is a significant reduction of spam and abuse is curation is more viable compared to shit post farms and you can be competitive without voting on your friends or your alts. I find a lot of people underestimate the value stake holders bring to the ecosystem. While creating content is time consuming, earning and buying stake is as well and not as easily doable by most users.
In another comment you mention this:
I don't think anyone outside of Hive really cares about voting incentives, and those are the people we need to encourage to invest in Hive. I do believe reducing inflation is valuable, and it is something that outsiders care about. I've suggested in the past we cut the reward pool in half until we can acquire more users. I think targeting curation only would drastically reduce any incentive to power up. In fact, as someone who has powered up since I have been here, I would struggle to justify it myself if curation was made to be pointless. Curation is already soul sucking, you are damned if you don't vote someone, you are damned if you do vote someone, you are damned if you downvote someone, you are damned if you don't. Not only that it takes an enormous amount of time, more so than any other crypto project I know of to just "keep up with the Joneses". The problem is made worse when you see garbage rewarded extremely well for little effort on a regular basis. Many stake holders will likely feel they are losing their percentage share unless they also become an author, and let's be honest most people here are not authors, so they will turn to easy solutions.
Let me turn this bus around and get back to the root of the problem.
auto voting is bad.
I disagree, I think shitty auto voting is bad. I mostly see myself supporting people who create good content and put in effort. I maintain an eye on these people I support and adjust accordingly. I also give significant votes to everyone I vote, $4-5 typically. Here is the real problem that I have brought up before. The majority of auto votes give a few cents, their vote is only there for curation rewards and nothing else. This is the bulk of the auto votes you see, these votes have zero concern about quality and effort and are purely for curation rewards. This is the real problem in my opinion. This also results in clumping where popular authors get the majority of the votes. This is also the result of very limited pool of "good" authors to vote.
The other problem is very few are downvoting to counter the shitty voting that goes on, which would be a balance to keep the auto voting in check.
I just dropped you a 100% upvote because, 1) you deserve it, and 2) that is how I manage to distribute my daily 20% recharge. I don't have but a couple of hours a day to dedicate to HIVE, so I give 100% upvotes on posts, and 50% on comments (with exceptions, like yours). I think it's also more appreciated on the receiving end too.
But get this: half of my votes usually go to comments, none of which ever reach $5.00. That's a huge disincentive to upvote comments (which should be just the opposite since comments are the life blood of a community - as you said, the vast majority will never be successful content creators). As incredible as it may seem, the opposite happens with posts receiving more than $5.00 of upvotes: we get unwanted curation trails as everyone piles on (sometimes piling on to what very well may not be exactly what we would call quality content).
In short, I'm rewarding your comment as I think it deserves, following what comes naturally, like we do everywhere else, IN SPITE OF BEING PENALIZED FOR IT (both of us).
That is what I believe needs to be fixed, and, not so ironically, I think that, by and large, by doing that, the curation trail issue would also be fixed in the process.
!ENGAGE 50
This is the problem, this is what needs to be addressed not so much changing once again the reward pool system. If auto vote trail following required a minimum value then this would solve the entire issue. Start with a minimum of $0.750 value per vote, if a minnow account an alt account or a low HP account wants to follow with a zero value vote to bad they should be voting manually.
This will be the first Hard Fork for Hive, I for one am glad it is not Adjusting the vote/reward pool. It will also be the first HF I have seen since 2017 that did not include changing the reward pool/vote system.
I don't know if code can be written to limit vote trails/auto voting, but if it can it should be looked into.
Very limited is not the best words to use there. I know of at least two dozen, off of the top of my head, that refuse to post anything substantially qualified as 'quality' (which is also subjective to the eye of the beholder), simply because their posts consistently got overlooked and were never curated 'properly' as they should have been. It still happens. I used to write massive stories that took hours to compose between gathering proper graphics and making it 'pretty'. Sure a few reached 100+ dollars - but only because of bidbots. Not a single actual whale vote aside from grumpycat who thought I made too much on it. I recently wrote a story on my first fish, I thought it deserved at least 15$ but nope. Nothing. 6 minute read with over 1000 words.
Which, is a whole other ballgame there. There is a post right now on trending from @krnel that is twice as good in my mind (pun intended) as the one written by @acidyo about @ocd. Krnel's is worth half as much. The one from Krnel is also a shorter read than my fish story. What gets the most attention around here seems to mostly pertain to the blockchain and actual content creators, don't get near the credit they deserve. The 'whales' would rather just support the 'whales' so they can remain the 'whales'. Not all, but most. Voting habits and the blockchain doesn't lie. Some even sit at 100% VP/Mana for days until one of their 'whale' friends makes a post. And we won't even get into the biases from 'communities' and the separation that bred into the system.
Shitty auto-voting is bad, but I use it. Not necessarily for the curation, but to offer steady support because like you, I can't be here 12 hours a day. I am in agreement with you though (once again - kind of an odd thing, but hey, it's been happening more frequently the past few months), reducing the curation rewards is not the answer. The actual content creating community, all inclusive of Hive, was already pretty upset when it went to 50/50 and so many had to adapt. You take that away again and as you say, we will be hard pressed to attract any investors or even users, for that matter.
I still stand by my words, even if every author was a "good author", we still have very few.
Really you mean as they feel it should have been. There is no "should have been" here. I've seen a duct tape meme get voted $943, and good posts make less than $1. You have to put in the work in any social media before you build an audience. That involves posting and engaging consistently. Social media is hard, yet Hive is still far easier than any I have seen do to the lack of competition, but it is far from fair.
The first half of this statement is a gift to the community, the second half is depressing.
I disagree, I don't do this, and most of the whales I know don't do this. There are not many of us. It isn't usually whales doing this, it's dolphins and orcas. A lot of the whales are in fact spreading their votes very thin to optimize curation or voting a group of favored authors (potentially friends). I don't see the behavior you describe often at the whale level.
This is a systemic problem on Hive, people think because they do something they are owed something. Unless you have a contract, then it is up to the community to decide what it is worth. But I will agree 100% there is no consistency in voting based on quality here. This is a result of decentralization, favoritism, ulterior motives, and just poor content discovery options. EIP has done wonders for helping in this department, many more stakeholders are voting outside of their circles. It isn't perfect but the end result has been a vast improvement over Old Steem. No change we make will ever get us to where we want to be, but if we can get closer that is an improvement.
Not claiming to be entitled, but I did go to college for English Journalism. So, I can actually deem myself a decent judge as to what quality should be. It's not what you know or how much heart and soul you put into a post here. It's who you know. Simple as that, and the same goes for any centralized system as well. I've seen crapass posts worth well beyond their limits too. My point is, many a good and often a great thing gets overlooked. Which is one reason I feel auto-votes are a good thing. Take @snook, for example. She likes to make people smile, and that's one of the reasons I love her. She is in my autovoter because I don't care if she posts a video, 3 sentences or three chapters. I'm supporting HER. I know her. And maybe a few days later, I might have enough time to comment my thoughts on her post. Maybe it's 8 days later and I missed the deadline to even give her a vote! Or wait, no I didn't, she's on auto - man I love those things.
I agree, and I'll quote my parent comment.
"This is a result of decentralization, favoritism, ulterior motives, and just poor content discovery options."
My original comment brings this up as well, I do the same thing. I use votes to support people, not always specific pieces of content. I like to support authors I believe that are creating good content and /or putting in effort. If I see something that stands out, I vote that as well. An important thing if you use votes to "support people" is reviewing those votes and those people as people tend to change when given automatic votes.
I do regularly just like you. I have my personal options and my community ones. Some are similar. But I'd say only half of, maybe less, haven't actually counted, of my votes are auto. Most of my personal is manual. I don't care if I get down in the 60% range, it's not just about the curation for me. Retaining users is a struggle itself. We wouldn't be much without them.
I think they are a bad thing, because they make people too lazy to discover new posts or also honor efforts of former 'bad' authors to improve or just unknown writers.
It's easy to upvote 'good' authors automatically all the time but difficult real, hard work to find great posts.
People don't want to discovery "new posts" because it's a lot easier to farm on defi and do nothing, earning 10-20x yield returns even if it does collapse.
The Auto Voting is a serious problem if you want a social unicorn. On the flip side, poor returns from APR yields is a serious problem if you want a blockchain unicorn. It's not to say by any means you need any APR, or staking for that matter, it's just for this comparison since rewarding is still in plans along with inflation.
It needs to to go strongly in one direction or the other. Currently all the mechanics are in the middle.
New Investors:
And it's important to get new investors unfortunately, because that's how the entire mechanics work for any asset class, stock or crypto for that matter.
We need to support more experimenting like @blocktrades proposal and attempt more radical changes(a bit less focusing on "finding the sweet spots"). More extremes imho.
Not sure that's true either. My feed is full of them. I wouldn't follow someone if I didn't think they didn't do good work. What would be the point in following a terrible author?
I don't like the concept of 'good' authors, I prefer the idea of upvoting good posts! :)
Upvoting 'good' authors automatically means being too lazy to read and evaluate posts, means allwoing 'good' authors to be lazy too, as they receive upvotes independently from the quality of their posts, means not giving 'bad' authors the incentive to improve and have the chance of receiving upvotes when writing better posts than before, means to keep ignoring new, unknown users which leave the platform as fast as they came, because nobody makes the effort to seek for posts manually.
I see not a single reason why I should get less curation rewards when manually upvoting a two days old post which I had really read and evaluated than someone who didn't work at all but just let a programm do the job!
You may read more about my point of view here, here and here.
@themarkymark please don't take this as an attack on you (I almost wrote auto attack xD).. But, I believe that auto voting on 4th minute with a stake large like yours is a bit shitty auto voting. It doesn't give time for manual curators to even read a post and possibly engage with author.
I am saying this because curation rewards are only incentive for manual curator, with other emotional advantages. So it would be good not to take that away from them (us).
I am saying this to you because I often see your votes when I am manually curating and I hope that you will give it a consideration to change it a bit.
By saying this, I also appreciate you voting on some small authors that are creating good content. So once again, I am not attacking u nor saying you need to change your thing.
I am just hoping you will consider what I said here.
Thanks.
I don't think it eliminates any incentive to power up, although I agree it reduces it. It would probably make sense to reduce the powerdown time to 30 days at the same time as a counter-incentive.
But what I don't agree with is that "disincentivizing staking" = incentivizing selling. Staking just to create scarcity is just playing a game with people's heads, IMO.
I agree with that. I just haven't seen a solution that just eliminates bad auto-voting.
I've also yet to see a decent proposal for how to make downvoting work well socially, unfortunately.
That's not what I meant but I can see how you got that as I put two thoughts together. My point is we have a large portion of users powering down on a regular basis and selling. Many see Hive as a weekly paycheck, and some depend on it as such.
My point wasn't that it would incentive it, just that it is an existing condition. If there is less incentive to power up (or even just not power down), it will likely happen less.
