Incentives to Vote for the Underdog
Note: Seeking curation rewards is not worth a minnows time.
Curation incentives can turn steemit into an interesting game for the dolphins and whales. The trick is to choose content that will get the most rShares (stake weighted votes) after your own vote. The higher the post rewards become after your own vote, the higher your curation reward will be. It's kinda like picking a horse in the bookies...
Except... It's not...
I once worked in a bookmakers where I sold bets on horses, dogs and football for 10 hours a day. It was a fun job and the punters were fun to be around. I noticed there were 2 kinds of gamblers: the ones who played euro after euro on horses at 100/1 odds, and the ones who played €50 on a horse at 2/1. The horse at 2/1 wins more often, but costs the gambler more if they lose the bet. The horse at 100/1 has lower risk of loss from the bet, since to win €100 you only need to bet €1 and so the punters really don't realise the gradual losses especially if they eventually get a win.
What's this got to do with steemit?
If you think of every steemit account or author like a racehorse, there are some accounts that have greater odds at winning the race than others. Some horses are just famous for their speed. Some are just becoming recognised and realised for their potential. Then you have the underdogs. An underdog is a competitor who has very little chance of winning. It is human nature to root for the underdog. We all hope and want to believe that if we put in the effort there is a chance we could succeed.
On steemit you have users like @dollarvigilante who came to steemit with a following. Similarly @charlieshrem instantly had a very good chance of "making it" here on steemit. So much so, he posted about feeling guilty about it. Normally greater rewards for the less likely winner incentivises people to bet on the underdog. Currently on steemit, there is very little incentive to vote for the underdog. The underdog could be highly skilled and highly appreciated by the minnows that read their content. But without the incentive to seek out this new guy - since the rewards of the already accomplished authors is more predictable - the underdog could spend a very long time building themselves up to gain recognition for the value they provide to the community. Most of us have to do that anyway, but it is that small chance of a large upvote that would not only give a high payout, but bring your post to the eyes of so many people - that is what keeps the underdog trying.
15 minutes of fame is all any good blogger needs to instantly gain recognition and a following.
According to SteemWhales.com the author on steemit with the most followers is @dollarvigilante. However, I used steemdb.com to figure out who has the biggest followers following them. View the table below for the Top 25.
| Account | Followers | Combined power of followers (GV) |
|---|---|---|
| @dantheman | 2656 | 108.475 GV |
| @steemitblog | 1188 | 78.941 GV |
| @krnel | 959 | 73.864 GV |
| @roelandp | 1237 | 73.809 GV |
| @charlieshrem | 1834 | 71.868 GV |
| @furion | 717 | 65.065 GV |
| @ned | 2064 | 63.362 GV |
| @donkeypong | 1376 | 61.327 GV |
| @dollarvigilante | 3567 | 60.648 GV |
| @stellabelle | 1680 | 58.825 GV |
| @good-karma | 749 | 57.552 GV |
| @gavvet | 1572 | 56.354 GV |
| @kevinwong | 1414 | 55.712 GV |
| @sirwinchester | 1372 | 55.056 GV |
| @ats-david | 686 | 52.990 GV |
| @pfunk | 1253 | 51.161 GV |
| @jesta | 857 | 50.937 GV |
| @andrarchy | 913 | 49.316 GV |
| @cryptoctopus | 1145 | 49.003 GV |
| @steve-walschot | 818 | 48.961 GV |
| @neilstrauss | 654 | 48.553 GV |
| @anwenmeister | 1155 | 48.552 GV |
| @thecryptofiend | 1479 | 48.089 GV |
| @ausbitbank | 815 | 48.018 GV |
| @tuck-fheman | 924 | 47.312 GV |
| @faddat | 356 | 46.429 GV |
| @dan | 1287 | 45.217 GV |
Currently 75% of a posts rewards goes to the author and 25% goes to the curator, no matter how high or low their chances of "winning" are.
I propose a change
For example, lets say a new user appears on the platform and has no followers at the time of their first post. The ratio of author rewards to curation rewards could be 50-50 since this author needs to gain some recognition on the platform. The curators who bring this new user to peoples attention get a higher % of the curation reward for doing so. Lets say this new user was the real @satoshi-nakamoto and they proved it in that first post (I know OMG #starstruck).
There's a high likelihood that after being brought to the attention of the whole community by the upvotes, @satoshi-nakamoto would have immediately gained a huge following of users that combine to make a large stakeholder. If the combined power of all of his followers were over 100 GV then the % of curation rewards for this authors next post could be as low as 5%.
This drastically lowers the incentive to upvote this user based solely on the expectation that they will win since the % of the rewards would be lower. However, knowing just how popular this author is is still incentive enough for many users to upvote the content.
"Gaming" the system
I can see two counteracting ways that this system could be gamed.
- Whales could choose not to follow the authors they upvote to keep the curation % high
- Whales could choose to follow authors in order to decrease the incentives to upvote their content
Since a whale could intentionally lower the curation reward % an author this checks and balances the system so that stake has another power in determining what incentives there are to reward content. Since curators would prefer to keep the curation % higher, they are only likely to lower them if they believe they are seen too often on the trending page. This would never completely remove curation rewards, and if voters were unaffected by the decreased incentives the author would be very pleased to receive a higher % of author rewards. But there would be added incentive for curators to seek out new authors who are seeking recognition.
