RE: Benefits of Pure Linear Reward Distribution
I believe strongly in simplicity and elegance. Almost every time in every market throughout history, the simple and convenient product has won the mass market share over the complex one; even if the latter did offer more powerful solutions.
You are absolutely right that people hesitate before voting because too many rules and controls involved. It's just no fun voting anymore, which is completely antithetical to the point of a social network. What was meant to be a game has become a chore few are interested in. This is why bots are effective on Steem - they never get frustrated.
I'm all for a completely simplified, linear voting and rewards system. As I see it, this will make voting much more fun for a vast number of users; effectively drowning out the influence of abusers.
It'll also drive up demand for Steem. Even with the new reward curve, it heavily penalizes people with a low stake. By making it linear, it'll incentivize powering up to small amounts. Very few will be willing to invest 100 MV ($5000), but many millions may be willing to buy up a small 1MV stake and give it a shot. Lured by a simple and fun game, they might want to buy up some more. Today, they'll just see their small stake has zero impact and give up. By lowering the barrier to entry, it'll open up demand for Steem to a whole wide range of users. Let's face it - Steem is not a Giffen good.
This will be controversial, but I'll say it anyway - I'd also like to see Downvotes being accepted. It's unhealthy - morbid, even - that there's only positive opinion allowed here. A negative opinion is valuable, if not essential, to any healthy community and society. In fact, I'd even say that downvoters should be rewarded the same as upvoters, knowing full well that had they upvoted, everyone including their own rewards would be higher.
By opening up the system to the masses, the abuse will be drowned out. Besides, if bots and abusers want to buy thousands of dollars worth of Steem to abuse the system, ultimately they have increased the price of Steem and bought the right to do so. Their abuse can easily be countervoted by the community at large, and no one will complain about the price rise they cause.
The only thing I'd like to see retained is the voting power drain, and penalize bots or humans who spam vote. That does not affect casual curators at all.
Well said.
I have thought about this as well. And I agree that "fair" downvotes should be encouraged. IMHO it's hard to be implemented on the blockchain without being gamed, so perhaps we can do it off-chain. That said, we can set a fund for downvoters, and manually reward the ones who cast "best" downvotes, like steemcleaners and etc. Just think out loud..
In a truly free market, all downvotes are fair just as all upvotes are fair. If you disagree with a downvote, you can upvote the post just like you can counter an upvote with a downvote. This will keep all rewards in check, accurately reflect the community's opinion and also stimulate demand for Steem.
That said, I totally agree that the community has not matured enough and in the end will cause a lot of negative sentiment if there were many downvote abusers etc. So maybe keeping it off-chain is the best approach in the short term.
I don't have a solution, but I'd like to see the community gradually embrace the idea of downvotes as being healthy for the network in general.
Good point.
Perhaps downvotes also split the same curation rewards linearly? I'm not sure if it's a good idea. Main concerns:
Like I mentioned earlier, there's an inherent incentive to upvoting instead of downvoting - you and everyone else will get greater curation rewards if you upvote instead of downvote. Of course, that won't stop abusers or schadenfreude enthusiasts, very true.
This is definitely a problem, can't really think of a solution other than countering or vote negation for abusive voters. Thing is, even without a reward, abusers will continue to abuse as we see today. I'd also like to point out that upvotes can be abused just as much as downvotes, and ends up costing the reward pool more to boot. So maybe fixing abusive voting requires a different system...
If a downvoter so strongly disapproves of a post, they'll be happy to bring it down to zero and give up their own rewards. If not, they will leave it be - if the rewards are close to being zero, we can be rest assured it wasn't "over-rewarded" anyway.
Not sure if I understand this correctly, but I don't think this is an issue; they stand to lose much more in author rewards by downvoting sock puppets than they would be gaining in downvote rewards. Besides, by upvoting instead they'd both gain greater author rewards and curation rewards.
Just thinking out loud, there's probably no need for a downvote reward, but good discussion :)
I just believe expressing a negative opinion is required for any healthy society and thus downvotes should be accepted by the community. Anyhow, to get back on topic, one thing's for sure - either there should be a linear downvote reward or none at all. Having a different reward system will add more complexity which we are trying to get rid of here.
Curation rewards for downvoting makes so sense since you are removing value from the post or maybe you were refering to something else?
I think curation rewards should just be removed: I'm not the only one apparently
Dan said
These rewards are the source of a lot of problems. The argument for keeping them is that investors won't have any incentives to buy steem power. This is incorrect. The value of the platform will be a lot higher in the eyes of investors if curation rewards are removed, no more bots, quality content, fairer distribution, less greed mentality, more appealing for other website to integrate, more comment voting, less confusing for newbies, more engagement,etc..all of these will make the platform a lot more valuable than it is now.
Special benefits could also be given to users who refrain from voting so investors can make extra passive income but like I said their passive income is the increase of the value of steem.
Great points and a great exchange here!
Not sure whether to up vote or down vote though ... 😉
What about, since you get curation rewards for upvotes, you get curation charges, that scale downwards the more downvoted. The cost of downvoting is declining part of your curation rewards, therefore. This would diminish the incentive for wanton downvoting, just as you have a decaying vote power, this vote power decay should be equally scaled whether you up or downvote, so not only do you consume vote power downvoting you also get charged a curation charge.
You would then only do it if you think the greater good is served because it would personally cost you a little to do it. This cost would be higher the less other downvotes, in other words, if a lot of people think there is a problem, the cost for all of them will be lowered because this opinion is 'trending'.
Honestly am not that interested in the nitty gritty of voting, and the forum, I just think it should be optimised and economical as a cost to the network to help establish reputation. But I support anything that helps lower the cost of the network and improves its understandability for new users.
If upvotes get curation rewards then maybe downvotes can get curation charges :) This disincentivises overuse of this, and shifts its use more towards negating clique-voting.
Yes, and invert the sense of the scaling of the share of the curation charges. The most accurate downvotes get charged the least.
I am not really up for making a post about this, I think that the curves for reward distribution become irrelevant when Steem's value goes up instead of down. Which may mean @abit's idea of a flat distribution may be superior, in the sense that it reduces complexity, which lowers administrative cost, leaving more for rewards. We just have to have a Steem asset that tends towards being deflationary, rather than as it is now, distinctly inflationary.
Great exchange guys. I think the inherent risk that comes with downvoting are enough of a disincentive against downvoting abuse.
Now that's an interesting idea! 😄 Idea for next post maybe?
I do like the steemcleaners idea, but it also feels like something that could snowball into a big Steem-Guild-Style disaster. But maybe that's just the way of things around here.