RE: Meet Steem's #1 Author!
Well, I just took the time to reread it here. You'll undoubtedly prefer to have a summary =p
I have followed you for a while, impressed with your reasoning, and apparent dedication to the platform. I have commented widely along these lines, and expect my recollection may be based on comments to which you replied, rather than my posts, or that I am completely losing my memory, and just plain wrong.
Anyway, to summarize (I'll try =p):
The various botnets, vote-buying schemes, circle jerks, and etc., are all potentiated by the fact that VP is weighted by SP held by the account. This is also why delegation is even a thing.
Were VP equal, or weighted by reputation (and reputation no longer gamable by self votes being able to increase it) as I prefer, then none of these scams would be profitable - except those involving sock-puppets and botnets. Furthermore, the downvote would no longer be usable by a whale to silence critics, but would need to be applied by at least several folks to have substantial effect.
While various folks have strenuously argued that equally weighting VP would end investment in Steem because it would end their ability to profit from their holdings, I point out that BTC has no such 'dividend' and no end of hodlers. Also (and I am assuming you know this already) the white paper advocates the VP weighting in order that investors be able to curate with more influence on the platform, not that curation rewards act as a sort of dividend.
Further the white paper strongly disavows such financial manipulations as @jerrybanfield has pointed out here, and @transisto brought to my attention earlier. By pointing out that failure to be known as a fair platform would cause Steemit to either lose extant accounts, or fail to grow, such unfairness is an existential threat to Steemit.
Given the powerful use case that social media platforms are, Steem, which derives it's value from the accounts on Steemit receiving rewards in Steem (and associated currencies) has a humongous potential for growth, and capital appreciation, even if it were to only reach 1% of the value of BTC. Frankly, given Steem's vastly improved transactional capacity, complete lack of transaction fees, and the Steemit platform, I expect Steem (can it solve the distribution inequities and scams) will overtake BTC.
However, that being said, I am aware presently of at least two forks of Steemit ongoing at present, one of which, Calibrae, I have tried to influence in exactly this way. @l0k1, the party undertaking that fork, has incorporated reputation as a modifying weight on VP, and made several other changes that I find preferable as well.
He's a smart guy, much smarter than I, and I hope that Calibrae succeeds, as I don't think Steemit is going to solve these problems. As another comment pointed out, the top two authors on Steemit aren't the top two authors because of the excellent writing, but because they are gaming the system, over a year after it went Beta.
There may be other, good, reasons to not make VP equal, or weight it by reputation, but I haven't read them, or at least not so I understood them to be nominal. While changing the weighting scheme does not solve botnets, or sock-puppets, it dramatically reduces the number of vectors for attack, and makes them more expensive. Regardless, we need to solve those problems anyway, so changing VP weighting does not make those problems worse.
@liberosist also proposed a VP decay curve which I strongly support, as having but 10 votes/day is, frankly, insulting. His proposal goes something like this: for the first ~100 votes, VP is essentially the same, but after that, it rapidly drops off to ZERO. Going to zero is important because bots can vote 1000s of times a day, and still deliver SOME rewards - which no mere human can. This would limit a given bot to the amount of votes that a human can actually cast, or closer to it. Some folks can probably cast more votes than the ~130 or so I was a day, until I read the white paper and discovered my VP would never recharge until I stopped voting.
So, taken together I reckon weighting VP by reputation, remodeling the VP decay curve, and working on other means of preventing botnets and sock-puppets, Steemit would become a far more profitable platform for investors, by strongly encouraging capital gains, and a far better social media platform dramatically less cluttered with pandering to whales, or F4F, or such spam.
I strongly believe that we are approaching a post market economy, and I have also posted how Steemit may be THE essential vector for that transformation. But, you din't ask for that to be inflicted on you here =p
Thanks for asking, and any substantive criticism you might offer would be greatly appreciated by me, as only by grinding away the parts out of place can the edge be made keen.
Thank you for an excellent and thorough comment. I think weighting VP by reputation could be very effective, but I would have to look at how easy it is to raise a sock-puppet's reputation via a high-rep whale account.
