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.
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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... because it was the reason cited above to push for 50/50, so it was what I focused on :)
We have agreed here for a long time I believe, down voting needs some serious attention, and IMO it needs it more than the change in ratio of authors:curators.
I'd rather see downvoting incentives (or more specifically, the removal of it's deterrent, aka "the lost in potential revenue") implemented and see how that plays out in regards to bots, rather than packaging both of these changes into a single HF.
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.
I’m sure there are plenty of old posts from 2016 that will likely mention the fact that manual curation took a nosedive when it was changed from 50/50 to 75/25. So there’s that.
But more importantly, since the only way to earn from your investment of STEEM is either through capital appreciation or curating, it clearly makes economic sense that ~doubling potential profits on your staked STEEM will make purchasing STEEM more attractive. With that potential doubling, I’m sure you’ll find some curators looking to maximize their returns through improved voting practices.
This isn’t a static environment and we shouldn’t assume that investment choices and behavior won’t change when incentives do. Real-world economics and the history of this blockchain have both demonstrated otherwise.
You can not make evidence-based arguments without trying it in this sort of system, where external behavior in response to incentives is an essential part of what determines the outcomes. The only arguments that can be made are economic structural ones, or just "what the hell, let's try it an see". Failing that the only alternative is to never change anything. The arguments put forth by @kevinwong and @trafalgar are economic structural ones. That's the best we can possibly do.
Though, in a sense there is indeed a sort of evidence-based argument in that the observation of the status quo as undesirable bordering on unacceptable is an argument for changing it.
That is not the argument being made at all.
You did not understand his argument. People are making more by behaving in a manner that directs rewards to themselves rather than helping grow Steem. That's a problem for all of us.
The number of accounts isn't the point. I am not convinced he has more to gain as a curator than as a poster. If anything it would have to be fairly close.
Also, you can't meaningfully count that way. My Steem is split between thousands of accounts, and I'm sure I'm not alone. I don't recall if any of them have >200K. I think so but I'm not sure and the reality is that it doesn't matter at all. Accounts are not an economically meaningful unit.
More to the point there are certainly people with millions of Steem, at least 10-20x more than what Kevin appears to have (of course he may have other accounts too). That makes his apparent holdings moderate when considering things like curation rewards to be earned and the effects of superlinear proposals.
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 don't think you have refuted my logic even there are NO naive voters other than downvoters (who count as a form of naive voter in the sense they are unrewarded).
Yes, there will be some equilibrium of curators. That's okay.
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.
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:
Looking at the pieces separately doesn't show the whole picture.
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'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.