Moment of truth.
It’s an event that happens to us all the time. We learn. We change our minds. Read and write. That’s how the knowledge base in our brains get modified over time. Thing is, it's most likely that not all truths in our minds are true. There may be false truths as well.
So now, have you ever get so upset in a matter so much because you know you are very likely correct, but the knuckleheads in front of you just don’t want to learn the truth and act upon newfound knowledge? I'm sure many have gone through such an experience before.
I have in recent times. It's quite a rare event since I'm generally chilled to the max. Part of life I guess. It's funny because I've never even been to the local council here to lodge complaints before. But here I am, doing it on Steem. I guess that's because we have highly responsible witnesses working hard to improve Steem all the time and making sure things are still working.
The economy is not working out, guys.
You might have seen my ramblings about Steem's dysfunctional economic design recently here, here, and here.
And why am I feeling like I should push this through? I can already demonstrate the problem myself if I want to. Everybody also knows they can do it as well. It's only a matter of time before it becomes a full-swing phenomenon on Steem. Just sell 100% of our votes or use it only fully on ourselves. This is the property of linear economics and cheapified curation.
I'm beginning to think the huge monthly salary top witnesses are getting is working against the best interest of the platform. None of these guys are feeling the urgency to fix the damn pothole everybody has been complaining about. It's like consultancy. Propose half solutions and prolong the problem.
Image source
But I understand that some of us may all just be talking past each other most of the time. Not saying that I'm right, but I might be absolutely right lol. I'll attempt to elaborate as best I can. If we're in the same scope of discussion, then perhaps we can begin discussing this matter clearly. There's not much to discuss here though. Even my mum is saying "why so stupid"? Decide for yourself if it's agreeable.
Guiding principles in economic design.
- We can expect many different kinds of voters in a massive social network.
- The lowest common denominator activity is self-voting / vote-trading (no work).
- The second lowest common denominator activity is curation (smallest unit of work imaginable).
- (2) is easily 6-10x more profitable than (3). Zero work for most returns.
- Because (4), the problem should be fixed immediately. It's creating negative feedback loops in the system, much more than positive feedback loops. Balance it out.
Proposed changes.
(What we think is the cheapest move Steem can make to shift the economic equilibrium sufficiently enough to balance out the effects of voting)
- Capped modest superlinear (ie modest superlinear n~1.3 in lower-end, linear in higher-end)
- ~50% curation rewards.
- Slightly increased downvote incentives.
Expected benefits of proposed economic equilibrium.
- Less spam.
- Less pressure on scalability progress.
- Bigger curation economy.
- Decent content.
- Happier and better users.
(How about making corruption somewhat irrelevant on Steem with the right economic designs? Image source)
Bidbots and vote trading practices are cancerous under Steem's economy today.
I don't really have a problem with anyone exchanging votes, selling SP delegations, buying votes, or even operating bidbots. That's just the best move now, although it's at the expense of the network's long-term health. More and more users will start doing it as time goes on as behaviours converge into the expected economic equilibrium, which is rampant self-voting / vote trading. Really can't blame anyone at all. Anyone participating in these activities will more likely stop contributing to such corruption naturally when the right economic incentives are in place.
However, I have a problem if top witnesses defend the existence of vote trading markets and is not working to make such markets irrelevant. To be frank, I think it's intellectual dishonesty to continue doing so. They're not helping the platform at all. Vote trading is by definition blind and doesn't involve any work no matter how you reason it out. They're exactly the greedy and greasy middleman stuff that blockchains aspired to get rid of in design.
It's easy to know about this truth once you relate it with your observations and experience in the real world. Vote trading is ultimately a practice that corrupts organisations and is never a good idea to have it as the dominating force. Now I remember asking if vote trading is a corrupt practice last year, but I guess I was being too open-minded about it, reserving some healthy skepticism for my own convictions.
But in the end, 2 plus 2 is not equals 5. The mathematics and behavioural-economics of vote trading markets can never work out in favour of the greater good of any social platform. Or anywhere else really. Giving yourself free money is not work and such behaviour cannot be dominating the economy. Sure, the behaviour will always exist, even I do it myself sometimes. Who doesn't like easy money? But overall, we need to keep it in balance in-design. Currently, Steem's economy is highly imbalanced.
Bidbots will never go away. But they're cancerous under Steem's current economic reality, for reasons stated above. This is why we need to get curation behaviours rewarded at least on par with vote trading behaviours for the good of the platform.
(A witness spotted in the wild Tai Chi'ing away. Image source)
But, but, but.. we now have bidbots with whitelists and blacklists and rainbowlists and we just need to get more people self-voting and bidbotting on high quality contributions.
While I'd agree that bidbotting on great content / contributions is a lesser evil, it still doesn't escape the fact that vote trading is inherently blind and is an activity that doesn't involve any work.
Vote sellers get money for doing nothing, which is the same as self-voting. Vote buyers pay money to get votes for themselves. Vote brokers facilitate the transaction between buyers and sellers while taking an unnecessarily high middleman cut from Steem. None of the economic agents are doing any favour for Steem as a social content platform for doing the least work at most expense.
So if anyone's defending the vote trading market by saying there's work involved in updating whitelists, blacklists, or whateverlists, I'd say they're just babbling with no substance, especially when the premise remains the same: in linear economics, vote trading is basically self-voting, which is again, by definition content blind and involves zero work. I can't say this enough.
Also like any oracles, bidbot gatekeepers and operators are the writers of their own whateverlists. They can also just as likely produce their whateverlists for whatever else, like green-lighting their own friends, sock-puppets, mistresses, cats, dogs, and such while similarly able to strike off anyone else regardless whether or not they're productive agents on Steem.
"They will keep defending it as long as they are raking in the cash. The whole altruism pretense is silly."
by a very dedicated Steem witness and curator.
Yes, this also goes to bidbot operators that are also policing abuse, spam, and the likes. I know these things happen all the time, and are very important work. It's part of curation in some indirect way. But it remains that we're operating in an economy that's fuelled by the very activity that should've been avoided in the first place. It's almost the equivalent of the police department paying abusers to be abusers just so everyone gets to keep their fake jobs being busy and prosper. There may be good intentions, but the premise is entirely false under Steem's current economic reality.
Don't get me wrong, most vote traders may have Steem's best interest in mind, but if any witnesses are vote traders themselves, I'd most likely not going to treat them seriously unless they really recognise the problem but is doing it anyway just because it's the best move. Just please don't defend the practice simply because you're earning from it. It should have no place being the dominating practice in any networks, and it should be on top of witnesses' minds that economic reforms ought to take place because in my opinion, it's the most pressing problem on Steem now that doesn't require years of research and development to get anything done.
Honestly, it's getting harder for me to take most of the top witnesses seriously now if they can't see this problem in plain sight and acknowledge the truth. Who doesn't like easy money to keep their position? Everybody likes it and will likely defend their privilege in accessing easy money until the end of time.
Focus on designing the right economic incentives where we can only hope that the path of least of resistance everyone takes go to at least some small amount of work in order to fuel positive feedback loops. And that will be based on curation, not vote trading practices that create negative feedback loops.
(More witnesses spotted in the wild doing the Tai Chi. Image source)
But, but, but.. we can make it more efficient to swat out those who are abusing self-voting and bidbot votes.
Another brickwall of knuckleheadedness lol. I'd agree on a separate downvote pool and increased downvote incentives to keep behaviours in check. But as already reasoned out in previous posts and replies repeating the same thing over and over again by hundreds of different people, we are just fighting against an economy that incentivices counter-productive behaviours to a great degree, so that standalone solution itself is very likely insufficient.
One of the big reasons is that downvotes on spammy vote trading activities end up diverting the rewards pool back to other spammy vote trading activities elsewhere, anyway. What's ironic about this situation is that our massive flagging activites, along with accounts creatively distributing themselves to more sock puppets and more useless posts will add even more spam on the network.
Again, this all falls apart only because of the dysfunctional economic equilibrium we're in right now, which can very likely be fixed.
Downvotes should only be seen as a backup plan. The only truly effective way to solve the problems we have right now is to design an economy that will have a better chance of preventing the activities and behaviours that we'd (rather not) want to downvote.
