since curation has never effectively promoted content discovery.
And this is the problem we're trying to fix by incentivizing more curation so that it can effectively promote content discovery.
If we assume more people move to curation bots, would the quality go up, got down, or stay the same? Curation may not be perfect, but I do think it's better than what we have now.
"Quality content" is certainly skewed towards those with the most voting power and it makes sense they want to increase the value of their holdings. One important way to do that is to show the Steem blockchain via Steemit, Busy, Steempeak, Steemmonsters, etc working effectively. That includes demonstrating an effective curation system bringing good content to the surface. By that, I mean it's not just "Hurray STEEM!" articles that will, in the long run, have a positive impact on token price. It's also important (for those who understand and consider long-term value) to promote and demonstrate the effectiveness of the stated (and valuable to investor) goals of the Steem blockchain.
"It doesn't work, so let's increase its influence."
If you could come up with a curation algorithm that actually worked for content discovery, there might be some argument for increasing rewards. But the current one demonstrably does not do that.
Can you clarify what you mean by curation algorithm?
The argument behind this change is that the current curation system does not give enough reward to curators, therefore it is ineffective. Increasing the amount of the rewards pool given to curators is, the argument goes, the change to make it work.
The method currently in place to distribute rewards from voting is an algorithm which rewards predicting what other accounts will vote on, not one which rewards discovering content.
If the goal is driving content discovery, it's ineffective because it fundamentally doesn't work.
How do we measured valuable discovered content and who discovered it first? Even discovering is not enough as it has to be discovered and promoted by an influencer and even then it may not get much traction. Sometimes bad content goes further simply because of the platform built by the author. These are not simple problems to solve. If you have a better algorithm, is it published somewhere for review?
Nope. That's the Holy Grail; if we could actually do that Steem would gain immensely more value, and you can bet that if I had one I would never shut up about it.
But I don't drive faster on a flat tire just because I don't have a spare.
Using your analogy, what do you suggest? Pull over and stop the car?
Bring solutions. It's easy to complain, hard to improve. If the Steem economy has a flat tire right now, then lets try some things to fix it. Just yelling, "That won't work!" is not helpful. Instead maybe try, "I understand the reasoning behind this argument based on X, Y, and X. There are a lot of good points there including A, B, and C. I don't think, however, it will have the intended effect because of 1, 2, and 3. Instead, I suggest alpha, gamma, and beta as possible solutions, knowing full well those bring about new challenges we'd have to solve such BLUE, ORANGE, and RED."
Steal man the argument you are bringing down so the people who disagree with you at least know you can fully and accurately argue their position before introducing something better. If you have nothing better to introduce then it sounds... kind of pointless?
You're welcome to go all the way back to this post if you like. Or you can read my most recent one. Or you can read my discussion with Smooth in these comments.
The argument that curation is ineffective so we should increase it is not really intelligent enough to be worth extensively deconstructing. It deconstructs itself.
Higher curation, cheaper downvotes, and even mild/moderate superlinear (superlinear I don't support) are all part of changing the algorithm. They all shift economic incentives and the incentives are very much part of the algorithm. Without input from external actors (votes) the algorithm does nothing and those external actors act based on the incentives. You can't separate one from the other.
Most obviously cheaper downvotes are a big change because they dramatically change curation incentives toward voting for content that has a lower risk of being downvoted. This means the curator must consider factors predictive of downvotes and/or net votes (including valuation and perceived value) and not just factors affecting upvotes (visibility, misterdelegation vote targets, paid votes, etc.)
You've made a pretty strong argument for an independent downvoting system, something I already thought was a good idea but a low priority; you've convinced me it's more important than I was giving it credit for.
But nothing you've argued has made me think that its benefits won't accrue just as well under 75/25 as they would under 50/50.
Fair enough. I agreed that outside of 100/0 we can't really make any strong absolute claims about what are the right numbers. We can make relative claims about shifting incentives in a direction (which is the reason for most of the support behind 75/25 -> 50/50), but that's not quite the same thing.
So given that and the concerns about "omnibus bill" forking, why not try independent flagging first and see how it works?
I already said it was fine with me. Given that the track record release cycle for hard forks is 1.5 years+ I'm a little concerned about moving too slowly but I don't strongly oppose it.
Curation bots is too generic to reach any conclusion. It depends how those bots are programmed, what inputs they receive, etc.
We can reason based on economic incentives and those incentives apply equally to humans and bots (created by humans based on the incentives). We can say with near certainty that changing the incentives will change the behavior. It is more difficult to predict exactly how the behavior will change, but we can still make some educated guesses (and accept that despite doing so we will sometimes be wrong).
Agreed. If more people move to curation for the rewards then it's feasible more people will move to curation bots. There are a lot of people in financially struggling areas posting multiple times a day, trying to scrape some rewards together. It's feasible to consider a good portion of them will instead curate content for rewards and, hopefully, hook up with SP holders to help curate for them. Maybe tools like https://wise.vote/ will help as well. I did an interview with Noisy a while back about Wise. More tools like that could bring the perfect balance of human automation and incentive / reward sharing.
Was not aware of wise but think you for pointing out it. That looks great and there can be all sorts of tools for different curation models including delegation, collaboration, and human-machine hybrids. Excellent points.