Man was I hyped about the effects of the EIP. Bid bots getting hit left and right, abusers downvoted, people are full with hope for a better future on STEEM.
Well, about time for reality to kick in I guess. Maybe I need to thank @exyle for bringing me back on the floor? It took his latest post to make me realize I've been hovering on a cloud.
First, I was puzzled. 18% in curation rewards - that's about the same as a delegation to a bid bot before HF21 raked in. That can't be right, surely he had an error on his maths. Turns out, he doesn't.
My initial issue with the EIP was that we've been there before. We had a non-linear curve, and it lead to people automating their votes to get onto known high earning authors as soon as possible to maximize their rewards. With all the positivity surrounding me the last days, I shoved these worries to the side. Surely things will be different now, change in consciousness, community working together, right?
Screw it. We exchanged content indifferent voting with bid bots for content indifferent voting with trail bots. And those people have the balls calling their maximizing strategy curation. That's a slap in the face to the few real curators out there (shout out to the amazing curator team of @curangel!). It's a disservice to the platform to call it that, and it's poison to advertise the ROI you can achieve with it. Honest curation of the huge mass of undervalued content is pictured as a waste of votes, a bad strategy, and nothing to strive for.
I had a few moments the last days, wondering why no bigger delegations come in to curangel. Well, thanks again for pushing me into it with the nose. Who'd want to exist in a world where you can't get more than 10% for doing nothing.
I'd love to blame the new curve, and it surely does its part to not vote on small authors, as what they lose in rewards for not getting over the threshold is lost for the curator too. But the problem is so much bigger. After so many years, the big stakeholders still didn't understand that we need a growing community to gain value. All they look at is their own relative growth in steem. Who cares that the value is going to shit when you can tell yourself you made an ROI of 20%, right?
Sorry. Usually I only rant to myself and people close to me, but I needed to vent. We'll keep fighting windmills with curangel, and watch the platform go to shit thanks to the maximizers out there. Glad I won't see you on SteemFest this year.
This is why I would love to have randomized curation rewards. No "5 minute rule" or anything like that, and, totally random curation rewards, regardless of the author rewards and regardless of the time you vote.
That would certainly change curation forever.
It's an interesting idea, but I think it would add a tremendous complexity to the code. But even if it is implemented, it wouldn't matter because of the voting trails, especially if backed by huge stakes.
Also, the reason why it was reduced to 5min, is to avoid having to wait 15min to vote (for organic voters at least). Of course with bots, that doesn't matter neither. Curiously lots of users are still on the old 15min timezone :)
I like this idea. Could we add a randomizer? Someone makes a post, it is stamped with a random time between 5-20 minutes. Have the number appear somewhere on the post only a human could read. That would rek autovoters.
I like the voting thing on Tribes. Like Palnet for example. Regardless if you vote on the first second or 2 days later, your rewards are exactly half of the vote you cast. Period. No front running no nothing.
but then there's also no benefit at all anymore in finding and pushing good content to the top?!
Good content will always find its way to the top. But is it really necessary to also race one another for better curation rewards? Because that’s what is happening...always have been...
I wasn't arguing for the timed window, I am totally against the short "competition-window" of 5 minutes.
I was arguing against:
because curation rewards should always be on a curve, in that sense that those who voted first will get more of the curation share for their created rshares than the vote that came later.
Technically that would basically be impossible.
Autovoters could probably scrape the value from the ui.
The 5 minute rule does appear to get in the way of 'natural curation'.
What would happen if curation rewards were just divided up by vote weight at the end of the 7 day rewards period?
To me that would seem to be a strong encouragement to just look out for good posts to vote on at any time...
The curve still heavily favors vote stacking on the highly rewarded. With an even distribution even more, because you don't lose out by adding to the end of the stack, but the curve makes the values of every following vote go higher and higher.
Thanks for the clarification on that.
Rules without rules. Sounds great! /sarc
I never understood why people thought these changes will increase manual curation ...
I mean, I can't throw stones, I don't curate that much myself, mostly just have my list of people that I know tend to post high-quality things and I trail steemSTEM. Not really profit-oriented, but also not that curation focused.
But the 50/50 split combined with the new curve is really bad for small/new authors. 50/50 takes away more from their reward, and the curve reduces the likelihood of them being voted at all.
That old circle jerks resurface doesn't surprise me. I think I've even registered a slight increase in votes on my posts, probably because I have a stable amount of autovoters that bring consistent curation rewards.
It's dumb. We're losing people we're not going to get back. It's easy for me to onboard new people (thanks btw for steeminvite, I use it a lot), but keeping them around? It's hard. If that doesn't change, STEEM won't be worth anything anymore at some point, and all the whales that tried to get a bigger and bigger piece will sit on their pile of worthless crypto.
I was going to add a comment myself, but @suesa, you said everything I was thinking. Yeah, I don't see brighter days ahead if we remain unable to keep people on the platform, and I don't see anyone really addressing this in a real-world, head-out-of-@$$ way.
I called it already 9 days ago:
https://steemit.com/newsteem/@isnochys/how-to-curate-in-newsteem-as-minnow
;)
I am more inclined to vote on potential high earner posts than new steemins just to save myself and recoup the "lost" earnings due to EIP @pharesim and I am sad about it.
I couldn't agree more:
They fight so hard to get the biggest parts of a cake which is getting smaller and smaller instead to try to increase the size of the cake!
The value of a (social) network is measured among others by the number of its users.
Therefore we all should try to support new and middle sized users to give them a reason to stay and also convince their friends to join as well.
