We would argue that the existing system taxes good content creators, and the proposed system taxes bad content creators because it creates better incentives for quality content curation. But this is all semantics. Calling any of these things taxes is overdramatic hyperbole. Taxes are compulsory fees backed by violence. Steem is an open, decentralized, and voluntary ecosystem that was intended to unearth high quality content. As you agree, it is failing in that regard. The economics behind the proposed changes are sound with respect to better aligning incentives toward curating high quality content. If quality content creators wind up seeing diminished returns, then they should go to a platform that provides them with better returns. But we believe that they will find that these changes increase the odds that they receive rewards, because they are more likely to be found and upvoted while at the same time, thanks to free downvotes, poor content will be more likely to receive downvotes.
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Yes, technically it is not a government enforced tax, but the fee is being taken from our rewards and very well might have the same effect. As we know, taxes tend to destroy things and if you "tax" the creators you run a big risk of disincentivzing creation.
I am on this platform all the time, and I don't remember seeing any substantive, high profile forum or discussions on this. I never see any scheduled discussions on Reddit - which is where I personally think these should be - and nor are they regular or centralized. Everything is all over the place.
Also, when you combine it with all the other ideas like the EIC and reduction in Creator rewards, it's just too much change at once @andrarchy!
It's not a fee taken from your rewards either, because the rewards are not yours until you are paid them, and this discussion is all about future rewards which aren't yours yet.
Technically all of the rewards of every kind come from inflating/diluting investor stake. With this fork, that money coming from investors will be spent a bit differently going forward is all. A lot of it will still go to content rewards. As @andrarchy says, ideally more of that will hopefully go to good content rewards. Some of what is currently coming out of the pool to fund projects will ideally shift over to SPS, leaving more of the remainder for content.
Overall it is very difficult to say what the net effect on any particular reward earner will be, but the goal here is not in fact to increase or decrease rewards going to any particular person or group of people, it is to make Steem work better to stop or reverse the slide into obscurity and ultimately failure. Yes I'm sure there will be some net winners and losers but at this point I'm not even sure who they are.
Semantics. I'm talking about the principle of the matter. If I'm promised a certain percentage of the rewards and rewards WILL be forthcoming, that percentage is what I expect. It is mine even if it isn't in my hands yet.
Semantics.
I don't care what he says and I disagree with funding the SPS via non-voluntary means. As far as the EIC, they're just promises of hypothetical gains based on how they think humans behave, in contrast to the objective gains large stakeholders and witnesses get. One is deterministic, one is not.
Why does everyone keep repeating what the goal is to me as though it's an argument? The goal is laudable, it's the means I disagree with.
Then you did not understand the system properly because DPoS has defined governance which explicitly allows for voted hard forks which change the rules. Some rules have a higher to much higher social barrier to being changed such as forks which would take your coins away, or forks which increase inflation (effectively taking them away via a back door). But changes to the allocation of and reductions to the amount of rewards have both happened before. You had no reason to expect or demand that something which already happened before can't happen again (and many things which haven't happened may also happen in the future).
Non-voluntary would be taking coins out of your balance and as I said above, this has a much higher social barrier to ever happening. Future rewards are not that.
It is ultimately a judgment call. You get a vote (via choosing witnesses who share your judgment or conclusions). Please use it.
I have voted, just not for any of the current Top 20, and I wouldn't ever based on this circus some people call a process.
Good, that is the system working as intended.
I'm not so sure if that's a good thing considering my - and many other's - level of discontent.
I totally understand why you would feel that this is too much change at once, and I appreciate you sharing those helpful suggestions. Maybe we should leverage reddit more. That being said, ultimately that's a call for the witnesses. They're the ones who wanted us to code up these changes and they were elected by you. It's their thought processes and discussions that you want insights into. If you don't like how they operate, vote them out.
Hardforks are our only opportunities to make improvements to the protocol and they are extremely disruptive, especially to exchanges. If the Witnesses hardfork too frequently, then we will get delisted from exchanges. I understand why people would prefer that we make smaller more frequent changes to the blockchain, but blockchains just weren't made for that. I don't know of any blockchain that hardforks as frequently as Steem, or has some kind of technology that enables more frequent, less disruptive upgrades. We do have some plans in the pipeline for making hardforks less disruptive to exchanges, which should enable us to spread out changes more, but until then we have to deal with the existing realities. We agreed with your Witnesses that these were important changes, and that we wouldn't get another opportunity to integrate these changes into Steem for a long time, unless we delayed the SMT hardfork.