I'm not sure that's two different things. I feel like it's the same thing, just expressed two different ways. But maybe I'm still missing something.
The only way to eliminate auto voting is to reduce curation rewards if you constantly vote on the same author. For instance, you could add a curation multiplier (0-1) that is associated with time. If you haven't voted on an author for say 5 days your curation is multiplied by 1. If you have voted on the same author 10 times that day your multiplier is 0. The difference is burned or donated to the HPS.
Does that make sense? It overly complicated things, but gives you the voting behavior you are looking for. Although vote bots could be setup to get around that. That is always the case.
A sybil attack (voting with a rotating set of accounts) would be the easiest way to overcome this. So given the added complexity to implement the algorithm initially, and the relative ease of beating it, it's probably not worth doing. Plus it would incentivize a form of "bad" behavior (the sybil attack).
Agreed. I didn’t come to that conclusion until I was mostly done brainstorming the idea though :)
Split the stake between multiple accounts and factor in the curation (loss) multiplier when considering votes.
It would discourage large stakes from frequently dolloping large votes in the same place so they'll at least have to cast their net wider.
My earnings:
Hive : 216,009 HP - Last 30 Days: 2,049.20 HP / $352.27
Steem: 172,800 SP - Last 30 Days: 4,954.97 SP / $841.98
Anyone with brain will leave this blockchain after 75% cut on curation
Anyone with a brain could figure out that a difference like that can only exist right now if fewer people are reaping those rewards, given the rewards systems are the same currently. That tends to point to a serious long term problem for Steem.
Steemians: "We centralized the chain, now we'll centralize distribution"
:-)
That's true, this is why I'm slowly powering down SP and converting earnings to HP but if proposal like this one gets funded it won't make any sense to me or any other investor
I get the feeling that there's no need to worry about it. I think too many people share your fear to try the experiment.
What I don't like about automatic voting is the abuse of the curve by programming to 5 minutes without giving time to manual curators. Eliminating the healing curve would be beneficial.
Another abuse of the automatic votes is when you use 100% of them and nothing to manual curation. The same group of authors will always be voted on, excluding others, and this discourages new users.
The solutions for many whales can be to get into a manual curation trail as you do with @cervantes and what you could do with others as @rutablockchain 😝
Now seriously, speaking of solutions. In the Whaleshares blockchain they did not have automatic votes, somehow they were not in the code, although I am not in favor of such a drastic solution. They also implemented (I think it would be at a frontend level) that to vote a post you had to open it and you couldn't directly from the feed.
@theycallmedan provided a solution to this and "delegated" their vote to several community leaders among whom I am, only following the vote of a new account with a fixed percentage. He relieved himself of curation and made it more decentralized, distributing that vote in several communities but keeping his stake for when he wants to vote. We as curators do this to help the community.
The whales must be integrated into the communities, so there are many ways to encourage manual curation.
Any proposal that goes through eliminating curation rewards will make it stop curation and as a consequence a stampede and abandonment of users. It is the content creators themselves who are bringing more people to HIVE, I don't see the whales in that. If there is only a ROI for maintaining HIVE, most of the community will leave and this project will no longer make sense.
What makes HIVE different from another blockchain where you earn ROI, is that here you can transform lives of people who express their talents, if you change that you destroy the magic
I've grown to dislike the 5min window. I've talked about this for awhile. It screws manual curators and makes most flee to auto bots so they can earn better curation rewards voting before manual curators. I would like to see a flat change here. When I have time today I'll jot down a few more ideas.
This seems like a simple solution to reduce auto-voting and give those seeking and rewarding content based on its perceived worth (and not the authors previous efforts) a fair share. If the CR was paid out purely based on stake voted, a % could be set aside and burnt?
It's good to know that community leader see the problem, trying to find the solution and asking for opinion (that's how I read your proposal). I bet we will have to get back to the discussion after the hardfork. There are many ideas in comments how to improve the system, here is mine:
I also think that anonymous downvotes would be helpful. But while it may be possible to do it, there's no obvious way to do so. I will give it some thought though, since I need to solve a related problem for the reputation/rating system I want to develop: I want there to be a way for people to report negative ratings without being the potential subject of retaliation. I do have some preliminary ideas along those lines, but I'm not sure how easily they can be translated to Hive's reward system.
Steem is a shit show with a paragraph and image making $200+. If I had stake there and wanted curation rewards it would be a cake walk. I would trust anything there to have powered up between them potentially stealing it to the price going to zero when Justin Sun dumps his bags.
Honestly, auto voting is not too bad. It gives the simplicity to users or stakeholder who does not have time to curate and that is why there is a downvote option use for, to downvote the bad content or post.
actually "bad curation" isn't as bad as it would seem:
https://peakd.com/hive-167922/@tobetada/how-bad-is-bad-curation
ENGAGEtokens.YES, all of this ^
I agree with this; autovoting is not the problem, shit autovoting is bad. While there is any incentive at all to autovote over manual vote people will do it. The key here is to align interests. TBH the 5 minute window has a lot to do with the way things are now. If we removed that, and let downvotes do their thing then we are getting closer. I would love to see the view of @theycallmedan on this. Hive is new; lets not meddle with to many things at once while the market is still getting confidence with us.
Supporting the quality content should be a mandatory, the content that brings real value to the Hive.Blog or Peakd. The content should be the case why people really wanna read it. It's MEDIUM kinda content when readers really pay for reading that.
It's not about writing some
codeposts about HF updates (example) that lots of top 20 whales do, receiving huge rewards...that should be at least burned cuz most of them HDFunded, when social people see this, they also see a huge abyss between them, this could be discourageous.Curators should be payed for curating - maybe. Good quality content creators need to be sure that their content will be
neededand supported.I really liked the idea written under the Solution 2, but in the direction of proof of verification ... it's like minting the NFT on the HE - you have to pay 4 that! Why not give the people some kind of the permission to post to the top topic communities which are going to represent Hive quality posts on the main page of HiveBlog or Peakd for burning some Hive? Starting from 5 Hive per post will stop people from shitposting - mining and make em feel more serious about what they are doing.
Regards
!BEER
I support you!🐝
Thanks!
I like it!
+++
Если бы я выбирал куда вложить свои активы между HIVE и STEEM, не имеяя опыта, что я имею. Мне, как инвестору было бы намного приятнее получать 50% кураторских вознаграждаений и меть возможность вывести в ликвидные средства свой стейк за 4 а не за 13 недель.
Думаю, эти изменения могут сделать STEEM более привлекательным местом для инвестиций нежели HIVE. Считаю любое изменения кураторских вознаграждей абсолюно АЛОГИЧЕСКИМ ВАРИАНТОМ.
I completely agree with this comment. Also I think that HIVE token needs to adopt stuff that make LEO token popular, for example ads and token burning.
!BEER
View or trade
BEER.Hey @rollie1212, here is a little bit of
BEERfrom @stranger27 for you. Enjoy it!Learn how to earn FREE BEER each day by staking your
BEER.My idea is a linear curation rewards curve where it wouldn't matter when you vote and how many other users voted on (or are expected to upvote) a post (which would also remove the five minutes 'curation window'...).
I know there is the myth of the manual curator who spots quality content first and then benefits of all the upvotes to follow. However, in reality the big majority of early upvotes are automated whereas real manual curators get the smallest piece of the cake. I see not a single reason why I should get less curation rewards when manually upvoting a two days old post which I had really read and evaluated than someone who didn't work at all but just let a programm do the job!
I explained my idea more extensively here (where I had to defend it in the comment section). :)
To balance the disadvantage that self-voting (because of the higher, linear curation rewards) would be somewhat more profitable again, I think the author rewards curve could stay convergent linear, and in addition one moght think about going back to something like 75 % author rewards and 25 % curations rewrds.
However, with 'free' flags since EIP I am not sure if that would be necessary at all.
I support what @jaki01 says in his comment 100%
Holy crap!! Finally someone who exposes the main problem coherently really putting his finger on the true sore.
yes flat 50% and remove that 2-4 minute advantage in efficiency.
I think Hive should be as easy as possible.
Content consumers hand over millions of dollars annually to content creators on platforms like Youtube, Twitch, etc.
All of these other platforms take a percentage of that money. If a consumer hands over $5, the creator doesn't get $5. Both the consumer and the creators lose money.
Here we have a platform where the consumer can spend the same amount of money, get a return, have their money back if they decide supporting creators isn't for them anymore; the creators get paid and the more they earn, the better their content becomes. The percentage that normally goes to the platform stays in the hands of creators and consumers. That helps guarantee a future. It's much like consumers are investing in both their favorite creators and ensuring those creators have a platform well into the future rather than being demonitized, banned, or shadowbanned. Consumers get paid to be entertained, get a return on their investment, and help ensure their favorites always have a venue.
Everywhere else on the internet when money is involved the consumers and creators all get screwed and have absolutely no say in business matters. Consumers and creators form a partnership but a middleman steps in, takes a percentage, calls the shots; in every case where someone got screwed over, nobody was happy. The creator no longer has a venue and the consumers are out all that money.
Hive is far more than just some run of the mill cryptocurrency project. It has the potential to appeal to millions of people. It has the potential to attract millions of dollars out of the pockets of regular folks who are not interested in crypto, but spend the money anyway.
Moving the goalposts because not many have figured out this potential or a way to sell the idea in order to attract the existing market; it's all a terrible idea. I've spent many years watching many overlook the true potential of a platform like this. There's not much interest in crypto, unfortunately. Shrinking the potential market so it only caters to a handful of people who might be interested in earning interest, for nothing, would be a step in the wrong direction.
If Hive wants to cater to those types, simply remove the interest from holding HP. Let people earn more for powering up and curating, since it takes some work and dedication to the platform, and has the potential to draw in millions annually from basic consumers. 50% now is fair but that percentage should actually increase if/when millions of consumers are on board, since the share would be spread out further. Make that savings account the place to earn on interest. It takes three days to quickly sell those funds. Make it one day. Leave the powerdown period as is, since that lengthy amount of time is what saved many of us from losing thousands when we came over from Steem.
Pardon my rambling response. It's been awhile since I stepped up to the keys...
P.S. Randomize the vote order at payout. There's enough money for development to cover the costs so someone can spend time doing something smart.
good to see ya!
Good to see you as well (and everyone else)! I was about to start posting again; but then I saw this...
The man (this man), the myth, the legend..nice to see you!
I somehow managed to live this long!
I heard Saskatchewan can be a dangerous place.
One wrong move and you'll get sucked into a combine harvester.
Welcome Back!
Thanks! Brief cameo... for now.
I'm still getting mileage out of for now... :0D
It's the gift that keeps on giving.
Este comentario no se puede reblogear:(
No, pero todavía puede servir para algo.
I found you!!! I need to consume your content!!!!
Post something already.
Fine... I still found you.
You have not left.
Soon™
Fuck yeah!
The place was turning to shit without you around.
Really appreciate the work you are doing, but this sounds pretty terrible.
