Several days ago, an insightful article was posted by @kevinwong in which he proposed several modifications on the Steem protocol that, seen as 'all in once' package, could help improve the current situation where stakeholders seems to have better economic incentives by performing 'vote farming' showing a 'content indifferent behavior' which is not aligned to the original vision of the platform to serve as a descentralice social network where value-adding users contributions are rewarded with cryptocurrency:
Cited from the mentioned post:
We currently have a system where stakeholders are incentivized to engage in content indifferent voting behavior (vote selling/self voting) to maximize returns. This completely defeats the protocol’s ability to foster engaging platforms that revolve around content discovery.
We need to move away from an economic system that makes it too costly to vote on work that stakeholders actually deem valuable if we want this place to survive:
- Upping curation rewards is an obvious answer, but by itself, it is easily circumvented. Bid bots can just offer to share most of the curation rewards. Self voters can spam hundreds of posts and just upvote the ones that were least voted on by others after 15 minutes to avoid others 'stealing' their rewards.
- Non linear rewards curve should be seriously considered. Having reward amounts/SP that differ per post depending on its popularity is the core component of moving away from content indifferent voting behavior. Yes it has a cost, but the n^2 we were use to was far too steep. At n^1.3 (or any crude approximation of this), we should get most of the benefits at the lowest cost.
- Downvotes incentives should also be encouraged. Of course greater downvote incentives has downsides, but in combination with 1 and 2 above it should allow for curation rewards to out compete mindless vote selling/self voting.
Content indifferent behavior is the bane of this system. No social media platform can survive if it's unable to at least sort exposure and rewards by some subjective standard of quality.
Based on this ideas - which are more deeply explained in the post, a set of concrete implementable changes have been proposed and discussed in public and private channels in a rather unordered way.
To facilitate the discussion, involve further community members and prove the viability of the modifications, the majority of top witnesses have all agree to individually show their willingness to support the modifications by first a) Identifying a possible set of changes and b) Individually vote for its approval or disapproval.
Identified changes
This is a the list of change proposals:
n^1 rewards curve
The rewards curve shall be kept lineal as introduced in HF19 (keeping it as it is today)
n^1.3 reward curve.
The rewards curve shall be updated from lineal to a “mid-superlineal” n^1.3
50% Curation reward.
The reward distribution per post should be updated from 75% for authors and 25% for curators to 50% and 50% respectively.
10% free downvotes
Users shall be able to downvote 1 post/day at -100% without actually decreasing the amount of remaining voting power
Separated upvote/downvote pools.
Users shall be able to downvote 10 posts/day at -100% without actually decreasing the amount of remaining voting power but consuming its separated “downvoting power” from its own pool.
5 minutes curation window.
The curation window shall be reduced from 15 minutes to 5.
3 minutes curation window.
The curation window shall be reduced from 15 minutes to 3
Consensus status
Witnesses have been asked to approve, disapprove or just accept the changes to summarize the actual consensus status. Meaning:
APPROVE: Witness is actively for the change
DISAPPROVE: Witness is against the change
ACCEPTABLE: Witness wouldn't vote against (if majority does) but doesn't necessarily approve of it
EMPTY: Witness have not express any opinion yet
These are the first results of the consensus voting:
Explanatory comments by some witnesses:
@good-karma:
0/100 Experimenting this change with SMT is best way for now, 50/50 I strongly believe this will improve engagement
@jesta
I'm still of the believe that a 50/50 change won't serve the average user and will only benefit the largest stakeholders and bots. The curation rewards system itself would benefit more from a complete reinvisioning than just turning the dials. If the majority of witnesses want 50/50, I won't stand in the way, I just don't believe in it.
@aggroed
Downvote should be 50-80% of upvote, also do nothing till SMTs come out
@smooth.witness
On superlinear (n^1.3):
We already have a small degree of (something like superlinear) at the low end. The dust vote threshold is subtracted from every vote, so for example a vote of twice the dust threshold only has 50% weight relative to SP. This converges to linear as the vote becomes significantly larger than dust. I would be aggreable with this being modestly enhanced. What I don't want to see is superlinear at the high end.
On curation window:
I'm in favor of the shortest proposed window (3m in this case) as I actually think the window should be even shorter, like 30s-1m. I don't think it should be used to force humans and bots into head-to-head compeition. Instead I see the value of the window as a short opportuntiy for bots to bid down the curation rewards on easy sure thing type content (known authors etc) for which curation is low value. These rewards forfeited by bots via this auction rewards are returned to the pool and can be paid out some else where they have more value. Once the short window is over, humans should not ever need to 'time' their votes.
I left comments here
Curation: would be open to a sliding scale adjustable by author
50/50 is still too big of a change, propose a test at 60/40, bad psychological UX for users to lose half post rewards, hinders business models of current major apps utopian, fundition etc, curation will still be centralised around certain circles, who can produce good content to avoid downvotes. Careful incentivising downvotes, could literally lead to a downward social spiral and no longer the "Dinner party" civil mentality ned once called for.
I approve of a very mild superlinear reward curve but only if it can be implemented without a large computational penalty to Steem nodes. A curation penalty window of 10 minutes makes more intuitive sense, but like a 15 minute one, a 5 or 3 minute window doesn't. This is an issue that can help or hinder voting cognitive load. A scale of 10 minutes easily translates to 0-100% curation burn.
I would like even more rewards for the curators if possible
Overall I don't think tweaking the reward curve or curation % is worth focusing our time and efforts on. The vast majority of users don't understand any of this stuff and I don't feel like changing it will change their behavior or encourage more people to invest. I do support the separate downvote pool however.
@therealwolf
n^1.3: I'm in favour of testing out the n^1.3, preferably on a testnet which resembles the mainnet | Downvotes: I'm in#terested to see how this turns out, but still mindful about the consequences this would bring to toxicity.
@steempress
I am in favor of a witness controlled downvoting pool size. So we can roll it out slowly with low free downvotes at first and see how the community responds and then adjust the size depending on the results. If it's hardcoded we won't be flexible enough to react.
The table above might contain errors and need to be seen as a work in progress that, if required, will be adapted as soon as witness express further opinions and/or vote rationals.
As already mentioned, we invite with this post all interested stakeholders and community members to further discuss the topics, express concerns or amend errors.
Witness @cervantes
EDITED (26.10.2018): The table has been updated with the latest information and the individual comments by the witness added.
EDITED (27.10.2018): @liondani ’s comment updated due to copy/paste error.
Thanks for this interesting article.
I would prefer a curve which started as n^2 / exponential (thus flat), and then later changed into linear which would work against self-voting as well as excessive rewards.
@clayop had a similar idea.
If a reward curve worked against self-voting whales and excessive rewards of single posts that would be already a huge progress, then it wouldn't matter if the majority of users changed its voting behavior or not.
I never really understood the sense of that curation window: bots can be programmed to upvote after 30, 15, 5, 3 or 0 minutes after a post was published anyway, so why should a curation window decrease the advantage of automated vote bots?
I can see what you are getting at with N^2 to begin with and reverting to linear at value 'z' for example. This way 'good' curating could earn more than selfvoting and post rewards won't blow out. I have a few questions regarding this.
What should 'z' be? Getting this right would be difficult and I can imagine would require trial and error.
Would the optimal 'z' value change as the price of Steem increased? In theory it shouldn't, as value in Steem remains the same (post value in dollars increases) but we are relying on human perception, which is often askew.
What happens with early whale upvotes that shift the curve straight to linear?
How would you be able to explain how this curve functions to the average user?
Auto-upvoting accounts favoured by particular whales will still be a problem which is the case with any curve that is not linear.
In my discussion with @eonwarp (under the here discussed article) I already explained why I am not really interested to elaborate the details of my idea. It was just to bring the idea itself into the game. If witnesses find it to be interesting they should care about implementing it (they are getting paid for that). :)
Many equations are possible ... And as I wrote, by using spline interpolation the curve could look more beautiful than my example graph.
I think the average user should not care and just vote as he always does. The idea should work against upvoting own posts or comments with much STEEM power (as long as not many other people are upvoting as well).
EDIT 2:
Your Post looks good now @cervantes, the overview is fantastic.
Alright, let us find out what we agree and disagree on, for the best of Steem.
Just want to say before we begin, I am not a big fan of changing the CORE ECONOMY, especially not until way after SMTs are released and working as expected.
be also aware of the price of STEEM being in a place where you may be in a state of "change everything"-panic and I hope that is not the case.
Sincerely,
@fyrstikken / @fyrst-witness
StakeHolder & Gatekeeper
I think you're wrong, and I can speak from experience as a content producer who's been here for over two years.
Providing curators with a larger cut will encourage more to actually curate(vote). That's exactly what actual content producers have been desperate for on this platform for a very long time. With more people willing to vote, content producers could potentially see an increase in overall rewards per post (more votes, more rewards). With more curation rewards being offered to consumers, all the content producer has to do to make up for some of the losses is powerup some of their earnings and curate others.
Even under this model, in recent weeks, I've produced content, provided curators with 'x' amount of SP, and made at or around the same amount of SP in curation rewards. In other words, I'm receiving the full value of my posts simply because I choose to vote and support others.
50/50 will also encourage more to play the role of content consumer. As a content producer, I feel this model of producing something, allowing my fanbase to enjoy it for free, and having them leave with more money in their pocket than they had when they arrive, all while I too can get paid; that's genius.
How often do you see a busker in the subway putting money in the hats of passersby? How often do you open a new book, get to page 50, and see money taped to the page with a 'thank you' note?
You call yourself a 'promoter' here because you sell votes. Have you seen the crap you and a few others sell votes to? Of course not. You get paid to look away; and that's the exact opposite of what true content producers need in order to succeed. When the actual content from actual content producers gets buried under those monkey posts you like so much, we end up losing money; that model is forcing many of us to leave because by the looks of it, the things some of you guys "promote" makes you all look like you've been drinking the moonshine. If I can't even compete with that monkey post, there's no reason to stick around.
