What is #ivoted ?
#ivoted aims to act as a democracy incentive. The goal is to encourage people to vote for witnesses, rewarding them with upvotes from the account @ivoted.
The system is simple :
People post with the tag #ivoted either with a general post “#ivoted for witnesses ! Long live Steemit !” or a more specific one “#ivoted for @witness1 because…”,
Doing that, they’re subscribing to the @ivoted bot, which then upvote them weekly (or daily, depending on SP delegated).
A system will be put in place for proxy voting (maybe with a bonus for the proxy or something like that).
Goals of the program
The main objective is to promote democracy on Steemit and sensitize users about the power they have by voting for witnesses.
With more people voting and interested in witnesses, it could generate a positive dynamic around witnesses, improve their visibility, getting people to know their programs, their visions.
The problems
As discussed with @abh12345 and explained in his post, accounts with a lot of SP that aren’t voting won’t do it even with this kind of initiative.
The targeted people here are minnows (5000 SP or less) but if all of them voted for only one witness, it would only make him arrive at rank 43. So the maximum result of such a program would, at best, be negligible.
Our Call to Witnesses
The situation in not irreversible. By attracting people to vote, to invest themselves in the core of Steemit, some light will be shed on witnesses and that can only be beneficial for all of Steemit.
What do you think of such an initiative ?
Would you support it or not ?
People won't vote for witnesses until they (witnesses) start doing smth in return for voters. Let's compare this to elections. The elector who has best programme gets most of the votes and win.
What do You think?
This can be compared to elections indeed. But if you look closer, you'll see witnesses already have a program, they already do many things for the steemians, but steemians (well, most of them) don't even know what witnesses are... That's the reason of this project.
So the program is not attractive or beneficial enough to vote for :)
I don't agree. If people do not vote, it is first because they don't know the existence of witnesses. I've been here for 3 months, and I discovered it only this week. And I think if I were not as curious, I would never have heard about them.
Witnesses are already doing things for voters / users but it's not obvious from the typical user's point of view, especially if he doesn't understand blockchain and DPOS. The majority don't even know what witnesses are, like @sebbbl said.
The goal of the program is, by upvoting directly voters / users (providing an actual, visible, immediate reward for their implication), to encourage them to broaden their vision fo Steem and get interested in the participatory democracy it proposes.
Let's prepare a list then, what does each of top 20/50 witnesses do for Steemians. Would be interesting comparison.
It's planned, as such a bot would be ineffective without educating voters. Or at least his purpose would be defeated by people voting only to get the rewards (upvotes).
For me it’s kinda opposite. My vote is not effective but I’m check what they are not doing such as running a bid-bot, circle-jerk etc. They all does one way or another but I try to pick the ones who is not poking those into our eyes.
That's the pilosophy we want to promote.
But it's not possible to distinguish educated votes from "default" votes casted only for the rewards. But with some articles about witnesses, comparisons and such, little by little, we can hope more and more people will change behaviours and get genuinely concerned about who they are voting for.
Then vote for witnesses that are doing something for you, such as putting together projects that benefit you and support your personal investment in the STEEM blockchain or those who help ensure the blockchain runs as intended by testing code, etc. If you don't know what a witness does and can't figure it out just by looking them up, then they're clearly not doing anything except random updates about things that don't matter.
Hey
Firstly, well done for thinking about witness voting engagement, good to see the newer accounts with this in mind. Raising awareness of voting and witnesses in general is a good thing.
I guess i'd be looking for a few more witnesses to show interest and agree to delegating a little, possibly from the lower standings as they may benefit the most.
A report from the account showing the votes out would be nice - those can easily be checked.
Will resteem and see if anyone else is interested..
Hi ! Thanks for your comment and your resteem. About your advice, that's exactly what we planned. We were just waiting to see the first returns, and they are quite encouraging, so let's go !
Hey Asher !
First of all, thanks for your support.