I powered up a lot of Hive in the last months mainly because I believe that Hive has a future, but also (and I'd lie if I'd say otherwise) because I can get something like 10-15% APR. This is a/the main incentive currently to power up Hive and buy it. It is what is absent in most other crypto projects and if we drop this feature I think the consequences might be quite drastic.
The reasons you gave for holding Hive after we lower curation to about 1/4 (governance and reduced inflation) are not very compelling (since most investors don't necessarily want to get so deeply involved with the chain/ or don't care this much about governance) Reduced inflation (and therefore reducing curation as you suggest) might be somewhat good for the token price in general, but it also comes at a cost of 10%+ APR. Every big investor won't like that kind of a trade.
I strongly suggest we overthink such an action carefully as I feel the thing that would be "fixed" by this would bring more harm to the blockchain at large (with investors leaving - and they will sell - token price will go south). Automatic curation can actually work very well if one reviews the accounts being curated once in a while. Automatic curation, I would argue, is actually one of the major incentives for many users to post at all currently as there is some "guarantee" of getting a return for your post.
I don't think this is true at least for group 1. Again, auto curation can work quite well. I am autovoting myself about 70+ accounts currently (mostly minnows) and these votes definitely incentivize the authors to post (in what in my opinion is quality content). Therefore, I think this would count as "useful work" for the blockchain. Of course I am not saying that currently the system is working perfectly and there is definitely room for improvement. But lowering curation to 1/4 is not a good solution in my opinion.
Well, you're at least one of the first to make an argument for auto-voting. I think the payout for such auto-voting is too high, but I understand your view point. Anyways, my opinion on this was never strong, and lots of other people do have strong opinions on it, so I'm just going to drop it :-) Author/curation rewards are really low on my list of things to spend time on for Hive anyways.
It's true that there's almost no reason to hold HIVE. Its value is inherently deflationary. HIVE is like a hot potato... you never want to own any.... and if you get it, you quickly get rid of it (or lose).
I’m going to have a firm NO stance on this one. My voice is small potatoes for sure but I create content fairly consistently for the chain and do my own manual curation every single day. I have very meager stake compared to some serious players on here but I’m very proud of what I’ve earned.
I’ve put a few hundred dollars into this place over the years and I’ve only taken out 25 hive into bitcoin, which is pennies compared to what the value of a bitcoin is. Changing the economic model yet again to hurt things like curation is asinine to me. I have auto votes set up for communities that I feel are important. I absolutely love the natural medicine community. Do I have time to curate that on top of being in the introduction section almost every day, trying to help new users? I unfortunately don’t because I also work and have a family. I can’t commit more hours a day then I already do (about 4-5 hours as it is over the course of the day) so that I can not only give other people my hive votes but my tribe token votes as well.
If we never had the tribe tokens I might be a little more reasonable with this proposal but there are tribe leaders and members that spend their entire day building their tribe and brand. Those of us that believe in the project but don’t have the same ability to dedicate time to look at the posts, curate the good ones and repeat with the other tribes trust in the tribe leadership and set up automatic votes based on their lead accounts. The same goes with PAL and Leo. Those are wonderful communities with dedicated members and teams. We have lots of PAL tokens staked for the voting benefit of others. Trying to hit the voters where they are trying to earn mere pennies is not something I could support at all.
I feel like this is just a way for people to pump and dump tokens. What’s the point of this whole thing if we can’t show our commitment to the platform and stake our tokens to be then rewarded with some curation as a way to say thank you for supporting it. As others have said, changing it back to a formula that disincentives curation will just lead to massive amounts of more spam posts and make people spend more time hunting down the farmers. All of that benefits those with the largest stake and crushes the newer generation of hive newcomers.
It doesn’t mean much but this was an easy downvote for me. I know you are trying to start dialogue and I’m glad but please take into consideration the lower tier of users. You need us to continue this experiment, many will begrudgingly accept it but many will also not. I don’t know which side I sit on if this were to come to pass. I’m usually 90% towards sticking to hive for the long run but that would definitely bring me to 50/50.
The side efffect of this proposal will affect some hardworking manual curating communities with standing promise to reward their delegators eg: ocd, bdvoter, Indianunited.
No matter the proposal as long as it all boils down to a system created by codes, people will always find ways to exploit.
I think we need to establish and reward a culture of generosity; in the end, anyone who votes is distributing HIVE that appears out of nowhere/inflation. It already is a gift-society.
Establishing a culture might be more in line than regulating things too much...
I love the optimism there :-) As a practical matter, I disagree with such cynicism. Game theory does work and software can be built that relies on it. That's true, regardless of whether this particular change would be an improvement.
I second this. The EIP while not perfect made such a positive profound change on the voting habits.
I'm not sure how all this is calculated or it is possible but would there be someway to differentiate accounts that are auto/bot accounts, be it bid bots or autovote bots/proxy voting and introduce some sort of tax to it? That way manual curation is favoured, it pays better but you can still do your auto thing if you so choose.
Or could there be some way that votes are weighted higher when done manually versus auto? Just thinking out loud, not sure if this is a practical way of doing this
I always thought it would be cool too on front ends to have votes classification so you can see how many votes are manual vs auto that way you know who is putting in the time to view and vote vs people who just want to "support" your work.
I think this is not easy to do. Methods could be devised to spot the current voting patterns of auto-vote bots, but those could be overcome easily by algorithm changes by the vote bots, leading to an arms race between the two sides that goes nowhere and just wastes time.
But if a curation trail exists, we can certainly identify the participants, correct? Even if it's only to put them on probation for a couple of weeks? 🤔
Don't know. But it sure would hurt efforts like mine if we can't find a way to reward real curating. 🙁
It would be easy to randomize the timing to make such patterns difficult to identify.
if you give permission to a vote bot service you are penalized with less curation rewards. is that possible? If so, anyone aware of that would immediately remove permissions to those services.
There's no obvious way to do that, unfortunately.
BT is correct about the arms race between auto-voters trying to look like manual voters and the code to try detect auto voters. But, the game is even worse; blockchain code to detect auto vs manual will be in the public eye while the moves of the bots are hidden. It's not easy to win a game of chess where your opponent knows ahead of time exactly how you'll react to what they're doing.
I understand and that is a valid point, it would just be a tit for tat exchange and get no one anywhere and focus resources on things that take away from other improvements. I think it comes to a point where you have to gauge the impact like are these auto votes really impacting the end goals?
I mean I would say if tomorrow we had instant sign-ups and users could flood in easily drown out a lot of this and gobble up inflation in more ways than we can think of right now
How is it possible that you don't know that inflation is reduced by 0.1% given a certain number of blocks? This translates to about half a percent a year. Don't quote me on that.
Just estimated the math by hand.
Would be around every 2.1M blocks.
Where's the white paper when you need it?
Once again messing with inflation so aggressively is a bad idea, especially when the block reward and the DHF remain unaffected, thereby gifting the elite more money via less selling pressure from other sources.
OBVIOUS CONFLICT OF INTEREST!
Once again my suggestion would be to allocate inflation away from the reward pool and into the bank accounts. We can eliminate curation entirely by allowing stake-holders to exit to the bank accounts if all they are looking for is ROI. On top of that awesome-sauce, we can work to bring collateralized loans that use the same bank accounts as collateral to create/destroy HBD to maintain the peg on the fly.
How does facebook do it?
How does Twitter do it? How does Instagram do it? Do all the centralized options order posts on the trending tabs via their payouts? Oh wait, there are no payouts. Frontends determine which posts get viewed, not stake-holders. Our system is totally ass-backwards.
Imagine letting the free market decide, rather than a few centralized accounts?
I don't think we should meddle/tweak/change settings without independent review from all angles. Somebody could propose or enact changes for personal gain. We can't risk the integrity of the blockchain by allowing a few people to suggest and carry out systemic changes.
That's the biggest issue of proof of stake !
Are you talking about the savings accounts when you say bank accounts?
yep, I've written multiple posts about this.
https://peakd.com/hbd/@edicted/hbd-the-ultimate-stable-coin
https://peakd.com/witness/@edicted/can-i-get-a-witness
We can use the savings account for massive ROI and and interest free DeFi loans and totally gut MakerDAO's exploitative protocol.
I read the "can i get a witness" post a while back, and tagged it for review again later, I recall it had some interesting ideas.
This is interesting and needs some more thought...
Facebook for real people.
Steem/Hive is for bots.
This isn't a facebook advertisement. This can be considered the true state of affairs.
:) agree
also i think,
Make RCs more usefull ( use cases, Smart contracts, Delegations, ...) = Make stacking more USefull = makes Hive more valuable.
If you cut the curation dont do it by such a drastic amount. You wont ever get rid of the auto bot culture id suggest you just embrace it as part of the game. A lot like bot traders and manual traders, it doesn't mean its unfair its just part and parcel of the tech. If you cut the rewards for curators to 1/4 id leave and id expect you will end up with a dead platform and a dead hive price. Proposing a 2-3 percent return now when Defi is getting started is insanity.
I also agree that cutting it by 75% would be a bit too much at once, although might be necessary to see the effects of it more clearly if it would be adjusted higher a bit later.
One idea I heard from @smooth recently which I hadn't thought of at all was if downvotes instead of just lowering post rewards would also eliminate the curation returns of early voters (i.e. those pre-5mins), although some content doesn't necessarily take longer than 5 mins to consume I thought it was an interesting experiment to disincentivize front-runners and maximizers getting ahead of huge votes. Wonder what it would mean to votes being queued to be cast at exactly 5mins and if they'd all fit in the same block or how the chain would calculate as to who allow to go through in that block before its full.
My question exactly.
Isn't there a way to distinguish between the manual and automatic votes?
Leave things like they are for the manual votes, and send the automatic votes back to the rewards pool.
Not through the blockchain, there is a way to tell if a vote has been cast through a front-end though, some used to do that (one that was called steeve or something similar coincidentally) so if those front-ends enabled some sort of human verifcation check it could work but of course not for Hive directly.
I can't even find posts in 5 mins, let alone read them. Making a race like this favours automation over real curation. I can't think of ways to favour the human touch right now, but there are plenty of smart people on here who possibly could.
Yeah, I wasn't a fan of the 5min timer, I think I suggested 15 or 10 initially and there were some who even wanted it at 1min. Dunno, been thinking of a second layer solution as of late through a token that would favor manual curation over bots.
1 min or 5 makes no real difference. It has to work on human timescales. I get some auto votes in seconds, so they can't make much. Anyway, I'll keep voting on stuff I actually like.
flat 50% reward. No matter which time you vote ( in the payout time)
The system must be as easy as possible.
That's the same view expressed by many manual curators in the comments, and I agree that it is a huge disadvantage for manual curators. I'll give it some thought.
There has to be some balance as we need a mix of big investors and active users. Maybe a curve that reduces rewards for bigger votes. That could encourage auto-voters to spread it around more.
That would so easily be abused and is in fact easier than what is already happening now especially with free downvotes.
