One example of how this impacts users is that when Steemit creates accounts for new Steem users, we delegate Steem Power to them so that they can use the blockchain. Due to this issue, Steemit cannot delegate to new accounts.
Wait, do you mean to tell me that one of the key functions of one of the key actors on the entire blockchain, the ability of Steemit Inc. to make accounts and delegate resources to those accounts so that they can function on the blockchain – was never tested for this hard fork?
Because if that is what you're telling me, why should I believe that the current Witness collection who were supposed to be responsible for making sure the hard forts could maintain basic blockchain functionality are capable of doing that? This is a massive, massive failure that should have never slipped through the cracks.
Seriously. Of all things not to test, that Steemit could successfully make and delegate functioning new accounts, the one thing the blockchain and social networks which depend on it all required to function, should have never been left to chance.
The goal of Proof-of-Brain is to reward people who create high-quality content as determined by the crowd.Votes should only deliver rewards if the content is deemed valuable by other people. If someone votes on something that is not high-quality, the creator of the content should not receive any rewards. If someone casts the same vote on something that is high-quality, the creator of that content should receive rewards. The reward should not be determined by the vote, but by the quality of the thing being voted on.
Yes, that's the goal. The problem is that this description captures the essential failure of the underlying design. You see, people don't vote to control what "the crowd" determines to be "high quality content." People vote to denominate what they believe high quality content to be – and intend to reward. When that content is not rewarded despite their vote, they become cranky, and justly so. They have accurately and perfectly observed that their actions have no consequence or meaning within the context you have defined.
The ultimate problem is that you have not created a system which is in any way proof-of-brain. On the contrary, you have created a system which is a betting pool. An upvote does not communicate that a user believes that the content is valuable. On the contrary, an upvote is a bet with a value people to the portion of SP which is temporarily unavailable due to placing that but, with the expectation that other people will recognize the target as worthy of putting a bet on themselves.
And that's all that it means.
It has nothing, literally nothing, to do with the quality of the post or the content of the post. A profitable ("successful") upvote just means that the voter has determined that others are likely to upvote on the same content.
This is what passes for "curation" on the Steem blockchain. Again, it has nothing to do with the actual content or with how useful, well-written, or well presented that content is – but only what the likelihood that other people will vote on that content is.
Despite the number of times that you say so, upvote is not a signal of value and never has been. It's a signal of what some user or by believes other users and bots will vote on.
As a result, it's not surprising at all that the content tends to be monotonal, unimaginative, and often mechanically generated. It doesn't matter if the rewards curve is exponential or linear – only that the underlying reward mechanic is based on betting on what other people are going to vote on. There is no value in voting for things which you find interesting, desirable, or creative, there is only value in trying to predict what others will find to be safe bets.
Uniqueness, rarity, and anything out of what passes for the mainstream of votes is actively punished. As you say, "votes should only deliver rewards if the content is deemed valuable by other people."
And since all of the above is scaled by SP, what you really mean is "votes should only deliver rewards if the content is deemed valuable by a whale."
If there is any surprise about the content which finds its way to Trending or why bots are rampant on the platform, it's right here. And it will never change.
You have made some exceptional points here, and have continued to make them, especially in relation to vote betting, and how the term used here - "high quality", doesn't mean that at all . I hope someone with the power to affect change pays attention to the feedback being given.
You have accurately surmised how this fork as made a lot of people feel. Like they don't matter.
It feels like steemit doesn't value the majority of its users as the minority hold a bigger combined stake. The curve goes against the small-big user is favor of the larger, the vote distribution and the latest revelation that this goes further than I had thought, where a vote from a big user doesn't mean anything unless it is backed up with enough votes from other users. It really kicks. My vote isn't worth much, but if i find an unrelated post, from a user who has made great content but hasn't caught the eye of others, my vote being diminished by the fact no one else found the really good post I had upvoted doesn't seem right. I appreciate this is more about the crowd than the individual, and this way small users can gain ground through upvoting big users and getting a tiny bit of curation. But the crowd is made of individuals, so i wonder if maybe focusing on building a platform that best serves the average user would help encourage growth?
These changes really feel like they are going to feed bidbots.
