Autovorotic Asphyxiation- The MEGA CIRCLE JERK is choking-out itself through the rewards pool
Yeah, so it turns out you can't give everyone a free lambo with linear rewards and then quadruple the Dank Amps (rewards) of those mega votes without consequences. In this case we're watching the rewards pool drain.
Definition
auto-self
vo- vote
rotic- sexy time
Asphiyxiation- Death by lack of air
What we're doing
We're literally strangling ourselves right now. The Circle Jerk was sooo huge that it's just started eating the rewards pool. That first day when we were giving $8K to some of the biggest authors is more akin to promising them like 7% of the rewards pool, but we did it to multiple authors, and everyone else was making more, so we promised more than 100% of the rewards pool that day. So, it drained.
@me-tarzan and his reward pool tracking
That image is from his post this week of - https://steemit.com/steemit/@me-tarzan/rewards-pool-i-have-charted-the-waters-for-you-june-27-2017
As you can see the reward pool is going down. Look at the slope of that curve.
(@me-tarzan Thanks for tracking that. I should probably ask you about including it here, but I'm also promoting you and your post. I'm a little unclear on the ethics. HMU if you feel robbed by me in addition to robbed by the pool)
My rewards were shrinking after my post earned
That slope remind you of any other? Oh, shit. It looks kinda looks like the drain on the reward pool! Correlation isn't causation, but I'm going out on a limb and saying what I'm seeing are linked.
So, what happens next?
What happens next is that the reward pool is going to drain until it reaches equilibrium with the speed with which these mega votes are draining it. It'll look like the post rewards in trending and other places have stabilized and are now lower (/cheer) but what has happened is the biggest giveaway to already rich posters and that much given to them has lowered the rewards of everyone else and will continue to do so until it stabilizes more (/stopcheeringandcryinside).
Funs over everyone. Go back to where you were before. Yes your minnow vote is worth more, but with the pool drained by the top posters it's gonna even out and ultimately not really help you. Sorry your views are down, sorry you can't vote on more than 10 things a day without draining your voting power, and sorry this may have killed your inter-minnow communication thing too. But we handed out a lot of steem to the richest among us and biggest users among us. So it was all worth it!
It's gonna look like a victory cause trending is down, but we just handed a lot higher of a percent to the biggest authors of what is now a much smaller pool for everyone. I think I remember reading someone suggesting there might be issues with this HF and some unintended consequences of it...
Side note Curation and Comments are up!!!
Hey, well at least here's a victory everyone will agree is a great thing. Commenting has gone up TWOFOLD since this hardfork. People are now actively commenting more and literally twice as much of the reward pool is going there.
It's probably just self voting and stealing more from all of us
Yeah, so you noticed all those $100+ comments peeps are spraying all over themselves now? Yeah... well it turns out that drains the pool too. Pretty sure we didn't all miraculously decide to love one another's posts more and spend twice as much in the comments section on someone else. We're now just mooning our own comments. So, sad panda on that. Seems like giving everyone the ability to free lambo the shit out of themselves didn't do as much for balanced curation as we were promised.
A radical idea
Can we go back to 40 votes for starters? It seems part, if not all of this, was a bad idea. I remember someone saying something about this being a bad idea before I got here too... Here's some perspective from the white paper (@dantheman).
In order to realign incentives and discourage individuals from simply voting for themselves, money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner. For example a quadratic function in votes, i.e., someone with twice the votes of someone else should receive four times the payout and someone with three times the votes should receive nine times the payout. In other words, the reward is proportional to votes2rather than votes. This mirrors the value of network effect which grows with n2the number of participants, according to Metcalfe’s Law
Assuming all users have equal stake, someone who only receives their own vote will receive much less than someone who receives votes from 100 different users. This encourages users to cooperate to vote for the same things to maximize the payout. This system also creates financial incentive to collude where everyone votes on one thing and then divides the reward equally among themselves.
Other than that Everything IS AWESOME!!!!
We ultimately have a distribution problem. Back end hacking linear rewards was meant to fix that. It appears to have worked out well in some ways and had some pretty crappy consequences in others
Vote for @aggroed for witness.