(A witness doing the Tai Chi by the beach. Image source)
But, but, but.. new and low-powered users will feel left out if they can't effectively self-vote.
So sell them some votes? I don't know what to say about this. If only for the purpose of advertising, sure. But now it's not advertising. It's something like a money-printing machine. What we're proposing here will effectively shrink the profitability of vote buyers / sellers / intermediaries. If vote buyers are paying much more with a higher-risk of not profiting from the action, then it's more like advertising, which means persistent users of this nature are the users that we'd actually want more than the rest.
Again, self-voting and vote trading are ultimately the same activity that's content blind and involves no work at all, even if said new users are self-voting or bidbotting on objectively great content or contributions all the time.
If users have been consistently curating and contributing to the network, they will more likely get voted up when there are better curation economies going on in the network. To retain users (the kind we'd want anyway), they would need to feel that it's more or less working fairly. Let me explain what fair here means. It simply means that curation rewards are on par with vote trading rewards, if not better. If the economy's fair and has a decent amount of curation, then users will more likely stay whether or not they're actually getting curated.
We can only hope to implement a massive, but functional Steem economy when it can at least reward work as much as no-work. Yes, we're working with the absolute minimum requirement by equating a simple act of curation as a smallest unit of work on the platform. Today, Steem is rewarding no-work much more than work. So it's not Proof-of-Brain enough.
I'd entirely agree that squeezing out the floor sucks for the smaller players as they lose some of that gamification element to dust-vote themselves under the proposed changes. But that's only one small part of gamification. There are other kinds of gamification, like persisting and perhaps getting recognised later by the community for their great contributions? Ever played a difficult game and succeeding?
But of course, we wouldn't want to make life punishingly difficult for new users and low SP users alike as with the case of n2 rewards. And as explained, purely linear economics inherently works against the favour of the platform even though it'd attract plenty of players. This is why many of us have been suggesting somewhere in-between linear (n) and superlinear (n2), which we could term as capped modest superlinear, for example, n1.337, or even n1.618 which is based on the golden ratio - with the top-ends maintaining linearity.
(Big butts. Image source)
But, but, but.. the rich will only get richer.
One common reservation about the modest superlinear and ~50% curation rewards proposal is that it provides highly-staked accounts more influence, while also making the rich richer. I seriously have no idea why this is a problem. It's very likely the rich will get richer anyway, especially if they simply diversify their wealth. Great wealth and influence is not the problem. The problem is the alignment of economic incentives.
Plus, if the argument is the rich will only get richer.. what about Steem's current economy that is making the laziest workers richer than the hardworkers? Don't even need to any hard data and statistics for this. Just use the platform and look around yourself.
Soon 90% of stakeholders will be doing nothing but just sell their votes and self-vote to oblivion with spammy stuff. It will become highly unsustainable. 90% is actually not so far from our current situation now with an estimated 50-70% of total Steem Power being sold and self-voted. It will only get worse.
The point here, again, is to have economic incentives moving away from vote trading activities and into curation activities, so that even the biggest stakeholders on the network will effectively have more of their voting power going to curation activities (either by manual curating, auto-curating, and delegating SP to curation groups and such) compared to what we have today.
However, I understand that extreme wealth disparity could very well be somewhat destructive in any society, although I still think it's not the greatest problem, especially with the right economic incentives in place, one that distributes wealth all around.
In any case, capped superlinear is a good idea. Superlinear rewards in the lower-end, and linear reward in the higher-end. What we really want here is ~80% of the benefits in superlinear for ~20% of the cost, hence somewhere between n and n2 with a linear top-end. Best bang for the buck.
(Sleeping buttnaked. Image source)
But, but, but.. maybe we just need more layers of value-adding services other than vote-trading services.
Of course we can use more value-adding services like @dlive, @dtube, @utopian-io, @steemhunt, @steemmonsters and such. These services may pan out well. But my guess is that's only more likely under the right circumstances. It's just very likely not going to add much to Steem at the moment. The path of least work and most money is still in self-voting and vote trading, which again, creates negative feedback loops for Steem and generally making the UX terrible for users of the platform as well.
But, but, but.. non-linear is not business-friendly.
I personally think the defence that investors and businesses should participate heavily in self-voting and voting trading is, sorry to say, moronic. No good investments work that way. It's literally devaluing their stakes because it's feeding into a negative feedback loop. But I understand that it's the best move now.
However, if you just think one step ahead, solving Steem's economic problem as per our proposal will likely provide more sustainable returns and make the platform a better place for everyone, especially investors.
But, but, but.. we should lead by example then.
"As I've argued before, this is not a problem of individual misbehavior or bad culture or inability to discover good content or bad ui etc. We've just got a flawed economic system that provides the very action we don't want with the highest rewards."
by @trafalgar
But, but, but.. ok chill. Enough has been said about the subject.
Why are we talking past each other most of the time anyway?
I had a realisation yesterday. Discussions can only be effective when participants are able to scope out their thoughts and work in the same wavelength, so to speak. I feel like we are sometimes irrational in discussions because there are emotions involved in the mix. I suspect that it might have to do with our sense of ethics when we're discussing stuff: Kantianism vs utilitarinism / consequentialism.
Anyway, going through this process of complaining recently has also made me experienced firsthand discussions on blockchain protocol changes. Oh boy, such discussions can hardly scale beyond the size of a telephone booth, and achieving consensus in a decentralised network is really not easy at all. The struggle is real. It's a long and tedious process to even get anything moving forward, even agreeing on something as simple as 2 + 2 is not equals 5 (like Steem's economic problem, honestly).
Makes me wanna bang my head on the wall. Because we also get muddled in-between objective and subjective thinking all the time. It's almost like thinking either in System 1 or System 2, fluctuating between different topics while communicating, while more often than not, completely missing the point of the discussion in the end. Even then, our discussions usually get lost in the wind with no machines around trying to make sense of it all. Repeat over and over again. It's a huge time-sink. Will the real semantic web please stand up?
Thank Ohad that the technology might be arriving soon. I hope it works. It'll be a shame to stay frozen and paralysed on this simple matter though. But I digress.
Please take our proposal seriously.
I know it might not be fair for me to say this, but top witnesses literally only have one job other than maintaining witness nodes: Make Steem Better. But it seems like Steem has been in the ICU ward for a while now and nobody's attending the emergency.
Don't mind if I repeat here.
Guiding principles in economic design.
- We can expect many different kinds of voters in a massive social network.
- The lowest common denominator activity is self-voting / vote-trading (no work).
- The second lowest common denominator activity is curation (smallest unit of work imaginable).
- (2) is easily 6-10x more profitable than (3). Zero work for most returns.
- Because (4), the problem should be fixed immediately. It's creating negative feedback loops in the system, much more than positive feedback loops. Balance it out.
Proposed changes.
(What we think is the cheapest move Steem can make to shift the economic equilibrium sufficiently enough to balance out the effects of voting)
- Capped modest superlinear (ie modest superlinear n~1.3 in lower-end, linear in higher-end)
- ~50% curation rewards.
- Slightly increased downvote incentives.
Expected benefits of proposed economic equilibrium.
- Less spam.
- Less pressure on scalability progress.
- Bigger curation economy.
- Decent content.
- Happier and better users.
Repectfully, you are completely mistaken about downvoting. I understand this is not necessarily a popular point of view because downvoting can cause a lot of problems. However, ultimately downvoting is the only way to differentiate between 'good' content and 'bad' content or between value creation and value extraction, or any other distinction you want to make (and we should be well aware by now of the critical importance of making such distinctions).
Curation rewards (and increasing them) are okay, but ultimately they too can be captured, sold, and redistributed. Current bid bots just keep their curation rewards, but make curation rewards bigger and they will start sharing those back with delegators and/or customers in a new form of mediated self-voting.
Non-linear rewards similarly incentivize concentration of voting (which has at times been also identified as a villain to a healthy Steem economy), but they still can't differentiate between good concentration and bad concentration. Again, this can also be captured and redistributed. For example, most current bid bots divide their vote among all bidders. But bid bots could do something different, like only vote on the top 5 bids, ensuring higher concentration and better returns. Or impose other rules enforcing sufficient concentration. It also rather directly encourages vote trading (of the form: "We both vote for all of my posts, and in exchange we will both vote for all of your posts.") This in no way improves the content or the economy. It has some modest benefits in increasing the visibility of rewards being paid out and discouraging spam, but beyond that, not much help to the quality of content or value-creating activities.