Those changes won't hurt content producers. The model you're defending hurts content producers, and the proof is all around us.
Have a good day, @fyrstikken.
I also have been creating content and curating here for over two years and when I first read @kevinwong's article mentioned at the beginning of this post I thought that if suddenly authors rewards were reduced to 50% it would tank their moral. But if you curate as well I think you're correct and it would compensate for the reduction in rewards from posting.
It's a known fact and something that's been on my mind from my first day on this platform that the majority of people online are consumers of content, not creators.
Of course, striking a balance between rewarding authors and curators who connect with others by commenting and curating and whether changing the rewards to 50%-50% would actually change enough users behavior is a whole other matter.
I see it creating a positive feedback loop in the feeds as well as within posts.
These days I see many publish a post, then leave. Snoop around the wallet region; their SP is delegated away. So they want free votes placed on their posts, then expect others to pay for their votes. Those paid votes then contribute to subpar quality content pushing the content creator/voteseller's work down and out of sight. As they get paid to look away, they're contributing to a negative feedback loop where they earn money to sabotage their own business.
Even if the content producer didn't want to go around curating posts all day, they could reserve SP to curate and respond to comments. The votes they place on curators comments would be worth more to the content producer. Commentators and curators might think they'll be earning less, but once more content creators catch on to the fact they can now earn while responding, more would do it, leading to more comments, and more people getting paid to comment. That scenario could potentially bring back some of the missing social elements. A lot of people publish posts and nobody leaves a comment these days.
As a content creator here, some days I'll spend hours under my posts, responding to and upvoting comments. I don't get paid much for that. Under this 50/50 plan, I would, and so would everyone else.
More people earning attracts more people who want to earn. Some are trying too hard to fit in and produce content so they can make money, they're not good at it (no offense to anyone here, you've all seen those crappy posts) they're wasting time, they make better curators, and should be rewarded for their efforts as well as be offered and incentive to hold and actually use their own SP.
As a content creator, I want satisfied customers. If that means I must earn a smaller percentage per unit with the hopes of earning more in bulk (more incoming votes), so be it. That's actually quite common in business. Nothing unusual about it.
What many don't realize is if this place scaled up to millions of people, a content producer would be able to maintain a blog/vlog and secure profits even at a 10% cut, provided the value of the token was high. 10% today wouldn't work, but it easily could many years down the road.
This all sounds good in theory but would it actually play out that way or will those inclined to game the system find other ways to game it? I can see the potential for bots spamming comments even more than they do now and vote selling wouldn't be discouraged just by changing the reward percentages..
How would that be worth more to the content producer as opposed to the one leaving the vote?
To me personally, a 50/50 split wouldn't make much of difference as I both post and comment equally. My focus is on building and engaging an online community, but I'm not so sure it would change anything as far as paid votes for sub-par posts. There are those here now who only look for ways to make money with the least amount of effort and they're not going to stop just because of a reward percentage change.
For honest actors who really are engaging with others on the platform, it would be a boost and probably create more engagement, but as far as bringing quality content to the attention of the community I don't see how the change would make any difference at all. Quality and highly engaging posts would still be competing with posts that bought votes and clog the trending pages.
Of course those attempting to game the system will attempt to screw things up. That's just what they do.
Vote selling may continue but who will buy? Spend 20, have 22 placed beside the post. They'd need to earn 9 in organic votes just to break even. Sounds kind of silly to me, but I'm sure a few noobs will fall for it, then feel ripped off, blame the platform, leave, like they do now.
If I leave a vote worth 10 cents on a comment, I'd now get 5 cents. $1.00, I'd get $0.50. It adds up.
I'm not sure how much profit there would be in selling votes. Spend $100, receive $115, lose half = $57.5. A poor quality boosted post would have to earn $42.5 in organic votes just to break even. If the SP is already locked away ready to be sold, who's going to be able to put $42.5 on a shit post organically? Minnows?
The higher they go, the worse it gets. Those votes would have to be sold for less if someone just wanted to buy votes hoping to squeak tiny profits out of low effort work like they do now. Spend $5, have $10 placed beside the post, lose $5. Break even. Is $10 worth of reward worth $5? I can't see them making much money selling votes that way. Those members with their own SP to use could easily just vote for quality work in a timely manner and earn more per vote because the odds are more votes will trickle in after theirs if the post has potential. To me, it sounds like curation would compete with vote selling, and curation rather than selling would come out with more potential profits.
Thanks for the explanation. That makes more sense to me now. I'm all for it because I curate and post equally already so in theory my earning would be about the same. I think so anyway.
I was very interested in your view on this... Because you are a "Content Creator" who wants engagement.
I produce art and creative writing; art needs eyes. I can't get laughs if they don't read. Why would I write humor if I didn't want to hear laughs? I'd never pay someone to look away, because that hurts my business. I want people to look, I hope they stay after the show to talk to me, I hope they support my efforts, and they all get a small token of my appreciation in the form of curation rewards and comment upvotes. That's like offering a free coffee at the art gallery or free beer at the comedy club. Provide incentives, more people show up. Back in the day, you could buy a movie because you want to see it, open it up, and there's a free poster inside. That's how this business works. Without engagement, there's nothing here for me. Sure, I could farm rewards, but just because I grew up on a farm, that doesn't make me a farmer; and there's no point in planting a crop if nobody is going to eat it.
I wanted to answer a few things, but I don't really know you. Nevertheless I would like that if it is possible you answer me only one question: When was the last time that you read an article of someone with reputation of 25 and 15SP and you gave him a good vote because you thought it was good content? Those who have large amounts of SP will benefit in any way because what seems to attract people here according to my experience is the SP not the content or its quality (exceptions are accounting with one hand). I don't have two years on the platform like you but I've spent almost a year and to get to the little I've achieved has cost me sweat. Now imagine a new user with exceptional content that nobody looks at because he doesn't have SP and how little he can do should lose his 50%. I am against monkeys like flames having great rewards but we are not going to detonate the atomic bomb on the city full of civilians just because KingKong is in the city. I think there may be other ways and I will look for them to give my opinion on all this controversy that threatens the stability of the system for new users. It's just my humble opinion and I don't know if I'm the only one here who thinks about newcomers.
There are 2 of us, jj.
I keep telling them they are literally taking food out of people's mouths just to buy themselves a trophy.
One day folks will care.
He votes for people with low SP. I received his a couple of times - back in the day when my SP was still low - and have seen others receive it too.
It is not that I am in oblivion because I also receive some important votes but this is not about me or the other subject but about a whole community, when I issue an opinion I do not think about myself but about those who have it more difficult, in the platform in general.How good it is that you receive his vote, maybe the man is one of the few who act well on the platform, I have not reviewed his profile to give an opinion, however I think based on the thousands I have seen doing what I say and it is not a question of judging if he acts well or badly but of evaluating if applying a 50% healing reward would really affect the behavior of users or simply continue doing what they always do with the difference that new users will receive 33.33% less than what they currently receive being more difficult for them to upload. Thank you for participating in the conversation.
The part I keep seeing here is everyone's forgetting, is that apps take a cut of the profits. Which means you will be getting in less then you think you will be getting. The Apps will not cut out their fee's it's not going to happen. As more specialized apps start and host images or videos. These costs aren't cheap don't expect apps to cut fee's very much other you can kiss image or video hosting goodbye.
Also, what's stopping anyone from just automating curation as they did before and like they do now. Also, people seem to think this 50%/50% will trip up the bots. The model is likely to switch over to @smartmarket style.
Or they are likely to start self-voting them self with big votes as some do now. Content curator plus biggest vote on your post means more for you. This update has a bigger positive for circle jerks and automation creation services. And the spread will be just as bad as it is now.
The apps with delegation wouldn't have to take a cut, because when they vote for content on their app, they'd receive a higher curation reward. Now factor in popularity. If more members were available to curate, instead of being paid to look away, a really good photo or popular video of the day would generate even more revenue for the app in the form of curation rewards once the other votes start rolling in.
Automated curation isn't terrible. If I earned someone's vote, and they want to support my work even when they're sleeping, then come later to view, which is typically the case for me, I don't have an issue with that.
Would you purchase votes if you knew you'd be losing 50%? Spend twenty, get $22 placed beside your post, no views, lose half to curators who were paid to look away. Does that still sound like a 'smart' market?
Did you just self vote yourself three times for no gain, no reason? Just wondering.
You raise some good points @thedegensloth. I agree with @nonameslefttouse regarding the Apps. It is quite possible people will move to the @smartmarket style of vote selling. I consider this less problematic as at least people keep their Steem Power rather delegate it away, therefore they can still curate whenever they want with ease.
Higher curation rewards combined with more downvoting, adds risk to selling votes to lower quality content. I think it is possible that good curation may actually be as profitable as selling votes. The same can be said about self-voting low quality content.
I think the proposed changes are worth a shot. I find it hard to imagine that we will end up with less manual curation than we have now.
Thank you @nonameslefttouse, I have been reading what you have said, including the dialogue with the others and I will think about it. I still think the OP looked like it was made in a hurry and brought more questions than answers. But if you and the majority of CONTENT CREATORS really want to earn less per post, I am not going to stand in your way if you all truly believe this will benefit you all short and long term.
It wasn't made up in a hurry by any means. Maybe the chart itself didn't take that long but these discussions have been going on for literally years (for example I'm quite certain there was a well-followed post in 2016 which discussed putting curation rewards back to the original 50/50 design, but I don't remember the original author and not going to go searching for it).
It's probably this one
https://steemit.com/steemit/@calaber24p/revamping-curation-is-the-way-to-increase-steem-power-demand
Good find!
Well, the last edits has made the OP better.