There are a few things at work here. First, the rewards pool was over-filled after the HF 19 hit. Second, users began allocating rewards at a faster rate that has since returned to normal to match user voting habits. Third, the price of STEEM (all crypto) dropped last week and is slowly returning. All of this contributes to the fact that you saw really high rewards that are slowly shrinking. We are quickly moving towards a new equilibrium in reward payouts. It is entirely too soon to draw any sort of conclusion over the success or failure of linear rewards.
meh. 1. quanitfy "over-filled." 2. return to normal = drained the pool. 3. price flucuation didn't really factor in too hard because it's a price average over teh course of a week so a flash crash doesn't totally fcuk the trend. meh
We reduced the amount of time the rewards algorithm takes into account for the moving average. Which means there was more STEEM in the reward fund than rshares were accounting for. This change was motivated by the fact that it took far too long for the rewards algorithm to respond to the whale voting experiment after HF 17. This will let the rewards algorithm to respond a little bit faster to changes (about twice as fast).
Price average is 3.5 days. STEEM had been dropping in price for a week, so yes. It would have impacted it.
Thanx for the explanation. I found a developer. great work. I just arrived 13 days ago on the platform.. I love it. You have a dutch name. where are you from?
Maybe read my blog about my once in a lifetime family trip to the US. I hope I can reach it with dedication to steemit. thx and bye
It is my opinion that HF19 has scratched the itch the community has had since the beginning, but as you point out, the dust has not fully settled after all the action. However, the issue of comment self upvoting, which has now become an epidemic, still needs to be addressed and not only does it look bad, it's diverting rewards from the central purpose of Steem.
By the way @vandeberg, I used to hate you. Now I see you are simply a bit more conservative than I am, which is fine, and perhaps it shows more maturity inheres in you than me. However, as the leadup to the mandate for the HF19 change shows, sometimes audacity and the courage to act ton convictions is also important for the health of the community.
I figured there had to be a reaction to the sudden increase in rewards. That doesn't mean it's not a little sad.
Thank you for your explanation!
A+ on the gif
This is to be expected from the gf 19 update.
Let it slowly reach a stable ground and things will go back as they. Err before hf19 with the exception that people are going to have a bit more of so and fluidity in voting. It's not cool having 1k following with a vote power of 2$
😎
Cheers and all the best
Sorta. Except the mega posters are richer and self voters are getting mad lootz
Hopefully we get a ew balance in the next hard fork.
Or some sort of fix about this.
I mean if you're hogging all the stuff sooner or later its going to suffice the community... I've noticed a post of mine had 120/130$ now it's down to 79. ;(
But I'm still happy.. Don't really get more than 12 20 😃 at best.
P.S cheers for the good work, at least I must admit that you are awesome. Keep on spreading the love.
shocker the greedy slicksters remained the same, effing shocked...NOT, great post
A vote power of 2 $!?? I have posts that got over150 votes and they don't even go over2$ 😂
I couldn't agree with you more @aggroed....Everything at first was all Smiles and rainbows when HF19 happened, now people are starting to relize that it is the draining the pool rewards.
I think it has to do with all the new people signing up which is a great thing!! It will make its way back up.
the drain is from whales overpromising the rewards pool to top posters from what I can tell. Oh, and a healthy dose of self-voting.
How do you find that chart with the reward pool numbers? Thanks for the post mate.
@me-tarzan made it. It's in a recent post that I linked in teh article.
To comment on this, I think this Idea is better than what we have now. However, I already foresee ( the same people draining the rewards ) making multiple accounts to upvote their main account. So in a way it won't really solve the problem that much but at least it is an extra step for the abuser to take rather than seeing how simple it is now to upvote themselves for $$$ with posts and comments with equal to no value.
On a side note, I really enjoyed reading this. Very enlightening and hope to see more posts like this. A view of a whale looking out for minnows :)
That's always struck me as odd too. I get how you wouldn't want two accounts, with half your net worth in each upvoting each other (under a quadratic model), but you could have one account with 100%, upvoting an empty sock puppet account, getting the full amount, either pre or post hf19.
Oh yeah that makes sense too.
My biggest complaint is simply the lack of views.
I was just starting to get traction before hardfork.
However, it has got me into communicating more in the comments of posts I like.