Yep, DV big to wipeout the early curators then use another account to upvote to pickup incoming curation rewards. Rinse and repeat with more alts as other bots try do the same to you. Would lead to some wild fluctuations in post rewards around the 4-6 minute mark.
Whether or not content takes 5 minute to consume or not is irrelevant with regards to whether or not a 5 minute window makes sense.
We should rebuild the rewards-model from the grounds up. Ideally removing all liquid rewards from the inflation-derived rewards pool too.
Anyway, even if one could read a post within five minutes, one had to add the duration between the publication of the post and the moment when the manual curator spots it ...
I think, we didn't agree in this point, but I am against any 'curation window', be it five or 15 minutes.
It's a zero-sum change for Hive investors. Lowering the curation rewards also decreases inflation losses by the same amount.
The last thing this place needs is another fracturing of the community. Dont try to fix something that is working well. Look at Steem and see how this place can end up just like it literally over night. inflation can take care of itself if you have enough economic activity to absorb it. Ie new comers.
IMO, it's not working that well. But the proposal is intended as an experiment to see if things improve or not. It's a change that could easily be reverted if it doesn't work out.
I dont see whats wrong, the trending articles are all from an organic community. Whats not working is attracting new people and making them stay/invest. Investing in this place is a multi pronged approach. You need people to want to stay and invest time, energy and money. Thats why the games are the backbone of our community. Gaming and talking about gaming, sharing gaming experiences is a real use case value proposition for Hive. The main problem is that money is only flowing away from Hive and too the exchanges. Changing the inflation rate will have absolutely no effect on the perception of Hive in the eyes of investors in general but it will absolutely kill the appeal which is already struggling. Investment in this place comes in many ways, writing, reading, developing, engaging and of course money. But without the money i think you will have nothing sadly, because where will the demand for Hive come from? it will just all end up on exchanges being traded in speculation instead of what you need which is supply and demand. Create demand. I appreciate your way more in the know about the ins and outs of Hive and more concerned about 'is it working' as it should so i'm only stating it from how i see it. Bots are a problem yes but im sure there is another answer somewhere.
Very well said here. I share many of the same thoughts! Without what we've got for curation what's the incentive for new people to spend a penny on something that's dropped far off the crypto top 100 charts? I sure as hell wouldn't. I could speculate my money on something like ethereum where there is very consistent gains.
Una vez el dinero salga a los intercambios el retorno seria muy bajo, el problema principal sería como mantener a los nuevos usuarios y como tener mayor liquidez con el token hive
Have you heard of sticky wages? It's a well-known issue in economics that people will resist lowering nominal rewards, regardless of the real value.
Also, lowering inflation would benefit current investors like yourself, at the cost of future users. Given that Hive's adoption is low compared to its potential, and the market price is based on expected growth, it's objectively better to prioritize the financial interests of future users.
I really vote for posts that I like - really not much worried about curation rewards - but I like whatever I get. But in case, if that also goes to nuts, then there will be no advantage to have the hive powered up, isn't it ?
I would say that you are correct. If the minority is a content creator (meaning really receiving meaningful author rewards) and the majority is a consumer of that content (meaning zero author rewards) and they only get 25% of what they vote? Time to pack it in as a curator I would say. Oh, and that's the majority, right?
And when you think about it, who really is working so hard, the content creator, or the curator? Perhaps we should actually increase the curator percentage!
!ENGAGE 25
I was thinking to buy some more hive and power up, but looks like its not going to be worth it. May be just buy and keep in exchange but again, I wonder what will cause the hive price go up, if curation reward is reduced to nuts. How many people who are content creators will be interested to buy enough hive to make the price go up - only time will tell.
I think this is true of most manual curators.
The counter to this argument is that rewards for curators were actually 50% less before the EIP, yet the EIP had no apparent impact on the amount of stake that was powered up.
To be honest, I never understood EIP at a very detailed level, and I doubt many understand it and then invest to curate. But I could be wrong.
The point isn't to directly make some change that attracts investors directly. The idea is to improve the curation system, which in turn makes it more attractive to consume content here (because you find things you are interested in reading more easily). This indirectly can lead to more investors. The other potential "side-effect" is that crypto investors often do look at coin inflation as part of their buying decision. But that's definitely a less important issue, IMO. My goal is mainly to figure out some way to improve what posts get rewarded, so that it's easier to find interesting things to read/look at. From feedback so far, I think the reward window/payout scheme looks like best area to investigate.
Improve the curation system without rewarding the curators ? Do you think, people will invest to curate just to read content and reward the authors ? Unless they themselves are authors, I don't think, many would do that only for curation.
My point is I don't think curators primarily curate for rewards. Because the rewards are much lower than the work involved. At best, the rewards are a bonus for whatever primary reason that curators vote for posts. As a clear example of this, people vote for posts all the time on social media sites such as reddit, without any expectation of a financial reward.
But nonetheless, the suggestion I've seen so far that seems mostly like to improve curation quality is to change reward window/payment algorithm, which would result in more rewards being paid to manual curators vs auto-vote bots under the current status quo.
I do not disagree here but I think, still the rewards gives something back to them which makes them happy, otherwise, they would have just powered down and leave this place, if they are not regular content creators. And definitely if the improved curation quality will result more rewards, then we would see more manual curators, which is also a good thing for content creators.
ENGAGEtokens.I think the topic of the next HF and core protocol changes should be focused on SMTs. They are way overdue. They are wanted by many. Moreover, having SMTs and experimenting with different rewards models will produce more data to discuss any future changes to the Hive inflation distribution. Potentially removing the Hive rewards for content altogether.
As you also say EIP has been successful getting rid of most of the bid-bot activity. Not only that, most those activities were diverted to curation and authors.
I don't think auto-voting is completely bad. Perhaps not managed auto-voting, set up once and forget for years kind is not helpful. But managed auto-voting, where voters keep them updated mixed up with manual curation is helpful. Discouraging voting will hurt the authors, who already lost significant portions of the rewards due to the EIP. The promise of EIP was authors would have more votes with 50% rewards, compared to 75%.
Now if the problem is auto-voting, let's focus on that. For example hive.auto made some changes discourage non-managed and forgotten auto-voting. We can closely work with auto-vote services to make improvements there. Alternatively, we could make code changes that would break the auto-vote scripts if not updated timely.
I like your Solution 2: make it easier to find good posts. This would be a great addition. Creating a search tool that all front-ends can implement. We did have tools like
steemlookupbut it was discontinued due to maintenance costs. It was developed by Curie and code open-source can be found here if anybody wants to repurpose it for Hive. Hiddenblade wrote detailed post how this kind of filtering tool is helpful in discovering content here. But ideally, it would be great to see such search tools built into Hive.blog.If we need to make any changes to the current Hive inflation distribution, I would rather see decreases to interest, and decrease to DAO funding because DAO already has a lot in it. Maybe we should also consider increase to back-up witness rewards. In any case these inflation changes should be considered as whole.
I agree that we should consider SMTs and other methods for supporting tokens in Hive in the next HF. But even more important, I think we need to focus on how we should facilitate creation of useful Hive apps (token creation is only one aspect of this).But all of that is a big task. I got very tired of how Steemit always tended to push off discussions of doing anything else, no matter how easy it was to do, while working on SMTs.
That's kind of true, but not an exact statement. To be exact, the promise was the quality authors would get more rewards (because of better curation). I think that has worked out to be true, other things being even. Of course, the dominant factor for author rewards has always been and will always likely be the price of the Hive token itself, since all inflation is a percentage of the current market cap. So the best way to increase author rewards is to figure out ways to make the coin more valuable.
This is definitely helpful.
I definitely plan to create proposals for doing this in the future, if no one else takes it on. One problem for the past months is that most all of the front end developers at BlockTrades have been tied up on projects that were begun long before Hive launched.
Just saw a tweet by @aggroed with which I 100% agree and so obvious for many of us on Hive.
This goes inline with what you said:
I completely agree, Hive is a perfect blockchain for decentralized Games and Apps. Taking this opportunity let me share some thoughts and vision on this.
I have read your posts in the past how it is easy to connect to the blockchain compared to actually building the UI. But we lack proper guides to do so. Instead of attracting veteran coders, perhaps we can attract beginner or intermediate devs who are just learning and getting introduced to coding. If we had some guides that teach how to build Apps and Games on Hive that can be powerful. I am not a dev, but got introduced to coding here and can do basic scripts and read code. Maybe we can create a hub where builders/devs can share codes or maybe even sell them.
Educational aspect of Hive is really powerful. Perhaps more experienced devs can create quality tutorials or courses to build on Apps and Games on Hive and maybe even get these projects funded by DAO.
I would like to see something like an App Store, a hub that provides easy discoverability for builders of Apps and Games. Addition of
Our Appsin Hive.blog is a great start. Perhaps we can addsubmit your Appsbutton where new Apps can have ways to be added there for more discoverability by users.I like your vision for Hive. Thanks for everything you and your team do.
I definitely think it is important to improve the information available to Hive apps devs, but even more importantly, I think we need to improve the actual APIs available to devs and create more software tools and components that reduce the amount of coding work needed to create Hive apps . I believe we can make substantial improvements in this area. This would also make it easier for less experienced devs to create apps on Hive, of course.
100% agree!
I also believe SMT's is one of the solutions to this problem as well. Getting rewards off the base token would put it into communities hands to maintain their value. It's really a shame we didn't have them out 3 years ago, but I know Hive can do it better.
There is an essential part of the use of auto-bots that I see no mention of here in your post @blocktrades. And that is how the current EIP places such a "premium" on the timing of our upvotes. There is no way manual curation can compete with coders who can programmatically "maximize" this, to their advantage.
If those inclined to put some serious effort into manually curating were not penalized for not getting their selected posts upvoted within the first 5 minutes of it being published, I wonder then what the "behavior patterns" on our Hive blockchain would morph to become, as a result.
It is inconceivable to me this change would not result in beneficial improvements.
Yes, I agree with you this could have a real impact, and I've thought the same thing (although I didn't discuss it in my post). And @enjar mentioned a similar idea in his comment. I didn't check to see who was first, but I suppose we're not going to discount the ego rewards to the fastest writer :-)
Okay @blocktrades, up before 🌄 (here) ...
... first let me thank you for this prompt (within 24 hours ...) response. It was very encouraging to me to read it. Why? I am long past deluding myself the opinion of a mere dolphin carries any real "weight." But yours? You can change the course of our Hive blockchain's future ...
I have covered what I consider the "heart of the matter" before and labeled it as "Programmatic 'Winners' and 'Losers'." As you say yourself, you chose not to address this concept in your post here. I would suggest to you, in far greater numbers than you might realize, many will be watching, waiting, and hoping that might change in the future ...
Appreciate at least the thought. As a part-timer, though, I try to avoid any concern on my part about timing. Another aspect of getting past deluding myself ... 😉
Thank you, Dan, for investing your time into this response. Have a great day!