These are really hard decisions because we are trying to solve really hard problems. We're doing the best we can, and when we look back at the decisions we made, well those were the decisions that lead to you being here, still commenting on this post and still using this blockchain we love. Ultimately, that's what matters. Users come and go, and no one notices everything that is working well. Steem is still far more advanced in many ways than any other blockchain. Resource Credits were an awesome innovation and the free accounts they enable stakeholders to create is still a feature that I believe is unique to Steem.
Part of that is probably our fault because all we're ever talking about are the things we think are broken and need to be fixed. But this blockchain is our legacy and what matters to us is that we can look at ourselves in the mirror and know that we made the right decisions, even if they're really hard, as opposed to taking the easy way out.
Good grief.
We need town halls. FORMAL SCIENTIFIC polls. We need a process that is the same every time and is public facing - and in my opinion not on Steem - and is centralized and is scheduled. We need outside voices and economists to lend their expertise. The creators need more of a voice.
I know that forking is hard on the exchanges, but we could have done the SPS and had a process where a scientific poll was created that asked something like whether or not we as creators would be willing to give up X% of our income for SPS. If not why? Then you would need to show us why the number was the one you chose. Then, at the very least, we're included. I'm sorry, but the Witnesses are not qualified to speak for all of us . Staking isn't a good enough metric and neither is being a developer. We have similar but also different interests.
Then we could move onto the more controversial aspects of this fork. All of it at once is asking too much of your creators.
I agree that discussion of these kinds of matters can be improved dramatically, and many other points you make.
but not that one. Steem is a blockchain and provides excellent archival qualities unavailable on other media. We just need better mechanisms to hold discussions, and that is a failure of our front ends, not our blockchain.
This actually was undertaken on Steem, and a poll taken that disavowed any non-voluntary contributions. This was done on a post by @blocktrades some months ago, and I participated vigorously. Since there is no sticky mechanism, and but little use of the memo function to alert folks individual users think to, you apparently missed the post.
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Why not? I don't see any reasonable argument to not leverage a platform with magnitudes more users to have our debates. I know Steem is a blockchain and I understand it's archival qualities. Those aren't things I'm concerned about when it comes to this process. They're quite irrelevant. Steem and the community suffer from being insular. We sit on this platform when we should be having these discussions in a more public forum, in a place that is removed from the mechanics and politics of Steem. I suggest Reddit because I believe being open about the process would allow voices from say /r/cryptocurrency to join in on the debate. The Reddit community is MASSIVE and the Steem community is miniscule. We'd find more voices there of the regular kind of user we need to attract and convince that Steem, and the process by which it operates, is worth being a part of and transparent. Us debating amongst ourselves doesn't seem to have had the desired effect of creating a transparent process with heterodox voices or a system that works. So I think we need to go elsewhere.
That is my whole point. I follow Blocktrades. I also follow Tim Cliff, Agroged and some of the other top witnesses. I never saw said poll and I'm on here allllllll the time. I'm assuming you mean this thread? https://steempeak.com/blocktrades/@blocktrades/stake-weighted-poll-for-two-versions-of-steem-proposal-system
That is not a scientific poll or study. When I was developing my social network - full disclosure: we couldn't get enough seed funding to get it off the ground - we went through a rigorous process to launch a nationwide, scientific poll to determine our market and what our market wanted. It was designed to eliminate bias or leading questions and make respondents anonymous. The company that helped us conduct the poll then broke down everything in clear terms.
What I see in the post above is an indefensible process for deciding something like what we're seeing implemented now. This just reinforces what I'm talking about. This whole discussion is on several different accounts and "polling", if one could even call it that, is relegated to comments sections. It's pathetic. We need to have a public forum, that is centralized, that is scheduled that reinforces or rejects proposals based on evidence gathered by not only the forum but through follow up, scientifically conducted polls with all the data presented to the userbase, who also happen to be stakeholders.
I just cannot agree to this process as it stands.
I agree with you completely that these discussions are broken, but have to point out that Reddit has no financial interest in Steem, and while it may be a great marketing mechanism to discuss things there, the absence of stake from disputants would not forward the interests of stakeholders. Indeed, Reddit competes with Steem, and I am confident that subversive efforts would pollute the discussion. Basically, it is discussions between Steemers that are capable of making decisions for Steem, and Reddit neither has stake nor interest in growing Steem.
