The "Captain Ahab" Curation Proposal
So, we keep talking about the same variations of solutions for the curation problem, but often the behavior of users is not taken into high enough of consideration. People are going to always be greedy. Let's not pretend that people will change their behavior if we change things to nudge them slightly. We need to use their own greed against them.
The problem with other proposals is that "curators" are still heavily encouraged to upvote the content of popular authors and whales because the current system encourages frontrunning other voters. Thus, a popular author could post a picture of a bowl of cereal from their phone and earn a substantial amount of cash because they have a history of raking in the dough.
Challenge:
I encourage any whales/dolphins reading to post pictures of their bowls of cereal because I think that would be hilarious and it would prove my point. Actually, anyone feel free to post their bowls of cereal.So, any effective mechanisms should eliminate the frontrunning effect and if possible discourage it. The following mechanism does that. But it does it in a very anti-whale / anti-investor way. That's why I don't expect that anyone will take it seriously. But what I want to do is to churn the waters and inject some creativity into what I find a rather stale conversation. Maybe it will light the spark for someone smarter than me to come up with a better solution.
To solve our issues, we give a true 75 / 25 split and eliminate giving extra rewards to the authors. This is really not that controversial. Then, we give a lucky curator all of the curation rewards. All the remaining curators are losers.
How do we select a winner? We randomly select a winner but give higher odds to those that vote earlier to reward them for finding the post. In order to prevent bots from getting the best odds, we give lower odds to those who vote before a certain time period. This time period would be randomly selected after the fact between 5 and 15 minutes. The odds after voting might look like something like the following picture:
x represents an ordering of the voters. Let's say the randomly selected cut off time is t. t on the graph would be the point where the probability is the highest. Pretty straightforward.
The main benefit of this proposal is decentralization of rewards through competition. Bitcoin mining works in a similar way. But instead of wasting electricity, we are utilizing brain juice through decision making.
Also everyone is not fighting for one block because we have a ton of authors who are completely ignored. We have so many undiscovered gold nuggets just waiting to be mined and brought to the light.
Naturally, smart curators who want to profit will go to authors who are undiscovered because there is less competition there. Frontrunning is now unprofitable due to the increase in competition. Those minnows that were making you the big curation rewards by stacking are now your worst enemy. Whales can no longer simply vote for the same author unless they want to regularly lose to minnows. If they want to see consistent rewards, they'll have to find hidden gems somewhere.
This also makes the rewards more decentralized which helps adoption and grows the ecosystem. With content now being looked at more and the more authors being fairly rewarded and curators who actively curate being rewarded with more sizable bounties independent of their stake, the platform will grow. This in turn makes Steem more valuable which rewards the investors and whales in the long run. Decentralization is good, if I remember correctly?
Why will this proposal never pass? Simple. Because it requires whales / investors to take a long term position. It literally "kills" their short term curation prospects. While it aligns profitable action with desirable curation behavior, it puts the whales in a tough position as they have to compete for rewards. And we know how sensitive those whales can be if disturbed. It also requires a hardfork.
Naturally one would expect them to resort to vote selling and delegation because greedy people aren't patient. But if we ignore that, we still have a healthier ecosystem where people are discouraged from frontrunning because in all likelihood they aren't earning anything unless they are very very lucky.
Also, we don't have to commit to such a proposal 100%. We could still implement such a proposal where part of the curation rewards go to a lottery and part are dealt out the old way. So I leave the discussion to the rest of you. Hopefully, this will help the creativity juices going or at the very least encourage you to eat some cereal.
I like this concept but would like it even more if some mix of allocated VP/SP were thrown in the mix. In the sense that everybody would start with 1 ticket, but the voting weight used defines how much of a ticket one gets [and if SP above x then it can counter balance the use of low VP]. VP should stay the main component tho.
This mostly to avoid that everyone goes full auto vote mode with 1% upvotes only.
Yeah, you're right. I didn't think about VP when thinking about the proposal. I would definitely incorporate VP% as one of the weighting factors in the vote. I'm not sure about SP and adding value to holders. I would prefer the decentralization aspects of a more random distribution where minnows and whales are treated equally. But that's up for debate.
Which is why I would never allocate more than one lottery ticket to any upvote. If we take 100% vote is 1 ticket, holders wouldn’t possibly get more tickets a day either since smallest possible upvote is 0.01%.
The question which arises though is bi-fold:
Yes, that was my main issue when writing this up. That's why I nicknamed it Captain Ahab. Because it kind of hurts the whales/holders in terms of curation. Which may be an issue because it might encourage people not to hold and just siphon rewards off to an exchange.
To add to the list of potential issues is the ability to spam vote non-popular trash in order to improve odds in the lottery. Just build a bot that finds posts that have low upvote counts and upvote at the end of the seven day period.
To be honest, many people don’t hold. Many are here to help them with their financial needs.
Which is also an overplayed factor, the holding part. Don’t hang in too many chambers with only echoing walls.
There’s what would be best and there’s the reality. The reality is that no matter what is best model we can design is a theory, not necessarily what people actually need for/in life. Both can be compatible but it is very important to realise and accept the second. Even if only because it broadens one’s knowledge.
i like it very much. The randomness would certainly add to the mix!