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RE: Witness consensus status to fix the actual steem’s economic flows (ENG)

in #witness-category6 years ago

Today that may be true, with a 50/50 split a reward of $100.00 vs a reward 0f $10.00, that is not going to likely be the case if a person is looking for curation rewards. People think the 50/50 will kill bid bots out right, that is also not likely to happen. There are people out there that are all about the "look at me look at me", bernie and that youtube serial quitter guy, damn can't think of his name, the not so swift self serving video guy.

The other thing I do not see it preventing is the self vote, add on the desire to cut the curation time down

The curation window shall be reduced from 15 minutes to 3

So how is this going to cause a large account to think twice about self voting at 3 minutes.

When it comes to curation, unless the curators with big pockets are willing to upvote a small account at a very large percentage, then no one else will be voting on it. So a vote on a two cent post is not going to get a real curation reward verses voting on a one hundred dollar post. Curation trails and votes are not about content, it is about money and how much a person can make, from the content of another person. If no one else votes on a piece of content you vote, then you are not going to get a very good curation reward no matter how good of quality the post is. It boils down to "Name Recognition", just like in any other aspect of voting in real life. If you have never heard of Joe Shmoe you are not going to vote for him.

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I don't doubt that there will people who continue to use upvote bots as you say for reasons like you mention. But at least they will have to pay more out of their own pocket to do it (there will be higher economic costs for such behavior as they won't get most of their payment back as author rewards).

The 15 minute rule to 3 minute rule change isn't about changing self-voting. I think it's completely neutral on that point. It's mostly about saving people from losing their curation rewards because they don't know about the 15 minute rule.

New users generally won't know this rule and even a decent number of active users probably don't understand it. Even if they do, they probably don't want to wait 15 minutes to optimize their curation rewards. This kind of PITA makes you not want to bother with getting curation rewards. With it taking so much effort to get them, a lot of people stop worrying about trying to get them and just "pile-on" vote on already popular posts.

Self-voting is potentially decreased by enabling you to profit more by voting for someone else's post versus self-voting. I say "potentially" because it will only "work" if people understand the new rules enough to act in their own economic interest. And we can't be sure that these new rules will be a sufficient economic incentive to reduce self-voting even if people do understand the new rules, so it is really an experiment.

The last portion of what you said isn't correct. You don't get more curation rewards just for voting for a post that has more reward on it already (unless you're talking about compared to voting for a post that falls under the special "dust vote" case). This is one of those misunderstandings of the rules that I'm talking about that could render many rule changes moot.

Curation is one of those hard things to understand. So if I am the first person to vote on a post at the fifteen minute mark and make the payout of the post $0.30 and 19 more people vote on the post raising it to $2.00, I will get the same payout curation reward wise if I am the 10th voter on a post that has 20 voters and the payout is $20.00?

Any way, I am sure you have a lot more important things to work on, understanding and a place to find the rules and how things work on steemit is not an easy thing to do, most responses from witnesses are "it's on git-hub" "go look at git-hub", The FAQ for steemit is not really a very good tool, and does a pretty poor job of explaining things. There is no centralized help system because steemit is a de-centralized blockchain. Go to get hub or to steemit-chat or discord chat. That is almost everyone's answer to any question from a person with no programing or crypto experience. Thus a lot of confusion for the "simple" users, such as myself, and the seemingly stupid questions or misunderstood answers from those such as myself.

from a person with no programing or crypto experience.

Reason why you should always look at the big picture. Your arguments have their merits and no one said bidbots are gonna die or peeps will stop self-voting. No.

The original point of this argument was to have a system where there will be very little difference between self-voting / delegating to bidbots and voting on other people's works.

50/50 does that. If the profit resides with bidbots, stakeholders will delegate to them. But if the profit resides with both bidbots and normal posts, stakeholders will at least think twice about what brings more value to Steem in the long term!

50/50 doesn't get to the point where there is little difference between self voting and curating. Self voting still gets 100% while curating only gets 50%. But it narrows the gap a lot from the current 100% vs. 25%. The idea is that along with other changes (especially cheaper downvotes) this is enough to achieve a balance.

Sorry for the delay answering, I missed your reply until now somehow.

I totally agree with you on the lack of documentation and I think it's a serious issue. I can't even fully answer your original question, because I don't know the exact algorithm and I haven't had the time to go delving through the code for it either.

And this isn't just an "academic" question: with users unable to know how the system rewards them, they generally come up with some guesses and react accordingly. If those guesses are wrong, even a system with finely tuned incentives probably won't work very well.