Why is that the case? People are capable of debating and arriving at sound conclusions that enable successful organization as a rule. There is a reason that on Steem these discussions do not do so. It isn't that Steemers are less competent than ordinary people. IMHO, it is because those with substantial stake are actively sabotaging any proposal that might reduce their ROI from profiteering. Disingenuous rhetoric and other means are employed by profiteers to prevent profiteering from being restricted so that the value they are extracting isn't restricted. Any value that is allowed to raise the price of Steem reflects their failure to extract it into their wallets. They use every trick in the book to prevent rational discussions and consensus from ending their profiteering.
As you point out from your personal experience, extremely rigorously scientific polls aren't particulary critical to success, and informal polling is often nominal. Despite the results of the poll there, whether rigorous or not, the results were ignored, and the profiteers used their stake to ensure that SPS funding wasn't voluntary. This is the problem Steem has, and that won't be solved with scientific rigor. The substantial stakeholders on Steem are all profiteers. This is because profiteering is in the code, allowing stake to extract rewards into the wallets of the stakeholders prevents capital gains, because it extracts the value of economic activity into the wallets of stakeholders before it increases the price of the investment vehicle.
For investors who depend on capital gains for their ROI, development is critical to increasing the value of the investment vehicle, and this is what differentiates investment from speculation. Profiteers extract the value of the business activity, and in manufacturing businesses for example, sell the industrial equipment to generate ROI, and this utterly destroys the value of the investment vehicle as well as the business. They don't care, because they've taken their profit and can just move on to the next business opportunity.
The industrial equipment of Steem is content creators, and they can't be sold. This creates a durable system where the production is extracted by stake manipulation of the rewards mechanism, and this has persisted for a longer time than simply selling the content creators would have enabled. However the price pressure on the token and disruption of the network have still dramatically harmed the business of Steem, and amongst the disruptive affects is the inability to successfully discuss the business, because any changes would diminish the ROI of the profiteers.
It is trivially easy to improve means of discussion and polling, and it is undertaken all the time. The active prevention of such discussion is why it isn't possible on Steem. I don't think this will matter for long, as EIP is going to halve the rewards paid out to creators (or worse), and the business of Steem is very likely to end, with profiteers moving on as they always do.
The problem is centralization, not decentralization, because stake is concentrated in 35 accounts that act disingenuously to maximize their ability to extract value from Steem. They do this via every means available to them, including rhetoric devoid of substance, and prevention of rational discussions. That's why my comments and posts are all flagged by one of the most substantial stakeholders on the platform, who participated in the original ninjamine and is amongst the most extractive profiteers.
Also, this iflagtrash bot is super annoying.
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I have essentially pointed this out to Tim Cliff as well. They get an objective benefit of higher profits AND development funds extracted without voluntarism while promising a hypothetical benefit into the future without demonstrating how in actuality this is supposed to take place.
It’s basically The Hamburgler.
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But the witnesses weren't voted in by "us", they were voted in by a very small group of the largest stake holders representing less than .01% of the entire user base.
I disagree. It only creates, both before and after HF21, incentive to extract rewards made possible by content creators. Nothing I've seen creates any reason to consider the quality of content. Financial manipulation of the rewards mechanism enabling greater ROI for voting on particular content does not provide any financial incentive for valuing the quality of the content. It only creates mechanisms that increase or decrease ROI based on metrics like vote timing, size of VP cast, and etc...
Your definition of taxes is not supported by credible sources I am aware of, and I checked several just now. The absence of physical force does not make a mandatory payment something other than a tax. Fraud violates the NAP and does not involve violence either.
The payments to the witnesses, and the funding for SPS proposed, are taxes. That's not hyperbole, nor dramatic. They're mandatory payments required by the platform, and are taxes. Claiming otherwise is semantics, and disingenuous. I expect better of you, whom I have come to respect as an honest and forthright writer.
Please don't abandon those principles in the fervor of debate.
This statement amounts to an ultimatum, and an invitation for disaffected users to worsen Steem's already poor retention rate instead of seeking to comment reasonably in the hope of improving matters. I can appreciate your passion on this issue. It is something that highly recommends you for your position. It is only commendable in the event that it inspires you to do a great job, and showing users that disagree with you the door does not meet the standards I believe you hold yourself to, nor seems desirable to your employer.
You and I don't always agree, and that is highly acceptable, because it is where we disagree that we can learn each from the other. Telling someone to leave is similar to censoring them, and rather than showing your arguments are more reasonable, reveal you would prefer not to discuss, and implies logical weakness.
I am confident you don't want Steem to be an echo chamber of yes men, unable to learn from the criticism of their peers.
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