The stakeholder map has changed since 2016, so I suggest we start again, please.
50/50 is a big disappointment to the majority bloggers, so imagine how loud SteemSpeak.com is in some parts right now.
Another thing we should think about is competitors. If we create a balance that feels unfair to content creators, and someone else opens up shop that could be a disaster for us in the short and long run.
Have all these pros/cons been really hashed out, or is everyone just being yes-men in order to not stick their heads out and ask for a ten minute break to catch up? ;)
Many pros and cons have been hashed out. Hundreds if not 1000+ comments on the various posts mentioned here, countless side conversations, etc.
ANY idea that has been around since 2016 on steem has certainly been discussed. A lot. Worry yourself not about that.
I am not worried. Just gathering opinions, @smooth. I run http://steemspeak.com discord 17 hours a day, been doing that for 2,5 years with an active user base of between 5000-6000 people (active last 7 days, I prune it often to only keep it with active and not dead users) so naturally I have a lot of people who wonder about things.
I hope to see you over there some day, spend some time, get to know each other better.
We are almost in 2019 now.
Someone visited my blog yesterday. They liked my post. This was said:
Too many people are paid to look away.
Content creators are earning less now because much of the SP is delegated away and centralized into the hands of a few. Under this current model, I was not able to earn the 2 cents I could have received had they not had a reason to delegate away their SP. This is a widespread issue for content creators. I've seen many slowly lose support over the past while due to the fact so much SP in the form of votes with value behind them is unavailable and can't be used to support content creators.
If there was more of an incentive for members to curate, they would not delegate their SP away. I'd be earning more if that curator was earning more curation reward. Even if I only received half of that 2 cent vote, after everything is said and done, I'm still earning more. That penny is more than the current model that gave me zilch.
There are hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of valuable votes that can't be used,daily. That gets unlocked the moment curators have more of a reason to curate. Content creators gain access to those hundreds of thousands of dollars, therefore, they can potentially earn more, even though their posts are worth half. I have my doubts seeing a steady stream of votes with value behind them pouring in will somehow lead to content creators earning less.
Since we all get about 10 full power votes to use on any given day, when one member is paid to look away, that's converted into at least 10 less potential page views. Keep in mind, many vote at lower percentages, so one member being paid to look away can easily be converted into 30-40 less potential page views. When 1000 members are paid to look away, that translates into a loss of 10000-40000+ potential page views. That's in one day. There are over 1 million accounts here.
I have trouble believing content creators would earn less having access to that many more potential views.
On the surface, it's easy to look at a number, only see 50%, and convert that into a loss because it's less than the 75% cut content creators take home now. There's more to it than that though.
I could keep going but I'll leave it there.
P.S. I see you edited your comment and removed the 'moonshine' bit. No offense to anyone here, but I thought that line was funny.
Changing from 75/25 to 50/50 does NOT (re)move 50% of author rewards, it is 33%.
A 1 Dollar Post
50 cent to Author
50 cent to Voter
Is that correct, @smooth?
That is the proposal described in the post, yes.
The status quo is 75 to author 25 to voter.
So this represents a shift of
75->50 for author
25->50 for voter.
Good, then that is crystal clear.
OK @smooth, let us say that we hypothetically go for that solution, with all due respect;
How would you/me/we sell that 50/50 change to the bloggers without experience a networkwide Ramascream from our content creators?
Would we not be labelled as greedy soulless capitalists by the bystanders and the little users which are in the people majority?
The sales pitch is
Alright, let me try.
https://steemit.com/fifty-fifty/@fyrstikken/bloggers-would-you-mind-sharing-50-50-with-those-that-upvote-you
Part of the goal of this proposal is to normalize downvotes and get more systemic benefit from them than soley abuse fighting. However, in this case I'm downvoting explicitly for blatant abuse in the form of harassment. Agree or disagree there is no need for hostile name calling.
This post came about after a year or more of discussion by numerous interested stakeholders as well as several widely-discussed posts by @kevinwong (and others). All of which is a serious effort to improve Steem. If you want to disagree, disagree, but kindly do it respectfully of the work of many devoted Steemians.
It is a draft to iniciate talking about the williness to change some economic parameters or not. I think we witness should place all this early discusions in public “places” to allow stakeholders participate or audit the decision making process. Perhaps this is not the right format or the right place but I rather preffer iterating and maturing the potential changes until consensus is found by the stakeholders (and their representing witnesses) and share the status of the consensus in a chart as the proposed above than doing nothing. Some witness have already begun to make deeper explanation post explaining their rationals in detail (i.e https://steemit.com/witness-category/@therealwolf/witness-consensus-therealwolf ) which I think is exactly what we neeed to keep moving forward.
thanks for speaking up for a lot who are a bit reluctant to do so due to exactly the issues you pointed out
50% curation is an opportunity for both investors and good content creators. Greater rewards for making an effort to curate sounds fair and reasonably easy to explain. Content creators may get a smaller piece of the pie but it'll be a bigger pie as more accounts are actively curating.
In regards to these changes not being called for, I strongly disagree. There have been many posts calling for 50% curation rewards for a long time. I wrote a post about it three months ago.
I can see the possible complications you might face as a bot owner. Demand for your services could fall. Rewards to delegators would need tweaking. You're an innovator I'm sure you'll be fine.
Interesting points, @spectrumecons
Ouch, mean - Of Course, these changes will not affect me in any other way than a larger part of the bots will generate SteemPower instead of liquid rewards, so for me, this is a royal jackpot.
That is also why I questioning its motive because if I had proposed it, I think you all would have been against it calling me too greedy or something.
Now you are speaking a language I understand. That should be the start of the OP, @kevinwong you have some learning to do from @spectrumecons, he is really good at writing 3 lines that make more sense than your entire post did, respectfully, no pun intended.
That being said, we still have things to debate, and @smooth, do not forget to include me in this haven of yours.
Thanks.
I do not have any sort of 'haven'. I mean I do own a private Slack that I used to use to chat privately with a few other Steem investors but it hasn't been used in a year or more. If you are looking for more venues to communicate, you will need to search elsewhere.
Well, ok. I wish you had one.
With so much onboarding, proposals/disputes, roadmap/HF21, SMTs and a bunch of other things going on, expecting everyone to read everyone's post on the steem blockchain is asking a bit much. Maybe one can be created and brought into good use for the purpose of gathering/sum up and talk about cases in a more organized form.
I think that is what this post was trying to do.
Sure. That may be, I would like to meet on a teamspeak/mumble/discord/VOIP conference in the future. Once a month, 60 minutes, do you think the top community could manage to arange something like that?
I don't appreciate that some of my answers to this chart were simplified into a trinary system. You're mischaracterizing my intended communication. If I had known this would be done I would not have participated in answering this survey.
Please either restore my submissions to this survey as I put them or remove my answers entirely. Thank you.
For further explanation, three of my responses said "See comments" and were replaced with "ACCEPTABLE" which is labeled in this post as "ACCEPTABLE: Witness wouldn't vote against (if majority does) but doesn't necessarily approve of it." This was not what my comments said, and it's unacceptable to put words in my mouth and go on to publicly share that.
Similar here. One of my answers was simply removed, which is not representative of my opinion. But I know that @cervantes will update it asap.The spreadsheet in the post has been updated.
I've also written down a post explaining my decisions:
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@therealwolf/witness-consensus-therealwolf
PS: the upvote from @steemtank was an auto-vote mistake. I'll keep it on since it fits anyway, but it has been fixed.
Of course, doing it asap. Sorry for the error.
I also thought our comments would be represented as rationale for our current position. Can they be added un as well? I added a comment already linking to a thread about my thoughts which were the extent of my comments anyway.
Adding the link to your comment as well.
I‘ll adapt it asap @pfunk. My wrong. Just tried to adapt the response to the three available ones. I misinterpreted your comments and for that I publicly apologice. Let me know how do you want it and I`ll update.
Thank you
Agree. The comments on the original survey should disclosed (where relevant but probably all), and I'm not sure what happened about changing responses but that sounds terrible.EDIT: Looks like the post has now been updated. Thanks for doing that @cervantes.
I`ll update also the post with the original comments if required.
I'm an acceptable for 50/50.
That wasn't an option when I first answered.
Sorry for the error @aggroed and thanks for the update. Im editing the chart and updating the post. Additionally im putting your comment as well.
This went out a bit faster than I anticipated. But then again, it's nice to see the discussions and feedbacks that it generates, so thus I am happy to see it shared even though I myself would have preferred going over it a few extra times before announcing any stances on such important questions.
Anyways, I am practically "acceptable" towards any new idea that has a decent argument behind it. Steem is still young and we will have to experiment with alternative solutions than the ones that we've got, not only discuss and speculate on their potential(s).
What's more important to me is the approach we take to test whether or not a proposed change has the desired impact that we want. Witnesses, developers, stakeholders, and active community members can discuss all they want which changes could result in better outcomes for Steem (not that there's a clear agreement among all parties of what an "ideal outcome" looks like, but let's leave that for now). In any case, if changes as big as those suggested in this chart (50/50 split on rewards and a new pool for downvotes in particular) are implemented, they better change behaviors in a direction that is desired and produce results that align reasonably well with initial expectations.
To do so, the desired outcome ought to be clearly defined and some measurable outcome that would constitute a "success" or "failure" should be set. Then the whole community can understand why a new change is being tested and join in scrutinizing its effect.
Does this mean with the new changes Cervantes will stop upvoting itself at 100%, it’s admin at high percentage and instead the authors it says it supports (Who currently get only 4%-7%)? I mean with new changes you would still make money from curation rewards, but you would be using your curation delegations to actually support the Spanish community. Hopefully it does...
Exactly, with this changes, curators will have the same level of selfsustaintability as authors.