Your comments about economic incentives and getting a better equilibrium are spot on, but the way that such an equilibrium is defined to favor a particular kind of activity is almost entirely via downvoting. Our current problems largely derive from insufficient downvoting: As you said, the dominant part of the current equilibrium is content-neutral, but again, how do you encourage an economic equilibrium that is not neutral. The only answer I see that actually does that is downvoting.
That doesn't mean there will actually be a lot of downvoting going forward (particularly after a transition period, as people figure out the 'new rules'). Downvoting is costly to at least one and arguably both sides of the deal (upvoters and downvoters) and naturally an equilibrium will tend to discourage it (just hopefully less so than now), but the resulting equilibrium will have voters who are more careful about what they vote on (doesn't that sound nicely non-neutral to you?!) because they face a real risk of downvoting if they engage in bad behavior (defined above, and by you and others very well in the past).
I know downvoting is controversial and in many ways unpopular, and that it has real costs in terms of potential for conflict, discouragement, etc. But if we want a better economy and better functioning voting system we are going to have to swallow the bitter medicine, and not by watering it down and describing what is needed as being only 'moderate' (as you unfortunately did above).
FWIW, I don't believe much non-linearity is needed, in part because downvoting already introduces non-linearity (your return is no longer linear in your stake/vote power if you face a real risk of downvoting). However, I would support some modest non-linearity at the low end as an extra step in discouraging spam.
Also, one last comment. @lukestokes is absolutely right that step one in making changes like this consists of one of two things:
I fully appreciate that your post may be, in part, directed at #1, and that's perfectly fine (even something I wholeheartedly support). However, many of your comments focus on the witnesses and unless you have #2 in mind, witnesses have a very limited role to play on this.
To me this is one of the core issues that slows down innovation on Steemit.com. Two years ago it was sufficient for a witness to have knowledge about servers and how to run and maintain a node. The Witness rewards back than were a few 100 Dollars I think which covered the sever costs and a bit extra.
Today however that same model isn't sufficient anymore in my opinion. I don't want to get off topic but we can learn a lot from EOS here in a way that BlockProducers (witnesses) are expected to contribute to the development of the platform beside running a server and producing blocks.
The same requirement should be true here on Steemit and all 21 top witnesses should have the ability or hire the resources to suggest and implement improvements to the Steemit platform.
Unfortunately we can't count on Steemit.Inc to solve all issues for us, that is why the top witnesses should be empowered to make improvements them self.
The other side is to take a look at what is working. I think Utopian.io is an example of a non-profit model that could thrive on a system like this... provided it has the proper support.
Steem is a DAO, and the voting system is broken for it's intended purpose. I agree that flagging is a huge part of the equation here that is totally broken.
We should look at what other DAO's are doing in the field. How has District0x and DAOstack Aragon approach these issues? All of them have written very interesting articles about the game theory in creating token curated registries like STEEM.
Part of the problem is there is no organized way for us to talk about these things. As others have said there is a lot of shouting, but not so much getting done.
Please give me the links to the articles you believe are relevant. It is impossible to follow every single blockchain project.
Ok these are articles from projects that are just now entering mainnet. Their main difference from steem being they are platforms preparing to enable groups to set up a huge range of DAOs, including steem style registries. I think these articles are relevant and might help you in the direction you going.
On token curated registries
https://medium.com/@ilovebagels/token-curated-registries-1-0-61a232f8dac7
Grading content on a TCR with up and down votes:
https://medium.com/@sebastian.gajek/graded-token-curated-decisions-with-up-downvoting-designing-cryptoeconomic-ranking-and-2ce7c000bb51
Daostack article on decentralized governance
https://medium.com/daostack/decentralized-governance-first-principles-1fc6eaa492ed
"What community governance actually entails"
https://blog.aragon.one/aragon-will-be-community-governed-5069ed8d0a33
Thread on governance algorithms:
https://reddit.com/comments/4rtpmm
These articles are from:
Argon - their "newspaper" is here (https://monthly.aragon.one/news/aragon/)
Daostack
District0x - another project to look at
Maybe we need anonymous downvoting. Could we add ring signatures? I would down vote much more if it’s secretive. Any monero Devs around @smooth.
Unfortunately it is rather hard to do anonymous transactions in Steem because it does not use traditional transaction fees, and instead needs to charge bandwidth usage to the sender.
Kevin wants to increase incentives for downvotes.
Isn’t that what you want also? I’m confused about which part is completely wrong.
I've said this before in comments, but the downvoting tool is like putting a chainsaw in the hands of a 6 year old. There are simply those intent on adding no value but only reaping any rewards they can gain with the least amount of work. Some of the big downvoters run an attack business and anyone innocently in their way gets taken out with his chainsaw. I actually hate the ability to downvote because it simply gets abused by people intent on either controlling the rewards pool so there is more available for them or to just plain be vicious. Bernie Sanders comes to mind...
"Slightly"
The overall take from the post as I read it was that downvoting was a relatively minor element. In my view that is completely wrong and downvoting is in fact tthe most important element by far, perhaps the only important element.
Thanks for clarifying.
Thanks for responding @smooth. I’d like to reply similarly to what I’ve written to Luke above. Our proposal has also addressed the downvote portion like you’ve mentioned, and we’ve also considered the other modifications as preventative measures as well when it comes to flaggable activities.
Yup, this is the plan. Maintain linear at the high-end.
And yes to be honest, I’ve no good idea of how things really work in a dpos setting and thought block producers are literally the ones making Steem what Steem is. I may write to Steemit, but in the end it'll still be up to the top witnesses to handle and execute the code? I may be wrong about a lot of how things work around here.
@lukestokes is the one to best address the issue of how to evolve the development process and governance (since he has probably thought about it the most and also written some about it) but as I mentioned, in practice, currently witnesses can only veto. There is movement in the direction of a more inclusive development workflow but if you want change now, lobby Steemit (the developers) and then once they release something you like, lobby witnesses to approve it (or if they release something you don't like, lobby witnesses to reject it).
Ah got it, thanks. It's been close to a year since the last HF. I thought that the 7x difference between curation and non-curation would've been causing an alarm. What has been stopping any tweaks and changes to move away from the situation? Or perhaps they're seeing value in self-voting/vote-trading that many are not seeing?? Confusing lol.
It isn't a priority of Steemit Inc nor on their roadmap. Their approach is focused on SMTs and other priorities. The idea of decentralizing development so that priorities aren't solely determined by Steemit Inc absolutely has validity but is first of all a complex transition to pull of and second of all, I also see some skepticism that the system "too new" to be ready for that..I don't agree with the latter, however, I do agree with the former and because of the scale and complexity of such a transition, it will only happen if there is widespread and non-reluctant support for it.
Maybe just bind people to downvote then ?
Like you have 10 upvotes and one downvote daily and unless you actually do your daily downvote your voting power will sink.
No, it depends on whether other stake votes for it too, not what it is. It is mostly a measure of concentration.
If I agree to vote after you and you agree to vote after me we both gain curation rewards. Or if we both delegate to a bot and the bot ends up making a single very large vote then we still gain curation rewards. Again, it is all about concentration unless someone else comes along and downvotes. Downvotes are different because they don't directly gain from concentration the superlinearity as curation rewards do. You can't help yourself or agree to help (trade votes with) your friend or swarm together to increase rewards by downvoting (although I guess you could help your friend a tiny bit by downvoting other posts; this obviously is of minimal significance).
That would be ideal, but without humans downvoting where does the input to say whether the curation rewards are being paid to actually 'judge' the content as opposed to just rewarding vote concentration, swarming, vote trading, concentrated stake, etc.?
I don't know if the proposed changes are the right ones, but I do completely agree with you that the economics we have today is wrong and will degrade the value of Steem over time. I for one, would love to see some changes. With those changes we (STINC, witnesses, community) shall analyses the results. I think we need to go through some serial changes, tweaking and tuning.