Furthermore I think we should support 'normal' users who are writing about 'normal' stuff like food, traveling and everyday life. We won't attract the 'masses' by repeating 700 times how great STEEM is and then upvoting it. :)
ditto ;)
mass adaption is the key imho
if only geniuses with their perfectly written technical articles are to write here
how on earth do this platform resonate to its slogan ?
I simply don't have time to curate as much as I had in the past and frankly I'm still kind of sore about the yahoo-ery from before.
But I will be absolutely forthcoming about it. Honesty is perhaps my strength at times but can also be my fatal flaw.
My HF20/19 ROI compared to the bid botters had been low since back in the earlier days.
What do I have to show for it? It's not really in my wallet. Many of the heroes of today were the assholes of yesterday.
Throwing down a few downvotes does not negate all the former collusion. My worldview beckons me to forgive people but that is not easy as the circumstances are different than anything I experienced.
All the stake that was earned via dishonesty is now power influencing the ecosystem. It's not easy to forget as the effects still reverberate through the chain. On the flip side, a lot of the bot vote miners are selling us some discount Steem. Silver lining?
Where's the MIB memory eraser pen when you need one? 🤔
To clarify, I am playing around with an autovoter when I am going to be extended AFK.
As much as I care about honest curation, I also don't want to be left behind again. My saving grace before was Utopian and I busted my ass for those rewards.
Now, since that's gone, I have to think adapt and being an idealist didn't seem to work for me in the past.
There is a pull between what the system rewards and what I believe to be the ideal. Until the system matches the ideal, it is compelling to at least adabt a hybrid approach to voting (mixed auto and manual).
Personally, I think the ideal is if you don't have anything meaningful to vote. Don't vote. But let's be realistic. Who really is going to do that?
Is this wrong? I'm still thinking that through.
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I dropped it in the post a few times, but let me push you a bit harder towards checking out @curangel for those extended AFK times ;)
The returns are way better than nothing, and not much worse than a non-optimized autovoting setup. And you can be sure that your stake is used for the good of all the platform.
Did I do something wrong?
Lol. No. Sorry for being on that list, I added that caption a bit ago to make clear it's not about you.
Not your fault that you're successful! Or yes, absolutely. But it's nothing bad ;)
For you manual curators out there, keep your eyes peeled for this starting on Sunday. It's meant to give quality producers a second chance at some some eyes, at least. Check out the comment section. People seem to be excited about it. I have no idea if it's going to work or not.
I've always wanted to be on a Bad Boys List :D
I also felt wounded by the list. :) lol
I don't know what to say. I went from spending 2 years going in reverse, watching incoming support slowly and steadily decline to, quite suddenly, seeing an increase in support, which is something we all strive for here and that was to be an intended consequence of the potential positive feedback loop included with the EIP; all I did was post, nothing about me changed. I have 806 published posts. Eleven of them recently start to take off, after being here three years, doing my thing. Already, after eleven out of 806, people are complaining about who votes for who and why. Eleven posts and I'm seeing some of these names being thrown around like "circle jerkers" and "old boys club" yet I've always done my own thing and never made a deal with anyone for anything. I think I've voted for exyle's stuff maybe 10-20 times, out of nearly 27000 manual votes I've handed out. I'm grateful for this sudden show of support from all these people who decided to step up to the plate, after all this time. Eleven posts and my name is already caught up in community crossfire. The last thing I want is for people to start hating me because of these arguments. I don't want to lose support for the simple fact I gained support. All I did was post.
Again, nobody hates you, and nobody wanted to put you in crossfire.
You're in the list, because you've been continuously successful. Some people don't vote for you because what you provide, but because they can get better returns from voting on you than on others.
It's a systemic issue, nothing of that is your fault. Don't hate the player, hate the game is a popular saying. You're not even a player here, but part of the playing field.
I'm happy for you and the others in the list that they can take in some rewards for their continuous efforts. At the same time, I feel for those who weren't able to get the same kind of recognition.
A lot of the folks I vote for often don't see much, but they'd see less if I didn't vote. Some folks do well, and I still vote, because I've always been a fan of their work. I often vote late. Always manually.
Subscribers often purchase something before they've seen or read it. People purchase music and movies, before they get a chance to judge if it was good or not. That's just part of how the entertainment industry works. Some folks make a purchase simply because they are fans of that performer. To me, auto votes are similar to that. It's quite normal. I do hope they check in to actually consume the content, even though I do realize some folks buy comics and don't even take them out of the packaging. It's not up to me to judge how one wants to consume or support my content in the same way it's not up to banana growers to say there's only one way to enjoy a banana. I know this system here has flaws, and I see where you're coming from. Just know, I'm not offended. I can't really look down on someone though for maximizing rewards, when I know every content producer here wants piles upon piles of Steem next to their work. We're all striving for the same thing.
I just read OCDB went the way of manual curation. Over time, @pharesim, I expect to see more and more folks stepping up to the plate to curate, and with that, more will receive the recognition we both know they deserve. It seems the majority these days want to see balance, an even playing field, and want to push for positive change. It'll take time to get there.
My critique is mostly directed at the bigger stakeholders. I've always wondered how those who already own a significant stake of the platform prefer to grow their personal stake over growing the platform as a whole. There's so much potential here, but most of the people who joined over the years gave up because they didn't manage to grab a foot.
My mission has been spreading since the beginning. Because I own a significant part, and I want to grow the pie for everyone. All I've seen is my share going down, while the value dropped at the same time. My efforts may have helped, but I can't tell, because value has been extracted by others who don't do anything to bring all of us forward.
