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%.
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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?
There's no inherent reward advantage for voting for alts vs one's own account, in either the current rules or the proposed changes.
The only real reason nowadays to vote using alts versus one's own account under any of these rule sets is for "appearances". For example, by voting with alt accounts, you might fool other people into thinking your post had popular support (and conceivably lessen their desire to downvote the post for fear of "going against the crowd").
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?