We are actively looking for ways to reduce whale influence and bad behavior. So far the best solution we have identified is to remove curation rewards all together. The existence of curation rewards does the following for whales:
- encourages reckless voting because the rate of return on voting on random comments is very high for the whale. Effectively, the whale spends $100 of community money and pockets $25. The $75 cost is socialized, but the $25 is privatized.
- the probability of being early on popular "good" content and getting an even higher rate of return is not higher than the "sure thing" of any random thing a whale could vote on.
- any attempt to impose per-account caps will result in sybil attacks
- good whales must vote as prolifically as evil whales or the evil whales will overcome them.
- any attempt to implement stake delegation for voting purposes is disincentivized by the curation reward algorithm unless curation rewards propagate back. This backward propagation is both difficult to implement and ultimately irrelevant considering points 2.
In other words, the curation reward system may be fundamentally broken and should be discarded. Once the curation rewards are discarded, then whales face no opportunity cost by not voting.
Why should I hold Steem power if you are going to nerf it?
Because profit?
Steem Power can affect the value of the awards for your post each vote
@dantheman, have you considered the idea of lending SP from the whales to the dolphins?
A whale could lend some of his SP (and take it back any time he wants) to a high-reputation dolphin and let her do some of the curation on his behalf. The curation rewards could be then split equally between the dolphin and the whale.
Dan actually did a post on this yesterday:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@dantheman/follow-up-to-people-rank-algorithm-for-better-curation-rewards
That was my understanding of this post he wrote the other day
i thought of this also while i was driving, even before seeing your post. I was thinking of loans in order to help curation and spread rewards around better. It would be voluntary, of course, based on trust. And it could be revoked by the whale at any time.
Creation rewards need to be higher for the lower steam power levels and lower for the higher steam power levels - a gradually decreasing scale from the highest SP or vests on the network to the lowest.
Right now I there is not enough incentive to actively curate content.
I think even the power at which whales can boost posts should be lowered slightly and minnows increased slightly.
Interesting...
This won't work, because whales will create a lot of accounts.
This will not work. I'm approached (mostly by unsolicited chat PMs) nearly every day by authors who want to pay me for my votes.
In fact, to some extent, objective evidence of this can be seen clearly on the blockchain by looking at any whale's wallet. Unsolicited payments attempting to buy votes are received constantly. Often these are 0.001 but sometimes they are higher. If higher payments are more effective then we will see more higher payments. These are unsolicited payments, but even without any explicit agreement, those sending the payments can continue sending them to the whales who comply.
Voting power has a value and a market will form. At the high end the amounts at stake are high enough that transactional barriers to such a market become insignificant.
Removing curation rewards has more effect on the middle and lower end where it reduces engagement and any opportunity for voters to be compensated for their contribution (since transaction barriers impede a side-payment market) than at the high end where money and power will always find their equilibrium regardless of the blockchain rules.
I think you are really on to something here. If curation rewards are removed, it removes the incentive to vote on content that other people find valuable. Voting will become little more than a way of distributing funds to authors. It would open the floodgates for abuse and bribery.
If you're worried about whales not voting in a way that benefits the platform, why would you eliminate one of the primary mechanisms for ensuring that they do so?
Do the curation rewards include the value of the voter's own upvote? If it does, that should be changed before ever considering the removal of curation rewards entirely. Average users appreciate curation rewards, and taking them away removes an incentive to engage with the platform. But typical users don't really benefit much from the 25% of their own vote, which is at best a penny or two.
This can't really be done without incentivizing SP splitting and other manipulative games. If my vote doesn't benefit from the effect of my vote, then I will vote first with a small account, then with the larger one. The smaller account would benefit from the effect of the larger account instead of the (now-disallowed) larger account benefiting from itself.
It helps to think of a large account as being a whole collection of imaginary small accounts (say 1 SP each) that happen to be working together. Changes that try to put caps or limits on the ability of one account to fully benefit from its SP will encourage people to make these into actual small accounts.
Even coalescing all votes from a single IP into one pool wouldn't prevent this exploit; proxy services are common enough.
yeah, whole can of worms trying to track whos got what sockpuppets.