I see the majority interested in growing the platform too. But that's the majority of users, not the majority of stake unfortunately.
Time will tell. There's no final judgement to be made yet. All I see is that the incentives given by the ruleset don't help, and lessons we learned before have been thrown overboard.
I know about this potential, and know it well. We want the same things. I don't cash out. I watched thousands of hours of work first spike in value, and at that point I could lead by example and show people what was possible here. An easy way to get that mass adoption stuff so many seem to want is to simply have proof of concept sitting there looking everyone in the eye. They want big names here? Well, those big names aren't coming until they see the money. Those were good times and it would have been easy to take this thing to the stars BUT that was precisely the moment charlatans and profiteers took over. They convinced people to buy something that was free! I had to sit and watch thousands more hours worth of work and two years slip by where everything went in reverse. Not only did the value of account drop, but so did the value of my work. I had to sit and watch people sacrifice potential billions the entertainment industry generates yearly, while they attempted to convert the place into some kind of makeshift crypto mining platform so they could earn thousands instead of generate billions.
I've been one of the most frustrated people here for a long time. The only thing I want to see is this whole thing work. I see a lot of folks bragging up how they've invested money but when you've invested nearly your entire life into something, for years, what's worth more?
Steem, DO NOT BE SUCCESSFUL. Especially not consistantly
Exactly, #newsteem only in words but not in reality. Everything is the same as it was before. Those so-called curators only upvote posts of the same old big names, which they are sure will get lots of votes and act like they are favoring and changing steem ecosystem. Noone is curating any small fishes, they only reward with downvotes when they find something odd. Again I say it's going nowhere, same old story but a bit different narration I'd say.
it's too obvious nobody is here for onboarding masses, everybody is after profit
When Bitcoin does it, it's seemingly okay, eh? But Steem stakeholders aren't allowed to have their own benefits in mind?
Does this post or my comment have to do anything with bitcoin?? I joined this network because I found it has different objectives / or uses cases. I don't know what bitcoin does or did. I wouldn't have touched this if it's like bitcoin and I believe most of the people wouldn't.
Sometimes I get surprised with your lame comments beside how knowledgeable you are as I always assume.
Which ones are the so-called curators? 🤔
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While I am sure your curangel project is great, many of us are doing manual curation. Exyle has been pretty open about trading votes. However, his list seems like decent content creators who also curate or are actively engaged in Steem.
I've always respected you, however, like many others you have been disengaged, and it seems odd to come back in swinging just when people are embracing a less ranty version of Steem. #NewSteem.
#oldsteem behavior is to complain about others and cast doubts on the project.
#NewSteem behavior is to use your downvotes and spread enthusiasm.
What are you trying to say with that screenshot? If you look a bit further than the colorful bars, you'll realize that 98% of my stake are inside curangel, doing exactly what you said we should do.
If #newsteem is cheering the circle jerks for you that's your piece of cake. I'd rather point towards the flaws we still haven't addressed, or as in this case even reintroduced.
That you're happy is clear, why should you complain when you're on the upper end of the curve. Look around the minnows and search for enthusiasm with them. Good luck finding more than a handful.
Or maybe you're just as happy as markymark with an old boys club. My goal always was engaging more people, that doesn't work any better with the status quo than with old steem.
Are YOU going to lecture ME... Look that's hysterical. I've been manually curating for 3.5 years.
I finally am winning a little, which I hand back to minnows every day.
You come back from your extended vacation to bitch about what everyone else is doing. That's brilliant.
I think your project will be good. I think you are mad you didn't immediately get a bunch of support, because lot's of people have been manually curating the whole time.
I'm not even in the top 200 earning Authors. (nor do I think I absolutely should be) but my post tend to be in the top ten for engagement every single day.
I've been voting for minnows the entire time. So, for you to complain that I'm getting some votes along with soyrosa and some other good content creators, is just ... ridiculous.
And yes, your stake is probably doing good things and it always has. You are one of the good guys, I just find your rant annoying on several levels.
Have YOU been telling ME to be enthusiastic? I can caps too.
The complaints in my rant didn't target you. I said before, I don't criticize those receiving the autovotes, it's nothing they could influence.
But you have been the one coming here to tell me that everything's fine, and I should shut up. Which just isn't the case. #newsteem brought some good things, and some bad at the same time.
Good for you that you make some more now. And props that you take part in distributing. That's the case with a lot of the autovoted people. My issue are the autovotes though. Giving their votes to smaller accounts who put in similar amounts of work would be the direct way to support the community.
I don't care about the support my project gets. I primarily set it up because I'm too lazy to curate myself, but want my own stake to help the platform grow. I'd very much prefer it to be a backup solution for those not having time to curate themselves than having to handle millions of SP and an even bigger team to use them properly.
And actually, the feedback by smaller accounts has been amazing and more than expected. But I realized now that for most of the bigger stakeholders we just can't offer enough, they still want more, so they shun it. And they still don't understand that growing the community is more important than taking in as much of the inflation as possible for themselves, while putting the "but the persons I vote do support the community then" forward as an excuse.
That I resignated and stopped being active on the platform doesn't mean I've been away. There's just been nothing I could do the last year to improve anything. I'm not a social media person, so I don't post just for the sake of showing that I'm around. I tried with the jukatravels account, but got bored and felt like a farmer pretty quickly.
I invest my heart and mind into working for things I believe in. When I realize that others extract value of my and others work, without contributing anything useful themselves, I get frustrated. Who are you to tell me I can't speak my mind then?
I didn't say you can't... Just be aware you are an influencer. Speak your mind, just know some of us have put a lot of time and energy into turning the mood around on Steem.