You perfectly summed up the objective of the initiative : raising awareness about witness voting, as a lot of users (who aren't too fond of the technical aspects of Steem) will never get interested in it if on their own.
The witnesses < 50 are the ones who have the most to gain, as it will allow them to get some promotion (more visibility), same for new witnesses.
We're just checking the general sentiment with this post, and we are planning to make contact with most of the witnesses to explain them in detail the program and obtain delegations.
For the checking side :
Thanks for your input.
It's somewhat poetic that my account was created just a few hours before @ivoted and I'm wondering if we might collaborate?
We're both focused on witness voting engagement. You're directed at getting inactive accounts to start voting while I'm working to make sure those votes go to active witnesses.
There might be something we can do...
Cool, you can reply here (or any of my posts/comments) or reach me on steem.chat or Discord at duplibot#1884
I can't find you on discord...
My name on Discord is 'duplibot' so reach me as: duplibot#1884
Hi, great initiative too !
We sure could embed the criteria of inactive / active witness in our calculations for upvotes.
Do you have any idea of how we could get the best synergy out of our projects ? Maybe warn people if they have "dead" witnesses in their votes ?
Alerting users to inactive witnesses would be great.
Take a look at the page for my votes: http://duplibot.com/deadwitnesses/@deadwitnesses
I'm not voting for any witnesses right now so it's just blank.
Once you are more formally established and have a full intro post, I'm wondering if it would be okay for me to put a link to your post for users like me with no witness votes? That would raise awareness of your project and hopefully encourage more accounts to start voting.
After things settle in more I'm sure we'll come up worth more ideas like this and other ways to colloborate.
Sure !
Great initiative @sebbbl and @algo.coder! I was the first to delegate SP to the project because I believe in it.
I'm a witness for STEEM, do check my updates to see how I'm making a difference.
A great, great thanks for your delegation man !
Wow that was just sad. Even we all vote for one we can only make him to be at 43th :) and I’ve read something about democrasy :)
I know, but it was made this way...
It is in Beta, opened sourced and possible to change. That is why it is my feeling we need a voting block, not just more minnows voting.
This will be taken into account.
P.S. Imagine a block strong enough to make the code changes that the majority of users desire and offer it to the witnesses to vote upon; letting them know that if they vote it down they can expect a fork like BCH/BTC. The new fork would allow the users to keep their new-steem like BCH did. Where do you think the users would go? How do you think that would affect witness votes? Open Source allows the sky to be the limit of possibilities. The Emperor has no cloths.
That's great on paper.
But for now, with the vote weight being based on SP, it's almost (if not totally) impossible, as the top witnesses (and the top accounts in terms of SP) seem to be completely locked.
Just to be clear the meaning of that rave was to leave STINC behind in a real fork, not how STINC refers to forks. Like Bitcoin Cash left Bitcoin Core yet kept the same blockchain up until the split. Holders like myself had then equal amounts of BCH and BTC (and Bitcoin Gold for that matter). 😎
I'm not a fork specialist, so you might have to explain me a bit.
For forking, how many witnesses would you need ? If only one block in ten is getting validated by witnesses who made changes in the code, what would it do (before the "real" fork) ?
Or will the witnesses who forked be validating all blocks in the new blockchain (but that's after the fork) ?
How does the transition work exactly (between the witnesses changing code and the fork happening) ?
How about the apps ? Will Steemit, Busy, DTube, etc... will switch from one blockchain to the other or will you have to have the app builders in the "coup" too ?
Until it is one vote with no weighting on the votes of minnows and up then voting will be meaningless until the userbase can counter an account like @freedom (which seems the defacto King/Queen maker at this point) and witnesses swapping votes. Your bot will likely benifit the top 50 which people will pick randomly (and probably the first 30) to get your rewards.
The goal is a lofty one, yet an uneducated vote seems no better than not voting at all to me.
P.S. Your welcome to steal this bot idea instead....