P.S. I was a "big boy" and did not even get into downvoting issues. Including getting a sizable one recently from @blocktrades. I try to take it in stride, as you and your team did this presumably in your efforts to "stomp out the bad guys." One (as far as the little bit I know about it) of whom chose to upvote my work ... Another topic, perhaps, for another day ...
I'm like you. And here I am too, a couple of hours a day, curating, manually, and very poorly, at that, upvoting comments I like because I think that is what this is all about, EVEN THOUGH I am penalized economically for doing that, curating poorly, that is. Poorly, of course, when viewed in the eyes of current rewards - comment upvoting just might be the worst ROI in the house! But I've already said enough about that in this thread ...
Not deluded, but very hopeful. The whole HIVE fork is a thing of wonder in my book. There's an extraordinary group of people at the core of this, and throughout as well. Lots of reasons to have high expectations for HIVE.
Well @cryptographic, while I have no way of knowing for certain, I suspect there are a lot of people like us here on our Hive blockchain. Frustrated ...
Unfortunately, we do not have the economic clout to make much (if any ...) difference. I intentionally stopped short of claiming (as I and likely you have seen elsewhere) the "system" is "rigged" in favor of those who do have the economic clout to make a difference. Who knows (that's willing to acknowledge it anyway) ...
Which brings us all to this critical decision point:
This reminds me of one of the very few times a "whale" bothered to respond to a comment I made on his post. In his response to me on this post, @trafalgar was man enough to admit he had once "fought the good fight" against all of the abuses on the previous EIP "system." Then he gave up and joined the others at whatever one might wish to call it. As a result, he was arguing in favor of the EIP system we are talking about now. BTW, last I knew @trafalgar was no longer active ...
I'm sure there are many who are hopeful, in spite of all we are discussing. And while we are waiting ...
The price of HIVE is heading down below 1500 sats ... Once HF24 is successfully behind us, I guess together we'll find out what is in store for us.
Thank you very kindly for stopping by! 😉
That chart is responsible for a lot of emotional FUD these days (or would that be the opposite?). You know the tune by now, everything is going to come from dapps, SMTs, now wrapped HIVE sent to DeFi, etc., etc. It's getting depressing. No one seems to see just what they've got in their hands here. That's temporary though. That chart represents the exodus of those who just don't get it. Watch how everyone is saying the opposite in a few months. But, in the meantime, the rest of us need to keep our wits about ourselves. ;-)
Yeah, and the economic clout? No doubt it's centralized. It's like that everywhere you go. The results of the early adopter advantage. With time things naturally get more democratic, and, well, while I don't think it's malicious in this case, it's the way it is and what we've got to deal with.
Cheers
And I'm going to 'upvote' you some ENGAGE - let's see if it works this time.
!ENGAGE 50
ENGAGEtokens.Hypothetically speaking if inflation would be lowered by lowering curation rewards, wouldn't it also make sense to lower the current power down period? A lot of the incentives to lock them up might be gone this way.
I'm going to need to think a bit more on this one, especially the abuse that could spring up as an effect.
Yes, I think there is an argument for that. One possibility would be to lower it to 1 month. I belief this idea had a decent amount of traction from stakeholders in the past.
why not 2 weeks?
Government voting after 4 weeks stacking. I see no problem with it.
All the Numbers with Powerdown are so Random all the time. We should get close to that point it makes the most sense.
"dump prevention" means also "power up prevention".
People let there power in the system if they can do something with the power.
Delegate / sell Rcs. Use it in smart contracts, Empower Smts and so on.
To be real, there is close to no reason to power up Hive in a large amount.
a lot of Rcs are close to useless.
There is some code written for RC delegation now, but it still needs review, so the plan was to consider its inclusion in the next hardfork.
I strongly agree
Why no one talking about how 5min voting window creates the issue ?
Changing the curve to reduce difference and efficiency of 3min voting against 5h voting could help. Not sure how difference math works, but could be just hard coded to not exceed x% difference between early voter and late voter...
Basically flattening difference between efficiency on timing, and creating more fair competition for manual voters. System is designed for bots and this proposal seems like penalizing both parties not just bots, and completely ignoring flaws in design.
up to 16-20%
dlease ratio +2-6%
it is actually 14% on leasing so more than your estimation for curation rewards :)
Can be also done with unknown authors. Much more efficient probability based approach not "name" approach, like Marky mentioned above it's increasing average rewards on posts by adding multiple small votes. Increasing average +1-2$ on posts that others regularly vote(probably with simplest voting with hive.vote) but with better(moving) timing.
I am afraid it would make many passive investors just sell, 14% passive profits are good enough to keep people holding. With 4% it would be better to lock USD stable on lending protocol...
Penalizing was mentioned. I think it is possible to penalize voters on set of “known good” authors, or on probability of high rewards with loss on penalizing account. Am not going to describe it here tho :)
And it would penalize authors too, cause if curators earn less, they going to switch votes. But this could force people to shuffle more.
Still in my opinion voting window is main issue here, and decreasing curation rewards, will decrease hive value.
I mostly keep my hive liquid cause it is more efficient to rent power than power up. Only reason for me to power up would be witness voting 😣 with this change there would be no reason to rent, and millions of passive hive investors would just sell...
I echo your thoughts. Voting window is the major issue here.
Several people have expressed the opinion that this is the key issue affecting manual voters, and I have to agree.
On the passive profits issue, most investors definitely don't earn 14% on their curation. You operate arguably the smartest bot that probably has the highest return on the blockchain, most people don't see the kind of return you get :-)
yes, but they can lease power for 14% :)
I don't see nothing wrong in increasing average rewards on few hundreds posts from few hundreds authors by 1-2$.
The question is, if that should give best curation rewards. I don't mind losing few % from apr if this can be moved to late voters, by creating less competitive or time dependent environment.
Also there is built in penalize system on timing where voting early decrease curation rewards for voter and also for next voters(as first one get bigger share in rewards and it goes back to the system). It was already used in some voting wars i believe. Point is that in competitive bot environment average voting time should always go towards this barrier and eventually voting popular author becomes less efficient. Maybe there is not enough bots 😅
It's good if manual curators can "discover" good authors, drop initial rewards, so authors can start earning from bots too at some point. Another issue is not enough content probably so votes mostly goes to same people and it makes auto-voting issue very visible.
Although not specifically mentioning the details, as you have here @gerber ...
... I did write about this. My number 1 concern! And according to the "clock," 2 hours before you did ...😉
Seriously, thank you for writing this comment. You have coding insights that should be beneficial to the discussion. Of whether or not this timing issue is ever going to be addressed in the first place, a year after its implementation.
And, if so, how it is addressed ...
sorry missed it :)
vote timing was always a part of this blockchain, still not sure how 5min is better than 15min :)
Not a problem. 😉
Always has been ... Good to know.
Question now (I hope anyway ...) before us is - "Will it always be?"
@blocktrades This is thinking in the right direction.
I would suggest rather than remove curation rewards, build MORE incentives for investors. As far as removing "Curation" rewards, people are stating this will reduce investor confidence.
Investor confidence is already very low, and even with the curation rewards the APR as an investor is very poor compared to DEFI which is offering many times 2-10x these type of APR's(regardless of ones belief on them) this is pretty solid.
Investors would rather stake coins and earn massive yields, even if it can collapse(a bit of a sad fact).
If anyone is saying removing investor confidence will be greatly impacted by proposal thought expirement, unfortunately I believe it is already there and an incorrect statement. Not even so much of Hive itself, but that investor dollars are going in directly certain segments of this industry.
You can't have investors flocking with 8-12% apr yields(at best), and that would be only an investor having an auto bot, Unfortunately for an "investor" they would not even consider manually performing these operations in this regard with 8-12% yields(It's much easy to farm and do nothing).
Above is really part of the poor performance we have with manual curation. Large Stakeholders don't want to manual curate. I can't see this changing no matter what. Investors are busy people running other investments.
I do like the thinking, I'm not exactly sure this is the perfect combination but it's the right line of thinking.
Another consideration would be the lowering of author rewards(as strange as that might seem), this would go more in the direction to focus on Hive as a killer layer 2 solution and less about the social rewarding, more focus on Hive.io then Hive.blog, etc.
Does Hive want to be a social network killer, or the platform tech that powers them? Biggest question imho.
Thanks @blocktrades for thinking outside the box a bit here.
What incentive would there be for those who don't post much to hold Hive while their stake gets diluted away?
I am against the lowering of curation rewards by 75%. We should inventivise powering up, not disencentivise it. Why would you ever power up if you are not a well earning author?
I don't see curation as a big problem that needs to be adressed asap. Many more important changes are in the pipeline. Curators (bot or not) earn between 5-20% APR.
The difference is marginal unless you have >500k HIVEPOWER.
We need sinks, we need mroe incentives to power-up, we need HMTs, we need advertising, we need a rework of the reputation system... and so on.
Cutration? Yeah let's think about that in 2 years again after the important changes. There must be a better way.
I agree that curation is not a high priority. I've only bothered to suggest this idea because it's a change that can literally be made in a day. Anyways, based on responses, I get the impression no one cares about auto-voting, which was the original impetus for the suggestion. I'm perfectly fine to keep the status quo if no one else is bothered.
I don't like auto-voting either! This problem is serious and it should be solved and brought up for discussion! Auto-voting harms platform. This goes against the original idea! Auto-voting should definitely be canceled. Perhaps even a lot of blood. We must make sure that the reward does not come from the delegated force!
We don't mind auto-voting, you won't be rid of it this way either.
Why would a well earning Author Power Up? The Authors reward is not based at all on how much Hive Power they hold.
it would be nice to see two more Hard Forks that did not involve changing/chasing the reward pool/vote system.
If your posts regularly earn 10 HIVE rewards by upvoting from others, and you have powered up 500k HIVE, you can more than double your 10 HIVE rewards, to 24 HIVE rewards each, pushing it over the edge regarding the curation curve.
That's why you power up as an already successful author. Because you can greatly improve your author rewards with self upvoting.
I have not powered down, but I can see the self vote as a big reward boost. Some do it some do't, it is still an option. With no curation rewards, of what value is the vote other than for self voting.
People don't need to vote on a post to read and enjoy it. I myself vote on post because I like it and would like to see more of that type content. I also vote on people because they have content I have enjoyed in the past and my mood taste have changed for a bit, but I know I will be back into that subject again.
A change to the vote system may be needed, I don't know. One solution via code may be an expansion of the dust level vote system. So it by levels, example:
Any vote from an account of less than 500 HP at less than 75% vote power is auto dust, so those accounts would need to vote with a percentage of at least 76$ giving them about 23 votes a day.
Any vote from an account between 500-2500 would use 50% as the dust cut-off
Any vote from an account between 2500-5000 would use 25%
Any vote from account 5000-50000 15%
Any vote from account 50,000-500,000 8%, and any account over 500,000 5%.