You make some great points... I guess I was just hoping those with the power to make change would make change and not spend their energy bringing everyone down. I'll let it go at this point.
I can't imagine being "brought to the floor on day 8.. by one user.
By the way, I also have a solution for those who don't want to curate. They can follow my vote and adsup votes behind me. Everyone knows what they are doing... but do they try to find out how others have been working.
Exyle's over paid and a bit blah, but he's been here every day, making pro steem posts and tweets. While I admit he's farming he also does some good things too.
Sorry, but I just can't agree that shilling is doing good. New people come in, see they don't have a stand against those in the in-circles, and disappear again. One can turn the mood around for a few days (as it happened with mine), but sooner or later reality kicks in. Community building consists of more than bringing new people in, you have to give them reasons to stay around.
Exyle's only been an example because he's written the post Google suggested to me. And there has been a comment under his post, where someone asks if his stats can be achieved with other projects. That made me realize how bad his "openness" is because it creates expectations.
Looking at trending and the current reward distribution, as well the autovotes I get myself, he's just a small part of the general issue.
!dramatoken
lol, you are right as always.. A bit dramatic all around.
You have
DRAMA!To view or trade
DRAMAgo to steem-engine.com.Yes - the 'circle voters' and ROI delegators were never expected to become manual curators I guess. They have had the maximizing on their mind for years now and are just now figuring out how that maximization works under the EIP.
I even suspect that a few of the big SP-holders that are doing manual curation now are going to automate that in a while - and just autovote the authors that they 'discovered' and manually created the most in those first few weeks/months.
I really don't know how we can make 'real curation' more attractive. There's zero content discovery except for 1) going through the depressing New tab on steemit.com, or 2) following feeds from projects like curangel/c-squared/ocd/curie, and 3) the random resteem - but without a 'note section' with our resteems it's hard to explain to your followers why you want them to click on a certain post. (Which is why I personally rarely resteem)
Very effective 'more posts like this' functionality is needed to get people to click on titles of posts before seeing which author wrote that post or even knowing if you follow that author or not.
Also: a tab with 'most commented on' would help out in discovering interesting content that get people to engage, something interesting to browse through but not influenced by high payouts/votes from exclusively high-SP users.
For those reading and willing to curate lesser-known users: the frontpage of steempeak.com has a few tabs like general/science/photography which shows the posts in a nice tiled layout that are curated by actual curation groups like photofeed and c-squared. These are not curation groups with a HUGE monetary impact per say, but they do search for quality content and try to get them more visibility. Browsing through those tabs and dropping a vote here and there especially on names you've never seen before will go a long way <3
Thanks.
2 years ago..
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@tarazkp/ui-resteem-suggestions
Tons of good ideas on the chain by tons of users, but how to make them into a to-do list? Shrugs
auto voter bots to charge customers for the service. Part profit goes back into community. i.e burn / SPS
non compliant auto voters / bots - run them out of town :)
I like the above mentioned 'random optimal curation window' per post that's unreadable by bots :D
I also was a bit taken aback in the boasting of “curating”.. when it’s just autovotes to where they know votes are coming, in fact I started writing a post on what curation is after a discussion on the matter that I haven’t finished yet.
I do believe this will be part of growing pains and I think it’s too early to give up just yet.. things are improving, but yes we have a long way left to go.
Don’t lose hope yet 😉
Still waiting for that post, I wanna know what
lovecuration is.That is primarily what this HF21 & EIP Have taught me. Small accounts don't matter, we complained, voted against this changes but still they happened. I guess we just have to keep going until we feel we can't. This place is certainly feeling like it's going to the ground! Less posts, less engagement, less user retention, sinking price... I mean, what more proof do people need? Of Course Blind Optimism will have you think we are doing great, that the change takes time to show actual results, that there will supposedly be more manual curation with time, that Steem is one of the best blockchain out there(It maybe, but it certainly has one of the worst team behind it- my opinion, don't come at me), that the price will go up past its ATH and so on..... The problem with Steem is, there's a lot of greed.
My Advice?Forget the monetary aspect, use it as you would your other social media accounts,have fun ...Only problem is, people will start to call you out for supposedly shit posting, and then you won't feel at home & one eventually leaves..
The Ship is Sinking.
As you upvote your own comment and milk your autovotes FFs ... this place baffles me sometimes
You're right. I just delegated 1000 SP to @curangel. I suggest the rest of you follow my example.
Gonna check this one out and consider delegating or trail vote. I like curators who curate relatively randomly. Only focusing on small, low SP, low rep, new, etc is a bias. A quick check shows they aren't just focusing on new minnows or something like 'art'.
Give it some time. In the end obvious curation trails will not be optimal. Hopefully :-)
Indeed. Not everyone can win by front running everyone else while curating the same popular authors.
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With the non-linear curve I don't see anything else happening.
It's not even important to be one of the first. When you come a bit late, the rising value that comes with later votes makes up for the smaller share of the rewards for a while. Voting on unvoted posts is a huge risk now (when you want to optimize your returns), because of the extremely reduced value when no other votes follow.
puff puff... I just curate ...pass
Top down mentality is the problem. This is and always will be a pyramid scheme where those at the bottom or those to come late are the ones to get the shaft without buying in massively. There is little to no chance of organic growth of an account here, not to the level that makes ANY difference. I am here 3 years now and can show pretty much nothing for my time. A hand full of my post have EVER gotten attention or remote traction, or hell even engagement. There has been this constant diatribe about the minnow, the little guys, on boarding, but that is all it has been, diatribe and lip service. Stake weighted voting is the problem. Greed is inherently human and this platform seems to exemplify it.