Oh man.... hopefully you can find a better solution. Curation was a big selling point for me joining as I'm sure many others as well...
Honest question:
If we get rid off curation rewards what would be the incentive to buy steem?
my guess is that you can still earn by posting and commenting. And that your weight in Steem Power would still proportionally move posts and comments higher. Am I wrong? Not sure but I hope that this is the case!
I wonder about that, too. For me this was a crucial element of the platform logic. If someone invests time in careful and responsible content curation then this should be incentivized. At least in a system in which posters get rewarded by exactly such curation efforts.
Speculative reasons: the guess that some may have made by now that the value of Steem coins/power/mist whatever the unit is called might grow just like Bitcoin and that investing a grand into Steem now regardless of any curation or posting rewards might return a nice 10 grand or another very profitable number. I think whether or not curation rewards become discarded, and whether or not interest even becomes discarded the mere fact that 10 Steem coins may become worth 10 BTC sometime in the future is a very integral part of providing incentive to ensure the Steem community grows healthy
If curation rewards are removed, surely large holders still have content visibility control as an incentive. Maybe this isn't such a bad thing and can be considered more of a balancing act. As dan said, the curation system may be fundamentally broken when large holders can game the system not for the benefit of the system but for private gain.
As for answers to your question, I think the incentive to buy steem still remains, except just one fractional aspect of the incentive would be gone. People will still buy it for the ability to make steem denominated interest at a rate higher than else where, they will also retain the content visibility voting power, whether or not this is important to them i don't know. And of course, the speculators will continue to speculate.
I am but a minnow who can't afford to buy steem. I am not incentivised to curate for profit because as a minnow there is barely a profit. And that's how it should be for a minnow.
But for those who have steem, such as the dolphins, the end of curation rewards I believe would be the end of steemit. And without the dolphins steemit isn't very promising for the minnows either.
There has to be another solution and thank you @dantheman for putting the issues here for everybody to brainstorm on.
There may be holes in my suggestion as I know that @steemit holds the majority stake of steemit.
But I'll throw it here just in case you haven't thought of it yet.
First of all I think the proposal you made in your last post about proxy vests for friends is going to massively improve the platform building lots of dolphins who can help with future bad behaviour.
Currently the more SP you have the more you accumulate from curating content. You say that per account caps will result in sybil attacks and since I'm not very techy maybe my suggestion doesn't get passed that either.
What if curators with higher SP could get higher curation rewards only up to a point? Such as a 3% stake of all steem or even 1% once this is further distributed
Would this prevent a 'whale-gone-rogue' from overcoming others as to remain vote-active on the platform they would have to remain below whatever SP that % is at at any given time?
@dantheman give half of the curation voting power and rewards to the 99%. Also give 20% of the new steem created each day to the newbies that are actively using steemit. The more active they are the more they get paid. We also need a direct bank link or a very least a paypal connection. So the masses of none crypto users can get in. The social media Butterflies
I hope you find a better solution !
@dantheman if we turf curation rewards, we go back to the reddit system where users still upvote a post or a comment because they like it. But higher ranked posts and higher ranked comments are still going to earn Steem Power and Steem Dollars... correct? I think that would break the entire system if that was also turfed. Keep that and you can still keep the motto 'Blogging is the New Mining'.
These are sensible points @dantheman but I would think about that carefully though before making such a drastic change.
I'm not sure what the rate of voting is vs the rate of posting. I suspect removing curation rewards completely might cause a significant reduction in the number of people voting.
There is already a perception that many people just "post" and leave.
Again I don't have the data with regards to that but it makes sense that when people are taking a lot of time and effort making a post they will have limited time to curate content.
There needs to be some kind of encouragement for curation.
One possible alternative I have considered is that curation grants a "posting reward". What I mean by this is that everyone must curate a certain number of posts before they can post their own.
Obviously this could have it's own potential problems in that people could just start randomly voting on content to simply get to necessary amount of curation in order to post. It would also penalise people who are more picky and selective in their voting. Perhaps you can think of a way to make this more viable.
Anyway it might be useful if you did a separate full post on the curation issue.
That way the community might also be able to help in coming up with a workable solution. The more people looking at the problem the greater the likelihood it can be successfully be solved.