Yes so with your current voting habits you would make more money, but the authors would make less. I’m asking about your specific voting habits and if you intend on changing them since you will be able to make even more money for yourselves?
As a curation group that is community funded and claims it’s intent is to support the Spanish community, I believe your voting habits should reflect that.
Currently your voting habits support yourselves and your admins rather than the Spanish community. Can we expect to see a change in that if these changes are implemented? Or will this just mean more money for you?
We are using more than 50% of our voting stake to support spanish writting authors, 25% to support collaborators and proyects and 25% goes to our SP Witness update. On top of that we are delegating 20K steems to independent spanish comunity proyects (ongoing project where we every month delegate 25% from our earnings as top witness). It is already decided that we stop autovote.
Sorry, we need to go deeper. There's a wrong assumption here on a fundamental level. Curating is not a selfless act of sacrifice for the greater good that should be rewarded. It's an act of exercising cultural power. I vote for @traf because I want to see funny gifs. You vote for @trafalgar because you want to read boring essays. Traditionally, this power cost a lot of money, and it was one of the things that made the grandchildren of self-made men squander their inherited fortune.
So here's my proposal: voting should not be rewarded at all. On the contrary, it should cost money. For example, if the author reward is 100%, the voter reward should be -150%. Nobody would self-vote in this system, not even between different accounts. Voting bots would be unprofitable.
There would be no curation window, no reward pool, and no inflation but deflation instead. Wouldn't that be good for the price? And if you ask me, we can do away with Vests, Savings and SBD too. If we want mass adoption, we need a system that the average person can understand immediately.
Would nobody vote in this system? Well, a vote would become much more meaningful. We can still keep a system where the early voters of the best posts are rewarded in the end.
But we can't just assume that the most popular posts are the best. That would still enable spammers to curate the shit out of one of their posts. We need a new class of witnesses: users who judge the quality of posts by their own voting behavior. These content witnesses will be elected like the block-producing witnesses, with one difference: everybody also gets a number of downvotes in this election. That way, we can keep out users who abuse the system. The content witnesses or quality oracles will have the privilege of voting for free. There could be more than 20 full-timers, maybe 100.
Of course, this comment is inconsistent with my other comment saying we should change only one rule at a time. It's about the arguments, not about the person.
steem is beyond steemit and at this stage votes dont only have use in curation. overall, what is rewarded has been value where content is only a form of value. a developer contribution behind the scenes can be considered value and may be rewarded using the same vote. if you consider the span of these things, you will have another interesting proposal. a vote as well in current circumstance as more cost than is obvious. this is where things like real reputation or responsibility comes in. it is quite broader than is obvious especially when you start to consider steem and the shift and its evolution from where it was, to a blockchain for apps. steemit is now the major centre where all the content from various app still will show and different apps have their own business model and own form of main content. some enterprises even pay with vote too. so vote carries a broader use now than was initially the case. I think adding these factors and you will be able to come up with yet another provisional solution.
Upvoted for interesting original ideas. I don't necessarily support them at this time.
I'm only a low-five-figures investor but I will be cashing out and seeking opportunities elsewhere if 50% curation is the consensus. We don't have enough incentives for posting content now, which is incredibly obvious if you look at the posting quality and quantity after the fork. Further reducing it basically makes Steem a desert, and you can fight over your curation all you want.
I do appreciate the general disapproval for superlinear, though.
50% curation will give more incentives for curators to look for good content instead of just going on auto-pilot/selling votes.
Agreed and it might reduce low-quality posting if people have other methods to earn steem. I am in support of this change.
This is purely wishful thinking.
I tend to agree. Increasing curation rewards could make bots/selling votes more profitable, since AFAIK the curation rewards themselves are what make up most of the profits.
There is no way it can make selling votes more profitable. The market price for selling votes is already close to the entire reward (because a buyer can self-vote and capture it all). The bid bots themselves are highly competitive with no real barrier to entry and margins are being driven down. This will likely continue. There are already some which are paying out from curation rewards in addition to cash bids.
The reason (some) bid bots keep the curation rewards is because both their voting and curation rewards are both generally terrible and the curation % ends up being low enough to serve as a (somewhat) sensible fee. With increased curation rewards this would no longer be the case, and the penalty from bad voting would be significantly increased (even more so from downvotes).
The business model of bid bots and other vote selling services would have to change dramatically. Extrapolating numbers from the status quo is going to very inaccurate.
I did say "could" because I agree that the business models would need to be changed, however I'm not certain those models would be worse in terms of profitability than what exists today.
It's a razor margin already, and for those who have to pay investors (delegators) I imagine it's even closer (or less) than break even vs those bots who are running on self-owned SP.
Can you expand on this? Are you considering "Bad Voting" itself to be when the post is downvoted on by others, offsetting the curation reward generated from the initial vote itself?
There's a floor on "bad voting" (in terms of returns) when you don't consider down voting in the equation. In the situation where a bot casts a $1 vote on a post with no votes and 25% curation, the curation reward is ~$0.25. That's the floor, unless someone down votes it.
If including downvotes under the proposed rules (new pool, reward, etc), then yes, I can see how that would impact bot profitability. However, that's not because of a 50/50 split, it's because of the new downvoting incentives - which make a hell of a lot more sense to me than changing the author/curation ratio.
Both
That is so FAR, FAR below the actual return encountered in that wild that isn't really worth considering. The market price of votes assumes mostly self-voting where the return is close to 100% (+/- a bit).
My view has always been that downvotes are the most important thing here. Merely changing curation on its own isn't very effective. One reason for this, as noted in the previous paragraph is these are really all (somewhat disguised perhaps) self votes where the split between curation and author doesn't matter AT ALL. It is all being captured into the price.
My comments on what would change with increased curation with respect to bid bots were narrowly directed at the assumption that bid bots keep all the curation rewards. That's sort of (if decreasinly so) the case now but would absolutely not be the case under 50/50. Whether that really changes things in a fundamental way is doubtful (see above).
Okay, agreed, and it would be after any change too. Why are we discussing this at all?
Well, maybe. Right now curation rewards make up most (usually all) of the profits because the cash sends are high enough to satisfy the delegators. Presumably that would change in the 50% system and the bidbots would have to be constantly powering down and sending those curation rewards to their investors, as some of them are already doing.
This doesn't matter a whole lot, though, because the bidbots are already eating themselves. Their economic model doesn't work in a high-competition environment without SBD prices propping them up.
One thing 50% would actually do against them is make them (and everyone else) benefit less from another SBD pump. However, this could also be done by adding a two-way pegging system.
Yeah - I can see that, especially when factoring in delegators and paying out those investors. I honestly wasn't thinking about that form of bot when I responded, I was more thinking bots that were self-owned (which probably isn't many these days?).
Good point on the SBD pump phenomenon that we experienced during the last bull run. That is one thing that a 50/50 split would impact, the rate of SBD generation and the incentive of using them to sell SBD when it's way off it's peg.
50/50 would bring quite a lot of change towards the vote-selling economics. Especially in combination with cheaper downvotes / seperate manabar for downvotes.
This will result in more quality control regarding promotion as with downvotes, the profitability of the services is being attacked.
So in that sense, a 50/50 change (or another ratio higher than now) would actually be good for the quality aspect of content. Especially since it would be more relevant to vote for good content instead of bad, as downvotes could result in a costly mistake (less or even no curation rewards)
No it isn't purely that. It comes out of a very substantial reasoned process of looking at economic incentives as discussed in several posts by @kevinwong, among many other considerations and discussions (but the @kevinwong posts are easy to find and well-documented, so let's stick with that for now).
You may disagree with the conclusions after engaging in your own reasoning, and indeed the reasoning behind 50/50 helping to improve curation may be incorrect, but that doesn't make it purely wishful thinking. The process that has taken place indicates there is clearly a lot more behind it than that.
I'm familiar with Kevin's arguments and I think it's completely appropriate to describe them as wishful thinking combined with a healthy dose of wanting the system to be more profitable for Kevin. I was willing to give Wolf credit for not being in on the second one.
I doubt wolf is and I'm certainly not. There are well reasoned arguments there in terms of shifting and rebalancing incentives whether you recognize them or not.
I don't really understand why you think this would be good for kevin either. He's a successful poster and only a moderately large stakeholder/voter. Does he not personally benefit from higher author rewards, and have more at risk from cheaper downvotes? One could argue he would benefit from superlinear, I agree there.
There are no evidence-based arguments in Kevin's posts for the idea that increasing curation percentages will lead to more manual curation. There are some interesting arguments for other things, but that one is purely assertion.
Cause he flat-out argues that? He's talked a lot about how he views Steem economics as a "race to keep up," as if other people earning more money than him is a problem that needs to be fixed. This is his solution for solving what he perceives as other people's advantage over him in that "race." That's explicitly the problem that he has identified and is trying to fix.
Referring to 200,000 SP as "moderately large" is not encouraging me to think that you have any idea what the wealth distribution here and the problems associated with it are. There are only 78 non-Steemit accounts with more Steem than Kevin.
yes it would for me!
Curation plays a key role in rewarding the good content. Otherwise we have a reward pool of X STEEM/day spread out over all kinds of garbage and abuse and the valuable content contributors get 75% of very little.
The goal of these changes is absolutely to get better voting and curation which means more rewards flowing to those who deserve them.
I respect that you may disagree on this but I personally find such strong disagreement a bit peculiar. From 75% to 50% there is a 33% reduction in rewards. I don't know how you can be so confident that better voting and less voting motivated by content-agnostic extraction from the pool won't shift enough back to the good content to make up for this 33%.
No it doesn't. The only way to believe this is if you're completely bamboozled by the white paper. In practice curation doesn't do this at all. All it does is reward predicting what other people will vote on.
The current optimal curation strategy is to cast an extremely broad net of tiny votes in order to catch the occasional "hit" of rewarded content and win a small amount of SP each time through the n^2 curation algorithm. Look at how well @cheneats does as an example. That's the behavior you're encouraging here.