On topic of witnesses. The article you resteemed written by donkeypong shows some of our top witnesses trying to earn even more money by running nodes in other blockchains...could that be the reason why they dont have time to get the economics in Steem correct? Certainly, they are de-risking their efforts in crypto space, when Steem goes down the drain, they may have a winner in some other blockchain. And I'm pretty sure it is not only EOS they are part of, but other chains as well. I don't like witnesses making excuses for what they do, whilst they dont take care of Steem, and in the mean time taking in a LOT of money!
But but but ... Long story short .... I fully agree with you, we shall change the economics of Steem now.
as i said before you could put a Captcha whenever you make a post or a comment it will certainly defeat some of the bots spamming.
I'm not sure you are "absolutely right" and that we'll see these expected benefits after having implemented these changes. I am actually sure you can't know you're right; I get that a lot when discussing economics, so you may blame me.
In this case, I suspect things will merrily carry on as before, with different money-making algorithms, as with the current distribution of Steemses, there is always a way of doing that.
But I don't care much about all that anymore, and I don't think it is worth arguing about.
If we do nothing, things will go down the drain with some very unpleasant noises, so let's just try your proposals and see what happens. If things get worse, roll back, if things stay the same or get better, keep the changes, and start thinking about other changes, if necessary.
It's the only way forward (and also the only way to show you are right).
I am afraid, however, that it will be difficult to find enough witnesses (or voting power) still interested enough to approve these changes.
The problem I've had with a lot of these proposals is NOT in trying them. I'm up for trying anything new, learning from it, and moving on if we need to.
However, proposing things like counter self-voting. That is super easy to get around just by using alternate accounts.
I've seen such proposals to these issues and others for a long time. They always seem to be something easy to circumvent once you consider people having more than one account.
It’s not countering self-voting or vote trading (which is the same thing by the way). I will still do it. Most will still do it. It’s just the frequency. At 100%, these actions currently bring 6-10x returns compared to curation (either post or account curation, including autovoting). The proposal seeks to bridge the gap so behaviours will land on a new equilibrium, one that with more curation happening.
Putting it simply, getting back ~50% of votes on average is more likely to get curation going and less self-voting / vote selling because it’s already part of the 50/50 act in each vote.
Of course, many may still exercise 100% of their votes back for themselves directly or indirectly, at least the gap is only at most 2x more than anyone engaging in curation.
Shrinking the gap to 2x max between curation vs selfvoting, I’d say it’s much more reasonable, and 2x more than makes up for the benefits of actually building a social network instead of being an anti-social user on the platform.
To amplify a bit what you said...the 2x gap is much, much smaller than currently. Curation currently yields around 15% (after factoring in the typical effect of the reverse auction), meaning the ratio between self-voting and curation is about 7x. Even if the effect of the reverse auction were diminished or removed, it would still be 4x. I agree with you that is too high and even 2x may still be too high. We might need to go to a higher curation percentage which would narrow the gap further (for example, 90% curation would reduce it to about 1.1x).
However, before we go that far we should certainly try moving way from 7x first. So I agree with the 50% part of the proposal.
I've written to @dwinblood below about this, not sure if it checks out. 2x may be justifiable. I think anything more than 50% is gonna have a hard time with the author-types. 90% is leaving almost nothing for them (although I could see that it encourages way more curation than authoring, and probably closer to the spread of user types in any social content platform)
edit: woops just realised this is the @dwinblood thread
Okay, "author types" are part of the community. Their opinion matters, but does that mean they have a veto?
I don't know if >50% is needed. But if it is needed to make the system work, what do we prefer? A system that doesn't work or pissing off the author types? I'll take the lesser evil if necessary,
Yes, I understand. I think your post was good and I'm willing to try it and pretty much anything. Keep what works well.
People can WHAT IF anything to death before trying it. So if people want to try new things I am certainly for it.
The average person would likely not think of alternative accounts. I don't know of many things that alternative accounts might not circumvent.
I also was talking about not being a fan of bidbots with someone a couple of days ago for many of the same reasons but I hadn't really deep dived into it at the level you did.
I self vote my post but I usually do only 1-2 posts per day. The rest I vote on other people. So I agree.
I also see and have seen these problems developing for a couple of years like you. I'd love to see it turned around. If it is not turned around I'll stick around until there is an alternative (perhaps EOS backed). Though I'll keep posting here as long as it remains functional.
I personally am not a fan of people down voting because they dislike the topic. I'd rather them ignore the post and go up vote stuff they like. It should balance out the same, and they are not restricting the interest of other people.
Downvoting is not really about disliking the topic.
I've suggested for a long time that we also have non-voting 'reactions' (like emoticons) where people can easily and concisely express an opinion (agree, disagree, etc.) separate from the reward-voting system. I understand this is part of the Steemit roadmap and is under development (I don't know at what stage).
Upvoting is really about thinking that rewarding the content brings value to Steem. It's a form of tipping where instead of tipping out of your own pocket, you get to tip out of a community pool. Downvoting is about thinking that it doesn't (or that the reward is excessive). Since the tips are being paid from a community pool, everyone gets a vote, and people need to keep each other honest by downvoting when necessary. If we don't like that, then we need to dispense with the community pool concept, people and people can tip with their own money (with no chance of being downvoted).
The two concepts are very distinct but both are necessary.
Yeah, you and I had this discussion a few times almost two years ago.
I've come to the conclusion that most of the disagreement comes from the clash between those who view voting as a shareholder would view it and those who view voting as a market.
The only minds we control are our own. So forcing our interpretation upon others as the correct way won't really ever work. There will always be contention. This is partially why I don't discuss it as much anymore as I don't really have a workable solution.
The reality it is both of those views slammed together and they may not be completely compatible. What you described DOES accurately define voting in a shareholder type of environment.
It does not describe a market.
I contend that the vast amount of people do not view using steem as a shareholder environment. Many of them may never have been on a board, been a shareholder or anything of that nature so that type of interaction is totally alien to their mind.
In a market there is no down vote. It is simply supply and demand. There is no anti-demand. I describe it like walking into a store. You go in and buy (vote) for what you want. You don't go in and say "I hate anchovies, they shouldn't be on the shelf". You ignore the anchovies and buy what you are interested in. That creates demand for your interest. Yet it does not cancel demand for other topics you are not interested in they are just much lower.
The problem with what is good for steem shareholder mentality is that it is that it enables people to pull stuff off of the shelves of the market because THEY subjectively don't think it adds value. It doesn't matter that others may think it is valuable. If power is sufficient since it is not a 1:1 voting situation it gives some the ability to be dictators and totally squash the interest of others. And that DOES happen on steem. That is not good for STEEM as far as I am concerned.
I no longer advocate for removing down voting and I haven't for a long time as it is the only way currently to combat spam, plagiarism, and abuse. Though abuse also becomes subjective.
I do believe adding the reward pool as a reason to down vote was a very bad idea. If people voted on demand then it will level itself out as it spread the actual interests across the pool. Will there be people gaming it if that were the case? Yes. Guess what? Many of the people claiming reward pool as justification for a down vote have been heavily gaming the system all along. That is going to happen.
"Code is law". No... code is what the programmer could determine how to implement. We know no solution to this at the moment that the code can fix. That doesn't mean we as a community cannot fix this. That is why it keeps coming up.
So the only thing I've been doing for awhile is trying to convince people not to down vote because they dislike someone, or disagree with what they are saying or talking about. That hurts steem. It may not hurt THEM but it hurts steem.
Thank you for the comments. I found them illuminating.
We do agree on this at least.
That is my biggest issue and always has been. I've seen people say they were doing it to protect the reward pool so they didn't appear to be doing it for dislike reasons then have watched them ignore or in cases up vote other content that if it were reward pool reasons they shouldn't have been up voting and potentially should have been down voting. This made me mostly view the reward pool excuse as a way to try to justify inconsistent application based upon even their own voting habits.
I've only been heavily down voted one time. That also came long after I'd mostly stopped talking about the subject. When I was talking about the subject it was always in defense of others. It was truly about trying to make steem a hospitable and inviting place.
I'd watch the conversations and see the toxic reactions people would have when their post was voted to almost nothing (sometimes was nothing) when it was not spam, it was not plagiarism, it was not abusive, and it happened to people when they were barely touching the reward pool.
Often they were pretty new. Then you can look at the people that get targeted clearly by bots designed to down vote everything they do by some powerful people and that doesn't send a positive perception about steem at all.
