Observations on Abitgate
It has been fun. These are my (flawed) personal observations. Flame away!
Day 1 - Sunday
So, it begins.
- Immediately, there's a longer tail on the Trending page, very few posts exceed $40.
- Minnows and dolphins are cautiously optimistic.
Day 2 - Monday
The effects start to show.
- Dolphins and minnows are excited by their suddenly dramatic increase in the value of their votes.
- Bots dominate. Their influence is significantly increased, particularly the whale-bots.
Day 3 - Tuesday
- The flag wars begin to counter non-compliant whales. Many users are upset, while others find it refreshing. It's very divisive, but there's hardly a consensus. Many support the no-whales initiative, but can't stomach the flags.
- New users are utterly baffled. (some of the replies to smooth's auto-comment are highly entertaining)
- Dolphin curators break into the Top 100 by Rshares influence. Their trails are now worth over a dozen cents.
- Active voters exceeds 5,000 for the first time since the December surge.
- Comments see a dramatic rise as well - highest since September.
Day 4 - Wednesday
- Authors who have strong minnow/dolphin support rise to the Trending page. These are truly the most popular authors on Steemit. Whales mistakenly downvote these authors even though they don't have any whale/bot votes. Conversely, authors that rely on the support of a couple of whales are lost. Some of them even quit.
- The tail is so long that most posts get lost. On the bright side, they at least make a few pennies lost in the void.
Day 5 - Thursday
- Many regular dolphin/minnow curators stop curating, bots and humans alike. Some of the previously most influential bots stop as well. The reason is simple - without whales to frontrun the ROI is pretty minimal.
- Meanwhile, near-whales / orcas take advantage and increase their curation efforts; new bots emerge.
- The Trending page is a mess - it used to be much more representative of the community's content before.
- Casual curators continue enjoying their dramatically increased influence.
Speculative inference
- The quadratic voting algorithm is overly skewed and hostile to community engagement.
- People vote much more when their votes are worth something. (Side-note: They may also be more incentivised to power up, though I don't have any data to back that up. Pointers welcome.)
- A disparity in voting power is essential for the predictive curation game - just not quadratic. Linear might be the best compromise. Of course, we have to question the value of a predictive game in the first place and whether there's a better system of rewards to better reflect good curation.
- Effective curation is essential for organizing content on the platform. (Of course, the Communities feature is crucial)
- All you need to do to increase engagement is stir shit up.
Nice writeup. I'd like to weigh in on curation:
This is a misconception. My bot clients and I are seeing the best curation rewards that we've had in many months: https://steemdb.com/@biophil/curation
The reason is simple! Because the whales aren't voting, the ratio of payout to rshare is larger. Thus, the ratio of curation reward to rshare is larger.
Think of it this way: if there were exactly 1 voter in Steem, he would take all of the curation rewards. If there are 2 voters, they would have to split the curation in some way. It's the same here - without all the whale rshares in the mix, everybody participating in curation is earning more.
It's a very strange incentive problem. Others have pointed this out as well: curation in Steem is a tragedy of the commons; curation incentives are intrinsically self-defeating. If there is money to be made curating, then more people will curate, which will reduce the amount of money to be made curating.
That's because you have effectively a whale trailing you. With the other whales gone, your whale trail's influence is dramatically greater. Earlier it was a gamble of when the larger whales would vote, now you can just make many more votes and reap in guaranteed rewards. Probably save for you, @steemtrail and @ats-david, no other curator can boast of a guaranteed whale trail. So your case is clearly an exception.
PS: Also, Curie curators, if you are good curator with a high approval rate anyway.
PPS: With other bots like wang and summon gone, along with many manual curators, you also have much less competition.
I was going to disagree with you, but then I checked the recent rewards of my clients, and you're right. Theirs haven't increased nearly as much as mine. I've created my own whale train. Oops.
What this means is that there is a lot of money to be made currently by someone who can figure out how to front-run my bot. Free whales!
Haha, yes, a bot to front-run a bot!
Heh, that's a game @wang and I have played a time or two. :)
I'm sure! @wang's VP is up to nearly 100%. Who would have thought?
What a time to be alive!
Interesting and valuable documentation @liberosist! It's been an unusual week in steemit. I agree with your comments on the trending page, which is essentially our billboard to the world. If this is the new world order I think we need a healthier way of displaying/organizing our home page in order to retain users and accurately reflect the array of content being produced.
Hopefully, things will go back to normal soon.