I'm not bamboozled by the white paper. I've explained (for years, often a lone voice on this) how downvoting is essential to anchoring the payout values (and therefore curation) to actual opinions on value of content/contribution. The white paper and the whole notion of downvoting only as an anti-abuse tool is getting this completely wrong (though to be fair with n^2 rewards there is less difference between the two; the original superlinear model with cheaper downvotes surely would have worked better as well).
That provably isn't the optimal strategy. I can easily improve on this by identifying some posts that won't 'hit' and not spreading to them. But to some extent this is true today because of insufficient downvoting. Literally any garbage can end up being a hit if it gets bidbot votes, and then it generally isn't downvoted enough (i.e. down to zero) because the cost of doing so is too high. Still, I think you can do better.
A large number of tiny votes on decent-to-good content is a useful form of both curation and content discovery in that it separates the possible wheat from the chaff. For example, I often upvote my own comments in large threads by 1% not to earn curation rewards or the few cents of self-voting-reward but to separate them from the huge sea of (often low value) comments.
The second level of curators then has less to look at, and can begin to shift rewards among the identified 'not worthless' candidates. This is good division of labor and value add all around, especially if you consider a scaled up system with much more content added daily.
In order for any of that to work, the large majority of the stake has to be voted naively, so that the people doing the algorithmic discovery have a large pool of content-based votes to be rewarded from. And you get naive voting by reducing the incentive to optimize, not the reverse.
If you have a first-level of curators that does basic discovery, and a larger (stakewise) second-level of curators that does higher-value discovery, you still need an even larger third level of "uncurators" who just want to vote on cool shit and don't care what their rewards are.
That remains the key population for making Steem work.
It works if overrewarded content is downvoted. Curators can pile on (or perhaps 'reverse pile on' is more accurate since it is anticipatory) because A expects B to curate/vote and B expects C, etc. But if D (along with E and/or F) comes along at the end and declares this to be trash and downvotes it to zero then A, B, and C all wasted their vote power (a costly mistake).
Even without any preference-motivated upvoters (and there will always be some) this can still work. As a curator you have to upvote something or your vote power is wasted. If you spread your votes thin or even vote randomly, this is superior to not voting. Once you do that, then choosing based on what you most expect to not get downvoted is superior to voting blindly. Simple model of course, but not absurdly off.
Somebody has to be the last voter who loses in this scenario. If not a naive voter, who's getting what they want on a personal-social level, then it's a curator who's not doing well enough to be successful. Over time the unsuccessful curators will drop off and somebody else will become the unrewarded top of the pile, until it has recursively reduced the curation-optimizing stake to the level the naive voters can support.
I think with 50% curation rewards we are going to see more bots like @nfc and people like me who would power down to lease SP (don't have money to invest), then follow the trail.
It too expensive to produce content but cheaper to get similar rewards from curation. Or at least thats what I am thinking.
I was following the NFC trail with around a 2x vote for a while last week to see how it did. (Steemauto won't actually do that so I kind of faked it.) It was maybe a little more profitable then the cost of leasing, but not a lot, and of course there's the risk of it losing value in an emergent market, since you'd have to commit to the lease for a long term to get a good rate.
I think either delegating to NFC directly or building your own curation bot are better options right now. @night-heron's doing reasonably well putting tiny votes on your comments. :)
Here is another @nfc experimental post. I will obviously think of coding a bot myself if @nfc doesn't work.
BTW I saw @night-heron was voting my comments and got good curation. You'd be better off with 50/50 system. ;)
I don't doubt that The Mespotamians would have a substantially larger return under 50%. But the cost is it making our mission far, far more difficult.
You're looking at it too statically. What if 50% curation more than doubled the upvotes you got?
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What if witches flew down and gave me a winning Powerball ticket?
Why wouldn't large accounts spread more of their voting power to other's posts if curation was 50% and not 25%?
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Because people who are interested in passive income are interested in passive income. No one's going to magically become a participant because you change the number around.
Also you're the ones trying to ruin user acquisition, the burden of proof is on you.
There will still be passive income. Instead of delegating to a content-agnostic voting service you delegate to a decent curator and share the rewards.
Just as easy access to vote bots change the dynamics of how people act, easy access to highly profitable curation programs will also change how people act. Investors will go where the money is. Currently the incentives in place encourage voting with bots, regardless of the content quality. Incentivizing curation incentivizes valuing content that others will also value (i.e. "good" content).
No, it also incentivizes voting with bots, just @nfc type bots. Even the curation increase with HF20 has done that. I've been playing around with some of my own. It's not about content quality, it's just about vote-racing, mostly in front of who Steemit is voting by proxy through the @misterdelegation recipients. Which makes sense, since curation has never effectively promoted content discovery.
Also, it's pretty clear that the peak of "quality content" on Steem is content that is perceived to promote the Steem price. If you reduce the diversity of content by concentrating votes you're just hastening the Bitconnect-ization of Steem.
It's not just any number. Besides it's part of a set of proposed changes. Secondly, all I'm trying is to get to the bottom of this by talking to people having different opinions on this.
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It doesn't need to double. Reduction from 75% to 50% is only a 33% reduction.
True.
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Yeah... 50% won't get vote sellers the desire to stop selling their votes, it will just give them more money for not curating themselves and keep selling their votes to make money. 50/50 is not solution at all, it only incentivizes more vote selling anyways as I see it.
Vote selling pays about 100%. 75/25 or 50/50 doesn't change it or increase incentives at all, nor does it pay any more to vote sellers (about 100% either way). It increases the relative incentive to not sell. Not enough on its own but it narrows the gap significantly.
As I stated in the comments under @Trafalgar's post, I have a solution to the bid bot issue that steps on no-one's toes and cannot really be circumvented. I wrote about it here. By giving every steem user the ability to mute the EFFECT of votes by allowing them to mute VOTERS - we allow everyone to block out the effects of bots while also empowering users to see more of what they want/need to see. This would also enhance the effectiveness of good curators too since their work would be more visible to those who care and they can then both benefit from their work by reading posts they discover and also then upvote them. This facilitates proof of brain in a pure way that does not involve overpowering anyone and that actually empowers people more than they have been. Empowerment is what is needed here.
I also commented that I see an issue with free downvoting in that the imbalance among user's Steem Power holdings means that malicious whales could literally shut down a large amount of the reward activity for the entire network, which would in turn boost their own earnings. Ultimately, power imbalance that can limit exposure is a problem when exposure is the proposed way to gain power and rectify the balance. This is a fundamental flaw in capitalism too, in the sense that new users (or new born babies) have to join in an old game where monopoly is already established. It's fine to say 'work hard and you can be big too', but in reality that's not how things play out due to the nature of the weighting involved and the ability of the biggest to crush the smallest with little incentive financially for them not to do so. The idea that the big whales who act selfishly to the point of destroying the network would change before they actually do destroy the network, presupposes a level of intelligence and perceptiveness/care on their part about such things - which is already possibly evidenced to be in short supply by the fact that they would have taken things to that point.
Every point in all of this is unique and we need to dive deeply into every point to fully understand it and reach the best outcome. Soundbytes jut can't cut it here. However, I will say that options that empower without overpowering anyone are always helpful.
Imho, protocol changes shouldn't be decided just by witnesses. There aren't enough witnesses for that not to be a really flawed way of doing it. It makes sense for nodes to be the main voters in bitcoin/ethereum, but doesn't make sense for Steem, since the purpose of Steem is the Dapps built on top of it, which are meant to be inclusive social communities, fostering interaction. To just change back and forth based on what witnesses (who, might I add, have completely different incentives potentially than other people) vote for isn't the right way to do it.
A witness have 1/20th of the responsibility to decide which changes he want to apply on the protocol, and he should do it defending the interests and opinions of the stakeholders, who are voting for him as witness. Thats the way DPOS works.
lol I know how it works. I'm saying my opinion is it shouldn't work that way, because opinion/interest is often divided among stakeholders, and a witness will have to vote one way or the other... so one portion of their voters won't be represented. At the end of the day, as well, they vote with their best interest in mind, which may or may not be the majority interest of their followers, ESPECIALLY if they would still retain witness status despite losing many followers. Additionally, someone may disagree with all 20, in which case they may not want to vote, so their voice isn't heard.
Overall I'm very pleased to discover that most of the witnesses recognize that we have a clear an urgent problem in terms of our underlying economics: we're just rewarding the wrong behavior the most (vote farming)
Moving the curation up so it becomes more competitive is definitely the right move. 50% is hopefully enough, as we want to leave as much to incentivize authors as possible
100% separate downvotes however, is far too much. Remember, with 50% curation, even assuming vote farming provides 90%ish of returns, we only need to make up the other 40% here. That is to say, you don't need to take every vote 'abuser' to 0, taking it down 40%+ means they're likely better off just using their money to curate. Therefore, a much more modest number here should be considered
Honestly though, I don't think there's too much we can do to make the current economics worse unless we're actively trying. I hope to see some changes come in before SMTs, even if I don't personally agree with them all. The platform can't continue to go on like this
I don't think these numbers are right. In the absence of downvoting, vote farming is nearly 100% efficient and takes far less effort than curation, which is inherently competitive. To even be an average curator takes significant effort. To achieve balance here probably means 50-60% or possibly more. Does it need to be 100%? Probably not but it is close enough to not over-complicate things and try to create a distinction where there really isn't one.
I see a system where one N SP stakeholder can prevent another N SP stakeholder from making an ill-advised payout as healthy. It shouldn't require a multiple. There should be plenty of content where there is a clear majority of stakeholders expressing an opinion who are in favor of a payout. If there isn't then maybe we need to stop paying all this inflation for things that we don't agree are valuable.