Do I have a solution? No.
Every solution I come up with in my head either introduces other problems, or I can easily see how to game.
That's part of the challenge of doing something no one has ever done before. It also introduces problems people haven't encountered before.
Thanks for the response. I haven't seen you write anything for awhile, but I suspect it is mainly because we are moving in different circles.
Reminds me of this article I read recently.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/29/the-financial-scandal-no-one-is-talking-about-big-four-accountancy-firms
You can't really entrust a group of individuals to guard a system when they are profiting from the brokenness of it. External market factors only temporarily mask how damaging the net behavior of all of these activities really are.
I am honestly not a fan of n > 1. I think we have already been seeing a race to the bottom with the cuts the bidbots are taking, but as they give more and more rewards to compete against each other they only become more attractive investment choices for those who delegate to them.
There is not enough combined sentiment+voting power to combat what is approaching a majority bidbot environment.
I think the major issue since the inception of steemit has been the distribution of steem caused there to be too few tastemakers, which narrowed the channel of content that was acceptable to those whose votes mattered, driving away a broader userbase whose interests fall outside of that spectrum of favored topic content creators.
This created a feedback loop of sorts wherein we have seen over time a slight distribution out towards those who write articles deemed favorable by those few individuals, they in turn continue to write what they've always been writing with an aim towards pleasing those same individuals, which is why the number of medium-sized SP holders who all write with very similar biases outnumbers those with varied interests and views.
And if steemit attracted some people over time who were interested only in investing and growing their investments, then they would naturally gravitate towards bidbots and other profit-making services, as they bought in with little to no intention of involving themselves in anything other than the money-related aspects of steemit. I think there were very few "true" idealists in crypto to begin with who found themselves on the platform, and they are outnumbered by those who have no desire to change any systems or rock and boats and are content to maximize within whatever system is available to them.
After the raid at Upbit we can see that Upbit volume of STEEM trading is already being outpaced by Huobi and even Binance, so now that we have potentially lost the Upbit frenzy upside potential I think it is due time for the markets to punish and properly price large steem holders who have been content with the status quo for too long.
Not to say that I think that it did not take some balls to hold a giant steem bag throughout the rise and fall of this past trading season, but I do think that because the rising tide lifted all ships it had lulled many into thinking that what they were doing with their SP was not that damaging to steem and steemit's future, which I think is totally wrong-minded if we look deeper at the economic realities and continued disinterest in steemit by an apathetic general public in many regions and user types.
If steemit was really doing as well as many claim it is, then, well, I don't know what to say to them, I would just ask them why aren't more people using this site recreationally from the middle band of the global income spectrum. As opposed to just being "forced" to use the platform as a means to potentially earn wages because of lack of other opportunities in their respective countries on the low end, or the idea that they can get rich if they use a stack of money to print more money on the high end.
true. unjustice. not inequality but incentives misalignment can shatter the system, or at least to immobilize it
There will probably always be "injustice" on here like in life. I don't think our incentives can ever be perfect maybe a 50/50 split would help but it might hurt.
Do you use @dustsweeper? There is a .02 payout threshold .
I Really think we should lower the threshold to .01!
injustice = measure of ubiquity of rules enforcement. privilege or oppression is not very healthy-wealthy for any society. nothing is perfect. perfection is after eternity, which is the best thing in this universe. No. I don't know how to use anything. I'm total novice. What is @dustsweeper ? What it does and how it works?
It is going to suck for the people who sign up a year or two from now especially if we have $1 million active users. Perhaps some of them might be able to earn 1 Steem that will be worth $1,000 but probably most will not. We are not in a magical perfect world so I don't see how we can design a system where a billion newbies can sign up to Steem and make decent money right off the bat.
Send your .352 SBD's to dustsweeper so I can upvote your replies. Right now if you have a post or comment that is under .02 you do not get paid anything even if it is .019 and shows as .02.
https://steemit.com/dustsweeper/@dustsweeper/dustsweeper-faq
The only downside is it is low on Steem Power so some votes are still being wasted.
I see you’ve been reading the #price chat. :)
I agree with most of this, particularly the comments about witnesses at the top. They’re a bit too comfortable collecting their witness rewards while watching this place burn to the ground...or worse - continually throwing more fuel into the fire.
Unfortunately, those approving them don’t care, so the needed fixes won’t happen. It’s not that we’re talking past each other. It’s that most people are unwilling to see and to listen. And if they aren’t just completely ignorant/oblivious, they’re just completely dishonest.
It all starts at the top, and unfortunately, we have no leaders there willing to be good examples. So, more circling the drain is in the cards. This is apparently the desire of our esteemed and extremely overpaid gatekeepers. How fortunate we are!
haha i haven't logged into steem.chat in while ever since riverhead left..
yeah now i'm seeing this as one of the bigger problems with dpos.
There is an upside to this: if the top-20 witnesses and some big wallets approve of one of the changes, we will have to take a very close look at that change. There's some predictive power there.
Other than that: fortunate indeed, my cup runneth over. Should have puked in the toilet.
what passes for curation on this platform amounts to a race to see who votes fastest. It does very little to move actual good content to greater visibility.
All too often the race to vote is being accomplished with bots and autovoting. Increasing the curation rewards increases the incentives for bot owners while taking rewards away from the content creators.
Content creators already feel largely undervalued now. Decrease what they they earn now and more good content creators will be looking for other avenues and leaving the platform to the spammers and shit posters.
You probably missed this 👇
I'd agree with this. I'm sliding between a casual/active user and 50% of my voting power are automated, so I can imagine more being entirely automated. It's not a problem, because I'm curating trustworthy accounts that way, and have the network build from there.
Will have a better chance to happen under our proposal.
Our proposal will reduce spam and shitposters. 50% curation rewards might sound like taking away from authors, but what happens if it results in a better Steem? We definitely could use more curators than authors, which is what this proposal seeks to achieve.
Thanks for your feedback.
I stopped taking this post seriously when you stated you know the truth and that you are right. :)
I just see it differently. I am not for the changes.
There is no point in debating with someone that already has decided they are right and they only understand the truth.
Well, I'd say that the arguments matter. Nothing annoying into s.b. stating that he feels he's right. It would be strange if the guy wastes couple of hours to put together a quite consistent and tidy outlay of structured statements and to declare 'i'm not right', or 'i'm not sure i'm right' or 'i don't give a f... if i'm right' :)
That is why it doesn't take an entire paragraph to tell others that you believe in your own view. :)
And to ensure the reader that even if they hold a different view, it is because they don't acknowledge that you are right.
It's not really the way to open a conversation. :) I did get a chuckle out of your comment though.
I don't think Kevin took it personally, he knows I respect him, that is different than agreeing with him. :)
Please wake up!
I am fully awake and I understand that we are still under development. Yes, the whole thing is flawed.
There is no market for this content. Off of steemIt what would this post be worth?
Likely absolutely nothing.
So, if you want to discuss the flaws. The entire thing defies reason. Maybe we should start there.
You just picked a spot to point at. It's your opinion and you are entitled to it. I just see different ways for it to play out.
I'm awake, I disagree respectfully. :) I am happy for your passion though.
It doesn't matter if the post is worth elsewhere or not. Steem is a decentralised organisation and all we're doing here is about an "insider" economy. It's about increasing the chances that Steem is going to the hands of those that are actually investing time and effort in the platform. Oh well that's my take anyway..
I get it that I might be wrong. Just saying that I'm right in my own light like anyone would, as explained.. thanks @whatsup
Yes. if good ... i.e. as you said it is just about alignment of economic incentives ... it would grow like wildfire, snowballing, avalanche - for the good of all, EVEN the poor get richer, does not matter it is slowlier. The trouble is low churn, b.s. content, all these things which make it less attractive.
This comment would have made sense if the December Bubble didn't draw the eyes of the world towards Steemit. If Steemit was still that weird geeky loner sitting quietly on the cyberspace with no media eyes checking it out. I have read your posts and seen your take on matters like this. If such POV prevailed on this platform, bidbutts and whales will keep raping the system, demotivated folks will increase, vast majority will hands up, Dan will replicate the fuck out of Steemit and his secret agents that still happen to be your top witnesses will jump ship. Waiting for Ned's SMTs? Goodluck with that.