Maybe adding more stats to curation rewards and having how well you have done curating affect your reputation score?
I think this is cause authors get ~70% of the rewards while commenters and curators are left with less, if we could maybe go down to 50% for author, 30% curation and 20% comments, it would give people more incentive to comment on posts they can relate to.
Currently I don't see how commenters have incentive to comment with more quality content on related posts except for hoping many happen to read it and vote on it. In the cases of not even the author replying or giving a vote to commenters who took a lot of time to contribute, its really sad to see happening.
Edit: I just wanted to add to what I quoted, that I spend a lot of time here and I see a lot of authors, doing their 4 hit posts a day, going afk with 99% voting power and a couple people followed while having many followers. Leaves a certain un-personal trace after their articles and makes it look like its just a magazine you are reading now with random titles and content.
Edit 2: we really need an edit indication with a timestamp at least, would make edits a lot less confusing.
I agree and I'm more likely to upvote authors who I see active in comments and voting. If I don't see that, I consider the posts to be more "hit and run" or worse press releases and do not constitute quality engagement for the platform and in some cases I might even downvote it.
I don't think we need special incentives for comments as that will attract spam, but we do need to pay attention to who is adding value and who is doing hit-and-run. I do agree that the low value of curation rewards is part of the problem both for engagement and the value of STEEM (I objected to cutting them from 50% to 0-25% and I object to cutting them to 0% as Dan mentioned is being considered).
Isn't the possibility to allocate funds itself already a big enough incentive to vote? Currently with many big accounts not using their voting power, effectively you get nearly twice your money to distribute to good content of your choice. What do you want more?
Currently many people are just voting to get the curation reward, not because they necessarily like to support the post. Also the curation reward algorithm is so complex, that not many will understand it.
We could give the saved money from the curation reward to fully verified accounts. This would help greatly to encourage newcomers to participate at steemit. More on how this could look like please see my other comment below.
Up Vote for the curation rewards lol but good point, being able to vote on the allocation of generated funds is definitely also an incentive in itself.
" reward to fully verified accounts"
We need to be making crypto-currency (and anything dealing with it, such as this platform) more private/anonymous, not less.
verifying accounts does not mean, that all accounts need to be verified. it just means, that you get an universal income if you have a verified account. nothing should stop you to create 100+ unverified accounts.
I agree. When I first found Steemit my first impression was that voting rewards should probably be removed. I think it could also help make bots less successful. I think bots have their place but it wouldn't be good if they amass too much SP for too little effort. I'm also worried that too many people will be sour if curation is removed.
Can't the whale just create a few alternate IDs that are commenting on threads and then upvoting them? In this way these IDs will get 100$ out of 100$.
i think users should flag other people only if their content it's a spam or a stolen content and not because you dont like the post... that will take away the freedom of speech
Dan -
I don't think it's necessarily a flaw with curating, but more of an issue with the whales that are curating. It seems that many of them are voting on posts for the express purpose of making money, not for seeking and rewarding quality.
There appears to be a feedback loop consisting of trending topic and whale voting, then an influx of other voters jumping in to "ride the whale," so to speak, in order to try to get some of the curating rewards. You can even see some of the attempts at preemption from dolphins and minnows. A post less than a minute old can have four or five pages worth of content, but already have upwards of 10-20 votes.
The whales should probably start seeking better quality content if they want a viable platform for the long haul. That's going to involve passing on the easy cash and spending more time searching new and obscure contributors. The question is whether or not the whales that don't currently do that are willing to do so.
"but already have upwards of 10-20 votes."
I see this less as trying to ride the whale and more "these people voting are fairly new and have no idea about the 30-minute rule".
You're bringing in people who have been trained, through other platforms, to click "Like", the "Up" arrow, or the "Thanks" button whenever they appreciate the content, agree with the content, or find the content funny...and then they move on to the next post.
So that's what they're doing,
Discounting all the bots, of course.