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@novacadian/exploring-alternate-ways-to-contribute-to-the-community
Sorry mate, I never heard about this post... Our bot is already in development, it will be deployed soon.
It has a downside for sure, as some people (minority or majority, hard to tell) will vote just for the rewards.
The initiative will also include presentations of witnesses, and a try at educating people (that's the hard part, but if there's no one trying, there's no chance to get it done).
For your idea, the problem stays : if you don't have a "whale" in your party, it doesn't matter how many users are in your group if they don't weigh in SP.
This said, your solution will be perfect in a system of "one-person-one vote" and could really influence things in that configuration. But the idea of lobbying is a really interesting one, and could be done in a way if we authorize people to proxy their votes to the bot and get the rewards.
Maybe it could be a good compromise : get upvotes for proxying to us, and we'll do our own lobbying, but that way, it defeats the purpose of educating and promoting democracy.
That sounds like a good idea to proxy vote for them. It sounds a lot better than @isnochys who offers to buy your vote in his profile. 😎
The problem for me would be the corruptibility of such a system. I have no link to any witness, even if I already spoke with some, but there's no way for people who proxy to verify I'm not voting to promote my own interests. But I think your comment was ironic...
Maybe proxying for rewards, creating a platform with collegial decisions for the people who are genuinely interested (another layer of democracy but this time with a one-person-one-vote system), it could be done. What do you think ? It approaches your idea.
The only way I'm seeing now (but this can evolve with time) is :
Yes, in my brief idea about a Steem Political Party the idea was that a platform should be voted on by those in The Block. Some examples may be we support releasing witness votes from witnesses inactive for more than 3 months or we believe self voting should be removed again from the software. Then after lobbying, witness votes could be directed proportionally to those that support The Block's platform. That should make things more transparent and less corruptable in my opinion.
I like the idea !
The only problem is, for having on impact of votes, you need SP, so ultimately you will need witnesses or at least big accounts (generally they're linked with witnesses) to support the Block.
So you still have an "independence" problem.
I think, to begin, it could be good to take the proxy system, make a platform for people to vote for the 30 witnesses they want and the votes from the Block are then casted by the proxy to have a bigger impact.
When you have that, you can begin to interrogate the Block about the changes they would like to see, and maybe affiliate with some witnesses with the same vision as the Block (and why not even having them join it), gaining SP and influence with time passing, allowing you to switch from "vote aggregating" to "active lobbying".
Yes, a step at a time sounds like a sensible approach. There is the Steem Power factor yet there is also the court of popular opinion. Embarrassing the witnesses into change if you will. If this is a ponzi sheme by big stake holders, as @dan may have realized, then those that believe in breaking that monopoly should be ready for a real hard fork (not the STINC kind) to make things right.
My interest here is the tech, having used Bitcoin to buy Minnowhood not blog posting. It is my belief that solutions found here will influence an untold amount of blockchain applications of the future. There is no emotional investment in this particular version for me.
Most users will want a more graded weighting to rewards, especially as more users are chasing after the ever shrinking reward pool. There is no way for this platform from stopping folks from advertising a new platform on this one. A real fork would mean that users could start on the new version with their same funds and keys. STINC is very vunerable to good competition.
Anyway, hopefully it need never come to that.
Update: Here is my proposal to the DevCoin Community.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=233997.msg38975686#msg38975686
Good point. That's why we will also (re)introduce witnesses who are outside the top 50. Not the ultimate solution, but...
This is both a good and bad initiative. It's good since it gets people interested in witnesses and it's bad because what it does is bribe them. You're going to end up with people voting randomly and putting in superficial reasons without researching the witnesses properly. "His name sounds nice" isn't a reason when a witness can't keep up a price feed.
On the plus side, lately we've seen a big move by minnows to vote for witnesses. Numerous new users message me on Discord asking about witnesses and voting. It's a really good thing because I got to tell you, when the voting function was first added to the Steemit website most people didn't give two shits. Witnesses didn't "campaign" because, frankly, everyone already made their deals. Projects like this activates the minnow armies in a way and makes them "matter".
