It's not about content quality
The only thing in this system that has ever been about content quality is downvoting. That's why reducing the cost of downvoting is essential to getting the rewards where they do the most good.
This is a package of changes and looking at them piecemeal is misleading or in some cases deliberate spin:
- Increasing curation shifts the 'go where the money is' incentives toward curation rather than self-voting. This would produce more curation but would not work to produce good curation without #2.
- Cheaper downvoting means more upvoted garbarge will get downvoted, and therefore curation (see above) needs to focus on non-garbage to get a good return. This would not work to produce good curation without #1 (actually I personally think it would work, at least better than the status quo, but it works better along with #1).
Looking at the pieces separately doesn't show the whole picture.
This is all focusing on abuse rather than usability, which is one of the Steem development process' biggest flaws. Yes, fewer votes might go to crap, and if that's your goal, bravo.
But the cost is fewer votes going to new posters. Something that we didn't start with enough of and have been dropping like flies.
Our argument here seems to be about whether promoting user growth is more important than reducing abuse. I strongly believe that to be true.
It's not focusing on abuse. It is focusing on content-agnostic voting for the purpose of generating rewards vs. expressing an opinion. Downvoting doesn't generate/direct rewards so it can freely be used by people to express an opinion without huge economic distortions in favor of reward extraction. That's why it is so critical here. Once we get people expressing their opinions (if mostly via "I object!") without an easy option to say "To me!" then we can see rewards flow to where stakeholders as a community engaged in proof of brain actually believe they should flow.
Curation is about finding and surfacing these posts to both help the economic system work as well as make the platform more useful as content discovery. But (as you correctly point out) it doesn't work without anchoring based on actual opinions of the content itself.
There is nothing about this discussion that involves fewer votes going to new posters. Indeed by shifting rewards away from massive schemes that gobble up a huge portion of them it leaves MORE rewards for new posters.
I'm beginning to feel like nobody behind this scheme has done any observing of the accounts that are currently trying to maximize curation rewards. They don't vote on new posters. When I've been building curation bots I don't vote on new posters. Why would I? It's much easier to predict the value of votes going to established posters.
I think the downvoting part of this proposal makes a lot of sense, but I don't see why it makes any more sense at 50/50 than it does at 75/25 or even 100/0. All of the benefits of downvoting you predict would remain.
Yes but also much more crowded.
I ran major curation efforts early on. Our biggest wins (hundreds of STEEM of curation rewards) were literally new posters like neilstrauss and others like that. They were lightly voted or unvoted for hours because everyone was fighting over a few STEEM curating stellabelle or dan.
Curation is very, very underdeveloped because there isn't enough money in it, and it isn't seen as effective. Both issues are addressed here. Like you, most who worked on it earlier have given up.
I agree the benefits of downvoting remain but there has to be some sort of carrot to go with the stick otherwise the benefits of selfvoting are still alluring (some chance you won't get downvoted). We need some incentive to shift the use of stake toward useful curation and away from extraction. So for that reason I don't think 100/0 is very good. The other numbers could work. There is a lot of support behind the idea that 25% is just too low, and the gap of 4-1 between curating and self-voting is too high. But you are right the 'best' number isn't clear at all.
Maybe it's because there's nobody in the space, and figuring out the new evp is taking people some time, but right now curation is massively more profitable than delegating to vote-selling bots. I have one very simple bot that's returning 5x par. I wouldn't say I've given up, I'm just not particularly interested in maximizing my Steem holdings versus participating in a growing and diverse content system that empowers large numbers of people. That's where all of my SP goes - I'm leasing more for that than I'm using for curation experiments - and that's the mission that is going backwards with this change.
If there's no extrinsic value, it really doesn't make sense for me to spend my time here versus doing something that earns USD, regardless of how my rewards are distributed. 50% would definitely make Steem more profitable for me, but not really in a way that makes it make economic sense to spend my time here. What makes it make sense to be here is the mission of trying to build that diverse community of stakeholders, and the long-term benefit that may accrue from it.
Good points.