My point was that there's no way they could have read the content within the first minute. They're just upvoting based on prior earnings by the author. And there's no doubt that they don't understand the 30-minute rule. They just think that they'll be getting rewarded, apparently.
yeah in current model good whales have to "work" to protect network, so not onyl they helped STEEM raise by holding SP but now they are full time employees :)
I feel like this is also connected to scalability. Being one of the curators I find it extremely difficult to curate these days because there is too much content. That way I changed to focus on virtual curation by early supporting posts with money. Whales being good or bad make the 90% curation of content anyways also the popularity of certain users does the same. I feel scaling down author rewards, curation rewards, and influence where it would mean one user for example 10 cents for upvoting and 1 cent for curation or something like that would be fair and could settle things down. Then payout for curation may be multiplied by someone's vests and created steem divided. This might help thing out.
Removing Curation rewards... It removes incentive to sort or seek good content. And whales are meant to be small in numbers. We need more Dolphins and smaller active voters. to help sort posts. Also one good dolphin downvote. Should hinder whale misbehaveing. Dolphins UNITE! Followed by smaller accounts etc...
I agree, more power should be in the hands of the dolphins.
I offered a solution aimed at engaging dolphins more actively in the curation process:
https://steemit.com/steemit-ideas/@innuendo/a-smart-contract-for-a-one-off-whale
Isn't curation rewards essential to the core of the system? Why would anyone want to hold large amounts of steem power, if they do not have more curation power that comes with it? Why would anyone want to buy steem?
Interest.
Very interesting idea. It would definitely change things. The main question is - would people still upvote and curate content if there was no curation reward?
Yes, upvote (we know this because it happens on every other site with no rewards) but no there won't be any real curation. Voting will be done very superficially, likely based on what is already trending, written by well-known authors, written by their friends, or has paid promotion behind it.
No one will invest in combing through dozens and hundreds of crap posts and poor authors to find the few good but unknown ones. If you think it is hard for quality content from independent authors to get noticed and rewarded today, it is nothing compared to a system without curation rewards.
I think this is already happening. Voters seem to just be preempting posts from trendy writers posting in trending topics. And those voters include many whales. Plenty of quality content is already being completely ignored and there's usually not a whale in sight when it happens...because they're still voting the steemit tags and whatever new social media celebrity joins the platform.
If the voting needs to change, the whales need to take the lead on it. I could give you a few posts myself to look at. This could be a valuable platform doing some really great things. But many of the people trying to make it great are essentially being pushed to the point of non-existence because of simply quicker opportunities for money/power grabs. It's unfortunate.
simple: when a whale does a "like" on a crap post that makes no money, charge the whale.
That is, have a negative payout minimum for curation awards, so there is a risk to random upvoting.
im probably wasting my time bringing it up, but what about simply using some non linear, non exponent method of weighting steem power to votes.
Im not talking about 1-man-1-vote. something like RMS, or based on a standard deviation from the mean... Well maybe from the median because the megawhales screw up the mean, but you get my point.
I get that early investors/adopters should have more influence, but can't it "just" be 500 or 1000 times more influence than the guy who invests 10k in steem power. I get that you have sweat equity but seriously that much sweat?
OK, maybe im just dense, but i don't understand what makes an evil whale evil. Because what it seems like is "evil" is just code for someone voting in a way that you don't like.
Isn't the whole point of having a vote that there isnt some controlling force to "punish" you for using in a way that others deem "unacceptable".
The primary concern I am reading is that this would disincentive voting, but as @acidyo pointed out below, there are already many users not voting. The curation incentive is a nice addition, but I agree in that I don't think it is 100% necessary. I'm no economist, but as a user, removing it wouldn't really bother me. I would be happier knowing that whales aren't gaming the system than make a couple more pennies with my votes.
I wrote an article on the same topic a day or so ago, but with a different proposed solution. Perhaps it is way off-base or perhaps it may spark some new idea: https://steemit.com/steemit/@captainpicard/a-controversial-way-to-fix-steemit-whales-will-hate-this
Random voting could be made ineffective by weighting rewards against future success of postings. You only get a curation reward if the articles you voted for do better than random in the end. Just an idea, perhaps it could be made to work.
I think I have a solution, please consider it.
https://steemit.com/steem/@wizwom/splitting-flags-and-votes
What about only removing curation rewards on comments? That seems lik It fixes the problem you describe while still incentivizing useful content curation behavior on posts instead of comments.