That said, some other numbers could work, with other tradeoffs. If we bumped curation to 90% then far less downvotes would be need to balance between farming and curating (perhaps 10-20%). There is still an imbalance in terms of effort, and downvotes are still important to anchor curation to real value. Incentives favoring curation over farming is necessary but not sufficient.
Mostly agree. I'm not strongly opposed to even the idea of 10% free downvotes as I see it as a step in the right direction, albeit a weak one.
BTW, the proposal for n^1.3 has very little support so you need to factor in that it probably won't happen. A significant amount of downvote power will still need to go to block farming (as with mack-bot, etc.). Whatever is needed to fight high dollar reward extraction, general low/no-value payouts, and generally maintain healthy incentives for non-farmers is additive on top of that.
Yes i'm becoming more and more modest with my expectations and learning to compromise big time, lets forget superlinear, it's not an issue until an otherwise functional economic system is introduced. I raised it initially mainly in anticipation of certain exploits that can occur in the future
This isn't a reason. This is stating the consequences of the change as if it's a reason. Tim does the same thing.
The numbers are not close, they're very far out. There's never been a very strong rebuttal to my observation that:
Downvote strength only need to be sufficient to push abuse posts rewards towards roughly the new curation value in order to deter them rather than all the way down to 0.
We can both come up with some reasons to fudge the numbers a little to either side, but can we agree that this is an important consideration that was likely missed by most witnesses?
Ok, so an actual separate pool is pretty much out of the question due to implementation limitations. Which means features separate and severable downvote delegations from upvotes are gone, and we don't have a good estimate of the actual downvotes that'll be exercised. We're stuck with one pool and we're sure we can implement 100%, but we're uncertain if we can do a multiplier, steemit's help on any of this is out of the question until well pass SMTs, that's where we're at correct?
There's a lot of stuff to speculate on under the new system, 2 of which come to the forefront in my mind:
Obviously I believe 1 >>>>> 2, especially over time, but assuming you probably think the opposite, can we just assume that they mostly cancel each other out?
At which point, in light of the stuff in bold above, would you agree to 50%? Of course we don't know if it's possible, but if it were? I'm guessing we don't even agree on to what extent excessive downvotes are harmful etc, but putting that aside, 50% should be sufficient and going more isn't likely to yield greater value, would you support it?
I think 50% is excessive, but I'm still very confident it'll contribute to a much healthier content discovery and rewards system overall.
If it's not possible, gun to my head, sure, it's hard to do worse than what we currently have. With 100%, although I feel is really really bad, will still be better than what it is right now. But I truly think it's such an excessive change (we're really going from downvotes being prohibitively expensive as it costs 100% returns, to a system with as many pontential free downvotes as upvotes) it'll introduce a plethora of new problems, and with a half ass coding job, the timing right before SMTs and without steemit inc's backing, I'm not sure if it's entirely worth it.
Highly commendable approach ! This really a professional effort, congratulations !
However, I'm wondering whether we are not all agonizing over things which, while important, are not the most important nor the most urgent.
Consider the following : we need more great content and great content creators on this platform to attract people - eyeballs, attention, thus investment. But tweaking the economic system will mostly concern those who are already in and understand a very complex mechanic.
The great content creators from outside steem (those blogging on their own blogs, on Medium or somewhere else), that will bring a lot or reputation and attention to this content platform, could not be expected to understand in detail the difference between 25% and 50% curation or linear and n*1.3 rewards at the beginning - this is for geeks like us who know the system!
At first they'll just see that they get some crypto whereas on Medium they probably weren't getting anything.
Shouldn't we rather, collectively, spend more time on marketing this platform outside the crypto world in order to increase the overall size of the community ? Rather than agonizing over tweaks to the economics?
Just consider
P.S. self-upvoted out of commodity - to have less scrolling to do in order to find my comment among the throng of comments
Your comment, @sorin.cristescu reminds me of some flagging I've seen that troubles me.
You talk about posters who are already posting outside of Steem coming here.
As most of the flagging, so it seems to me, is nowadays done by bots, they find the original posts and flag the poster, despite it being mentioned in the post that this is a copy of the original by the same person.
Another system that angers me is that someone plagiarises, they are caught out and flagged. No problem what happens is good....but, some bots do not punish you just for that cheat, they keep on flagging you and warning others that you are on their black list (as an example) - and you can only get released by apologising and humbling yourself with pathetic promises you will not do it again. Whenever I see this, it sickens me and makes me want to #walkaway
Thanks for your comment, Arthur.
Of course it would be best if people post original content here first before going outside. Why would you want to copy to Steemit something that has already been made public on Medium or elsewhere.
I can understand there is natural tendency to suspect that of being an attempt at milking the reward pool.
Why not post original content here BEFORE going to post it someplace else (if at all) ?
If the content is already available elsewhere, what's the point in copying it here?
Hey, @cervantes.
Thank you for doing this. It's hard to get everyone represented in the way they feel they should be represented. Thank you for taking this on.
I'm not a witness, nor am I someone who has been around long enough to even know how things were before, nor do I have a technical background in development or game theory.
I am, however, someone who spends quite a bit of time, all day, six days a week, posting, commenting and curating. I do it all manually. I don't self-upvote, I don't use bidbots, and I spread my upvote around as much as I can based on what I deem merits my upvote of what I do see.
This is how I interact with the STEEM platform. Other than some investing in STEEM, what I have in stake is what I have earned/received from my efforts, which will also include contest winnings.
That's where I come from. I don't know what's best of any of this. I don't know which of you here claiming that this or that will work best even knows what they're talking about, even though you say it with such authority and such absolute certainty.
I am grateful for the discussion, at least. And I think it's worth discussing further. I even think it's worth testing out in as big of a test as possible. I don't think these are the types of changes that just get implemented. I think they need to be tried out to see if they even do any of what all of you are saying they could/will do.
I've read in the comments that testing will take place. I've also read comments that make it sound like this is already a done deal, rather than an introduction of sorts to the greater community. I would hope that would be much more discussion on these issues among the rest of us other than the witnesses, so hopefully there's more to be discussed and more to be learned.
While I would love to see more curation among the higher SP accounts, I also know the higher SP accounts who do curate do so through curation trails and other means of autvoting. Someone else is already doing the actual reading, or they've prescreened authors somehow. I don't know how any of that changes this. I don't see where any of this causes reading of posts to increase among them, or for that matter, the rest of us.
Personally, if quality post discovery were easier to begin with, and not dependent on upvotes by large SP accounts or whatever it is we're going for with this, that would be the first step. I don't think quality content discovery happens through upvotes. We've already seen bidbots at work, and it seems to be quite widely recognized that they are not the ones discovering content of any kind—they are merely a workaround for the issue of visibility, and the creator's means of self-promotion.
I guess in my mind, there's much more to discuss, a lot to fully test, before these changes ever become a reality. They were changed to this from where they were for a reason. At one point, these changes were deemed more fair, or equitable, too. Now, they're being deemed as not so equitable or fair, or at the very least, that conducive to curation. I don't know. Myself and others have been curating since we got here. We haven't needed extra incentives. We haven't even been able to figure out when or optimally how to vote. The reason for that is, we've been more focused on finding stuff we like to read and engage with, rather than how much greater of a percentage we're going to end up with if we upvote on certain posts at certain times.
I don't think the masses are going to want to learn all of this. I think they're just going to want to upvote what they like, and be sure that it gets to the author. I think they'll be happy to get something in return, since that's not been an option anywhere else. I think they'll recognize that what they do in curation takes less time and effort than what a creator takes producing this quality content we keep talking about. Quality that is subjective and in the eye of the beholder anyway.
Well said - thanks on behalf of authors/creators of good posts.
I also feel that if the ratio of reward is changed, then we must inform all posters that the first thing they must do on posting, is vote for themself (even that ability in our preferances was removed, already working against posters, as bots can react faster) so that they still get more than 50%.
People will always look for loopholes so as to make the system work in their favour and we've seen from the way the legal system works in real life, it is like the dog eternally chasing, in circles, its own tail. We need to provide other incentives. For instance, I write stories and a few poems. When a group like the writers block congratulate and thank for for making a well written piece of work available, that is worth more to me than an upvote of $100
How about a board where the best posts are preserved for a time? Such board can include various conditions that have to do with originality of work and so on, but must not try to set out voting rules. Maybe posts shown there will only appear AFTER the 7 days? That means it will be there to be read, not for voting on.
Hey, @arthur.grafo.
Well, I'm not sure what I actually said of worth in re-reading what I wrote, but thanks for the kind words. I'm kind of wary when anyone starts talking definitively about any of this, regardless of which side they're coming from. Obviously, not everyone can be right, and so trying to sort through all of this is virtually impossible. That's why testing it thoroughly seems to be about the only way to come close to knowing how it could turn out.
re: 50/50
I earn a decent amount in curation as it is. It's not nearly as much as someone with higher SP would make, though. But it's constant, and it's what I have the most control over. I can determine who I vote for.
It use to be a 50/50 creator to curator ratio and they got rid of it in favor of this. I've been trying to find out why, but so far, no answers to that. My guess is, combined with everything else, it didn't accomplish what they wanted it to. Or it could be that conditions were truly different back then when there were fewer on chain.
Regardless, in my mind, there is a definite psychological barrier to a 50/50 split. I can manually curate dozens of posts in the time that it takes me to research, write, add images and edit a post. So the amount of work differential is an issue.
Also, there's no guarantee that enough high SP is going to change for what amounts to a 33% increase in rewards. Nor that they just won't put it on autovote, through a curation trail or their own. So, no greater amount of eyes on post.