I guess we agree to disagree. I am fine with that.
Really deep grok article, dear Kev. I'd refer again to this ancient (2015) article applying real understanding of economy and going over DPOS, too: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/ - this can give some solid base for consideration of better results. Also, on Kantianism vs Utilitarianism ... I prefer not -isms ( ethical ideology ) but directly on the iron implementation of ethi-CS . See this.: http://www.orionsarm.com/fm_store/The%20Entropy%20of%20Choice.html
i everyday write about malaysia numismatic history but did not get much vote. Sometime i wonder if people really care about what i write. i don't really care if i don't get 100+ SBD because history Are Not Everyone’s Cup of Tea… and That’s OK but it piss me when shitty post get 100+ SBD.
Exactly. The current economic incentives are simply not aligned with rewarding high quality content even considering that quality is context dependent and a high quality post with a small audience will not produce as much in rewards as a post with a large audience.
Hi @kevinwong
Can you please explain "Capped modest superlinear (ie modest superlinear n~1.3 in lower-end, linear in higher-end)" in layman's terms so that an older railway worker, which I am can understand. How will this work in practice.
How will it work if we can limit self votes to two and then the remaining votes have to be used for curation? This will also limit self-voting and then people will have to use the remaining votes for curation, if they want to earn more. (Bought votes can also be counted as self-votes, I am sure the programmers can code something like this) I still believe vote buying should be eradicated completely. @oneminja received over a $1000 from votebots, which is not right, I wonder what it cost him to get that kind of money. (I have nothing against his post, it is actually a decent post with quite a bit of work going into it). Perhaps self voting on comments can also be stopped completely. I also see a number of people running various accounts, voting on each other and resteeming each other, this is again another form of self voting.
I just cant understand why people will mess up a very good thing for everybody including themselves for short term profit.
This is my opinion on the subject, thank you for all your hard work to try and improve this platform!!
Linear rewards mean something like 10 SP vote = $0.01 and 100 SP vote = $ 0.10 which is 10x SP for 10x rewards (just giving example of relative scale, not absolute number). Under modest superlinear rewards, it means something like 10 SP vote = $0.001 and 100 SP vote = $0.03 which is 10x SP for 30x rewards and it'll exponentially increase. What this amounts to is the wide end of low SP users wouldn't be able to self-vote effectively and have a threshold before they get anything meaningful. It basically requires users to stack more votes for anything substantial, which promotes collective curation. However, the exponential increase would favour high SP users too much, hence the adding a cap to the modest superlinear, which means having linear rewards on the higher-end SP so that high SP users wouldn't get the disproportionate influence.
Yup, vote trading markets (and selfvoting) will become somewhat irrelevant under our proposal as it triggers a new economic equilibrium to equalise any style of voting (which is voting for others vs self-voting) and make it just as profitable no matter how one votes. Since there's also the modest superlinear rewards curve in place to encourage collective behaviour, more will tend to curate content. We can't eliminate self-voting, but we can make it less desirable to do so with new economic incentives that favour curation. It's like fixing a broken dam, but many can't see it at the moment because it's mathematical and has higher order effects on our activities here.
this can counter some of the illths of the inflationarity.
I am in agreement with others at in I don't know if these changes will work... (As I stated on another post, curation in my opinion is broken regardless of reward level)
However, I am completely with you in regards that something needs done and in my view it is always better to attempt something rather than nothing.
So, yes, bring these changes, if at all possible, on, I say.
look at that amazing comma usage in that last sentence. Incredible!!! :0D
Since I've been on steemit for just one week and am completely new to cryptocurrency, I don't think I can adequately assess the impact of the proposals above. However, as a new user I find kevinwong's posts and all of your comments very useful. I can also give my perspective as a new user. First, the idea that new users will get disappointed and leave after working hard to provide content that gets barely noticed, is understandable, but I don't think one of the main problems. My first real post was recognized by #steemitbloggers, which was great and made me realize that there are many on here trying to help. My second post, which I thought might get more attention since it discussed an interactive steem tag explorer that I made, got a few votes in the first hour or so and then nothing. But in hindsight, that is not really disappointing: I have only been here a week and have few followers. It will take time to build recognition. Besides, the same post on my (rarely used) Wordpress Blog would do about as well, or even worse. The real problem is that I'm not finding a lot of diverse high quality content. Much of the quality content is about Steem and Steemit. And while those with lots of steem power do produce quality content, even their not so great posts tend to get high rewards. In general, steemit just doesn't seem to be working to reward quality. Even more disturbing is quantalysus' analysis showing that Steem's Gini Coefficient is very close to 1 and has been for some time. In the real world, that would have already spawned a revolution, but on Steemit the masses really don't have any power to revolt... other than by leaving. Despite this, the platform is still a grand experiment and if you think of it as just a place to have a Blog, it is easier not to get disappointed.
Thanks @toddrjohnson. Yes, new users getting disappointed etc isn't the big problem. The economy that rewards worst behaviours the highest is. Getting rid of this market force will have a lot of positive effects on the economy, but of course all this at the "expense" of new users and low powered users voting for themselves or have their votes worth something, but again I don't think that's a problem at all.
There's actually quite a lot of good content, but just gets buried and doesn't get noticed. @curie is a curation communities that does pretty well to help new users and old get recognised for the content they produce. But the current economy can't go on like that for too long, as it's tearing down the content and attention aspects of Steem.
Thanks for the information on @curie. I'm now following them. And thanks for upvoting my posts. I'll continue to work on providing quality posts, supporting others who provide quality, as well as those who are striving to improve Steemit. I do think the UI here could be improved to help surface some of that good content. A large part of my background is in UI design, but I'm not sure how I could make a difference here in that respect.
Hmm how about a UI-prototyping community?
Steemit.com's UI person is https://steemit.com/@pkattera I think. Other than that there's the @sndbox guys who's doing that @creativecrypto magazine-layout website. Yeah just out of my head atm. Oh and also there's where you can list and find out the apps around Steem (not sure if they're actively updating it) https://steemprojects.com/
Just followed @pkattera, but his last post was 5 months ago and last comment 7 months ago, so I'm not sure how active he is anymore with UI work here. I'm finding add-on's that help a bit with the UI and finding content, but since quality has both intrinsic and extrinsic properties, it would be best to have a UI and economic reward system that recognizes that. By intrinsic properties I mean properties of the content itself, such as whether it is original vs. copied, accurately achieves a stated goal, etc. By extrinsic I mean factors like the size of andinterest/needs of an audience, as well as other things going on in the world. For example, I find the Mathematica StackExchange site to have very high quality content both intrinsically (because there are so many detailed answers theres) and extrinsically (because I use Mathematica every day and often need to get help on StackExchange). On Steemit, I think higher quality content could be found much easier if the UI supported communities that could both curate and better organize content around some theme. This would address the extrinsic aspects of quality (that of audience interests). Some of this is being done organically here, but the UI doesn't really support the efforts, so it is done through browser add-ons, curation accounts, and other apps. That makes things really messy, especially for new users who are likely already overwhelmed by everything Steemit. The strange thing is that the models to do this area already out there on Facebook, where they are clearly successful and of value to users.
I do not know where the truth really is, and how efficient your model will be, one thing I can say for sure is that now we are going to hell.
When you spend a few days to write a post for yourself and a few more free bots, or when all your friends use voting-bots, depriving you of the opportunity to receive curation rewards for your vote ... hell, I feel that the authors and human curators are no longer needed here.
paperclip maximization, but without paper and ink ... and eyes and hands maximization.
Hmmmm we still got a long long way to go.... I like the part where you said "I'm generally chilled to the max." I have known you now a year ! And I think I do pretty much agree with that hahaha
it's a hard problem since they're getting enriched by the process for not doing anything about the issue.. yeah i can't chill when the problem is so clear :( lol
Even though I don't participate in any of these behaviors (tempting as it is, just to survive on this platform, lately) I do appreciate your compassion/understanding, here:
Also, sorry to say, but I agree that the great salaries witnesses are receiving are not justified, if they result in apathy. I'm not saying witnesses as civil servants should lead an altruistic life of service, but getting rich off our backs while we continue to struggle is not helping, either... Sigh
Most importantly, thanks, for pics of gorilla and pig butts :P
Yes, I've never considered this before until I got into the process of complaining and figuring out why there's so much dilly-dallying.