Since my amount of votes has been reduced, where I place that vote has become more important to me... So now I'm digging deeper into people's content... Seeking better content... And since I can't just throw votes around, I'm spending more time with the content that I've found and enjoying.
Hardfork has changed my views, it's changed my payouts, but it's also changed my behavior... So I'm not complaining...yet
yeah, pretty sure that was the intended consequence. I'm discussing the uninteded consequences associated with that one. I don't think it was worth it.
to a large extent the increased decay rate is mitigating the worst of it but as I say:
This was fascinating to read. I am learning about Steemit as I go (little minnow here) and this explains a lot of my initial questions.
I came in about 2 days before HF19 so I don't know what it was like before, but I'm with you when you say you hope the voting evens out soon (also I like the quadratic suggestion. I get a lot minnow upvotes).
I love the platform, I love the concept, but I still find I am putting out content I am working very hard on with little to no reward. I won't give up, but some days it's more challenging.
Yeah. Posting is a great way to start for a minnow. Short posts. Lots of good comments.
That's the goal. I try and bring quality content in short bursts. I'm also posting across quite a few topics right now to see where I receive the most feedback.
Also, thanks for the feedback. It is appreciated!
Don't shitpost but it isn't worth 10hrs on a post 8 minnows read.
I'm usually in the 30 min range right now. 1 hour at absolute outside max. I am an experienced blogger, so hopefully I will make it work on this platoform like I have on others
Before HF19, you get less pay from minnow votes. If whales voted on you, you made a lot. Now, Minnow and Dolphin votes pay much more. HF19 was amazing at the start but now these greedy people are just voting on themselfs...
The law of compound interest is in your favour. The more you win, the more you hold, the more you will be able to win. I did this for almost 6 months starting in late August last year, and I accumulated 20,000 steem power, of which maybe 3000 I put in from my welfare payments. Those power ups ended up growing over 400%
I think I need to read more about this reward pool because I was of the understanding that the pool was fixed and that it was handed out to people on a percentage basis (post vests/total vests).
But yea, a lot of people said at the time, and I agree, that changing vote scaling AND the cost of voting at the same time was a bad idea.
Most people will read about HF19 and gain from it - 10 votes per day maximum. They are not limiting their voting. Everyone votes for their own posts so they aren't being cut so it's slightly worse than 1/4. Sure the votes are worth more, but it's less interaction (being replaced by commenting).
HF19 effectively gave us the ability to add 4 votes to a post, but for minnows without the slider it means we can't go any smaller than that (without external tools).
Would lowering the bar for access to the vote power slider be a solution?
How about introducing a minimum value for the slider so if your vite has to be worth at least X amount or you can't cast it, and give the slider to everyone?
The solution has to be spreading the love, not consolidating it.
Yeah, so many issues to sort out at once. Tough to know all of what's going on. It hurts my head just thinking about it.
Here's a painkiller for your headache.🍷
100% upvote from me, because I like jerking you off @aggroed
I knew this was going to happen but have kept my mouth shut on the subject. I gave up trying to voice improvement ideas long ago, there's no use when a centralized few decide what happens regardless of better options voiced by a community of enlightened folk. All we can really do is sit back and watch this place burn, or hopefully succeed; hopefully.
Gotta speak up. This place is important.
Loool!
This place IS important @aggroed and I thought the whole point was that a "central few" COULDNT do this. Vote collusion and self vote self delusion are things we can't ever stamp out completely, but how do we prevent "how votes work" collusion by the "core few"?
I thought the whole point of witnesses was a bit like the electoral college and we the people, pick you in the steeple to run the church for us. Am I wrong?
Nice post. Seems like this could also be viewed as a one time redistribution of steem. Many accounts that got paid were accounts with high reputation and many followers. These were often long time steemians even if not the best writers. I think the one time distribution is good and will balance out in the end. The self voting is likely to be a problem. We do need some exponential (maybe 1.1?) but I think the 10 vote works especially if more accounts get the slider. Maybe if they don't have enough power it could be 1/3, 2/3, 3/3 slider.
We probably did overcorrect for exponential rewards and minnow influence but it was still a step in the right direction .
The ease with which substantial rewards can accumulate from self voting is going to be the next big problem. It's going to lead to a decline in quality and maybe 20% of rewards will have nothing to do with community opinion, which is the central purpose of the system.