I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the best strategy to get curation rewards is to "bet on" posts from people who already have a track record of having popular posts. If this is true then it's not clear to me that this works well as "proof of brain" so I'm not sure it makes sense to devote more rewards to it, especially at the cost of rewarding creators. Is there evidence that careful, thoughtful, content-based curation "works better" than dumb algorithms like voting for posts from accounts with good track records?
If the goal is to improve the incentive structure on the blockchain to encourage people to manually search for good posts based on their content then it isn't clear to me that this proposal does that. For one thing, since the share of curation rewards you get are still tied to impact of your vote most people won't see very big curation rewards since most users of the site don't have large amounts of SP. If the reward for identifying an awesome post is still tiny for the majority of users isn't it bad ROI for them to put in the effort? Or is the idea to try to incentivize big accounts to curate?
Anyone can build a track record over time. It takes a while but it does happen.
The highest ROI even for smaller accounts is to find unknown content that figures to be successful once it becomes visible and vote on it. You won't earn as much as a larger account in absolute terms, but you may actually earn more relative to your SP level (return on investment).
Voting mechanically for authors with the best track record doesn't work to generate the highest return because you have to vote earlier and earlier to get ahead of everyone else doing the same thing, which then reduces the curation rewards (the system docks them back to the reward pool for votes before 15 minutes).
The ROI available to such small curators is so insignificant that it is ignored.
Curation rewards do not create incentive to curate good content.
All they do is create financial incentive to corrupt curation for profit, and only for substantial stakeholders. They are a drag on Steem and basically a tax on capital gains.
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Dear @valued-customer
IMO I see the present issues with whales circle jerking, downvoting as a hole in the bottom of the bucket. These solutions only appear to widen this hole. I wish I had higher SP to give you larger upvotes Sir. Your comments are fantastic and you really hit home with every point.
Great work.
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If there are N low-reward posts the odds of finding one that will be a hit are very low. Is there an effective method for finding posts that "figure to become successful"? If there is why aren't people using that mechanism today? Is the argument that they're not but they would if curation rewards were ~2X what they are today?
Do you have some kind of evidence or analysis for this assertion, or is this speculation?
Well, that is the competitive skill in curation, and there is no cookbook approach to it. There are different methods that can get there from just being a good judge of content popularity to things like machine learning.
A few are, and if you look at the highest ROI accounts by curation that is generally what you will find them doing. A big reason though, is that with 25% curation it is very hard to overcome the natural 4x advantage of just self-voting or delegating to a bid bot. The change from 25% to 50% base curation share is a step to rebalance the system back toward better ROI for curation.
Yes, there have been numerous posts analyzing voting times over the years. I don't have a link handy but the analysis has been done, and it agrees with the game theory (which is itself not mere speculation, it is a theory that is shown to be predictive).
My understanding is that since HF20 rewards from votes prior to 15 minutes goes to the author and no longer back to the reward pool. Can anyone confirm or deny that?
It's the other way around, before HF20 to the author, after to the pool.
False.
Thanks @smooth.
Just quoting myself from earlier:
So because you can't figure out how to improve the situation you want to double down on it?
And it can incentivize giving up if it looks like becoming successful is an extreme long shot.
The current proposal doesn't change the 15 minute thing, so whatever effect you think it has should already be in effect, no? Also, in response to someone else in the thread you said:
So which is it, it doesn't have an effect or it's the solution to the problem?
Currently we have pretty much complete system wide failure as the vast majority of active SP are just winding up back into the staker's pocket via some form of content indifferent voting (self voting vote selling).
The 15 minute timer has an effect on the issue you're raising: the mobility of votes when it comes to established authors. Currently, the focus is on avoiding the near complete failure of votes to reflect content on any level, which it doesn't have too much of an effect on.