@Helpie Witness - Preliminary HF21 Position
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Helpie HF21 Position
There is a new set of changes around the corner, and now that it has been officially announced and explained we wanted to let everyone know where @helpie stands.
The summary of changes is:
- Steem Proposal System, funded with 10% of inflation redirected from rewards (which is reduced from 75% to 65% of inflation).
- Economic Improvement Proposal
- 50/50 author curator split.
- Convergent linear rewards curve.
- 25% subsidized downvotes.
The very short summary is that we support all of the changes. There are some concerns that it may not function the way we envision it, but we believe in the goals behind the proposal. Let's dig into the details.
Steem Proposal System
This is simply put, an accountable funding system, decided by SP staked voting. Every proposal is simply a description of work, cost, and an account to transfer funding to. At each round of funding, some portion of the treasury is distributed to the highest voted proposals, in order of rank, until there are no more funds.
In the beginning, likely only a single proposal will be active: a "return to treasury" proposal that returns all funds to the treasury account. This is not enforced right now but would be a controllable way to slowly shift the budget over time as more proposals come in. Of course, all large stakeholders need to agree to send that one to the top.
Another likely use is a "burn proposal" that sends the funds to null. This allows for contraction of supply if necessary, reversing some of the dilutions that happens with inflation.
The funding is all done with SBD, which has proven itself to be more stable than Steem, even though it is not a true peg. And that stability is a desirable property for funding.
Funding Source
Now we get to the funding source. It is to come from a part of the inflation. And some of it comes from the reward pool. As of current writing, it looks to be 10% of inflation. Meaning, before the reward pool was allocated 75% of the inflation. Now it is 65% inflation, and SPS is 10%, and all others (15% vesting, 10% witness) remain the same.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is a far superior system to what utopian has going, and it just seems better to be able to grant funding for projects in a way that is transparent and fair. There's concern for example that the way utopian allocates its stake is completely lopsided, over-rewarding various things while not rewarding actually valuable contributions. Here proposals indicate a funding amount, and if agreeable, stakeholders can bump it to the threshold of funding.
So we envision a future state where SPS is to be used instead of Utopian. This means for example that something that used to be allocated from the rewards pool can adjust to using the SPS instead, and thus this shift need not be a 'cut' to authors at all. In the end, we can cleanly separate rewards for content creation with rewards for contributions to the platform.
Economic Improvement Proposal
Downvotes
The first thing to note is that use of downvotes is critical to the goal of properly evaluating content. To see why granting free downvoting can affect things, a basic thought exercise can be found here.
The specifics of how it works is that there is a special mana pool that is 25% the size of your main mana pool, regenerating to full at 5 days. When deciding what power to use for downvotes, however, it will take from your downvote mana pool first, and otherwise, it will deplete the remaining downvote mana pool and take the rest from the upvote pool. There are a few more details missing about what power is actually used, but I would not like to complicate this much more. Point is, effectively you can use a little more than 2 full power downvotes a day without depleting the upvote mana pool at all.
But when choosing how best to allocate the downvotes, it is advantageous to knock out the other highly paid votes, especially if it's an indifferent whale. This introduces an interesting dynamic that is harder to predict than if there were no free downvotes.
We acknowledge the fact that whale bullies have more, should they choose that route, but the potential upside for this change we feel outweighs the downside. Note that when they choose to bully, their stake is already overwhelmingly larger than their targets, and 25% more doesn't affect this outcome at all.
50/50
The next on this list is the 50/50 author curator split. Our motivations for this are simple. We believe in adding additional incentives to curate. There's a common misconception that this just makes it easier to just auto curate. It doesn't. Curation is actually a much harder game than you think, due to the curation curve, as well as the auction timer. Autovoting can only get you so far because everyone is competing to try to front run every other auto voter without sacrificing too much back to the reward pool.
The incentives are set up so that you are motivated more to find something that will be popular that isn't popular yet.
We also believe that this change will be disruptive to the voting systems such as bid bots, which we view as a poor use of inflation allocation. If incentives adjust to make alternatives attractive, then this will change for the better. The short of this is that 50/50 doubles the curation leaked to the outside (not the bidder, and not the bot). And even if some delegators choose to withdraw their delegations for better alternatives, that itself is disruptive.