And now some are arguing that instead of de-incentivizing the bidbots, it will just allow them to continue because they will be able to get greater curation rewards, too.
re: self-upvoting
The ability to automatically self-upvote was removed, but so was the reward for it. Since HF 20 went into effect, all curation from self-upvoting at 0 minutes go to the reward pool now, rather than to the creator. So, self-upvoting upon posting would need to be nearer to the 15 minute mark, if I understand correctly.
re: a board
I think your comment about what happens within the writer's block community is probably our best bet, just in a more formal manner. Communities, the change in UI that is supposed to be coming, is probably going to be our best bet for actually truly compensating quality work. And since ned has started a new company to work on such a thing, maybe we'll actually get it.
I tried to avoid showing my bias in too didactorial a form, but on one point I remain adamant. Many posters on Steemit are complaining about how impossible and disheartening it is to get started as a poster here, which is why I said that this may be the wrong time to make changes, for it will be perceived as a move to take away from posters and give to those who already are making the most.
The word perceived is more important than some seem to realise. I also see comments, again and again, that 'content' is not as important as we claim it is.
The reaction by those who do not understand the arguments (like me) is not going to chase away everybody. Probably just those who produce the kind of content that makes this an interesting place.
Just before you posted this comment, I found and read two posts (a new story) by perhaps one of the best known authors in Steemit, @johnjgeddes
I cannot reward him in a meaningful way (moneywise) but I rejoiced at finding something good to read and made a few comments.
It made Steemit feel like a nice place to be.
No curator has made me feel that way.
Ey. Thank you. And hopefully, as someone mentioned above, we are able then to focus the - often fuzzy - discussion - on discrete and widely agree updates on the blockchain`s codebase.
Thanks for putting this together cervantes
Been calling for these changes for around 8 months. There just doesn't seem to be a way to get things done here in an efficient and cost effective way here.
You are welcome @trafalgar.
Fast isn't the same as efficient. Large consensus systems with many users have many different interests to consider. Even the so called 'abusers' are users with interests. A diverse ecosystem requires some degree of stability for people to to build on it and not have the rules changed out from under them. Some blockchains such as Bitcoin have a culture of resisting change altogether, arguing that the long-term value of stability outweighs any short term benefits that might come from 'improvements'. So far that seems to be working okay! (Of course it certainly has its detractors, too!) Steem doesn't quite have that culture but it doesn't mean we just change things on a dime either. That wouldn't be 'efficient'.
Yes, speed is not the same as efficiency, example: the HF20. :)
Also, I only hope that among witness seek to defend the interests of more than 1 million users and not be influenced by those who seek to fill much more the pocket. ♥
I wonder why you were not consulted @arts-david . well,i think 50/50 curator is one of the most important thing that i see and would be an encouragement too.it is a good thing @pfunk @kenney-crane @cervantes
I'm sorry, but still being somewhat new here, just a little over one year. The 50/50 split on rewards in my opinion would be the death nail, (final nail), in the steemit coffin lid. Unless one of you can explain to me why I should vote for a person reputation level 40 or less or heck even 40 to 68 rep, when their rewards are only pennies, nickels, dimes, loose change, or not likely to break the Five dollar mark, when just about every post done by someone with a reputation of 70 or more get rewards in the hundred dollar range, (like this post).
So explain how this math is going to help content creation? How it is going to create Quality post? You think it is funny that @berniesanders can make a post with no content and earn hundreds of dollars in rewards, with a 50/50 split he will be in the 10,000 dollar reward range. @haejin will be in the 10,000 dollar reward range. There would be zero reason at all to vote on any name that is not easily recognized because that is the name that will get the votes because people know they rake in extremely large rewards. Who in their right mind looking to make a buck would not vote on their content.
Some serious rethinking needs to be done on this 50/50 reward split. What would you want a chance at a part of a 10,000 dollar prize or a part of a two cent prize.
A separate pool for downvotes is also not a good idea, but I will stay my fingers on that one.
You won't get more curation rewards just for voting for the post that gets the most rewards. You maximize curation rewards by finding posts that haven't been upvoted but will be upvoted afterwards. For example, if I want to maximize my curation rewards, I'll typically get a better return on my vote by voting for lesser known posters of quality material.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I have read the article in question. I believe that the behavior will change to people just trying to optimize their curation reward, thus going for the traditional high paying posts, thus bods bidding for accounts at the best time to optimize rewards, again not going for good content but for the best return - just another bad behavior.
I believe we should start with getting rid of all bidbots. They are the biggest evil, people buy votes and with it reputation. Reputation is not earned but bought - people with 6 months on steem has reps above 70!! The entire system is messed up by bidbots.
Then there are people with numerous accounts, voting for themselves and withdrawing all money that they make, trying to milk the system. Only one account per person should be allowed. (I can still vote for myself and receive 50% of the curation reward, will this split really help?)
This is my feeling.
The changes in curation window, is ok in my view.
I think the RC system could have worked to curb bidbots, but now they went and multiplied every bodies RC with 10 - mine never goes below 99%.
For more background on why we have the current rules and some reasons for the changes, you may also want to read an old post I made: https://steemit.com/steem/@blocktrades/voting-abuse-and-ineffective-curation-a-proposal-for-blockchain-level-change
It mostly still captures my position on the proposed changes, although I've been talked into the experiment of having a separate downvote pool (this is the one change I'm not totally comfortable with of the changes approved by the majority of witnesses, but I think it's worth testing it out).
The reason that making downvotes cheaper is so important is to remove the incentive to simply go for high paying posts, because those posts, if overrewarded, are more likely to get downvoted.
Curation rewards and superlinear are methods that reward concentration. They don't reward merit. To reward merit requires (both directly and indirectly) that the community police when rewards are not deserved, and that requires there be a lot more downvoting going on. It is unfair and not effective that currently what little downvoting there is ends up being done by a few people and even then not that often. Those people then, in addition to giving up valuable vote power with no compensation, face directed hostility and retaliation. The only way to fix this at every level both economic and social is by encouraging wide and more regular use of downvotes.
One criticism of downvotes is that they 'take away rewards' and this will discourage people from posting and chase away good contributors. However, that is not correct. Downvotes only move rewards around. The same rewards are paid out, and when the good people of Steem are downvoting 'the bad stuff' it means 'the good stuff' will be rewarded more, not less.
Bidbots are not really something that can be gotten rid of or curbed directly. They are users taking advantage of the same system rules that are available to everyone and their structure emerges out of the broken upvote and downvote incentives that exist on the platform today. By changing the incentives we hope a result of that will be more useful models of voting, curation, and monetization emerge on the platform.
Actually if you vote for yourself you receive 100% of the reward. That's precisely the problem. If your content was really valuable then this is okay; you are being rewarded for valuable content. But if it wasn't and the only reason you are getting that 100% is your own vote, then we need the community to police that and say 'Not so fast!'. That means downvotes.
The goal of increasing curation to 50% is 'a carrot' to go along with the stick of downvotes. By curating other people's good contributions instead of voting for your own (maybe, uh, less than good), delegating to a bidbot, etc. you stand to earn 50% instead of the current 25%. We hope this, along with the increased downvoting, will encourage more people to do it.
I really want to see flagging normalized. If those who are upvoting valueless content feared flags, they would think more carefully about promoting content they thought might get flagged.
I don't understand it at a code level, but common sense says, if I have 10 votes a day, and I spend 11 (one flag) that has to come from somewhere. It has to be paid for in terms of stake and resource credits... doesn't it?
Downvotes would still use RC, so in that sense they wouldn't be completely 'free' and do indeed use resources at the code level, but would be far less expensive than the status quo where every downvote costs you an upvote.
Putting the responsibility for this on uncompensated labor by the community isn't practical either, though. I can see the value of this as a stopgap solution but we really need something better.
Uncompensated labor? The members of the community are not employees, they are stakeholders who have EVERY incentive to participate in the protection of the asset STEEM.
He's right in a sense. It is uncompensated. If we had a good proposal for downvote rewards that would be great. We don't, but this proposal for 'free' downvotes moves the needle in the right direction. Intead of uncompensated downvotes that cost a lot, we have uncompensated downvotes that are free. The latter is far preferable to the former.
yeah, I'm for incentives that get people to flag. I just don't like the employee analogy I guess.
See my reply to @whatsup below
The increase in curation rewards should incentivize voters to vote for posts that will get more votes afterwards as opposed to just "voting for their own posts to capture author rewards". Also, note that voting for already popular posts leads to less curationrewards than voting for not yet popular posts, which in turn encourages 'finding' good posts before other people do. It's a sort of game to discover new 'potentially popular' content first.
There is no technical way to get rid of vote bots. But what can be done is modify the incentives to make vote bots less attractive. The new rules should decrease the attractiveness of vote bots by lowering the rewards for paying for their service (with the exception that paying for a vote bot vote to get visibility may be useful if it then results on a lot of 'follow-on' voting which would in turn mean that your post was interesting to other people).
There's also no clear way to prevent people form holding numerous accounts. But there's no reward advantage associated with distributing your SP among multiple accounts.
You can still vote for yourself and receive curation rewards, but the same vote could be used to vote for someone else's post before others vote for it, and the new rules would allow you to gain more curation rewards for voting for that post instead of your own post.
I think using curve instead of linear might reduce bidbot and self-voting or voting alts (of course this has to be combined with a separate flagging pool)
By curve, do you mean super-linear or sub-linear? I think a super-linear curve would encourage paying vote bots to upvote one's own posts to maximize the post's author rewards.
I understand the argument that this will make the post more "visible" and then it will get downvoted. But I'm not convinced this downvoting will actually occur.
Anyways, I consider superlinear curves a drastic solution, so I'd like to try other methods before moving to a solution that I think will introduce new problems.
I meant super-linear, don't need to be exactly n^1.3 as the proposal, basically anything more than n.
As for bidbots, my understanding is, under linear it's easier for bot owners to sell votes, as the voting amount of bots can be evenly distributed accordingly. It's more of a win-win for both vote buys and sellers.