Increasing curation rewards sounds right to me because not everyone here might create quality content and creating good quality content consistently is actually hard to do but finding quality content and upvoting is something lots of people can do.
yes, exactly. @tshering-tamang
"they know things aren't right, but the paycheck is too good to rock the boat"
just like in any socialism, i.e. anti-economy. zero-sum ... if inflationary it always moves within - bottom to top until the top is tall and heavy over thin weak base.
'' Here lies a toppled god.
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one.''
-- Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah :P
Like self-canibalization. Btw the great pseudonimous author of this great material ( https://www.scribd.com/document/354688866/Bitcoin-A-5-8-Million-Valuation-Crypto-Currency-and-A-New-Era-of-Human-Cooperation ), also pays attention (towards the end) to similar self-destructive effects in a fiat, inflationary currency system.
In order a currency system to be good its currents must suck in wealth from the without and to grow organically, not just to move mass from the bottom to the top and to destabilize the boat ...
and value and efficiency of any democracy and voting is a function of the cost of a cast vote. Vote is by definition == ''informed vote''. selling or automation of voting is elimination of the 'informed' essential component. uninformed == non-voting, categorially.
Actually I have been wanting to ask because many of my peers are using smartsteem and smartmarket. Are those for selling and buying votes.
I came across one post regarding #nobidbots and out of a sudden I repented and totally agree with what they say about not using bidbots.
I have not been using for some time (except the recent post I crowd fund for my brother using postpromoter).
I am tied in between too. My conscience is telling me using bidbots or vote-trading will cause STEEM to be in ICU and no one attend. But many are using it seems tolerable or good for future. But I hvnt started using smartsteem or smartmarket.
Please shed some light. I am still learning about STEEM blockchain.
Thank you for this series of "But, but, but". ✌🙂
My husband and I invested in Steem. What SP we have, it's mostly paid for by our savings as investment. So far, it's not looking good. But we're hanging in there because we believe in the potential of this platform. As investors, we have a great incentive in fighting abuse.
Abuse
The spammers grow daily, multi-account holders are all over the place, you submit a new post and here comes 30 new followers that you don't want! That said, a few good things have happened recently with the irredeemables and Steemit Inc taking away their delegated SP to these irredeemable accounts. But just the number of irredeemable accounts accepted is astonishing - 17k initially from what @sneak committed in GitHub.
We were involved through @steemflagrewards by @anthonyadavisii fighting some of these everyday irredeemable abusers. Being part of steemflagrewards and us being connected to steemcleaners - we see all kinds of crazy abuses daily. From large account holders to new accounts. My question would be who hurts Steemit more by abuse - a whale circle-jerking and self voting or a new user spamming comments?
Downvote incentives
On the downvote incentives, I kind of agree too. We use some of our SP to downvote abuse and use the rest in upvoting quality content. We really don't like to downvote but we're the kind of people who see trash, pick them up and throw them to the garbage. We don't like it but we do it anyway since no one seems to care. Like @dwinblood, we don't downvote for disagreeing, there's a better way to show disagreement than downvoting. The necessary downvotes are reserved to the abusers - copy/pasters, plagiarizers, spammers, scammers, phishers and the accounts that think it's ok to threaten others with physical violence.
How difficult is it to integrate a plagiarism tool within the posting process? Like so, before the post is accepted it was ran through plagiarism software but there would have to be a way to appeal because of folks like us who have a YT channel/blog and we're moving our content here.
What kind of downvote incentives will enable us to actually fight abusers but not allow abusers to abuse more? We can't think of a solution for it that doesn't require some kind of moderator. And who would that be and would they do the same thing to everyone? People will favor their friends even when their friends are wrong. So this is a difficult task to accomplish. Who is going to set the guidelines for what abuse is and who is going to define those types of abuse so everyone has access to it in their own language.
Language Barriers
Another problem we're having in fighting abuse is the language barrier. We have many Germans, Polish, Chinese, Turkish but not any Spanish or any other languages helping us fight abuse. If we want to help somebody and teach them that copy/paste is not ok, we have to be able to communicate with them. This is a big issue on the platform.
How difficult would it be to integrate a multi-lingual TOS with definitions of unaccepted behavior included?
There is a lot of activity trying to bring new accounts on the platform. Many of these new users languages are not supported here. Wouldn't it be wise to support the language first then promote amongst that demographic?
Increased curation percentage
I would say yes on 50% curation rewards and that would motivate many who are selling votes now to curate. I'm manually curating now, somewhat auto-curating using SteemAuto because I actually read the posts of the people I support.
Let me know your thoughts on my thoughts :) And by the way, thanks for this great post. I hope we can get all these issues resolved.
It's finally time to go and sleep buttnaked after jiggling my beautiful butt a little and save the platform, I'm so tired jeez.
is that butt up for a bid? i have SBD ;) No lie.
I jiggle only for Kevin, but I'm flattered to hear that other people appreciate it too :)
Big time. I pray Kevin will not outbid me for your butt tho
He loves me not because of butts, even though they are fabulous.
Yeah, for some people is only left to pray...
I guess it depends on how you curate. I curate a music contest called Steemit Open Mic and can assure you it is not the least amount of work possible. It's turned into my full-time job and I'm working my ass off to build a huge, engaging community of musicians on the Steem blockchain. About 8-hours and many days more to do so.
Can you clarify on this? Are you proposing reducing curation rewards by 50%?
Seeing how I do not upvote myself at all and make my rewards upvoting others and building community engagement, that would not be something I could get behind.
However, all your other points I'm onboard with.
There are only two kinds of voting effects: one is curation, another is self-voting (and trading, which is the same). Just saying curation has at least a minimum amount of work, the other does not have this. There's no way to properly measure hence the statement.
~50% curation rewards is not reduction, it's increase from the current 25%.
Thanks for the clarification. In that case, I'm all for every one of your points.
"Plus, if the argument is the rich will only get richer.. what about Steem's current economy that is making the laziest workers richer than the hardworkers? Don't even need to any hard data and statistics for this. Just use the platform and look around yourself." If Steemit can solve this problem, that secret should be shared with the world to solve it everywhere! Ufff so many good points here, but I guess I ended up feeling informed yet depressed :( Not your fault of course, but just the society we live in.
STEEM could change the world more than any other blockchain! I can't wait to see what happens!!
I just hope @kevinwong that your proposals will not fall into deaf ears especially when money is involved. The question remains, how some people will find away around to curve the new rules is yet to be seen, or felt.
It'll happen, but at least we can expect curation to improve. Nothing can be worse than the current econs, imo..
Dead accounts and circle votes are also a major drain on real content creators, human beings I mean, not being the judge of what is awful or worthy of being solid content. The curve in SP delegation to garbage accounts would be great. Have a downward multiple based off of the SP that is used to power up a new account that is vested, like a multiple of 3 for second month on the platform, multiple of 2 third month, and a max of 5.2SP to fall by 0.1 weekly if that difference doesn't match 15. There are garbage spam accounts that are being churned and being paid for by the community. Why not incentivize every single account as well to vest as much SP as they can right away so the community does not have to prop their account up while they may or may not even be doing anything? Plus it makes these people that are growing and interacting right away an incentive to work with them as they are more highly valued than the average user for at least a short time, and may also incentivize them to not fall in SP and may lean them toward leasing SP in keeping this up, or even purchasing Steem via fiat, God forbid, lol. Great post once again and addressing the problems and offering a forum for the crazies like me to sound off their rants.
You're right sir, Bidbots and vote trading are cancerous to steemit economy the one whose reach in this platform become more richer by selling their votes plus getting the curation rewards, and the one who has more money to buy votes gets the chance of getting higher upvotes. But how about the newbies or future steemians who wants to make a high quality content who will curate their contents if most of the voting power spread all over the bidbots
It is clear that all Steemers are created equal, but some are more equal than others!
dont worry. a bot will answer this.
I agree with you Kevin, since HF19 is running for almost a year now, we are all aware of its pros and cons. Why don't we just give the modest superlinear a try, it should work out in my opinion.