Thoughts? :)
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I'm actually disappointed that something similar has not been implemented. This would solve many of the problems of Steemit. It would reward people more for going out there and finding the good content by lesser known authors.
they already are. Most of the curation reward for established authors goes to either the reverse auction or front running bots.
For example
look at the vote details on charlieshrem 's post here
https://steemd.com/steem/@charlieshrem/i-haven-t-written-on-steem-in-a-while-here-is-why-by-charlie-shrem
the weight is almost all in the first 5 minutes.. though blocktrades did OK ish i suspect he would have been way better off voting for an unvoted post 30 minutes in.
Hmm.. I never looked at it that way, thank you..
But it's only the curation of those who vote within the first 30 minutes that partially goes to the author... Dolphins vote within the first 30 minutes but whales don't unless it is somebody extremely popular like the examples I gave. So a collusive group (whale) tends to profit nearly just as much from voting for the same content. There's an incentive for dolphins to look harder since we want to get our votes in first, but not really for whales...
Whales make more by not voting oin the first 30 minutes, but not that much more.
Because the orca/big dolphin buts (like wang) front run them. Remember, its not just how many people vote after you that determine weight, its how many people vote before you.
check out what the big whales are making a week in curation rewards. Except bernie sanders (who makes more than most becuase he votes first in the curie trail probably), its not a lot.
Theres no money in curation -- everyone's solid, IMO
Thanks, I hadn't really worked out the maths. I would have thought though that the n^2 curve would somewhat counter the loss from votes getting in before you...
I actually don't know the formula precisely, but curation rewards are not distriuted on the n^2 curve.
Theyre based on the voters rshares (not vshares), the rshares that got in before and the rshares that come in after
one of the reasons that @biophil was so successful with his bot is that he doesn't seem to vote on material with even moderate support at the 30 minute mark.
The whale penalty for bandwagoning is huge, as is the penalty (because of front running bots) for voting on the same author multiple times. But its only huge as a percentage of fairly small potential curation reward.
someone like dantheman or smooth isn't going to put a huge amount of effort into increasing their curation reward from 150 steem\week (which is about where they are) to say 450 because its cheeseburger money relative to their balance.
Incidentally, BP's method is somewhat resistant to frontrunning, inasmuch as if someone cracks his algo, it would be easy to anticipate his votes and come in ahead, but he would no longer vote for those posts (because the front runner has changed the equation)
But you could argue that an aggressive front runner with his algo would be able to force him into his second and third choices.
Hey, thought I'd chime in here. As I'm writing this, your post has a potential payout of $0.41, and your net_rshares (I pulled this number from steemd.com) are 5813770798916.
This may be surprising to you, but with this many rshares, new voters for your post will receive very low curation rewards. The curation rewards have almost all been allocated already. You can check this yourself by computing the base-10 logarithm of the rshares; in your case, it's 12.7. The curation rewards start dropping off sharply around 12, and by 12.3, voters are already starting to lose out significantly on curation rewards. By 12.7, the potential curation efficiency is getting pretty bad. It's not zero, but you only get about 20% of what you would have gotten with an optimal vote.
This is one factor; the other factor is vote timing. As @sigmajin was pointing out, popular authors get voted very strongly immediately after their posts are published. Early-in-time votes also have their curation rewards curtailed. So if you get past that 12.7 mark of rshares in a post's first 10 minutes, nobody earns significant curation rewards: the early voters lost out because of the timing, later voters lost out because the rshares are so high that further rewards are suppressed.
My point is that the system has already been designed pretty well to do what you're asking for. The reason you think it hasn't is that nobody (to my knowledge) has ever sat down and written a good overview of how curation rewards actually work. I've started such an overview myself a number of times, and stopped because it's quite complicated and I haven't mustered the discipline to do it justice.
Thanks. I really should do the proper research into this to fully understand.
Great problem and solutions post @beanz.
I always feel good rooting for the underdog in both sports and life.
Good concepts and ideas. Very interested to see where all this leads.
I also have a proposal for the system. If you are interested in advance publishing please pm me on steemit chat :)
May I listen in? I know you have a better grasp on the system and value your thoughts.
This post has been ranked within the top 50 most undervalued posts in the first half of Jan 20. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $7.50 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Jan 20 - Part I. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
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Authors should be able to chose a certain percentage that goes to curators, the same way they can chose to power up 100%. Before posting they would put how much % of their post goes to curators, this way underdog could put a high percentage to attract curators and get more attention. This could be done too to reward comments, basically authors chose how much percentage of their post goes to comments in that post.
I like this idea too. But I think comments should have their own reward pool as planned in the hard fork. I can see that leading to growth
My concern about having a second pool is for curation rewards as it is the main reason people are buying steem power. I don't really know the impact such changes will have to curators...
As a new fish in the tank, I find myself increasingly disillusioned by the mixed agendas, overly complex, and seemingly imbalanced weighting and politics - much like the old paradigm I'm trying to swim away from. But maybe all this is necessary in an evolving ecosystem?
I for one, in order to maintain my own integrity, will only upvote (or comment) on content that is of value and meaning to me, rather than the motivation of any potential quasi financial gain - old hungry shark survival skills which do not seemingly belong in the overarching ideal and ethics of Steem.