Why linear rewards in HF19 won't solve SteemIt's main problems
This is a follow up of my article from yesterday (Trending posts finally made me realize the main problem with SteemIt and how to solve it!).
Current situation
- 1 person with 1 million STEEM POWER has 1 million times more power than 1000 people with 1 STEEM POWER combined
- STEEM POWER influences your rewards exponentially (10 STEEM POWER gives you 100 times more power than having 1 STEEM POWER)
- Curators can use 0.5% of their remaining voting power per vote
- Users with almost no STEEM POWER are completely powerless
- The system promotes going after quantity rather than quality
- The system doesn't penalize incorrect curation
- The system forces everyone to curate out of fear, rather than rationality
- The system completely ignores curation quality
After hard fork 19
- 1 person with 1 million STEEM POWER has 1000 times more power than 1000 people with 1 STEEM POWER combined
- STEEM POWER influences your rewards linearly (10 STEEM POWER gives you 10 times more power than having 1 STEEM POWER)
- Curators can use 2% of their remaining voting power per vote
- Users with almost no STEEM POWER are almost completely powerless
- The system promotes going after quantity rather than quality
- The system doesn't penalize incorrect curation
- The system forces everyone to curate out of fear, rather than rationality
- The system completely ignores curation quality
Unresolved problems
- Users with large amounts of STEEM POWER have more power than dozens or even hundreds of people, regardless of their curation skill
- Users with little STEEM POWER can't gain a (noticeable) advantage over others by consistently curating properly
- The system doesn't penalize (in fact even promotes) going after quantity rather than quality
- The system forces everyone to curate out of fear, rather than rationality
Conclusion
If the system doesn't recognize and keep track of the user's curation skill, it's possible for bad actors with a lot of money to abuse the system. Users that curate properly also aren't sufficiently compensated, so there is absolutely no incentive to curate accurately!
The second main problem is that people are forced to vote out of fear, because they simply aren't given any time to curate properly. You can read my explanation in my article from yesterday.
The third main problem is that holding STEEM POWER gives you power and control rather than a long-term investment opportunity. The beautiful goal of decentralization is that power isn't centralized, right now on SteemIt we experience exactly the same problem with the power of the rich as the old system we're so desperately trying to leave.
As long as these problems aren't solved, linear rewards will change almost nothing. I have nothing against people having more money than others when others have voluntarily given their money to the them. I'm just tired of injustice in the world, aren't you?
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Steem is not based at all on user having free money or more power than the amount of SP they hold. If it was the case it would always end up being abused by sybil attacks.
There is absolutely no problem with quantity over quality when the UIs can manage large amount of content efficiently.
Your title point out Steemit's problem,,, Steemit problem are steemit problem HF19 is about Steem.
Steem problem is that steemit is confused with steem and that it's UI can't handle a lot more than a trending page with a few page of links.
Linear reward is key to allowing smaller niche communities to not be as diluted by one large trending page.
I don't understand what you mean by curating out of fear ... I like to think that I curate as rationally as I can and don't feel threaten not doing so or doing it wrong.
What is your solution ?
First things first: SteemIt is the first application running on the STEEM blockchain. Linear rewards have everything to do with SteemIt so of course HF19 is about SteemIt, even though it's being implemented on the STEEM blockchain indeed.
With curating out of fear i mean that people are forced to vote as early as possible (while ideally taking into account how fast the rewards are growing on that post). They are scared of missing out and many times they have no time to even read the first line of content before they have to vote.
I have described one possible solution in my referenced article at the very beginning of this article. I personally think it would solve so many problems already. In the end i just want SteemIt to be a fair environment for 100% of the users.
If you still have any concerns, let me know.
Curation reward is a reverse auction that give the full 25% reward after 30 min, So the optimal time to vote is 30 min, enough time to go through most of the posts.
I'll look into your article, Thanks
Nope, if you vote too late a large percentage of the curation rewards are already gone. I believe 75% of the curation rewards go to the first 6 people or something and 99% of the curation rewards go to the first 40. Many posts have 10, 20 or 30 votes within a few minutes.
That's not what I understood of it. Would you mind checking ?
@transisto I wrote a huge article about curation rewards to finally clear up all confusion about curation rewards for everyone. It's a long read but it's a complicated concept :)
There are 2 mechanisms working at the same time. 1 of them is the reversed-auction you mentioned, which means that the first 1800 seconds after publication every second your potential curation reward grows by 1/1800th.
The second mechanism i mentioned makes sure that not everyone can just wait for 30 minutes to get maximum rewards.
I'm 99% certain this is the current implementation. If you have any proof to the contrary i would love to see it :)
summoning @pfunk @timcliff
There could be a 5 - 10 minute timer that gives people time to read it so the vote at end gets counted to when 1st opened Doesn't the fear come from having to upvote straight away? Needs to be some space to concentrate.
Some good points here, especially in relation to curation history/reputation. However, it sounds like you're complaining b/c the "rich" have more "power". This is just the reality of the world in which we live and no blockchain, technology, or socialist ideological hope is going to ever change that.
