Not Voting Is Bot Voting
Introduction
A few months ago, I began a series of articles that was intended to make the case that not only is automated voting unavoidable in the steemit ecosystem, it is also desirable. In the first article, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and The SteemBot Revolution, I argued that automated (bot) voting is guided by human designers, and is thus constrained by Maslow's hierarchy of needs - just like the humans who participate in steemit's ecosystem. In the second, On SteemBots and Voting Errors, I borrowed from statistics and introduced the concept of Type-I and Type-II voting errors. In this framework, a Type-I voting error occurs when I vote for an article that is not actually valuable to me and a Type-II error occurs when an article that I value does not get a vote that I could have cast.
[Image Source: pixabay.com, Licence: CC0, Public Domain]
I had an insight on voting the other day in the comments of a post by @dwinblood, where @dantheman said:
I view down vote as up voting everyone else, but the downvoted item, just more efficient. Every upvote implicitly reduces rewards of everyone else.
It's the old Abbot and Costello routine. The Drill Sergeant asks for a volunteer to step forward, and everyone but Lou Costello steps back, so Lou is left standing out as the volunteer. The downvote (and the upvote) can be viewed the same way.
[Image By Anonymous - http://www.ebay.com/itm/BUD-ABBOTT-LOU-COSTELLO-PUBLICITY-PHOTO-for-the-1953-Abbott-and-Costello-Show-/122255313721?hash=item1c76fc0b39:g:FWQAAOSw6DtYSJfe, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53901173]
So, following that logic in today's post, I am going to extend the argument on bot voting in a new direction. The reality is that when I am not voting up to my full potential, I have delegated my voting influence to everyone else - bots and all. Not only am I committing Type-II voting errors by allowing valuable posts to go by without my vote, but I am also committing Type-I voting errors by delegating my voting influence to people who cast votes that I disagree with.
It's All About Responsible Curating
In a more recent post, Did you give your steemit voting keys away?, @beanz wrote:
Curating takes up a lot of time and attention. When the option to make curation rewards without putting in much effort is there, we can become irresponsible curators. Curating is a big responsibility. Rewarding as many users as possible without making people after months of creating content feel left out can be tough, and it's an importort (sic) part of user retention.
I agree with almost every word of that excerpt. There may be nothing more important to steemit's success than the quality of curation on the platform. There's probably a reason why curation was listed first in this excerpt from the steem whitepaper
However, I think that @beanz is overlooking the impact that not voting at all has on the morale of authors in steemit's ecosystem. When I choose not to vote, everyone else is not standing still. If no one voted at all, the harm would be limited to Type-II voting errors, where no one receives rewards for valuable content. But like the rest of the line in the Abbot and Costello skit, everyone else is not standing still. If I decline to vote, the rewards pool is still going to be distributed, and my influence is delegated to the accounts that do vote. By delegating my share of the voting influence, part of my "share" of the rewards pool is necessarily going to go to support things that I don't like. I'm making the very Type-I voting errors that I sought to avoid by eschewing bots in the first place.
So I am led to ask, which is better?
- To use the best bot I can get my hands on and delegate my voting to the closest approximation to my own tastes that I can find or create (and continually seek improvement so that the bot will do a progressively improving job of representing my own preferences)? -OR-
- To leave it up to chance and delegate my voting influence to all the other bots and humans who will guide the reward distribution?
Conclusion
The voting system has not been clearly described in any recent publication that I've seen, but it is said to be optimized for about 40 votes per account per day. Are you casting that many manual votes? If not, then you are standing still while all the other voters move ahead. Effectively, you have traded your share of curation rewards to the other voters in exchange for having them do the work to distribute the author rewards. Go take a look at steemdb.com and search for your account to see what your voting power is. If it is near to 100%, then understand that you are voting with bots. It's just that you're voting with bots of someone else's choosing, instead of your own.
Two final points: The first is one that I've made so often that it's coming to feel like a cliché, but it is certainly true. Google's PageRank system is nothing more than a sophisticated bot. They take web pages and try to rank them according to humans' subjective tastes. No one would seriously suggest that Google should disable their supercomputers and replace them with human readers. Why, then, do we assume that complex interactions of many steembots can't learn to be just as good as Google at finding quality content for human enjoyment?
And lastly, I am not - by any means - proposing that all curation should be done by bots. Google uses human input in the form of links between pages to guide its algorithms. Similarly, in order to deliver curation that is consistent with human tastes, steembots will always need human input.
What do you think about the idea... of removing rewards for voting? My theory is.. that those rewards are incentives for bots, but people actually do not need an incentive to vote, because great content is for them very often more valuable for them than few cents. Good article about programming can save me hours of work!
I think, people which are passionate about certain things, will vote for their favorite stuff without being paid for that.
That might make sense if you have enough people reading, but with today's numbers of users I think too many posts would go without many votes.