I'm guessing some whales may continue downvoting, though I suppose some were already. I would like to see the flag replaced by a downvote. I see there's a GitHub issue for that https://github.com/steemit/condenser/issues/1222
Maybe the experiment has pushed the community to get used to downvotes as merely an expression of opinion rather than an act of aggression or something...
As a minnow who has been ganged up on whales and downvoted (total 7 times) on an undervalued post I hope things do not go back to normal. I work very hard on HQ posts and find it sad that new people can be picked on like this. If that's how it continues many new people will leave and the buzz will not be good one for steemit. Steemit is a wonderful place without the few bad whales giving it a bad name. I think Dan and others have said enough about that issue. Until the few bad whales are able to be curbed no minnows will find this a friendly place. I love this experiment!
Just keep writing, don't worry about the downvotes. Write because you enjoy it, the market will decide your rewards. Looking at your blog, I can see a few posts that earned more than $10, so there are "good whales" too, from your perspective of course.
You are right and good whales blow my mind with their kindness. Thank you.
There's an upvote for ya! which now actually does something.
O my goodness and thank you. That commet upvote is more than many of my labored posts. Didn't know that was possible and I'm so impressed. Bless the good whales > I'm coverted and my comic was correct. There are all different kinds of SP whales in steemit's pond. Thank you.
I feel your pain, fortunately for me steemit is just a place to have fun. I have done well enough on other social media platforms to know that sometimes its just takes time. Maybe take a break if it feels like your are being bullied. You can also save content until you feel the time is more favorable to post. Once you get a decent following that enjoys your content, I am sure you will be killing it!
Good advice and thank you. I have been stepping back and reading more posts. There are good people here and that's what really counts. Thank you.
Yeah, that does seem to about sum it up... some of this I have "no opinion" on... I very rarely use "trending" for anything (as far as looking for content goes) because it may represent "popular" content, but not necessarily content I am interested in. So I tend to use tags more, to find stuff... hence I agree that the "Communities" feature will be great, whenever it is implemented.
As far as usage goes, I am now done with the "let's wait and see how this all works out" stage and this week will be back to simply creating content... which is my primary reason for even being here, in the first place.
On the whole, I'd say your analysis is pretty accurate... and it seems the outcome (in part) has been that there have been some "churning," in terms of who's become more active and who's become less active.
That's my take from reading this also. Some big pros and cons. The community takes time to adjust to any new reality. Just do what you like doing and don't worry about money or flags.
Yes, Communities is crucial. It's scheduled for Q3 2017, though best to be skeptical of that.
I agree, I think the experiment has run its course and given us most of the information we need. We can get back to normal. Or should I say, move on to the next piece of drama. However, things won't be the same anymore, there'll definitely be a noticeable aftermath to Abitgate, and slight shifts in the community's sentiment to stuff like downvotes.
Communities should not be rushed... and I'm assuming (perhaps falsely?) that these will serve to categorize content better?
Back in "another life" I was part of eBay's "user advisory group" for setting and creating new categories... and it was a VERY protracted affair of observation-suggesting-testing-observation-suggesting-testing before anything at all was actually implemented. I mention this because if there's one thing eBay is superior at, it's subdividing "content" into meaningful chunks, at multiple levels of granularity.
It'll be much like Reddit's sub-reddits from the looks of it. You can read about it on the 2017 Roadmap.
Since i joined just yesterday i was wonder what has been going on. This put it in more perspective for me, tho I'm wondering was all this needed. If I'm not mistaken they have done these test many times and seen nothing really come of it. Or is that just one sided info that i got my hands on? I try to educate my self as best as possible but I'm not sure what sources i really should be looking at as a newbie.
Here is a post that explains the experiment:
https://steemit.com/steem/@timcliff/the-whale-voting-experiment-explained-including-downvotes-from-abit
Oh thanks i made to to give it a read and it's a lot more clear.
Welcome to Steemit! It's been an unusual week here, but this actually is a great time to be joining. There are some good resources around for newbies, but they are not always easy to find. I recommend Shenanigator's FAQ, the first part of which is here (you can find the other parts by clicking on his name in that post and reading his other blog posts). If you have questions, please feel free to join Steemit.chat and contact me there.
https://steemit.com/steem/@shenanigator/updated-steemit-faq-part-1
Oh thanks ill check it out.
