RE: Elimination of Curation Rewards
It is entirely up to each user how they want to use their votes, but paying them to do so is not necessarily going to incentivize better behavior.
between paying them and not paying them, paying them is more likely to incentivize good behavior. But personally, i don't think there is very much that is going to change voting habits.
A large portion of voting is taking place without users even reading or evaluating the content. While bots could be used to perform a lot of automated evaluations of content that would not be easy for humans to do on a large scale, that is not what they are doing today. Most of them are designed to maximize earnings from the curation rewards game.
For exmaple, this. It will still cost inactive unengaged users who don't want to read little or nothing to use bots. maybe they would use them to auto upvote the largest of the new upvoters, in hopes of getting upvoted themselves if they post occassionally. Maybe a new steem sports like endeavor will come around that will allow them to monetize.
What you don't seem to get is that if there is money involved, people will find a way to get it. If my vote can assign money to everyone but me, im going to find a way to monetize it by voting for someone else.
Im writing up some ideas now that provide a lot of realistic fixes.
From my experience running a consumer review website, I've experienced the opposite. By rewarding users to perform actions you end up with dishonest actions being performed just to earn the reward. Removing (and disallowing) rewards causes interactivity to decrease slightly, but the quality of interaction increases as people are performing the task willingly.
It's sure possible to build some sort of reward system to engage positive behavior, but it's not easy. The current system doesn't do a good job at that.
I look forward to seeing what ideas you come up with!
I agree that this happens very frequently. I think they key is to align the actual easiest/best way to perform the desired behavior with the reward. That is to say, make it inefficient to cheat because doing it the right way is also doing it the best way.
In a way (if i understand correctly, which i probably don't) this is how bitcoin security works. Using your computer power honestly (mining) is more efficient than using it dishonestly (to crack private keys.)
In the case of steemit, the most efficient way to get curation rewards should be to find good content (its a debatable point whether 'good' is the same thing as 'other people will like it' but for the purposes of this reply, assume it is..) i would argue that it is not. RIght now, the besst way to get curation rewards it to front run a whale (or be one)
check my most recent blog post for my ideas on the subject of how to change things so that the best way to get curation rewards is gasp to curate.
Totally. I just don't know how it can be done, and I'm not sure if tweaking the distribution is going to "fix" it. It will most definitely improve the distribution problem, but the fact still remains that people are going to be casting votes simply because they earn a reward for it. The system encourages you to vote ~40 times a day to maximize your reward, without you caring what content it is you're actually voting on.
We don't have a system of discovery that's based on the wisdom of the crowd right now - we have a system that's based on the wisdom of profit.
Changing distribution method to
nand removing curation game things will reduce bot activities as well. But yes I also agree that even though the distribution is fixed, giving financial incentive to "just upvote" will encourage bot running with simpler algorithm.Yep, exactly. I agree that the voting weight proposal (n^2 to n log(n) or something along those lines) is a good idea and solves another aspect of the problem. Curation is creating its own set of problems though, which a change to the voting weight is not going to solve. You very eloquently articulated the main issue that curation rewards created.
It is, by definition in a social system like this. The only way to measure whether "good" content is being rewarded is whether more people (stake-weighted in this case ) like it. There is no "right" opinion on what is actually good (other than mine of course).