Those were just arbitrary percentages and levels. I am sure something resembling fair could be worked out, with out doing away with the curation rewards.
did i got this right?
you stake, curate, vote get rewarded (amount) = you own hive, do nothing, get rewarded (amount)
most will chose the you do nothing, get rewarded option.
what happens with creators/authors?
Not exactly. The current situation is "you stake, you auto-vote (essentially doing no work)" and you get the highest return. I'm just looking for ideas on how to change that.
I don't think it impacts creators/authors directly, unless we make a change that positively or negatively affects the coin price.
As much as I'd love for this to change, I think to be honest it never will as it stands -- I'll try to break down my thoughts a bit more here:
Even if a person sees Defi and foolish and not sustainable(it will have all the attention for a bit here in the coming 1 year).
On Defi you don't do anything. It's going to be hard to tell people that they have to perform manual operations, to earn 1/10th the APR at best.
Unfortunately I can't seem to get past this regardless. So its a good thought, to figure out a system where we can remove auto-voting and more on manual. It's a hard one, and kudos for Blocktrades to start the conversation.
Well, the only way I think that can be done is by getting manual voters 20-50% yields. Which is a nearly impossible, as anything can be gamed on a front-end operation. So we sort of have to rule that out.
Dropping curation rewards by 75% would definitely change the balance. A lot of the votes I get are automatic. Some are from people I know, but I expect many are as you describe and just fishing for curation rewards. It would be better for people to follow trusted curation trails to get rewards where they are earned. Most of my voting is manual (apart from trailing @tenkminnows) and it is aimed at getting rewards where they do the most good. Even some of my friends cannot expect a big vote from me if they already get plenty.
Something needs to change or it will turn into a big 'circle jerk' (horrible term) and that may devalue HIVE further. People need to give a shit about the platform. If it can be seen that quality matters then we stand a chance of recruiting good creators and eventually going viral. We have to be honest about the fact that we are tiny and the highest earning people may not be that great at attracting new users.
Those who just treat it as an income stream are likely to go elsewhere if their return rate plummets. Then it's a question of whether the remaining community can prosper.
I'm a manual creator and think lowering the curation rewards sucks! I like getting a cut, if there was no $ in curating i probably wouldn't be arsed doing it as much
I'm not a fan of change for the sake of change, and I know many that enjoy curation, but I do think that curation is too deterministic, which is what encourages autovoting and exploitation. I would like to see a randomness factor, a curator lottery in essence, where it's not the first voters who get more highly rewarded, but a random voter. For example, as votes come in a curator lottery pool gets created, and at the time of payout, an RNG determines which voter or voters receive a proportional bonus reward based upon voter position. The 'lottery' winner position could get the maximum bonus, while adjacent voters could get a smaller share of the pool. I think this might force people to vote on posts not as positional snipers, but posts with a better vote distribution, which tend to be higher quality posts.
Yap, if we change this, we could see some solutions for auto voting. Those 5mins curation window and who gets to curate first is killing the whole point of manual curation.
A similar, but less gamified suggestion, was to spread rewards evenly between voters during the first two hours to put manual voters on a more even footing with the vote bots.
It's a good idea. Let several spots be "lottery" and the rest can follow normal calculations.
Are you suggesting that the curation rewards are reduced but not given back to authors as before? So where does that share of reward go?
The change to 50/50 was sold to authors as necessary to attract investors. So this failed? Or somehow we don't need investors anymore?
Posted using Dapplr
I'm suggesting lowering the overall inflation rate of Hive by ~2% (e.g. less rewards paid = less inflation). So I think this is at minimum net-neutral to investors, and my belief is that it's net-positive to investors who don't want to vote 10 times every day.
are we talking about traders that don't care about the ecosystem and just want to make money trading but are not happy enough by just trading so they also want to earn while they hold and wait to trade?
did not we took from creators when we went from 75-25 to 50-50 with an excuse of incitement for investors to invest and get the bigger share for their investment?
this feels like "whales" don't really care about the social part of Hive, they think is boring and have no interest in it, but they want max possible ROI because they own hive.
I did not see any analysis of what how this change will affect authors/creators. nothing will happen? all will be the same?
One question, @blocktrades. Why should we worry about the investors who don't want to invest a little bit of time and vote 10 times every day?
Because that's literally almost all the major investors here, assuming you mean manual voting.
It's far from little. It is literally 2-12 hours a day if you want to effectively manually vote with a lot of stake.
So, I read this post and the comment section.
I like @edicted and @yabapmatt's comments about alternatives to redirect that inflation to stakeholders and investors. Somewhere, I think one or a combination of those ideas would be better alternatives. I do prefer the former.
I also note @themarkymark's point about the challenges facing curators, et al. which incentivize the current auto-voting culture.
Point being, there are approaches to make things attractive for most fronts without going for the "no HIVE for you!" route. I'd much rather not going back to downvoting circlejerks on regular basis. It's too much hassle making enemies all the time.
How about approving this proposal?
https://hive.blog/proposal/@crypticat/burn-821-hbd-day
Ideally there should be no hive/hive power/hive dollar reward for posts at all; billions of people post on Facebook without ever receiving any kind of payout, so what is their reason? With Hive-Engine and Communities, people are fully able to receive rewards in Hive-Engine tokens on their posts, and this incentive to post in a tribe/community already helps us find content we're looking for on Hive. If I want to find finance-based content, I go to Leo. If I want to look at photography, I go to the photography community, and so on.
The problem with Hive in my opinion is that the only way to acknowledge someone's post is to vote with hive power, and because our hive power is finite, we are selective in our votes. There's a psychological barrier of some kind in play here. If Hive gave the option (in addition to voting with hive power) to "like" someone's post, you might see a lot more engagement. Reddit employs this kind of system already, as does YouTube and Twitch. The difference with these platforms is that viewers/readers must directly give tokens/currency to authors and content creators.
On the surface it seems like Hive is a better system because we get to have our cake and eat it too. We can "give" authors hive power through our votes, while getting to keep our own hive power and getting some more as well. Like you are alluding to however, if everyone is doing this, then no one is actually gaining anything in the long run. We might be increasing our hive power nominally, but in terms of real value, not really. In retrospect, Hive (Steem) would have been better off using the system that other platforms have now adopted, where you could gift hive to authors if you wanted to, and have upvotes/downvotes not tied in any way to a reward system (other than the reward of engagement and attention). This in turn would cause people to buy Hive tokens for the sole purpose of rewarding authors, and in turn increasing the velocity of the Hive currency inside of the ecosystem.
I'm not poo-pooing on the current model of Hive and Hive Power, but it would make more sense to do away with hive power altogether. Maybe that sounds radical, but the writing has been on the wall for some time. I started powering down a month ago to leave my Hive as liquid for all the reasons mentioned above and in the OP. The Annual return by staking Hive and utilizing auto-voting is a very large nail in Hive's coffin in the long run. I personally think the entire Hive Power model is flawed, and clearly I'm not the only who's been thinking this over. I can make a much larger return sitting on liquid hive and catching periodic price spikes and dips, and in truth I'm probably going to reward extremely well done posts with liquid hive from now on and utilize my soon-to-be-worthless upvote to acknowledge posts I like in the same way I would on Facebook or Youtube.
I've said over and over for years that it's a bad idea to market Hive (or Steem prior) to people on the premise that they can make money by posting. Much like socialism, if there's no production of wealth to begin with, then everyone is going to be equally poor. Hive has proven once again you can't spin straw into gold. If it were not true, Facebook would have adopted a reward system years ago to match Hive's.
Hindsight is 20/20. Is it too late for Hive to change its model to be more inclusive and engaging? Maybe. I haven't lost faith in the platform just yet, and there are many who find the current model rewarding in more ways than one, but I'm sadly not one of them anymore. I suppose there is a fear that if the Hive Power reward system were done away with, then Hive would be just like any other platform. This is not true of course, as Hive is a decentralized commons for content creators that is free of censorship. Hive is also a place where one can tokenize digital goods to sell to others. Hive has DApps and communities and token markets and many other qualities that give the ecosystem great value.
Hive power, curation and post rewards are not the heart and soul of Hive anymore. Maybe the reward system was at the beginning when Steem first was born, but most of the value has moved elsewhere into DApps and tokens. At this point, Liquid Hive is to the Hive ecosystem as Bitcoin is to the Crypto market, and I just don't see the value in powering it up any longer. Seeing this post by blocktrades validates what I'd previously concluded in my own head about Hive Power and the reward system. It will be interesting to see where the wind blows with the community as a whole.
I don't think you're alone in this view, it's been expressed by several well known figures in the community.
I think the social media application on Hive has a useful purpose as an onboarding and marketing tool for Hive, and gets people more engaged than many other blockchain networks, but at the same time I think we have to look beyond it to achieve the best growth of the platform. In my personal view, this will be the creation of innovative types of Dapps that further spur engagement and that tie-in nicely to the social media aspect of the network.
something like this? :)
https://peakd.com/hive-102930/@tobetada/introducing-a-like-button-to-hive
IDK
But if we remember that at the heart of the matter, we're all miners, that we’re mining, or, better said, in this case, 'minting', 'staking', or what have you, but, essentially we are mining. It’s the distribution via a rewards pool that complicates things, but the root activity is mining. The newly created tokens have their inherent value, upon creation, just like any other thriving cryptocurrency. Those ‘mining’ rewards rightfully go to the miners, or the authors, curators, witnesses, etc. as is the case here. It’s real wealth being distributed in as an equitable way as we can.
Rather labor intensive in comparison … remember you have 20% of your voting power you MUST distribute daily in order to do your job correctly. It’s your duty. And you’re not giving away anything. You’re working together to equitably distribute the newly created tokens.
Obviously we’re not all here for the short term monetary returns though.
Not to mention all the real content creators who are tired of giving it away via traditional means. And, hey, why not give it a try. Who’d have said that they’d indirectly become crypto miners!
And the problem of lack of engagement is due to the reward system being skewed to the higher vote count posts. Comments are at the other end of the spectrum, with few votes, inferior prorated returns, and miners don’t like that – they tend to gravitate to higher returns, not lower.
You’ve got to align rewards with desired goals. You want more engagement, then you’ve got to reward it accordingly.
The points you make are solid arguments for shortening power down time though, but, again, bottom line is this is really a business and/or investment. Imagine the “power down” on BTC ASIC miners. Here you walk away with your entire fixed cost investment, if you decide to do so. Everything has its pluses and minuses.
But work it is: we’re distributing real wealth to the tune of 20% of our voting power on a daily basis, ‘giving away’ upvotes that count!
increase this
lower everything else including power down time
would suit me :)
I think there is a simple solution! Remove the curation rewards for delegated hive power!
I had a similar idea some time ago to add a small fee for delegations: https://peakd.com/@vikisecrets/hf21-eip-solution-proposal-for-bid-bots-and-delegation-abuse-add-a-small-fee-for-delegations
You don't have to delegate to an auto-vote bot. They can be setup so they just tell your account how to vote. So there's no programmatic way to stop it.