I don't know what could changes could be made that would actually have a positive effect for any of the ...
1.3 million accounts that are not a dolphin or higher. The changes are for the top 2433 accounts to benefit.
Is the honeymoon over already? I thought we were building an echo chamber. In which case I think the EIP has been a roaring success.
Thank you @pharesim. I was beginning to think I was a notorious pessimist. Your witness-posting confirms my growing, pessimistic view of the perfidious Steem system. Actually, I'm just waiting for the right course to get out. But it probably won't come again.
The curve being sublinear up to 20 steem is a huge disincentive to ever vote for new/small users. No one wants to 'waste' votes that yield almost half of what they could if used on something expected to be well voted.
It's not a waste to appreciate small authors, it's what this platform needs. Pure profit orientation of the individuals will never result in a great community.
While I agree, I don't think expecting a community of humans to be altruistic (above profit oriented) in order for the community to survive for any length of time is a sustainable model.
It's not altruistic wanting to grow the platform when you own a part of it. It's just the sane thing to do.
I've upped my manual voting cut off to 2 stu.
Before hf21 if a post had more than 1, I wouldn't vote it.
If more people followed that rule we would have much happier minnows.
Then we should have a reverse curve, eh? Again, creating a financial incentive always degrades curation, replacing it with mining Steem.
If your vote is big enough, then it doesn't matter.
And how many have a vote big enough, less than .01% of the entire platform? Technically you are correct and those people have no excuse for not voting small accounts/new users, however, that is not the norm for most users.
It is good food for thought and a discussion worth having with the citizens of this blockchain.
This is just going to reinforce the importance of a group of real curators looking out for good content from the little folks.
Let’s focus on solutions.
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Haha, I noticed this too. I usually voted 4 pre hf21 and I continue. 3 of them engage so well they deserve it and the other just posts photos I like and can relate to (we both live in Korea =)
I won't just start autovote the other 4, but I will check them out.
I could add a few more to your list.
I called the new EIP curve a regressive curve before hf21 and it's still regressive.
That list is a screenshot of the pending curation rewards exyle receives. All well known authors, and the list continues with known names. That's not curation, that's profit oriented voting, and it will keep steem down.
People with a big stake either start curating for real, or steem will never have a chance to appeal to the masses.
That makes sense. I missed the description the first time around.
I autovote, but I also check out all the posts I autovote and remove the ones that are undeserving. I also constantly adjust it.
I think people who do this should pledge to 'give away' 25% ~ 50% of votes to random people with decent content. I upvote a lot of people in #powerhousecreatives which is the curation group I'm part of. Let others be the judge and I'm not talking about voting the people who dance for you.
My stake is relatively small and I do trail vote a few large curation accounts as well. I can't manually curate and I think decent curators should have a % of my stake to dole out (I check a lot).
I'm trying to improve. The bigger guys should too. I guess it's better than circle voting.
I added the caption to make it less confusing after your first comment.
No need to justify what you do - this is a problem of the guys who could make a real difference setting a bad example. Still good that you put in some manual work of course ;)
I think we need to justify what we do.
Everyone should reflect on their actions monthly or weekly and justify what they do at least to themselves if not in a comment or post.
It doesn't matter how big accounts are, everyone should be accountable. I guess we should focus on trying to get the bigger guys to improve first, then work our way down. By the time you learn to set up autovotes, and figure out how to game curation, etc. I would say the Steem honeymoon is over and it's time to be better.
What no CAPS lock?
In my opinion this HF what made was worse. The activity has decreased considerably and the authors are demoralized. especially the small and talented accounts
I read another post, there was about self voting and the change is good against.
So is it now Bad or Good? What is with Smts on a later point? I think that can fix also the problem.
People in voting trails don't realize that they themselves are producing the high curation rewards for the one they follow.
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I did a few posts in the past on curation and when we had 25% curation reward and 30-minute reverse auction I found curation ranged from 12%-20% and most of the time around 16%. Many times below 6% when the reverse auction sent to the author instead of the pool.
While it is now 50% curation, most people will never get near 50%. There are so many auto votes and curation sniping going on. A lot of "Manual Curation" projects are actually just curation snipers voting at 4 minutes to popular authors.
I am not sure I agree with randomizing the order, there is still value to people who discover good content, but 5 minutes is a very small window for discovery and becomes vote before you read if it isn't automated already.
Also, consider people tend to support people not content, so many auto votes are set up to just support people they like (although I will agree most are likely just supporting where the money goes). It's one part of the curve I brought up prior to the hard fork as a side effect (in addition to low-value bid botting to raise your content to the part of the curve that meets or exceeds linear rewards).
You easily get to 50% by looking for posts with few votes. That makes your value drop extremely though.
What a stupid idea to revert the changes we implemented years ago to counter the autovotes.
I don't think any change we make will ever get us to perfect. We can only get close to ideal in each iteration. There is no question there are side effects we do not want in the recent changes but overall we are close to where we want to be.
That being said, I have a love/hate relationship with the curve part of the changes.
There was consensus once that we need to make small imcremental changes to see the effects. Free downvotes, maybe combined with the 50/50, would have brought us the same positive effects we see now.
I dont know where you want to be, but I dreamt of a platform where new participants can at least compete on equal grounds. The threshold is wayyy to high, and everyone affected by it said it before. They were ignored, because those who can make the decision have the stake to actually profit from it. I cant find any love for the curve favoring the bigger stakeholders again.
I was also never keen on the curve change: I'd prefer it to have remained linear.