It is like playing a used computer game you bought with no rules or rule book, you just start plugging away and hope for a good outcome. There are no "cheat" codes available for the players. You try something it works you think that is the answer, then someone comes and tells you "your wrong", but not what or how you are wrong, just your wrong. It helps when people explain why someone is wrong in their thinking or observations, with out that they will just continue to be wrong with out knowing why.

Hey @blocktrades and @beshadow I was reading through these comments and just randomly thought I would drop in and give a few thoughts.

I also had a ton of questions as far as curation rewards are concerned, especially post HF20.. Right after the fork, I spent a lot of time testing and scratching my head on exactly how curation rewards work on the blockchain and how you can predictably measure your earnings and potential earnings given a set of different variables and circumstances.

I happened upon a discovery that made me so happy... It's a post made by @miniature-tiger. Although it was made 1 year ago, most of it still applies (except for the window being 15 minutes now instead of 30). I recommend you go check it out, it gets pretty technical, but I have yet to see anyone explain and distill it in such an easy to understand way as miniature-tiger does! (https://steemit.com/curation/@miniature-tiger/an-illustrated-guide-to-curation-from-the-simple-to-the-complex-with-real-examples-from-past-posts-part-2)

Here's an excerpt that I think may help answer your original question:

Screen Shot 2018-10-28 at 4.09.57 PM.png

The left hand column (anchored by the blue square) represents the amount of the curation rewards for the curation hound. Each area the size of the blue square is $0.25 worth of curation rewards, generated by $1.00 of upvote. For each successive colour it makes no difference to this example whether one upvoter adds all of the additional post payout or whether it is split between a large number of upvoters.

The milestone increases in curation that we are aiming to derive are as follows:

  • Blue: The curation hound adds the first $1.00 to the post payout and at this point would receive all of the curation rewards of $0.25. Their curation weight is √1 - 0 = 1 (the curation weights are based on rshares in practice but here we have scaled them down to the level of the upvotes for simplicity).
  • Green: The post payout needs to increase to 4x the original upvote in order for the reward paid to the curation hound to double from 25% of upvote to 50%. At this point the post payout is $4.00, the total curation reward is $1.00, and the weight share for the first upvoter is 1/2 giving a curation reward of $0.50.
  • Yellow: The post payout needs to increase to 9x the original upvote in order for the reward paid to the curation hound to treble from 25% of upvote to 75%. At this point the post payout is $9.00, the total curation reward is $2.25, and the weight share for the first upvoter is 1/3 giving a curation reward of $0.75.
  • Orange: The post payout needs to increase to 16x the original upvote in order for the reward paid to the curation hound to quadruple from 25% of upvote to 100%. At this point the post payout is $16.00, the total curation reward is $4.00, and the weight share for the first upvoter is 1/4 giving a curation reward of $1.00.

These figures are intuitive once we consider that the curation reward curve is a square root curve such that each linear increase in curation rewards requires the square of that increase in post payout.

I hope that helps! This obviously gets a lot more complicated as other voters/curation window get added to the mix, but I've run some field tests and have found the calculations to be both useful and on target.

Thanks, that is helpful, but on it's own it doesn't fully answer his question, since I'm not sure what the rewards wind up being for the "10th voter out of 20 case".

My bad @blocktrades, I should've addressed his question more directly lol. This made me do a much deeper dive than I intended to, but here goes. I may have gone slightly overboard with this, but it started as some back of the envelope calculations and now I've come up with the following chart. It should shed light on his specific question and case study of being the 10th voter out of 20.

Please note that @beshadow did not mention the value of the votes that came in the 9 votes preceding his 10th, thus I assumed it as being $5 for this example. You can input whatever number you like and the calculations will play out accordingly - the greater the value of the votes preceding yours, the less your curation reward will be.

Another note: as I mentioned before, it doesn't matter if 100 people vote before you or if 3 people vote before you or if 1 person votes before you. The only thing that matters is the value of the vote(s) preceding yours

you may have to zoom in on your browser to see the image. Otherwise right click and copy image address and open in your browser:

Screen Shot 2018-10-28 at 11.51.10 PM.png

To verify my the math on these charts, example #1 uses the equations of #2 and #3 and applies them to the example provided by @miniature.tiger in his post that I linked in my first comment.

As you can see, example #1 hits the exact same result as miniature.tiger's chart, so we've verified that the equations are actually correct ;)

Screen Shot 2018-10-28 at 11.32.34 PM.png


Conclusion

It's a very steep downward curve when it comes to not being the first voter.