I really don't have the answers to the various ills of Steemit, but it's good to have the discussions before it really takes off. I don't even know if vote selling will scale to tens or hundreds of millions of users. I guess it could if they all decide to delegate to them. This is all an experiment with new business models.
It's a good point. I hope there will be SP left to delegate to all the projects that grow the network, @steemhunt one in mind at present.
It would be sad if something else came along and failed to get the SP (although perhaps Steemit inc would do the honors like with dtube and utopian) because everyone was delegated out to bots.
Maybe when this time comes the big players will pull some out of the bots for the sake of the blockchain, who knows.
I'm interested to see what steemit do with all their steem. They've said they would be distributing it somehow
I'm hopeful it will be released steadily and carefully at the right time, too much to soon may not be a good plan but perhaps there will be some going to the communities that are working well.
I think there is a big potential that they will do a partial clawback of what is delegated to some of the apps, maybe leaving more for those who have been developing their apps the most and using their delegations efficiently, and then a distribution to some of the fastest growing/strongest communities that pop up to spur interest in the user-side of things after the apps have been given some time to mature. I do not think they want the apps to collapse completely in the absence of their delegations, however, because undoubtedly many users and communities will continue to rely on their use.
Yes this makes sense and could well happen once the apps have 'enough' SP to adequately reward on their own.
I agree with the communities aspect - much development work has seemingly gone into this, and so it would make sense to give it a 'push'.
Cheers
Yeah, exactly what I was thinking.
You just got one wild comment section after this post :)). Speaking for myself, I'm all about incentivizing work which is not really happening at the moment.
When i joined nearly 2 years ago i was told keep writing, voting and messaging it will get better. That's what i did nearly everyday i still try hard but its so slow even for me after 2 years it must be hell for newbies.
bot to bot economy, insentivised towards 'optimization' quickly kicks out the 'guests' to be served.
delete the "must" and that statement becomes gold.
I still feel like a newbie so I am with you on that :)
I think our current system is fine and eventually we will get more and better investors and more and better users.
There will always be people who want to game the system when votes are worth money.
You contradict, or dont want to see the realities, or simply dont look at what happens on the Steem blockchain. For more than 10 months I'm curating the Steem blockchain, seeing all the posts (well, title, image, and first sentence) of some of the tags like #music, and open at least 100 posts every single day. What I see is those users who start out at Steemit writing great articles, stop writing them, or become inactive. I also see the amount of spamming and copy/paste increasing by the day. In parallel, more and more users, even those with good intentions, are joining the game of selling and buying votes.
Your thought on eventually all will be good; How do you see this happening when users who try to do good, either stop their activities or join the gaming of the system?
This guys search is over. He's found a bidbot to up-vote all his comments with and he's happy.
It's in the name hahaha
lol
Yeah, but as far as I get it, what Kevin advocates is 'alignment of incentives' so even such phenomena like votes trading, buttbots ... growth to pump growth of the value of the system - for the rich AND the poor, be it slower for the later. All the donkeys to pull into one direction - the biggest and the smallest.
I think he wants a 50-50 program. I doubt that would get rid of the bots and might even make the bots more lucrative than they are now. Also we do need content. We already have a bunch of autovoters with only the 25% program.
You might want to sign up for @dustweeper.
Frankly speaking @kevinwong bro - I won't expect that I will be filthy rich with Steem, but as long as I can share my knowledge and expertise with other Steemians - I would be very happy :)
It takes a very interesting post to sustain my attention in reading a very long post. But your article speaks so much on the current state of Steemit right now. I was never a fan of bid bots but there was a time that I look up on the trending, new hot categories and I see high payouts because of vote buying. Paying bots to do the job. And people have this mentality that majority are doing it so why not do it too? So I tried in 3 or 4 of my articles but reality sink in I am just fooling myself. It is cheating! I feel better with less upvote than paying bots to upvote my post.
Self voting, everybody is guilty of this. I hope somebody out there read/hear/consider your proposal. I am not active on Steemit nowadays because of full time job but I can see the flaws of the system and it is a sad fact that we are allowing this to happen.
I really hope that people take the time to read this. Everyone wants steemit to be successful now, but what is important is that steem stays successful for the long haul. Thanks for taking the time to write this.
Thank you for this thoughtful contribution to the discussion. I'm going to have to google linear/superlinear in this context, lol, but you made a lot of good points that I did follow even without that. Side note: yay Crash Course!
Have you been following the discussion about witnesses having one foot in Steemit and one in EOS?
they said conflict of interest does not exist in their dictionary.
That was a long post, and a lot of comments to read. I was very happy to see the mention of @dustsweeper. I think @kevinwong, if you have not looked at that program, you should. It could be used as an example for your reward distribution sort of. @dustsweeper sort of eliminates the dust vote. The dust level vote only affects the new user, not any one else. By eliminating the dust vote, the vote giver receives their curation reward for voting, the vote receiver receives the intended reward from the vote giver, and @dustsweeper receives a small reward also to reinvest in the content creators of steemit.
Does it work? Yes. Is it effective? Yes. Pick any set of two weeks from my account prior to may 1st, look at the number of vote rewards I received. Then compare that to any two weeks after May 15th, you will be as amazed as I was at the increased amount of rewards due to @dustsweeper.
Uh damn nice post. Damn nice. Place holder comment. Ima get right on this when i get home. ;)
Still need to read the comment section.
Thanks for the amazing writeup. I whole heartedly agree that the economic engine is broken.
Unfortunately, since witnesses and whales are benefiting from the broken system, I'm worried they will be slow to make changes, if they make changes at all.
Alternatively, we may just need a new voting bloc of witnesses....
Well, I quite agree with some of your proposed changes but what is the guarantee that it will be implemented? And if implemented, how sure are we that it's still gonna work out?
Just like you rightly said 👇
So, it is ours to make these decisions, they may or may not be subject to approval.... Or implemented
Hello @kevingwong
I quite agree in most of what you said but not in all cases. The current system, sure, isn't working. For one thing linear equality isn't right for this system at all. It limits the capacity of curating Steemians to cover a large number of people daily. But I guess 50% curation is not friendly to minnows and those still struggling to find footing within the community.
All the same, lots of healthy revelations and worthy recommendations.
@eurogee of @euronation and @steemstem communities
vision? I know you do not need an answer from a low reputation person like me. But I try to say my vision to you. vision: I want to grow my friends in a small community that I coach, so they are not neglected in this platform. and the rich should help the poor, not the rich get rich, and hopefully the police do not create criminals to be caught by themselves.
What you say is very appropriate because your prediction about all is reality in the field. Very sharp but true.
I agree with you, but honestly, it's almost impossible to grow your account without the help of bid bots. Even with bots, it's REALLY hard and slow to get anywhere. Unless one invests a lot of liquid crypto of their own, it's practically impossible in my opinion. Or super slow..
you can not do anything with bid-bots. nothing. check the shitposts that make it to the trending page by means of a bot-push. does anyone not notice how lonely they are?
Proposed changes have no merit. The existing system is good enough. Pls consider that anybody who has ability to write good content can buy the visibility for free from bid-bots as it is paid back in a week time. No other platform provide this opportunity to however great content creator one is.
Bid-bots are the best thing on the platform.
And flags are the worsts things and need to go. We need to come out of the mentality that my content and views are good than of others.
No one would follow a user who does not have any meaningful thing to say to his followers thereby discouraged to either improve or rest in peace.
Let us come out of policing mentality.
And with SMT all who thinks differently can design their own reward schemes to experiment. If any of that is more successful then we all will follow and support that driven by simple economics for individual and group.
So all in all no need to change.
only if someone (@dan i see you) wasn't taking note of this shit show and planning on milking the experience to build a platform that has the prospect of running on a more "valuable" blockchain. Yeah, it will be hard to scoop a million folks onto the new machine but not as hard as you may think if by then, Ned and his team somehow manage not to get people being here for more than just the money, but just plain wanting something different from Facebook, Twitter and Medium. Steem Inc are taking for granted the pioneer-effect a two-year old first-among-equals site is giving them.
as a new user in steemit i cannot understand all of your writing. i made friend with some people including paula to learn more about this platform. Looking at your last words about expected benefits i hope those things will happen soon. Hopefully i don't make any wrong on this comment.