While with super-linear, to split or distribute bot voting amount to vote buys is not as profitable (say, if 10 buys bid for a 500K sp bots with the same amount, they got 50K sp vote, but under superlinear, 50K is less than 1/10 that of 500K) which makes it less attractive for both owners and buys to use bots, meaning buyer might lose money by using bots, plus their content would get more "visible" which might bring potential flags. But yeah, gaming/last minute vote trading is still possible.
Ofc I might miss something here since some Steemians also told me super-linear curve would encourage paying vote, maybe we need some math proof.
Super-linear would make it more difficult for bot owners to estimate how much their vote is worth. But it also increases the value of "concentrated votes" and this is a much more powerful benefit for vote bots, which can easily make big votes due to their high SP. This benefit can quickly dominate over the relatively small issue of trying to exactly calculate the value of their product.
Now, it's possible that some sufficiently lower superlinear amount might not be such a huge benefit, but in such case it's also not going to affect calculation of the value of the vote much either.
I see your point, 50/50 curation would certainly be better, OK, if linear, then flagging will be quite important to do. Otherwise one can always vote alts instead of others and get more curation right?
At least people will start giving a fcuk. Stop focusing so much on bidbots.
If it was so profitable why did yallapapi stop using them?
My feeling is that until a carbon life form can be distinguished from a vote bot there will be no trust in Proof of Brain.
One solution was explored in an old blog post of mine, whose link is included below for your reading pleasure.
https://steemit.com/steem/@novacadian/a-decentralized-capcha-annonymous-proof-of-brain-verification
How is it that there are massive number of bots on reddit, twitter, youtube, etc. and still the curation system works far better (not perfect) than it does on Steem? Bots are subject to the same economic incentives as humans (remember, every bot is ultimately run by a human). If humans can make money via stupid or abusive voting then so can bots an vice versa. Indeed I would say that Steem is (or at least should be with the right economic incentives) less susceptible to manipulation by bots because raw vote count has a lesser to negligible role, and mass voting is one way in which bots have clear advantage over humans (try voting with 10k sock puppets without a bot).
Yesterday was my first opportunity to edit a past payout posting. No sooner had it been updated than esteem recognized 10 100% 25 rep account votes from someone's bygone experiment. They must be triggered on post url.
There are plenty of dumb bots that's for sure.
Wow, what an interesting table! Thanks for your efforts in compiling the information and for providing us with so much transparency.
So the n^1 rewards curve got basically approved by all witnesses, for instance. Does that mean that it's automatically going to be part of the next hardfork?
That's what we already have.
Ah, then I misunderstood the line This is the list of change proposals.
Then change means keeping what we have in this specific case, got it.
yes, @tcpolymath is correct. So basically it means most of the witnesses didn't want to change to a superlinear reward based on stake: the preference was to stay "as-is" and change other rules/parameters.
Thanks for clarifying this! I was reading the line This is the list of change proposals and thought that all following points included changes to the current system.
Yes, it's probably worth clarifying that point in the post itself (@cervantes).
Good point. I‘ll adapt.
Nice, thank you :-)
I left some comments with my thoughts related to my position here.
Thanks for getting this conversation going.
I'm open to any and all reasonable discussions on these ideas, provided they aren't simply rehashing the same discussions that have been going on and on for over a year in some cases. Voicing our opinion is easy and feels good as we feel heard, but doing the hard work of reading through all the discussions and debates up to this point to form consensus and understanding is much more difficult.
Hold my beer.
And yeah, you're welcome.
Now imagine 500+ of these discussions spread over two years. There is no top down consensus on a distributed, decentralIed blockchain.
Cool video though. :)
Yet.
But it's alright.
Good thing our distribution is in so few hands.
0.o
Could you please implement only one change at a time, so we can see which one actually works? I hear the antilinearists talk about deep thinking, early history, maybe math and game theory, but are any of these proposals based on empirical science?
And has anyone had independent readers rate the Trending page (compared to what?) When I look at it today, I can't say it's worse than my feed. The fact that you need to pay to get on the front page encourages the people who can only afford to do that once to make an effort. And being able to buy attention gives Steem value to outsiders.
There's a lot of nostalgia for the early days of Steem. But you can't say that it worked better because of the original incentives and rules. It was a different situation, with a lower ratio of bloggers to investors. Spammers hadn't discovered how to exploit Steem yet. It must have been a great time if you were a whale or friends with a whale, but we can't turn back the clock.
The original incentives and rules shared a lot of the current flaws (especially with respect to downvotes). That was the first and likely biggest 'wrong turn' that was made on the platform in terms of incentives and having a well-functioning voting system. And indeed it worked differently but not necessarily 'better'.
Why was I not consulted about this?
Witness rank maybe? (Somewhat guessing as I didn't perform the survey, only responded to it.) Anyway, please give your input as well.
If the listed things will happen it will be an awesome Steem will be
I personally think that a set curation level might be a mistake. Bid bots are currently making a fuckton, even with low curation levels. Imagine what they'll make with 50% curation.
I think curation should be given on a sliding scale based on average rewards. Newbs will give out a larger percentage to curation, maybe something like 50%, in exchange for the larger payout they get when they have a great post discovered and rewarded appropriately. Meanwhile, people that get $100 payouts every day, they might get a bit more with a lower curation percentage, maybe something like 20%, but there's less incentive to vote for them. People trying to go for large curation percentages will be incentivised to find awesome new authors.
Potential issues I see with this is people trying to gamify the system by upvoting random posts by low rewarded authors, or even random accounts they are create themselves. Of course, if it's a random account, then a random minnow gets a huge upvote, which is only bad if it's a really shitty post and poster. To create accounts to upvote occasionally is also kind of a pain in the ass.
We don't need big changes here. We need little incentives for people to actually do what they're supposed to be doing, curating.
I thought we are meant to be making good posts - I did not know that our main responsibility here is to curate...irrespective of the quality.
As should be obvious, I see it the other way around, we must find a way to incentivise authors so as to improve the quality of posts. Seeing a well researched and written article earn a fraction of what another post earns for publishing a photo from pixabay, just because the poster has a high rep and large voting power, is what discourages good posts being created.
You want to improve curating? Then provide curators with a way for them to find good posts. The Feed system does not work, it tends to be just as full of worthless posts as looking at new posts list. Not many have the time or patience to go through hundreds of 'rubbish' posts, just to find something worth curating.
An idea, for instance: You resteemed a post by #sircork, where a condition he places for taking part in his contest is this one:
How about a 'place' or tag, where we can promote a post, for free. It must not allow self-promotion. I would say that it needs at least one 'promotion', but not more than five, as after that, it means a bot was paid to provide the votes. As a matter of fact, using a bot for this should be penalised.
This is a blogging platform. Well researched articles should earn well, but it takes a long ass time to write them. We can't expect everyone to just up their posting quality. There will be some amazing articles here, and just some mediocre ones. People doing part of their jobs as members and curating, finding the actually good posts, and rewarding them, and preferably sharing them, is what ensures great posts get rewards.
We shouldn't be curating irrespective of quality...that's not curating...
And this is what I usually talk about when responding to posts about the issues here, tools to make it easier to curate. But there are many ways to incentivize curation. In this case I was talk
The feed system isn't really made to help us find good posts though. It's made to help us follow people we like, just like on every other social network. We can then reward the people we follow for regularly posting. If you follow groups that curate, maybe you can find enough things to upvote with combination of the individuals you follow...but there are also a few additional tools. There need to be more though and Steemit should be integrating some.
There are some places, like discord groups, where you can put links to different steem posts that you've curated. It would be nice if you could get a list of posts curated by your friends though...
Thanks. How about a post with links and information regarding the systems for helping curators to find good posts.
I strongly disapprove of 50/50 curation rewards.
Some reason for doing so?
Curation rewards are clearly not working to incentivize good curation. Author rewards are working pretty well. It makes no sense to me to double our spending on a subsidy that is not working while removing that money from something which is working rather well. Further, from the perspective of a user who makes votes, I am interested in upvoting to give money to the content creators I support. Half of that money going to voters is a very high tax on my influence, I would be hard pressed to ever vote on something that has already had votes under such a regime. I'd probably end up self voting and giving away money directly instead. Finally, curation is a whales game and has very little benefit to the normal users we should be looking to attract.
Guess the other 100 witnesses invite to take part in this was lost in the mail.
Imagine if its hard to initiate a survey where majority of top20 participate, how would it be with 100.
I am now the 68th witness.
Where can I tell these stories?
I have not seen these stories at "https://steem.chat/channel/witness"
I think that this discussed possible changes have more sense if we look at them as temporaries adjustments in order to achieve something specific, but should be applied for a long period, from 1 to 2 years, with a well-defined organization chart and action plan., in this way, I believe that 50/50 or maybe 25/75, a curation interval of 3m plus n^1.3 reward curve will do very good for the system, we will have bigger incentives for the curators in that time period, and it will be more likely to obtain external investment to obtain SP, make curation great again.
But then, what we do next? The movement, the change, is necessary to maintain a healthy system, I wonder the following, is it sustainable for the system to boast frequent changes in the code to benefit more curators for a while and more authors in another?
If we look at it superficially, these changes seem to benefit the curators much more than the authors, but I think that the opinion of @nonameslefttouse makes a lot of sense, if we analyze a little more, we can predict a much more active behavior in the curators and therefore more benefits for the authors.
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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.
@cervantes
I want to talk to you.
Sorry for late response. Please add my opinions.
n^1 rewards curve Approve n^1.3 reward curve. Disapprove 50% Curation reward. Approve 10% free downvotes Disapprove Separated upvote/downvote pools. Acceptable 5 minutes curation window. Approve 3 minutes curation window. ApproveI’ll add asap
This post had a mistake in its mentions that has been corrected in less than a day. Thank you for your quick edit !
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