What problems are people facing on Steemit?
I have done a Poll on Dpoll.xyz trying to identify a problem , already 242 votes so far. You can still vote here on the poll: https://dpoll.xyz/detail/@niel96/what-things-should-be-improved-to-make-steem-great-again/
These are the top 10 problems that people are generally facing on this blockchain:
The main problem seems to be that good content simply doesn't get enough upvotes. You have to spend some money on upvote bots to get trending.
Personally i think that's because most people are here to write and not to read. Curating is also not very profitable, when you have lots of steem power it's more profitable to just sell your vote. Cheating is the name of the game on Steem.
Probably that's also because the upvotes are financed by the community. So we are like politicians trying to fill our own pockets. It's easier to spend the money from community than your own money. There is an incentive for abuse so people do it because they can and it's more rewarding.
But i don't really know the solution. Making curation maybe more rewarding? Or will upvote bots then rape the system even harder?
It's pretty complex because everything here is new. Steem is like a big social and financial experiment. Something like this has never been done before. But most political system fail in the end. That's why Bitcoin is still king. Trust the code, don't trust other people.
Completely on the money
Has there ever been a time where curation on Steem was effective? We've had curation rewards under various economic paradigms since the beginning, but we have never had that result in a well curated front page, the best or most popular content getting the most rewards.
Reddit has been consistently better than Steem at curation without ever giving a monetary reward. We should get rid of curation rewards entirely rather than increase them - curation rewards simply don't work. Author rewards do at least attract creators (we've had top Youtube personalities arrive here, with varying degrees of sticking around as the rewards drop).
Removing curation rewards takes away the main incentive to hold steem.
The main incentive to hold SP currently is self voting directly or by proxy. If you want to extract rent from the platform, you get more from other methods. If you want to use your SP to support people á la Patreon, curation rewards undermine that function.
You can also change it to a straight dividend if the point is to reward holders.
Voting is the main mechanism to distribute the steem token (to yourself or to others). Removing curation rewards does not eliminate self voting via proxy or alt accounts (assuming that author rewards are distributed via voting).
As long as the token distribution via author rewards is part of the logic of the system you need a mechanism to counter sybil attacks. In the abscence of some proof of uniqueness of any account stake-weighted voting is the best way to do it.
Remove the incentive for stake weighted-voting (aka curation rewards) and you open up the ecosystem for such an attack. Or just get rid of rewarding content producers and turn steem into just another generic blockchain.
That is the game theory argument for the existence of curation rewards (at least that's how I see it). It's all about incentives.
Removing curation rewards does not remove stake weighting. Sybil attacks are thus unrelated.
The only incentive to vote for someone other than yourself is because you want to support that person in some way. If you want to monetize your own vote, then there are better ways to do it. You make far more by voting for yourself. If you want to use your vote in a supportive way, curation rewards actually undermine that function. A portion of your vote ends up going to people who you weren't planning on supporting simply because they predicted your vote and dropped in a tiny pre-vote maximizing on a per-rshare basis. Curation rewards make pro-social voting less effective, while having virtually no impact on self voting because self voting is almost universally better for personal ROI (at least if we ignore the impact on the value of Steem of pervasive self voting).
Let's assume that curation rewards are dropped and a higher portion of the inflation is allocated to stake holders to compensate and we keep the stake-weighted voting.
My only incentive to vote would be to allocate a portion of the reward pool to content that I find worthy but I would not have a financial incentive to actively do it (after all I am getting my earnings wheter I vote or not).
In this scenario it is plausible that we would have a large portion of the stake inactive and the distribution of the author rewards would be dictated by a large number of accounts with little to almost non-existent stake. That is what opens the door to sybil attacks that drain the reward pool.
Or the rewards distribution would be dictated by an even smaller number of large accounts...pick your poison.
Both outcomes are examples of anti-social voting that could play out. Granted, this is hypothetical (but not unlikely) and it proves that removing curation rewards would not be a silver bullet to encourage "good" social behavior.
Oh, and I don't disagree that curation is not conducive to pro-social voting. I just don't think that the alternatives are much better.
Fair point.
Very good point. I was personally also afraid of that. You can make curation more rewarding but who hold people back to still use upvote bots. Then they even rape the system harder than before. What we really need is some type of mechanism that rewards manual curation instead of vote selling.
Exposure of members being acknowledged with low Reputation levels. The ones being regarded are only peepz with 60 reputation level and above!
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