I think a lot about how to solve these problems, but I don't have a workable solution yet. Craig-grant the scammer just dropped into another thread I'm in, wrote two 8 word posts bragging about his new condo with no punctuation, and then voted himself $19 on each.
If this continues go on much longer, many of us will either leave of be forced to do the exact same tactics. Humans will not sit here and donate some of their stake everyday while shitheads like Craig-Grant literally live off of scamming people out of money every day while self-voting to community inaction. If we do, that means everyday this human garbage gets more power on this platform and we have less.
I find loki/elfspice extremely toxic, as do many others who attempt to converse with him directly via comments. I attempted to engage him and some of his cronies in earnest discussion, and when he demonstrated a complete inability to support his arguments with logic, he simply flew off the handle and labelled me a troll while seemingly-oblivious-to-the-irony began trolling my comments and blog. He is the only person to ever flag my post, and it was a post trying to make suggestions to help with flagging sock-puppets and botnets wherein I proposed the addition of a separate flagging power. He then attacked me for several days, rabidly sputtering in a way that was so disconnected from logical discourse that it honestly seemed like one of my mentally ill patients. He then made a big post talking about how his alcohol withdrawal from being a long-time alcoholic was making him irritable and he was flying off the handle at people (implying me without explicitly saying so), ranting at them wildly and had no patience. When I cited his own words to explain his attack on me in a comment I expressed sympathy and concern for his struggles in, he flipped out , deleted his posts like a crybaby, and then said he was quitting the platform like 3 times.
He is highly emotional, prone to bouts of anger, intermittently irrational and occasionally lucid. Basically, a textbook substance abuser. Almost every-time I see him in the comments somewhere outside his own blog or those of his sycophants, he is being toxic and horrible. He was instrumental in pushing the only flagging bot I know of, an idea I absolutely loathe.
I hope he gets the help he needs, because buried under an acerbic personality, there are some potentially good ideas and skills in there somewhere.
However, at the moment, I would not touch any project he is headlining with a 10 foot pole, and I humbly suggest you are far too good to do so either. If a person or company I was doing business with had hired to him a lead dev position, I would immediately sever that connection.
He's the absolute worst ambassador you could ever have for a social media platform.
Further, is own inability to stick to his own rules and ideas is self-evident. He started Calibrae claiming he would port all users stake over, but only those he "manually investigated and concluded were legit". He wanted to make himself the emperor of his own little kingdom, where he is the ultimate arbiter of who is worthy to enter (and obviously, nobody that doesn't agree with him will be tolerated).
Then, days later, he started going back on his claims to port SP over, even beyond his own arbitrary vetting process. I no longer bothered to follow after that, since he was literally changing the whole design hour to hour. He started to want to arbitrarily decide "who was a pre-miner" and who "didn't deserve the stake they bought". Plus, I knew he'd never approve my account anyway.
I predict loki/elfspice is far more likely to come here and rant at me in response to this, but if he can show a modicum of civility and apologize for being such a nasty, toxic person (terms used by other steemians in reply to his comments before I ever did), I would be willing to look at his project with a careful eye.
Which, admittedly, does have a cool hummingbird logo and a name I think is solid.
Good background info, thank you.
[ Were VP equal, or weighted by reputation (and reputation no longer gamable by self votes being able to increase it) as I prefer, then none of these scams would be profitable - except those involving sock-puppets and botnets. ]
As far as I understand it, this is absolutely the flaw in the system. The concept of Quality > Quantity posts is an appreciable design, but it fails in practice because it has been substituted by SP weight. There is absolutely no reason to believe that SP weight should have anything what so ever to do with Quality.
Worse, weighting VP by SP also makes Steem a security (a voting 'share' per SEC regs), and creates an extraordinarily simple means of mounting a Sybil attack on the platform, and seizing control of the witnesses that control the code, as witness votes are weighted the same way, and all an attacker has to do is buy SP, with enough money to simply vote their compromised witnesses in, or offer to (cheaper yet) simply bribe vulnerable witnesses.
Excellent point to be certain. I find it especially ironic since as far as I can tell, the design favored Quality over Quantity in order to avoid bot corruption in the first place.