But, IMO, this wasn't necessarily a change driven by the largest stakeholders.
It's true that kevin and traf were proposing a somewhat strong nonlinear curve (and I don't really consider them "large stakeholders") but that was mostly rejected. The current curve is mostly the brainchild of Michael, who while he's technically a large stakeholder, I don't think he even curates, so I think accusations based on desire for more income aren't fair in that case. I think it was done with an honest intent to improve things, although I do agree that the overall result was a less than ideal outcome. But if we reach a consensus on that, I assume it's not too difficult to revert to linear.
I fully agree! I do not think it was with bad intentions as many claim, to make the whales more powerful or screw over minnows. That's just an (expected but ignored) consequence.
I didn't expect my post to have much effect. Glad a discussion is going on, thank you so much for your feedback. I hope a consensus between the top witnesses is possible.
There will be no platform that new users have equal footing.
Success on social media is extremely difficult as it is ultra-competitive, Steem not as much due to the lack of active users. It is extremely hard to get noticed even on Steem with the handful of users we have that is the case. If we had 1M+ users it would be considerably more difficult and curation guilds would strive.
When you add money into it, it becomes more of a good old boys club and it is unavoidable as people tend to vote for people not content.
Perfect doesn't exist.
However, eliminating the financial incentive to mine Steem will eliminate the financial incentive to ignore more valuable aspects of society. Mike Tyson said Don King would sell his momma for a dollar. That is the kind of curation we can expect as long as folks like Don King are willing to degrade society for tokens.
There is no benefit to the platform from encouraging such actions. Capital gains alone create incentive to reward good content, exactly as the salaries of curators of museum collections do. DJs in the Fifties revealed that being availed financial incentives for curation results in profiteering. It was called Payola, and it's just mining cash: corruption of society for pay.
Since it's what you do, your business model, I am unsurprised to discover you are opposed to ending such corruption. Here's an idea: get a job and quit manipulating Steem content for money.
It's the right thing to do.
I would rather they were gone and people voted organically. But as long as that isn’t happening having me running a bid bot betters the platform as I have a slice of the sp used by bid bots and devote a large amount of times finding and stopping abuse and preventing them from using bid bots for garbage.
It isn’t perfect but we far from perfect.
Be the change you want to see in society. Apologia for profiteering falls flat on my ears. Kinder, gentler degradation is still degradation.
I didn’t apologize for anything you must have misread my comment.
Definition of apologia
: a defense especially of one's opinions, position, or actions
This post has been included in the latest edition of The Steem News - a compilation of the key news stories on the Steem blockchain.
This is the difference between actual curation, and mining Steem. It's why curation rewards actually degrade curation, and why I have long advocated eliminating such rewards. We are presented with a Steem mining mechanism that is called a social media platform, and the financial incentives reveal the actual purpose of the code.
For some reason, perhaps the global onslaught of censorship and proliferation of propaganda, some folks are using the Steem mining app incorrectly, focusing on content, engagement, and society rather than extracting tokens as the app was designed and intended to facilitate.
Who'da thunk it? It's like people have aspects of society they value more highly than tokens, like their moms. How can mom be worth more than money? You can't even trade her for a lambo!
Thanks!
The problem is, and always has been, stake-weighted voting. The two founders of Steem readily admitted that - with Ned acknowledging it has failed; and Dan going for a completely non-stake-weighted approach with Voice.
No matter what you do, whatever changes you make, the system will revert to lazy, circlejerk curation to reflect the rich people that control the platform. I do believe that HF21 is a marginal improvement in the short term, but it's insignificant compared to the endemic problems facing Steem. Replacing bidbots with circlejerk voting maybe a slightly less abysmal result, but it is still terrible.
The only way to fix Steem is a radical new approach, built from scratch.
There are lots of great ideas in the comments of that post, and although I don't remember the discussion I just saw that I upvoted many of them when they were written. Diminishing votes, a curve that gets flatter, limiting posts. All of those would be ways to better the system. Anything requiring big stakes to be spread. Instead, the recent changes went against the small guys and reintroduced favoring big stakes more and incentivizing them to collude. I don't get it, and there's nobody in the comments here who could explain on which problem exactly that part of the EIP is improving.
The stated reason for the regressive curve was to:
In practice, it was to combat bidbots, self-voting and other selfish behaviour from escaping detection, so they would be more visible to the stakeholders for downvoting.
But yes, of course, it goes against the minnows. My vote went down from $0.02 to $0.00.
That's my whole issue though. The underlying concept of stake-weighted voting is fundamentally flawed. Some things get better, others get worse, with every update. It might be a marginal improvement every time, but it's simply not enough. It's the definition of insanity to try small changes 21 (well, not really 21, but you know what I mean) different times but refuse to acknowledge and fix the actual problem once and for all. We need a radical new solution.
Sybil attack is real though. Dan introduced voice with the requirement for users to kyc themselves. That's no option imo.
Maybe I've been blind to it, but the problem with small accounts hiding in the noise didn't seem so big to me to shoot all minnows to solve it.
I agree, it does seem like an anti-social move to throw minnows under the bus.
And yes, sibyl attack is real. Dan's solution is KYC, Ned's solution was SMT + oracles. I hope someone comes up with a better solution. Giving the rich all the power is not the solution.
Heh if the difference between honest curation and profit maximization curation is 10% vs 18%, it's already shrunk considerably from pre EIP where honest curation was making maybe 1/4 that of vote selling or bid botting.