So while the downside clearly is an initial hit to authors (all else being equal), we think the post-equilibrium state will result in a better distribution overall.
Convergent Linear
Convergent Linear is a slight adjustment to how posts are scored and eventually paid out. All else being equal, lower share posts would be given a lesser share of the rewards pool. But, as the distribution of posts equalize, it can actually get better, because for example, if the high-end posts actually get downvoted, that will skew the shares back to the others. This is also viewed as an incentive to curate as well because identifying the higher-voted posts before others will reward you that much more with the curve.
From the details of the chosen parameters, the immediate effect is around a 50% cut at the low end, and 50% gain at the high end, with a cutoff on posts hovering at around 12 STEEM in payout. But this is just the start. Once behavior shifts, there will be a new equilibrium for how rewards are distributed. I anticipate that many low-effort and low-end farming will be out of the equation, leaving more rewards towards larger shared posts.
Note that the curve makes it so that upvotes and downvotes alike are more powerful on larger posts. Consequently, it makes downvoting highly valued posts more efficient, which means less free downvotes are required to do the work.
The curve here all else being equal looks like a cut in the low end. But again, if post distribution shifts, it results in a healthier system.
Think of it this way-- instead of making little off of low-effort low-content posts, you can instead contribute to the curation, and that will ultimately help with highlighting actually good posts and mitigating abusive ones.
Philosophy
The main point when it comes to these economic changes is that every piece has a specific target behavior in mind for what it wants to incentivize, and we feel these are all in the right direction. We've evaluated the common critiques for why people are against it and ultimately came to a consensus that these adjustments will improve the platform in the long run.
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Pretty much entirely agree with your analysis.
I'm very under informed wrt SPS. Is the 'burn' proposal always going to be there by default just like the 'return to treasury' proposal? Or do people have to make one each time? I guess we could propose to have an auto burn proposal if it doesn't come with one, but just wondering if it does.
Also, do you have the roughest guideline as to when you think it's a better idea to start voting for 'burn' rather than 'return'? Or do we completely play this by ear?
It has to be done manually by the stakeholders. So it could be a little awkward. And you'd have to make one with just the right amounts I suppose. Nothing is automatic, but I do remember hearing the 'return to treasury' will be one of the first ones to go up.
No guidelines about burn vs return. I figure always returning gives the highest flexibility to in terms of funding, however it's also very awkward in that if you continue to return everything, the proposal to return needs to scale with the amount of funds in the treasury until they are ready to start disbursement, or just set the number to an unreasonably high number to keep it returning funds until others are ready to be voted above.
yes, I sort of share those minor concerns/uncertainty. But shrug, I guess they're relatively minor
Oops. I meant to respond to this as myself. But ah well, either way :)
I am curious if you would you be able to provide any examples of this? I know there was that one time that I got in a little bit of trouble fighting for one of my colleagues valuable posts to receive an upvote but that's been a while ago. Not anything recent that I am aware but as a moderator that sort of input would be helpful.
Feel free to DM and I'll be glad to take it for action if appropriate.
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I cannot. It's really just an impression of mine, along with other anecdotes. I could say for example that my impression is that people milk things like translations and bug discovery and things like fixing bugs is a trickier issue that doesn't always get rewarded. It wasn't ever perfect and I know they try continually to adjust parameters and such, but it's all just so messy to me. Mix that with moderator pay and you get another source where some people perceive it as unfair. Whether that's true I won't offer an opinion on.
The fact is though that basing it through votes is simply not easily accounted for, nor is it stable in the way SBD would be. The accounting part is not exactly solved by SPS because I imagine there's a "moderator/reviewer fund proposal" that joins everything and a second layer audit would be necessary to see how that gets distributed. But the point is that it isn't as ugly to figure out as a voting bot that even doesn't vote what it was intended to vote in many cases due to VP management.
And if the community decided that the % allocated to something that is not even providing much value, they could vote it down. Now that I think about it more, I'm not 100% sure the model. Some development could go directly to SPS, and some might go through utopian indirectly and have utopian allocate a proposed budget. But any of that is better than the voting based system we have now.
Hmmm I honestly believe that 50/50 is too high and that won't encourage content creators to post because their rewards will have been slashed by 10% with this SPS, a further 25% gone with the move to 50/50 curation and this convergent linear whatsit, you're saying that any post that doesn't get more than 12 steem will see their post payouts reduced as well.