There are lots of different things going on at once. All activities are recorded on the blockchain, perhaps a "post-mortem" would reveal some insights. But so far, it's a whole lot of confusion especially for new users. Look through the platform's eccentricities and there's beauty in the way it works. Community's still a work-in-progress :)
I take it you are in the "utterly baffled" camp :) Sorry, my post doesn't really explain the situation, it's more of a rant about my observations, for those who have been following.
As a newbie, I'd recommend totally ignoring all of this. Get back to making good content. Or you can wait till the experiment is over - there'll be a higher chance of your posts being discovered once things get back to normal and the curators are back.
Yeah basically baffled im not sure how i could be anything other then that with so much going on.
I don't blame you, I'm sure I would be too :) Take it easy, hope to see some good posts from you.
Welcome to steemit, @thedegensloth > So glad you could join us. I will follow you and check out your posts. Sometimes Steemit makes no sense to newbies/minnows but sooner or later it all fits together. The steemians are the most helpful people you can meet.
well thank you
Running a bot posting 50 "Great post !" comments daily and auto-upvote all of it is now profitable even for someone having just 30 000 SP )
Before that it would work only for 1+mio SP accounts )
Easy enough to run counter bots for that. Negative voting would deal with it better though.
A few people started negative voting a few days ago and look at the turmoil )
Can you imagine a few hundred negative voters on duty ?
I think having linear distribution curve we'll just have to accept self-voting.
Personally I don't mind to give it a try, the current system have prooved itself to be not scalable anyway.
Negative voting isn't possible on Steemit. Negative voting involves voting on votes, rather than voting on posts.
I think @svamiva means flagging/downvoting.
Thanks, I see now.
Anyway, even if it would be implemented I doubt that more then just a few people would bother to use it, there are not many people around want-to-be-policeman-for-free
For the largest stakeholders, downvoting some Steem Power to policing bots wouldn't be something they do for free. It would be something they do to help protect their investment.
Ah, back to July then!
Do you have any data on how many accounts have been voting since the experiment started, compared to how many before?
Mentioned it above, it has been above 5,000. The 30-day average is 4,300.
http://steempunks.com/dashboard
wonderful summary - clear, neutral, concise and a subtle sense of humor.
This is a nice recap. It has been a rollercoaster, for sure! Pretty interesting and helpful, in my view. I haven't done any analysis, so it's just an impression, but I don't see near so many higher paying posts from folks in Aceh. That's a case where I can appreciate whales upvoting people to develop a small critical mass of successful folks, to build inroads into a region where cryptocurrency could really take hold. So I wonder what happens in that region now? That may be a case where the community functionalities will really help, because there could be regionally-based communities, that would develop their own value. Steemit is sure interesting!
The trending page is a mess. Everything is sadly said.
I don't see that, looks much better to me as compared to before. It's just that trending now results from a larger number of opinions.
The very top of Trending is better, but there was a nice tail of good content in Trending beyond the Top 20 or so. Now it's a bit of a mess, a lot of good content is lost in the void.
@gavvet @shaka: This is what I meant. A lot of good posts are hidden in a mess of not so good posts.
It's nice to see positive things about steemit and not doom, gloom and negativity on trending
Thank you for posting @liberosist. Very astute observations...appreciated the day by day breakdown.....which shed light on bleujay's observations.
@cryptoctopus just released his article regarding the experiment as well.
Yes...Steemit would appreciate a numbers/fact/graph of the happenings. It should be of interest to most.
Yes....you are quite correct...experientially...one is quite pleased to bring value to Steemit and their fellow Steemians and therefore motivated to engage/invest even more so......now for the numbers.....perhaps @elyaque would be interested in providing these.
Hmm, I can't seem to find @cryptoctopus's post. Would you have a link to it? You can get a lot of numbers from steempunks.com and of course elyaque's daily reports. But yes, would love to see the power up numbers.
I may be wrong on my observations and I'm not technically literate enough to make a definitive judgement. But I approve of the experiment for data purposes.
Apologies @cyptopus for my mistake in thinking you had an article versus a post out there with regard to this issue.
All the best. Cheers.
Apologies @liberosist for mis-writing....it was his reply under the linked post.
https://steemit.com/experiment/@artist1989/the-whale-experiment-are-you-for-or-against-it-show-your-support-opposition-with-these-banner-images
Aha, I agree, I'm sure there's a correlation between demand for Steem Power and giving minnows/dolphins more influence for their SP. Currently, you have to be a whale to have any influence - very few if any are going to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars on an experiment (I mean Steem, not Abitgate). However, many might gamble with a hundred or thousand dollars if they see their vote has some value.