My rule of thumb is and always was, even before I became a witness myself, is to only vote for those a) whose contribution I know of b) who aren't making mint off it and are giving back and c) who are willing to talk to a minnow with the same level of priority as to a whale.
In a previous post I listed the objectives for witnesses. Feel free to reuse them if you want them:
Thanks for your comment. We are conscient about this downside. We will try to be as educative as we can, with the hope most people will play the game. But I know this will not be easy.
We are thinking about a way to avoid random voting.
Wish I had a solution for you.
I you do, feel free to contact me ! XD !
I'm going to start with the bad. I don't like bots. I don't like them because there is more bot activity on steemit than human. however lately there has been a rise in 'good bots' , some trying to combat bad bots, some trying to improve things...like witness voting.
reading the comments I was surprised to see that being here so long you have only found out about witnesses, but very fast to act when you did.
Resteeming for Extra visibility
To be honest I heard about witnesses before that. And I often said to myself "i MUST get to know what they are".
But every time my attention was distracted by some other feature to discover on Steemit.
But indeed, when I discovered their importance, I couldn't imagine why the hell this kind of information is not brought to plankton ASAP after they register...
Thanks anyway for resteem !
Thanks a lot !
It's clear that bots are not ideal, I personally am a fan of your direct engagement approach (and Asher's way too), but for spreading the word about witnesses, it's hard to put in place (or at least I couldn't find a way to apply it to our subject, for now).
Let's say the bot (I must insist on the fact that to subscribe you will have to engage by posting about your choices, that's the compromise between automation and interaction we chose) is just here for the first phase :
But first and foremost, we would like this to be the trigger and the fuel for other initiatives that we are already working on.
cant wait to hear what else you are working on, once it is not a bit bot. Ur bot is on my good list as there are many that need educating about witnesses
Sure you won't ever see me (or @algo.coder) developing a bid bot !
Hi @paulag, in case you missed it, here's the introduceyourself post :
https://steemit.com/@ivoted/introduction-of-ivoted-a-witness-voting-incentive-bot
The bot is ready to launch.
No time to comment in depth, but this is a great idea.. I've often got a # going spare, anything to raise awareness of witnesses... they do control the evolution of the blockchain after all.
Thanks !
That's our goal. A lot of people are coming here on Steemit, seeing only the monetization of posts as the revolution.
They're not aware that Steem is a fully functional ecosystem (but also really hard to fully comprehend if you're not really "technical") and that witnesses are :
I agree.... funnily enough I'm just in the middle of trying to summarise the bluepaper... I've developed a new appreciation of how this steemit front-end really is just the tip of the iceberg!
The discussion below the original post is more informative and something to be pondered over than the post...
Hope for only positive...Lets hope for Best
We precisely opened this thread to get external points of view. Goal reached ! Thanks !
when can we start using this
Very, very soon. I promise.
Great initiative, thumbs up!
I'm new to steemit.How many votes will I have. What steeminas get in return if they vote?
You will have one weekly upvote, the value will depend on how much SP is delegated to us and how many witness votes you casted.
oho! What is steem delegation?
It's when you give part of your Steem Power (which influences your upvote value, and is also your "weight" in general to simplify, for example your voice counts more when you're voting for witnesses) to another account, but it stays yours and you can get it back whenever you want.
Thank you very much!
If a witness wants to buy my vote, I am listening. :S
I have ignored witnesses wanting to buy votes before. So seriously I don't sell my witness votes but I would like people who have SP to vote for witnesses that povide public rpc nodes.
Of course it will generate a positive dynamic around witnesses. The goal is to encourage people to vote for witnesses, rewarding them with upvotes from the account is really impressive. I appreciate your thoughts.
The account's Governance and Policy rules have been published :
https://steemit.com/witness/@ivoted/the-ivoted-account-governance-and-policy