Curation is a zero sum game, once better tools are available and profit maximizing curators attempt to undercut each other, it should balance out over time. Some of the free downvotes will likely over time find their way towards over rewarded authors too. This process will take time as right now outright voting selling and circle jerking is still rampant and are absorbing all the free downvotes.
Big bid bots like smartsteem and OCDB recently just switched to curation. OCDB is completely manual I think. Whatever profit maximization curation is, it beats the shit out of straight up vote selling. And it's hard to say if in the long term it's a bad thing at all. We want people to be rewarded for curation. We want it to be competitive vs vote selling.
Ultimately, vote selling/circle jerking etc gets you nearly 100% of your voting value back and curation 50%. We want the downvotes to keep the former in check so eventually most users settle for the latter. Everyone polices each other to keep the place honest.
When linear was introduced it took over a year for things to get really bad. We're only 2 weeks in after EIP. Maybe it'll fail, I don't know, but it seems way premature to call it.
Staying at linear would have resulted in even less difference, while not hurting the bigger part of the userbase.
I had issues with that part of the EIP from the start, and I saw many many comments of those who are now affected who said they don't like the idea, without being taken into account.
Going to linear was a right step imo. It was done for exactly the issue which is now reintroduced. (I also think the 30 minute reverse auction was good. Could've been even longer.) When the blatant abusers stop eventually, we'll then have to downvote honest users because their voters maximize? You, me, blocktrades, the people on the list up there? I would have serious issues pushing the downvote button for any of them! I would have preferred to stay vigilant and identify smaller circles "hiding in the noise". Way too much collateral damage with the way that was chosen.
To be clear, I like the rest of the EIP. It's only that part that bothers me, but it does a lot.
I'm somewhat indifferent to the reverse auction timer being shorter. Maybe a case could be made for it being longer, but there are trade offs here, though nothing seriously major either way.
Convergent linear forces all profitable behavior into the light to be scrutinized by all. That's it's only intended effect, and it's a big one. You can't downvote what you can't detect in a cost effective, efficient manner. Imagine if we're otherwise in an environment where people are voting honestly, but over time an increasing proportion of stake are using a thousands of dynamic clusters of accounts to give themselves 0.04 here, 0.07 there in countless comment spam. Without the curve these would all be 'profitable' self voting that's hard to detect and will siphon rewards out of the pool until very little is being used for honest curation. Why would I curate honestly for 50% of voting rewards when I can just siphon back almost 100% of it in hard to combat micro spam?
Yes this has the unintended effect of hurting real content and comments under a certain threshold. It's basically a tax on low payouts but there's no other way to stop the above described abuse.
Vote selling, self voting, circle jerking etc are all content indifferent behavior that attempt to extract 100% of the voting rewards. Content indifferent behavior completely undermines the POB system where voting in accordance to one's honest appraisal of content is a must. It's up to the rest of us to keep such abusive behavior in line to bring their profits down using our downvotes so they don't out compete curation. Otherwise, if you can get much higher voting rewards selling votes, why honestly curate or delegate to honest curation?
That's basically the idea. It took a long time for it to all go to shit, it might take a while for it to correct itself again, assuming the EIP is broadly sound. I can't promise it'll definitely get us there, but for something 2 weeks in, it's not looking too bad. OCDB, Smartsteem, bernie, myself, switching sides. Haejin on lockdown. Bid bots businesses falling. Initial signs look ok.
Still a shit load of vote selling and circle jerking etc, but the more people switching sides now that curation is more attractive, the stronger our chances. More robust curation initiatives and downvote tools are still being developed. We're still reeling from the price fall. All things considered we have to fight for honest curation being the dominant behavior on this platform and there are some positive signs.
Theoretical comment spam like you described could be fought with automation pretty effectively imo. Once a farm is detected with the help of a relational database and some sophisticated analysis algorithm, the farm is done, and the cost to set up a large number of accounts puts a huge risk on starting an effort like that. Even with the relatively low account creation cost right now.
Imo shooting all small users because of that possible scenario is the wrong approach.
Also, the scenario you described doesn't need a threshold of an equivalent of currently ~3$
I made a small test. My 13k SP vote adds 6c to a 0$ post, but 24c to one with 30$. Raising the rewards for the big one in return lowers the rewards of the small ones. I will not like this ever. Going to linear was good.
Convergent linear should be very close to a 50-60% tax at the lowest end
From the graphs, it was like -40% value right at the start, and +20% at the peak
I don't know if detecting low level profitable farms is as you as you say. Keeping in mind many downvotes are in the hands of unsophisticated people. Put it this way, imagine Steem was $15 and there's ample incentive to try as hard as you possibly can in sophisticated ways to vote farm while avoiding detect. Making multiple seed accounts, then spamming RC to create more accounts from those seed accounts, then spreading them into clusters with only minor overlap, but moving funds and votes in a way that's dynamic, with comments being a combination of AI and generic messages in a foreign language etc.
Basically imagine you tried your hardest, or even someone considerably more technically sophisticated tried their hardest to evade detection under linear, and compare it to under convergent linear. I'd bet the former would be far more elusive.
Remember, n^2 was someone with 1000x your stake got a vote 1,000,000 your weight. Compared to that, this is nothing.
Also, I believe over time, as your curation project gathers more momentum, it'll easily break out of the starting part of the curve.
I mean, just look at the comments of minnows here and elsewhere. They hate the whole EIP because of this part.
They say we won't onboard the masses like that, and I fully agree. All efforts to fight abusers don't help when all the saved rewards go to the top instead.
There is no enthusiasm for it to be found on the base, the only ones defending it are the ones not affected.
Steem at 15$ would bring the threshold to 300$? I don't want to imagine that.