I mean, we can cancel the curation reward for delegated power. I think it will be useful.
There are a few things that came to my thought:
I feel that reducing curation rewards would discourage people from powering up. If we have less staked tokens, there would be more supply in the market which can reduce the price of Hive even further. We have to find ways to make people stay staked/invested.
I feel that we should talk more about the flat reward curve. I'm not sure what drawbacks it has but it would be great if we can implement a system where the time of vote shouldn't be a factor for how much rewards someone gets. That's what currently encourages people to rush with votes at the 3-minute mark to grab maximum curation rewards.
Auto votes are mostly done for sniping purposes. Most of the auto votes are in such a way that the snipers pick authors who get rewarded with big votes and vote them as early as possible at the 3-minute mark.
Many people may not agree and even I'm not sure what I'm going to say now will make sense or not. But would it be a good idea to give random curation rewards from the reward pool for the curators? Of course, the stake they hold should also be criteria taken into consideration but let the vote rewards be a random value between an upper range and lower range. This would not remove the auto votes completely but at least give a solution against auto votes that are done for sniping purposes.
It could definitely impact this, as I mentioned in my post. It's really hard to say how much impact there would be, given curation payments really aren't that high for the average curator.
Ultimately, they can't be but so high, because all curation rewards are paid from 2% of the coin's inflation. The only reason it rises above 2% for individual curators is that some are curators are getting paid more than others. Predominantly, this is the probably those using auto-vote bots, which is unfair and not really sustainable in the long run, IMO.
This is true, but like it or not, that's actually by design. An important point to note is that voting earlier than 5 minutes returns a portion of the curation rewards to the reward pool, so that other curators can get it. Voting at 3 minutes actually returns 3/5 of the curation reward for that vote to the pool. The point of this design is to encourage curation of new authors, rather than everyone just piling on to the same list of existing authors. I don't think this theory was completely bad, but it overlooks one key detail: curation rewards just don't pay enough to justify manual curation on an economic basis. So paying them a little bit more for finding new authors still doesn't justify the extra work. So it doesn't achieve the desired goal in practice, because on an economic level it's still easier to auto-vote and get less rewards, than to do the huge amount of work to find new authors to vote on and get the potentially slightly larger reward.
You are only considering the big time players/investors but we should look at it as a whole. If there are no incentive to stake then most of the content creators will sell off their HIVE as soon as they recieve it.
The governance of the blockchain will again go in the hands of big investors and not evenly distributed.
I can understand that people with big stakes are earning well with auto-votes but that's why they invested.
Another point to consider is if we reduce down the inflation and curation rewards, and HIVE price remain the same? It would be eventually a loss of their investment.
Posted using Dapplr
The counterpoint to this argument is that the same inflation that's allowing users to benefit despite the price not increasing, can also be contributing to the price not increasing. And that "price not increasing" can lead outsiders who are not aware of the inflation payments to think that the coin is going nowhere fast (which is detrimental to existing investors too, of course).
I think that you are focusing attention on the wrong area right now. While auto voting isn't good for the system in my opinion it is not the most urgent issue. In reality i would love to see flat voting,
Take time and stake out of it to have just straight up 50/50 rewards with no curves. This would allow people to vote for the content that they like as opposed to what they think will get rewarded. A big difference.
Simplicity is everything as most people will never see or care about all of these calculations in the future. They will never need to know how everything runs behind the scenes so keeping it simple is the best way to ensure it runs smoothly and makes it easy for newer users to get to grips with the chain. Less is more.
Get rid of self voting option as it should have no place in a DPOS system.
Reduce powerdown to 4 weekly payments and make staking more attractive.
Create token buybacks from the market to actually add buy pressure on hive instead of a constant sell pressure. A higher price is the most attractive marketing campaign that you can run. We are wasting our most valuable resource which is the content being created here on a daily basis. Ad revenue is being used on @financeleo to great effect and they have set an example that we should really be following on hive.blog and other interfaces to generate revenue. A system where all the money flows out and not in isn't one that will attract too many investors. However if you can show a clear business plan that will add value over time then larger stakeholders are more likely to get involved and buy hive as well.
https://peakd.com/hive-102930/@niallon11/make-hive-the-wordpress-of-crypto-monetized-communities
Get SMT's released so that we can see other sites get involved on the chain and open up exponential growth. Then we could release tokens with various attributes to offer different solutions and see what other rewards systems would look like going forward. It would also allow for larger groups to join at the same time and get more people involved with the chain going forward.
https://peakd.com/hive-177032/@niallon11/i-would-build-a-site-that-tore-up-the-voting-system
This scenario simply demotivate quality and good content creator. Because of these high stake holders auto voting, even a single picture or a shit contents worth more within min of posting.
I have been advocating for manual curation since long and now a proposal to get it right seems genuine....however there is one more scenario, where, if a post is manually curated and that was supported by a voting trail..like in case of @curangel or @ecotrain or @indiaunited reducing the curation would certainly lowers the return to the voters as they rely on these big names to make use of their HP stakes....
Auto voters does suck out the Hive reward system and we must focus on manual curation to support the fair reward distribution on Hive...
I have a variety of thoughts on the subject.
First, if self-voting is such a bad thing, as has always been said, then why allow it in the first place? It seems the easiest way to deal with self-voting is either to prevent people from being able to vote for themselves, or to have everyone automatically vote for their post when it's posted. The second option could even be an incentive for more people to power up their Hive. Either way, instead of trying to fiddle with the systems this way and that in order to discourage self-voting, why not just solve the issue once and for all.
Personally, I don't vote on posts for the purpose of obtaining curation rewards. As a result I don't have much Hive power and that doesn't bother me. I vote on posts if I like them, and that's the only criteria I follow. If I happen to come across a post or a comment I like, I vote on it.
Keeping that in mind, I would be okay with removing curation rewards entirely. Let's think of the YouTube approach for a moment. People on YouTube vote on videos they like just because they like them. They don't get anything for voting on the videos other than knowing they helped a video and a creator they like. There's no reason a system like that wouldn't work here. It could lead to more honest curation, more honest votes, and it could help to better promote good and popular material.
After all, Hive isn't supposed to be just about the cryptocurrency. That's a very nice incentive and it's a way for people to be compensated for their time and work and it's also a way to help content creators monetize their work without using some of the more questionable means of other websites, but Hive is also supposed to be a blogging platform, a sharing platform, a content platform. A place where people can share their creations and quality content rises to the top, which can then help inspire other content creators to join the community as well.
Besides, the curation system just adds another layer of complexity which can help to dissuade new users in general. When it comes to things, especially things involving cryptocurrency, simpler is always better. That's how you get more users to join and sign up and participate. Make it too complicated and people won't be interested. They'll just continue with whatever networks they're currently using. Make it simple and easy to get into and people are more like to give it a try, and more likely to stick around.
I agree that lowering curation rewards by 75% without increasing other forms of inflation would decrease the incentives to stake HIVE. As a result, the vesting fund would probably shrink substantially. Maybe not a full 75% as merely holding HP has a roughly two percent APR and there is some benefit in partaking governance and because of the possibility of vote farming.
Because author rewards would not be reduced, a new equilibrium would be found where the smaller total amount of vests would be able to earn the same curation rewards per 1000 HP as before.
Problem is that the remaining stake could be used for auto-voting just as well. See, the main reason for auto-voting is not the fact that curation is a lot of work - it isn't if you vote mainly on a reasonable number of authors you follow - but the fact that curation yields depend so strongly on the timing and the order of votes on a post. What's broken here is competitive curation because it leads to curation sniping, not curation by itself.
At the new equilibrium, the division of author rewards vs. curation rewards would be 80/20, which would be nearly the same as before the EIP. You can count on vote farming in the form of bid bots, circle jerks or straight up placeholder posts being self-upvoted or sock puppet votes to re-emerge. You think this would be kept in check with downvotes? I don't think so. Small stakeholders' downvotes wouldn't make a difference. The risk of retaliatory downvotes would be too great for the middle class. Could the whale population be trusted to keep the vote farmers in check? The problem is there are too few large stakeholders. They wouldn't have time to do that and in some cases they would be the ones doing the farming themselves. Quality control hasn't been working too well when it comes to the proposal system, either.
Also, I don't think automatic voting is bad per se. A lot of large stakeholders vote on a number of trusted quality authors who realize that starting to post shit to milk the autos would eventually cost them the large auto-votes.
What is actually problematic is content agnostic voting, automatic or not, to snipe for maximal curation rewards. What I propose instead is changing the parameters of competitive curation to make the timing and order of votes to matter less.
There are many great manual curation projects such as @curangel, @curie and @ocdb among others that pay for delegations. With the advantage in curation sniping greatly reduced, the curation rewards afforded by those volunteer-run curation projects could pay delegators substantially better.
From a stakeholders point of view, both large and small, the critical element is price. I haven’t been around as long as you, but I think I have been around enough to prove that I don’t care for immediate personal gains. Instead I like to focus on longer term success. In this space price is a clear measurement of success. Your thought of dropping inflation benefits price. But how much is too much is the critical factor. I haven’t seen any plot that show curation rewards plotted against hive inflation. With so many smart developers and data guys around, such a plot should be possible to generate. I appreciate if someone does that.
I think it's hard to figure out without experimenting. But my conclusion from the feedback so far is that most people are too fearful of potential downsides to the change to try the experiment. Since it only would solve a problem that most people don't seem concerned about, I'm not sure it's worth much more time to analyze.
@edicted 's idea for a lending system might generate enough interest to overcome the fear though. But it's more work, so would need some analysis of the work required first. And unlike probably most people here, I'm not really super invested in current trends in DeFi in crypto, as my own ideas are much more radical. Nonetheless, if it's not too difficult and there was sufficient interest by the community, we could put someone on it.
I think we will benefit from some kind of new innovation. You know this better than me, in this space we got to be doing stuff constantly, whether perfectly beneficial or not ;)
Yep, but looks like we need a way to experiment in a way that people don't feel there is a risk to their current income stream. Probably we'll need to wait till we have HMTs to experiment with, as a new HMT can be setup with no pre-existing expectations.
But just having HMTs won't be enough, we'll also need ideas about what changes we want to try. And ideally, we need those ideas before HMTs are created, as otherwise we might find ourselves needing to redesign them to support the ideas.
But in the future, I guess I should couch any such discussion in terms of HMT economics rather than Hive economics, to avoid the resulting panic engendered by a discussion of an economics change :-) Lesson learned!
I would like to hear your radical ideas @blocktrades. I also have a very radical idea I would like to share with you. Just wanting to check you can hear me before spending many hours crafting a post to attempt to explain :-)
Namaste
While we on the topic of Hive in general i wondering if it would make sense to make changes to the downvote? allow the downvote but not have it relevant to the persons stake. That way people don't get bullied off the platform, which as i see it is a massive problem. It should be free to all.