If you vote on a post that is already at $5 with a $0.30 vote, and the post still goes up 4x in value to $20 after your vote, you won't make much Curation Reward at all.

However, if you're the first one who votes on a post with $0.30 and then the post goes up to $2 afterwards, you'll earn a Curation Reward that is equal to 65% the value of your original vote - a 40% increase from your original 25% curation reward.

Hi, I'm deeply concerned with the idea of a 50/50 reward scheme...

The numbers just don't add up. At least this not where we are supposed to be driving the platform. Please read this post, I would love to have your feedback on the subject.

Thanks for wasting 4 minutes of my life :-)

No, but seriously that's a lot of math for a simple conclusion: higher rewards from investors to non-investors will spread the stake faster.

If the goal is just to spread stake faster then it's easy: just increase the payouts/inflation rate to hyperinflation levels, and it'll spread really fast.

And everyone holding Steem will sell it as soon as possible to find an investment that makes sense. Steem value will drop precipitously and ultimately the payouts will become worthless in real value.

I understand that perspective, it will be true if and only if the value of the Steem asset will be the investors' funds locked on the platform as SP or something else... but the reason for any investor to buy Steem is because of the user base that is incentivized to join and stay on the platform.

Why would any be interested in that? I dunno, it depends on the characteristic of the business... mostly advertisement revenues, AI training, big data gathering and analysis, and many other profitable initiatives can be created from the user base. Therefore, as far as I understood when reading the Steem whitepaper and the SMT whitepaper this platform needs to properly incentivize new users to enroll themselves on it.

Thank you for your time :)

I wasnt here yet when curation changed from 50/50 to 75/25, what is different today that negates the reasons to change then?

I've never seen a real explanation for the change from 50/50 to 75/25, but maybe I missed it. IIRC, this is also when the rule change was made that switched early curation rewards to the author, another change that seemed completely unreasonable to me (most voters would have no idea that by voting early they gave away their curation rewards).

The only thing that ever made sense to me was that the guy who decided to make the change was posting a lot at the time and those posts had very high rewards. AFAICT, mostly what the change caused was a lot more crap posts and self-voting of such posts.

Its looking more and more like the farther we get from the original design the worse things get.
Have we jumped the shark?

Mistakes were made, but I think they are fixable. My belief is that most of the changes required aren't that difficult.

Then why the obstinancy at the top?
No changes until after smt's?

We should already have downvotes separate from rep harming flags.
This change isnt even mentioned anymore because of the futility.

Personally, i dont like betting the farm on promises that a new token will fix our broken coin.
How does issuing new fiat tokens backed by a broken fiat coin fix anything?
The folks are unlikely to be convinced, imo.

If we had let the whale experiment play out, likely we would have a middle class, excited new users, and could look at raising the soft cap on voting.
Having avoided rewarding those with dumping immediately as their goal for nearly two years, and counting.

I hope this new peristroika from the top leads to something changing sooner rather than later.

switched early curation rewards to the author, another change that seemed completely unreasonable to me

The auction itself makes sense (if you can autovote immediately then the value of such 'curation' is low) but giving it to the author makes no sense and it is pretty reasonable in hindsight to view it as a money grab. The new method of returning it to the pool makes a lot more sense.

how is this going to cause a large account to think twice about self voting at 3 minutes

Someone looking to vote for profit (or bots doing the same) will vote at 3 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever is required. They will figure out it and play whatever games are required to maximize profits.

The idea of shortening the timer is to get it out of the way of new or casual users who aren't going to play these games. If you see something you like and it isn't heavily voted, you should just vote for it, not set a timer to come back 15 minutes later and vote for it. Nobody does that.

The timer is a game for bots, which does have some useful secondary benefits for the platform as a whole, so I don't mind having one. But let it run its course on "bot timescales" not get in the way on human timescales. (As noted in the post I think it should be even shorter, but 3 min is better than 15 min.)

I'm one of those that just vote pretty much when I see it sometimes i will wait a few minutes, I rarely see anything when it is fist out because I rarely look at the new tab. The only vote I don't like is the one I give on an old post 7 days old or more, have done that several times, and I do not understand how people can resteem things that are 2 months old, but glitches happen I guess. People voting for maximum profit are going to like you said, vote for maximum profit, and there really is nothing wrong with that.

3 minutes works, it is long enough to see if you want to vote or finish reading the post.