The world, the universe, is build on the principle of give and take, equilibriums just do not exist.
To put this in perspective; If everyone's vote was the same, where would the demand to purchase more STEEM come? Altruism? I think you're leaving out one of the most important and genius aspects of STEEM, the economics.
Read this article i wrote today. It's not as bad as you would think.
Lol, someone has the steem power powerfully.And he voted my comments. Then his curation reward given to me is more than the reward of my post. How sad the truth is steem power is the most powerful within steemit.
The heart of steemit is SP. It is an influence token... It should be rewarded to have and hold it, otherwise the price of Steem will plummet.
Right now that might be true, but that doesn't mean that there aren't numerous improvements possible, right? :)
Also, the article is focusing on the curation quality problem as well....
All your points are very valid. I would say 100% valid :)
I agree with you on almost all conclusions. Except for:
I am not sure that those with a lot of Steem Power are really trying to leave the old system. I think that they are trying to hold to this power and use it. Yes, they invested in it, somehow. They won't just give it away...
The two major pitfalls of the platform remain untouched:
No, I don't have solutions to those two. Linear rewards might be a very small step towards fixing the first issue without actually hurting the major power holders.
I wasn't talking about large SP holders wanting to leave the old system, i mean that we're all trying to leave the old money system and centralization of power.
The "invisibility of posts from majority of authors" problem shouldn't and can't be fixed by the blockchain. Marketing is the task of the author, not the protocol ;)
Thanks for the feedback.
You are welcome :)
I used your post as a reference here.
I am talking about the old system copy pasted to the blockchain - power distribution and stuff :)
Blockchain in itself won't solve the invisibility issue, I agree. The front end usage of blockchain data might solve it ...
Yup there are small improvements in the clients that could get us in the right direction. And of course there is "promoted posts" already!
I think the promoted posts system is leading exactly in the wrong direction - if I understood it correctly. It enable people who have a lot of steem already to make even more., while someone without funds is screwed. But that just as a side note.
The problem with invisibility of posts (minnow posts in particular) I see as a major issue, especially if - as we all hope - Steemit grows to a size like YT or Facebook or so.
With numbers of new submission like those have, your post has less chances to last long enough in the visible region like a snow flake in hell.
I admit, a perfect solution for that escapes me as well. The only thing I can imagine is a kind of splitting into fields of interest, time spaces or whatever.
A good (silly) example is a live stream on YT with 10.000 viewers, that has a open chat running. Everybody is posting, but you basically cannot read anything, because it just rushes along.
If rhat happens here, people will start to leave again, rewards or not.
It's already a huge problem, even without 100s of millions of users. It's caused by curators not having incentive to find quality posts. And whales are even more problematic, they make money regardless of what they do (even by potentially adding low quality to the platform on a regular basis). The fact that all whales have 1000s of followers and some of them almost never post any content says enough about people slimeballing whales all day and the protocol allowing quantity over quality.
Yes, its impossible to look at every post, even briefly. And the curation thing, IDK... Whats quality and what isn't is a very subjective thing. Being too strikt will scare many people away and will take some of the fun factor of it all.
To the voting power thing... it might be worth concidering a equal power for all system, with a vote limit per day or something. The way it is now, is incredibly complicated. But I guess such a suggestion would meet a lot of resistance.
The quality of a post is almost entirely a matter of opinion of the people who are reading the post. Of course, it doesn't matter how high the quality of a post is if no one sees it because of the volume of posts on the feeds. I don't look at the trending or promoted post feeds, and I seldom look at the new feeds. It takes most of my time here just to look at the new posts from the people I'm following. That's pretty much the best I can do.
The system should reward curators to find great content that is undervalued, currently it doesn't.
The volume of posts is actually not bad at all, you can pretty much scan the NEW section all day and rarely not being able to keep up. Not that i scan NEW anymore, because it's quite pointless :)
Followed! I couldn't agree more but what can be done?!
Thank you for pointing out some of these things... however, I'd like to add that we have a helpful solution to combat the quantity over quality idea:
Downvotes.By spreading this awareness we can downvote articles that are getting bot upvoted etc. A downvote doesn't necessarily mean you don't like the article, it just means you want to affect a redistribution of the rewards.
Downvote articles that are botvoted.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@showoff/the-solution-to-steemit-s-curation-problem-us
This is alot to think about as a new user. I have been trying to only put out decent to good original content. As I have been browsing I have noticed the something like what you are pointing out. It makes it so you cant grow and only the people with stocked assets can achieve proper numbers on their post because they already have the exposure and boost. It will eventually push all but the top tier user out. Or people willing to buy in off the bat for a boost.. Should I?
Good job, Very interesting.
Quality insight. Not many think critically towards steem as you do.
I just want the coming millions of people to get treated fairly. I'm a programmer too so i'm used to always strife for a perfect implementation. The developers seem to care less about it at the moment:)
The problem is complexity. The developers keep adding more.