Also, I really think that humans + bots will do a better job surfacing quality content and avoiding problematic content than humans alone. Bots can look for statistical correlations. Bots can learn from the block chain and apply AI algorithms to predict what people will find valuable. Bots can more easily avoid voting for people who repost the same content repeatedly or employ other forms of plagiarism. Bots can guarantee that no post is voided simply because no one happened to click on the link.
Lastly, there's the ethical question of rewarding people for the value that they put into the system. Up-voting provides information to the rest of the users. I think it's good to compensate the people who do it.
Nice explanation; voting is a binary choice (here or anywhere else), you either vote FOR the choice you like the most -OR- somebody else is making that choice for you. Followed.
To be honest this all sounds like a lot of FOMO. We are afraid of not voting because the whales are voting constantly and we therefore have less influence. But the truth is if the whales were voting less - which they would be if their bots were limited - then the power of those who do participate by hopefully reading the content would be higher. True that that would mean you would be leaving the fate of the platform to those who are online while you are sleeping, but that is a consequence of nature. I believe those who participate the most on the platform should be gaining the curating rewards - since they are paying with their attention while others spend their time doing other things.
https://steemit.com/curation/@beanz/let-s-reawaken-the-debate-on-auto-voting
You might benefit from reading this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man.
It is so common, I even wrote a Fallacies article series.
I don't think I saw all of them, but I enjoyed the ones I read. Even reshared one or two on facebook.
WOW.... Did you just pull a straw man by accusing me of pulling a straw man???
No.
How about old proposal from @dantheman about reducing 40 votes per day to 5 votes to become more suitable for an ordinary human user of steemit.com and not a bot.
I don't know. I'm not familiar enough with the nuts and bolts of it. My guess is that [human + automated] will always be better than human-alone, though.
What if I have an AI agent that predicts the five most valuable posts of the day? Does it really matter if I click the up-vote button manually or through a bot?
Not every user will use a bot even if he can. He is just too lazy to do it. Instead he will be vote from time to time manually. But because he won't be voting 24/7 with 40 votes per day he will always give his money away to people using bots instead of manual voting. I ain't against bots, I just think that steem should be more suitable for ordinary people who would prefer to vote manually from time to time. Reducing from 40 to 5 is just fine rebalance towards ordinary users instead sophisticated bot creators.
That's true, but the point I'm making is that in addition to giving money away, the user is also giving away her voice, to people who will vote using bots and to people who will vote for things that she would not have voted for. My own bot is a better approximation of my preferences than someone else's bot.
Update: I didn't read your reply carefully enough the first time. Regarding your last sentence, if it really would rebalance things, I'd be fine with that. I'm just not convinced that it really would make much difference. I remarked on that here:
I'll have a response to this posted in about 5 minutes.
Nice article, but I read it twice and I don't actually see that you responded to any of the points in this article or earlier ones. For the benefit of readers, the response is here - https://steemit.com/curation/@beanz/let-s-reawaken-the-debate-on-auto-voting.
I have been a proponent of allowing authors to set their own curation percentages, so I don't substantially disagree with your proposed solution, although I do disagree emphatically with your fear of automation. (for reasons already stated and not [yet] rebutted).
Interesting article but don't know what to think. I thought I voted more than most but just checked via steemdb.com and says my voting power is only 22.07%
What should I do as I continually comment and upvote posts
Wow! That means you're voting a lot! If you're only voting manually, that's seriously impressive.
The way it works is that f we don't vote at all, we have 100% voting power. Then, the more we vote, the lower the voting power goes. As I understand it, our voting power replenishes at a rate of about 20% per day, so it would take you 4 days without voting to get up to 100%.
The best articles I've seen to get a handle on voting power are The Ultimate Guide to Voting Power and The Complete, Definitive, and yes, Ultimate guide to Voting Power. Updated! , both by @biophil. The second is an update of the first. According to those, after 40 votes, you have maximized your influence for the day.
Many thanks.Appreciate the information
Your article is lucid, well-reasoned and helpful to the likes of me who are trying to get to understand the mechanics of Steemit and the principles behind these. Thanks. I am now following you and I look forward to seeing more from you.
Thanks for the feedback. I followed you back.
This is a great idea in theory... but my one issue is simple: The rewards for creating content are far greater than voting. I can't see myself spending hours carefully curating content to the point of upvoting 40 great articles, when I could spend those hours working on my own original artwork to post.
I love the idea of using our votes well, but that 40 number is HUGE! When it's presented that way, it makes me want to start getting in on those auto-vote bots.
Sorry I missed this earlier. I think you make some very good points and this is why I have changed my stance as it comes to bots over time.
Thank you for the feedback and the resteem.
You're welcome:)
I can no more agree with you! As soon as the bot is doing what you want it to do and what you would have done yourself manually, why not?
Well, my perspective on that is largely guided by Jaron Lanier's ideas, here: https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-the-myth-of-ai. In order to be able to do what I would have done manually, I think the bot will always need some input from human voters. Also, considering that my tastes will change over time, there probably needs to be some sort of permanent feedback loop.