RE: A Possible Cure For Steem?
Thank-you for commenting. Not long ago, we used to have 40 votes per day each. This was reduced to 10 in exchange for 4 times the vote power so that minnows could actually see a number when they voted. Before that the fractional value was so small it showed up as zero. I don't believe people will just shoot their votes anywhere. At the current 10, I find myself always short of vote power because I don't have a slider to extend my number of votes. Those with sliders generally DO use them to increase the number of votes they can cast, so I really don't see having more votes as a problem. The idea is to dilute the value of self-voting by those with huge amounts of Steem Power. Maybe it would be even better to go back all the way to 40 votes per day and do away with the sliders? Either you like what the author wrote or you don't; keeps it simple.
My thoughts about the fixed value of the vote would be a calculation using the amount in the reward pool divided by the number of votes cast.
They're very good points you raised in your post, especially with relation to being shareholders. unfortunately it's not that simple.If you make votes equal weight, then there are going to be even more bots pop up draining the reward pool. I think if we can somehow disable bots on Steemit and disable self-voting and restrict repeat voting on the same accounts, then it could be a good solution. Also in terms of current 10 votes per day, it's only 10 votes max voting power, but I vote much more than that at, and my current voting power is around 50%.
Thanks for reading and commenting.
It is true, nothing is that simple. That's why it is good to discuss ideas and look at a situation from all angles. I am not fond of the vote-buying bots and would much rather have someone read my post than have a bot just automatically vote on it without even having opened the page. The bot isn't going to say, "oh this is worthy of a re-steem". It will simply do its job and move on. In that case I may as well have posted gibberish! I think bots like cheetah have their place here, but I do wish the rest would be treated by the community as a bad virus. Having multiple accounts is one of the big problems, and if only 1 account were permitted per person, then a 2nd account could not be created for the bot. Steemit has many problems but if we can over-come some of them we can just keep chipping away little by little until we get a better and better product. Having a central repository for ideas would be a good start.
Actually, each vote knocks off approximately 2% of your voting power, so even after just 1 vote, you are no longer at 100%. In order to always vote at 100% one would need to wait to recover vote power before voting again. The 10 votes per day is a simplified way of expressing that you can make 10 votes every 24 hours and recover fully in a single day. Even the 2% / vote is kind of misleading (I hate percentages) because as your vote power goes down, you lose less per vote. Someone did an experiment and found that when your VP is extremely low, you can continue to vote almost indefinitely because the amount taken off is so small. 2% of 100 is a whopping 2 points, but 2% of 1 is 0.02 (next to nothing)!
Let us also remember that when we had 40 votes each, it was also "pre-linear" days... as in voting weight was ^2. So someone with 20 SP would have 400 voting power, while someone with double at 40 SP would have 1600 voting power... which skewed influence very strongly in terms of those with a lot of SP, while minnow were little more than "dust."
As for self-voting, there was a proposal floated some months back to add to the base code to address the "abusive" part by simply having self-upvotes drain your voting power MUCH faster than votes for others. It was something like your first self-upvote was at full power, but a second one would drain 20% from your power, the next one would drain another 30% and so on. The counter argument was that people would just create more multiple accounts.
It's always tricky... when there's money involved, people start behaving badly. Even when it's possible to profit from behaving well.
Yes, I remember all that. It's not easy to devise a system that is fool-proof. I liked the idea of draining your vote-power for self-voting, but it still doesn't address the fact that newcomers are still dust and absolutely need to have a dolphin or whale show them some love. As more and more people join up, the competition for the attention of someone with lots of VP becomes fiercer and fiercer. This leads to attempting to 'game' the system or leave in frustration. Neither is good for the platform. However, if everyone drops 25 cents per vote, there is no longer that competition for the attention of a whale and everyone feels like they have an equivalent chance as everyone else. Lots of votes is how to make good rewards and that means growing your audience with good content. I realize that someone with 1,000 accounts can still 'game' that system too, but that is going on now anyway, so it won't make things worse. What it will do is give more hope and a feeling of inclusiveness to the newcomers. Some other solution needs to be thought up in order to stop the multiple accounts problem.
Solutions won't be found over night, but if we keep brain-storming, we may be able to improve things bit by bit. I think its also important to keep the long-range goals out in the open so that new people will see those goals and understand what they need to do to achieve those goals and what actions will hamper those goals.