That's a triple kick in the balls (and female private part equivalent) for any content creators hoping to make something on this platform is it not?
Personally, a 2/3 author 1/3 curator would be fine but with 50/50, it feels like you can get more just by setting up steemauto on curation trails and reap rewards than spend all the hours creating a track, travel blog or video (or whatever else for the steem platform).
Correct me if I'm wrong but I've read a few articles explaining all these changes and it does not sound like it's good for any content creators seeing as post payouts are not exactly great in the first place?
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For good content creators, I expect this to be a boon, because the entire premise hinges on good content being augmented from the effects of all the changes. It's conditional on for example low effort bid bot posts bring targeted for downvotes. People may not agree that this can/will happen or not, but I am optimistic about it. It's a triple kick only if you view them assuming nothing changes in post distribution. And I don't believe that it will stay the same at all.
I'm not convinced.
Who determines what "good quality" content/creators is/are? Sure, we have manual curation initiatives but it's so dependent on subjectivity. There's so many conditions that already need to be met to even get a post payout of 8 steem (which is a good payout for me) and then for all the augmentation you mentioned to bring "good quality" content beyond that 12 steem threshold with hf21, I fear that it will deflate any remaining air out of an already deflated pool of talented minnows.
And who is going to be flagging bid bot abuse after hf21 when there's an extremely high probability of permanent retaliation of downvoting post payouts to 0? One doesn't have to look very far to see what happens when you speak up against bid bots yet they are running the show!
Stake weighted opinion, great 👌
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That's fair, but I think there will be cascading effects that at least help this along. I expect plenty will be downvoting, and I will definitely be among them. And yes it's subjective. It always was. But if we can get traction on things that are universally looked down upon yet still trivially steal the show right now, it will work. I understand the hesitation, I really do. But I think there's potential for real change here.
I hope you're right about the cascading effects. Just hope we don't have another mass exodus of the remaining userbase when people's hearts skip a beat when they see less author rewards than before.
The change needs to come from everyone, that means EVERYONE, to use their downvote quota to stamp out the behaviour we're trying to get rid of. I can't help but feel there's an easier solution to give someone the power to just switch all the bid bots off. That's the way to combat it isn't it? Seems like we're going a very round about way when some authority on it (I.e. Steemit) can easily cull them from their end?
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The steemit-stake solution has been mentioned before. However, I think that they want to keep their stake to be neutral to keep that precedent. I think there are plenty of people that would be upset about them flexing their stake, unless they have a robust governance system in place for setting guidelines and making decisions. I actually feel that such a thing could arise from the @steemalliance Foundation that's in setup mode. Or perhaps more informally we could use the SPS as a mechanism for holding elections to establish such a body. Just sort of spitballing here. That could happen in conjunction, possibly, but I see that not being very close to fruition at the moment.
See that to me would make sense for any functioning community. You have leaders and followers in this world so if a common set of guidelines can be set e.g. post payout is commensurate with post quality (and some guidelines as to what good quality looks like) then this whole issue can be resolved. Decentralisation doesn't work with people and we can see evidence of it in the current situation.
I joined that steemalliance discord but seems like there hasn't been much action the last couple of weeks. Nice idea, hope that something good comes of it and we keep the bid bots at bay.
I am reading posts about this - from both perspectives, but there are two things that concern me. You use
three times. That is a concern and in my experience on Steemit, not much is equal.
My other concern is that this will only affect posts realising less than 12.
Then I am dead on the platform after HF21, as I nearly was after HF20
In this case "all else being equal" does not mean "everything being fair". It means keeping all other parameters fixed. In all three cases used, it talks about what appears to be cuts, but when allowing behaviors to adjust in full to all the changes, we expect the distribution to be fairer. This is a big unknown of course, so it's really hard to say just how much everything will adjust.
Exactly.
Which is why I am concerned. It's taken me 23 months to get to where I am. Granted, not everything I post, can I consider to be quality. That said, my "quality" posts see no return and what I consider "fluff" do relatively well. Huh?
I power up everything I can - even SBD. I cannot afford to buy Steem. I have never powered down. Ever. I create, engage and curate. If there are no creators to create?
I took a serious knock with HF20 and if I take another, well, what's the point of staying on the platform?
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