I think you're suggesting "anonymous" downvotes. Most everyone agrees it would be an improvement, but its not easy to figure out how to do it. But it's something I'm going to think about after the HF, and see if there's a solution.
not necessarily anon downvotes all though that would be cool but i meant just not related to a users hive power so that its more of a fair game. People don't come here because person x or y doesn't like them and they have more power than them. Beef starts pettyness etc etc its toxic for a platform like this.
Do you mean that all hive users would have equal downvote weight? If so, there's a problem with this. It's called a sybil attack. The problem is that one person can easily create many accounts, then vote with all those accounts, magnifying his power. To avoid such attacks, Hive relies on stake-weighted voting, where people at least have to pay for their voting power, instead of just gaming a signup system.
It is worth pointing out that a properly designed reputation system might enable a more democratic system. But this is a topic for a much later date.
Can I assume that the overarching aim is to reduce the slow bleed of Hive being sold off? If so, can we not just focus on tweaking the rewards model and look at other options....
We have a lot of eyeballs looking on hive.blog, so why not capitalize on it by incorporating targeted adverts? I know some will quickly get their knickers in a twist over this concept, but until they forward a proven option they can throw a tantrum on their own.
Steemit did the same before the take-over, but needed the cash to pay for stuff and bloat. Hive has HPS and development, maintenance etc is taken care this way.
So, if something want to be advertised on hive.blog, the $ fee is converted into Hive and subsequently burned in the process (or vast majority of it). This is the same model as the LEO community. By burning these tokens, it adds value to everyone already holding Hive and the naysayers will quickly quieten when they see their $ value increase.
If I remember correctly, Steemit were generating 50K USD at one point from ad revenue a month, correct me if I am wrong, but 50K USD in Hive is a lot of Hive to be burnt. Then view this over a year.
Now we have created another use for Hive and one that brings in $$$. Price goes up, the higher it does, the more people are attracted to the platform. We see these metrics everytime Steem/Hive increases in $ value.
Also get SMTs off the ground, too many opinions and entrenched thoughts on Hive. Let each community figure out its own way forward. Good ideas get copied in the long run.
Anyways, my two cents.
FWIW, I’ve never bought into the notion that our inflation rate is too high.
7.9% is actually lower than the true inflation rate in America if you go by ShadowStats analysis rather than the official hedonics-based CPI numbers.
And with the Fed and Treasury going brrrrrr, inflation is almost certain to be going gangbusters in the not-distant future.
Hive’s inflation rate is quite tame by comparison.
I also don't think Hive's inflation is too high, per se. I just would like to be sure it's effectively directed inflation.
Couple Ideas:
Make downvotes blind. More people would downvote more because they wouldn't fear as much retaliation.
Make is so anyone set up with a voting bot or trail automatically receives less curation returns. Isn't there a way to see all users who participate?
Remove timing altogether and make curation simply a pool of your HP compared to all others. Most autovotes are to provide incentive for timing to get better curation returns. Just make is so if you vote in the 7 day period you get paid based on that. Why reward timing of a vote for curation? Maybe I'm missing the point of that.
Remove trending and force people to follow more. There is hardly any incentive to follow. You follow good authors and it's easier to manually curate. Also make it so you see what your followers like/comment/resteem kind of like how twitter works by default. Going to trending takes work and on hive.blog it's the default landing page.
My opinion is that active hive users should in fact be more rewarded, they add value to the platform through engagement. This is an interesting topic. I see a lot accounts come to Hive to only cross post, I hate to see that especially when they never engage and are essentially coming to hive solely to milk it. I like to call them platform whores :) I don't like the idea of making curation rewards less. Honestly if you did that, I'd unstake all my Hive right away and just try to pull in author rewards only to sell it on exchanges.
Good ideas!
While I like this idea, there could be some downsides.
Good content creators and whatnot will benefit, but some will complain about distribution. This could also disincentivize discovering new content creators. Why bother when you could just drop a vote on say, @taskmaster4450, or something.
I think places like YouTube has spoiled us in terms of content discovery. Frontends do not offer that sort of algorithm.
Idk how this is possible without some manual intervention and centralized "blacklists".
Many of these points are impossible if you think at the blockchain layer, now I really am not a dev or that technical but here's just some thoughts that come to mind:
This would be cool, but right now I've haven't seen a good solution for how to do it. Doesn't mean it's impossible though.
What about increasing the curation rewards to 75% to make more people motivated to stake even more and buy more hive what will lead to lower inflation not by reducing rewars, but by making more people invest in it ?
Every time i see these random and and poorly thought ideas coming from the witness it makes me more convinced that the current witness have no clue about what to do...
Without discussions of new ideas, we'll never get anywhere. I've heard a couple of new ideas that I haven't given much thought to just by reading replies in this post. But not from non-constructive comments such as this.
Roll out SMT's and we can watch hundreds of these experiments play out.
I see this as a silver bullet. People come to content powered sites for the content first and then for interaction under such content. Right now it's the completely opposite. I do not even bother searching for content, other than scrolling through the feed until i stumble upon something of an interest.
If as a community we want this site to grow and scale think at least of Reddit, and we must have the tools that allow to search for wanted content specifically. Then and only then it would be viable to create quality content as it can be discovered and appreciated accordingly. As of now, it's just still circles and it is normal since the system is designed to work this way.
Create discovery so people can find content, then people will put more effort into content creation, then manual curation will be much much easier and fun process instead of "tedious work"task.
Why do devs constantly try to reinvent the bicycle and fail to implement tools that already works elsewhere and proved the concept of content websites? I get that crypto devs are smarter that ordinary devs, and that might be the reason, that it seems too simple to work.
Also, when creating such tool, add a separate optional field for keywords, unlimited keywords, that would be used in search. It would not hurt anybody and for people that want their content to be discovered that would be a tool to showcase their work and it would also serve a great purpose for content discoverability.
Final note : as long as people will not be coming to hive for the content forget scaling, it will not happen no matter how much you tweak the reward mechanism. Do basic things first.
I should have probably rephrased my thoughts on solution 2. I think it can help a lot. But it also requires a fair amount of work, so it's not something that can be done quickly. And all my frontend devs have been tied up on other projects began before Hive, so I'm waiting for some of them to free up for frontend work like this.
Obviously it requires work but for a long term vision, I agree keyword searches made in platform would be helpful for content/author discovery and other related tasks like trying to figure out something about the platform like for troubleshooting or "how to" , I'm no dev and sometimes run into roadblocks and I just end up ignoring the problem because it's easier than looking for how to get the desired outcome. I have been wanting this aspect on the platform since day 1. Obviously, easily finding answers does help with usability of the product and may help in making the platform more user friendly which should be a long term goal anyway. It's ok once you learn the ropes, but for a new user this place looks complicated and could translate into why on-boarding and retention may less than desirable at the moment. Hopefully you consider @bescouted 's suggestion in the future.
There is some work being done on keyword searching by good-karma: https://hive.blog/hive/@good-karma/open-search-engine-development-and-maintenance
But I think there's many things that can be done to improve the frontends, once we have more devs available to work on them.
That's awesome! Thanks for letting me know. Cheers!
That is a bit different solution. Or i might lack knowledge how search actually works. As far as good-karma considered his solution is indexing all the content and providing results based on the content body itself. Which might be useful if it is working really well and sophisticated, and if it is seamlessly integrated into front end products. Even then ability to add keywords or tags would be usefull, they could even be entered into the same field as it is now on Hive.
@blocktrades How many tags are now taken into consideration 5 main and 8 total?
I appreciate you giving it another thought. Really. Think about it. Why do you or most of the people use Hive? To write a post, yes. It is fun to share your adventures or ideas for some people to read, on a platform where you are not the product.
Get an upvote? Obviously. It triggers very powerful reward path in our body and seeing a financial number attached to it makes it very powerful stimulus. Too powerful sometimes, i'd say so it triggers actions to game the system for financial profit and we all know this too well. Since day 1.
Other than that, who is using platform for the utility, i.e. information or entertainment? Quite few people frankly, people engage in circles and loop the reward pool. Just because it is so damn frustrating and not fun to search for new content or find information that you actually need. Or get the news about a topic as well.
Why do people keep mindlessly scrolling IG for HOURS! Because content is displayed and fed so effortlessly, algos feed you with content you like and they know better.
All other things are very important in Hive too, and you guys have been doing a great job so thank you for that a lot.
But as long as we do not have a very simple, one click, friction-less signup process and proper content discovery tools this machine is not going mainstream sadly. If those two things could be fixed platform would be much more friendly, if it is doable in reasonable amount of time of course. Other than that amazing work done by devs constantly, but we need those few simple tools for simple people to keep it alive...
I upvote manually and have some of my friends automatically follow my votes.
I never go searching for content out of my own Feed though.
So I only vote people I follow.
Probably because I have gotten used to checking my feed daily and picking out best posts from there and also because searching content outside my feed is too time consuming.
I think this is common, since most people don't have time to read all the posts that are written. Communities at least potentially allow people to select areas in which they are interested, rather than just following known authors.
A good rule of thumb when takling a problem is to attack the 20% that causes 80% of the effects. The biggest source of inflation is not curation, it's not author rewards nor is it any of the other buckets where new tokens are allocated to...it is HBD conversions.
Framing the proposal as a way to reduce inflation like the title suggests is totally misguided. The real annualized inflation rate from 3/25 to 9/15 is 13.96% which is about 75% higher than the 8% that we should have and it is all due to the HBD conversions.
If we want to reduce inflation we need to change the pegging mechanism and aligned it with the industry standard...mainly create HBD by collateralizing Hive instead of having a dinamic system where all of the stakeholders pay the price of maintaning the peg.
It's easy to read too much into the title. The primary issue I was examining was auto-voting, especially potential negative effects of it. Note that in the actual post, I mention the decreased inflation as a side-benefit.
People are often confused on the HBD issue. HBD can both lower and increase overall inflation. It all depends on the timing of when the HBD is converted to Hive versus when it was created.
Fair enough.
Regarding the effects of HBD on the inflation rate: although in theory it can go either way the 4+ year history of steem/hive shows that it leans heavily on the negative side. The average annual inflation has been between 14% and 16% (not counting the period before the December 2016 hardfork which reduced it from 100% to 10%).
In my view any conversation about reducing the inflation (even if it is only a side note to the main topic) that does not address the major contributor to the deviation from what is programmatically supposed to happen kind of misses the point.
I am not trying to be hostile but you have to admit that the title is somewhat clickbaitty.
Yes, I'm sure that's true. Unfortunately, it's a natural consequence of the coin going down more often than going up.
Thinking about it, the tendency of HBD conversion to create inflation rather that reduce it is probably exacerbated by the other components of inflation in the system, which tend to drive the individual token price down. Even though holders themselves are compensated for that inflation via rewards paid out by it, this inflation still affects conversion rate of HBD.
It wasn't meant to be. I was just looking for a short title that accurately described the mechanism proposed. To indicate that removed curation reward would be burnt, rather than redistributed.