All data is public, who created which accounts and where funds move. It just has to be done, we have the minds here to set it up.
With this carpet bombing approach we disincentivize new people even more. They don't have the reach, which is perfectly normal, but then they get penalized for it. Even if my project and others get over the threshold (which would require several millions in delegations when we keep up the amount of curation we do right now - besides that I'm not viewing it as our problem mainly, but a problem for the platform as a whole), small users will never feel like their voice matters unless they follow the big ones.
👍👍👍
curated at 4:57
XD
That was an interesting read, post and comments. When manual curation is brought up it seems that people only think of the big accounts. I am by no means a big account. I am hoping one day to be thought of as a big account but that day is far into the future. Being not a big account I don't need to worry about how much I reward a post, I have a long way to go before I ever hit the double digits above the decimal point. right now may on a good day $0.018 vote worth. That make manual curation for me easy. 20-25 votes a day, some time more if I am doing a 25% vote run. Big accounts have a bigger problem, they need to find a lot of things to vote on.
Vote trails and bots can be a little bit iffy when it comes to finding manually curated post. Even as a small account some post I vote on just to support the Author, and may or may not have read the post, it could be a shit post for all I know, but I do look and see if not that particular post at least every other day to make sure they did not go to hell in a hand basket and start taking the easy street to money lane.
I offer to any who want a few post that I feel are quality to take a look at my comments tab. If I left a comment, that means I found something worth my time. Following who I vote for is a wasted effort, following who someone else voted for is a wasted effort. Curation is supposed to be about things the user found useful, meaningful or enjoyable.
Talk to Asher @abh12345, he is good with steem data. Have him set up a comment trail from his curation league. This comment curation trail would show post that were commented on in the course of the last three days,with multiple comments and positive votes, not negative ones. This would indicate post that people thought were worthy of votes and comments, so above the average vote only recipient. This gives people a chance to find comment and vote on things they liked. Three days later use that list to go and reward the post authors.
One down side would be that a lot of popular authors as you noted above would be on that list, but there would also be smaller accounts on that list. Manual curation does not need to be an individual account looking for and finding everything on their own, this comment curation trail idea I think could work for some of those large SP holders that want to help grow playing field and not shrink it down into a small lump of coal.
Cry me a river. Honestly. Based on what I saw, you've been inactive on any of the EiP development. Just jumped onto the train when it left the gate with curangel. And now, since these changes are seemingly not perfect (duh) you write this post about how everything is going to shit, because people rather earn more money by auto curation, than to delegate to your project. Are you seriously complaining about the nature of human beings, wanting the best for themselves?
Auto curation is far better than bid-bot delegation or anything else in that matter. Especially, considering that people can downvote these auto-curated posts. Have you actually thought about the posibility, that Proof of Brain might not ever work the way you want it to be? If you still believe that it could work better, then please, for the love of Steem, come up with a way to fix it! Because what you're doing right now, is NOT helping. It's not difficult to find the flaws in things and complain. Everybody can do that and that's usually what everyone does. But less than 0.1% come up with solutions and I actually hoped you were part of these 0.1%.
Well, you obviously don't see everything. I took part in the discussion and mentioned my concern earlier.
My project plays a minor role in this, I don't care how many delegations it receives and would prefer people to curate themselves. It's a band aid, not a business.
Way to fix it is easy, mentioned in the post and explained in the extensive discussions here (as everything else I just replied to you, or could add. Everything's been said the last days, and I'm actually done with the topic).
Well it definitely works to Upvote Minnows original content (who also happen to get a big OCD or Blocktrades Upvote) since you are typically only 1 of maybe 20 people who vote on the post so your share of the 50% Curation reward is greater.... the whales are getting 500 votes so your vote on their posts is a complete waste of time.
I never liked EIP and still don't. It hurts the authors and now you're showing us we're reverting to a previous state of things.
Though roi is small by voting those who are striving to get $0.02 in rewards, I am still curating my minnow countrymen using #philippines as it gives them hope to push on because I believe that the Philipines community matters in the long run. While powering down to take care of some medical concerns, I hope to power it back up once done with all these unfortunate events.
yeap yeap... that's exactly what I said before the fork dropped... while it might help curb the use of bid-bots... it will just favour trail-bots instead. Especially the combination of the curve with the reduced curation-competition timeframe of five minutes... well... we're lucky we even got the 5 minutes instead of the 1 minute they had planned for... talk about "reading" a post and curating "good content" with less than a minute to decide... pffft.
I do understand some of the reasoning behind the EIP and some of it makes a lot of sense. The implementation however will probably just shift the farming for ROI into different avenues and quality content and discovery still doesn't really matter too much... well, quality is subjective anyways, right?!
Well... the inflation has to go somewhere, and if it's not going towards a wider adoption, the tokens value pays the price. The way forward is certainly challenging. I've heard discussions about hardforking out the proof-of-brain mechanism completely after SMTs and Communities have been established. Leave the proof-of-brain and content side of things to new smart tokens and the communities behind them while STEEM would become the underlying transaction token, no longer mine-able through content... It sounds drastic, but the concept doesn't sound too bad imho.
you finally wrote it - it's either we grow and the opposite of it is die .. growth or wither .. just like gardening ;)
darn it .. that curangel curating team seems to be getting flagged now it's almost vanishing so less hope for the minnows
Flagging the curangel compilations for revenge is great! We don't need the rewards to do our work, and they spend their voting power. All good :D
Congratulations @pharesim!
You raised your level and are now a Whale!
Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!
Hope you used an angry voice for that.
🤣😂