Say a lone curator upvotes me, if I want their vote to have the value they intended, I have to either hope enough other users, with enough power, agree. Or i can reinforce it with bidbots. I am not a bidbot user, talking hypothetically here, yes the bidbot gets a 50% curation cut, but confident the bidbots have adapted to that, and if the bidbot increases the value of other users votes, then it is worth it despite the curation cut. That combined with the increase in the curation cut, and the new payout curve, no wonder people are shocked at how little their posts are worth.
The flags are already an under estimated problem.
Now, a flag has more power. Some one petty down votes me because they were pretending I was their girlfriend, and I found out and was understandably not okay with that. I don't think that's a good reason to flag everything a person does. Before this fork, that flag used to have no power, their flagging behavior hasn't changed, but their flag now takes value away from my comments/posts. I tried to express my concerns about this on a previous post, saying I didn't think I was alone in being bully flagged for none-content reasons and that I didn't think that kind of flagging was good for the platform, (and did meet someone people who want to help) but that comment got flagged by a big and unstoppable user who disagreed. That one users flags (from their various accounts) stripped away a value accrued by 180+ other users. The crowd determined a value, and one person with a lot of SP was able to take it away with their downvote. That doesn't reflect the opinion of the group, and the culture and principles behind flagging need to be addressed, not made worse with the encouraging of comparative flagging.
It feels like steemit is becoming a place where trying to say anything makes you a target.
Diversity, and sincere engaged disagreement can bring amazing positive change, it is a chance for people to evaluate their own position, improve their understand, and learn. If someone disagrees, please tell me, I want to understand why, not to argue with you, but to better understand my own perspective and learn something about yours. Downvotes don't help that, and I don't see how that element is going to attract new users. Debate, and open discussion however, does attract people who want to get involved. Hell, I am here commenting on this.
Although that said, i think this is probably the end of a girl who doesn't matter commenting with an opinion that doesn't matter, even if all the people who don't matter express it, when no one who matters cares, it feels pointless. But I am so grateful there are people like you who are still putting themselves out there and commenting, saying what so many may feel but may not feel empowered enough to say.
Thank you <3
"votes should only deliver rewards if the content is deemed valuable by a whale." Which means be should be a whale or we vote for the whale who is self voting?
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Effectively? If you're a whale, anything you vote for is going to gain in value and see a notable reward. If you're not a whale, if you want significant curation value, you want to vote for things that whales will vote for slightly after you.
This has always been true because it's an inherent description of how the Steem blockchain decides value, but now under HF 22, with the $20 breakpoint S-curve, unless something is valued at least $20, the further from it you get the less rewards you get for creating or curating it. The natural effect being that both curators and creators will only target content that they feel relatively secure will earn over $20 – and if you look at the distribution of rewards over the last three years, that's actually a relatively tiny part of the content on the platform which is extremely monocultural.
The Bananafish community, made by small users who love to write fiction and poetry, is with you @lextenebris. Cheers to your critical mind.
We do the best we can with what we have. which is a very limited test suite in the code base itself as well as a testnet which runs mostly independently of the main net and where it is a tremendous amount of work required to try to reproduce main net conditions (and even that can never be done perfectly).
In cases of small patches we can also do independent code reviews but that isn't feasible for major release on a large codebase, at least not given the current size of the economy (perhaps with more value to work with we could pay for comprehensive professional reviews, but currently we can not). Even with the new SPS, the resources available for tasks will be much smaller than the potential number of things those resources could be spent on. Again, we do the best we can with what we have.
If we wanted to wait until everything were perfect we would never get anywhere. Progress is being made and improvements will continue to be made for future releases as noted in the post. It is an ongoing incremental process.
This is indeed a signal of consensus that the content is value-adding because the one thing that all stakeholders have in common is wanting their stake to increase in value. If you bet on content getting upvoted by other stakeholders when that content does not contribute significant value, you are much more likely to be wrong than when you bet on content that does. Sure, there are other factors at play and individual cases can certainly vary, but that is the core of it.
HF19/HF20 did not accomplish this very well. HF21 remains an experiment and we'll see if accomplishes it at least somewhat better. If not, well Steem itself is also an experiment in progress and we can iterate.
No, that is not what it means and there are plenty of rewards paid out with NO whale votes. Yes, those who own a larger share of the system and with more value at stake have a larger say in how their resources are used and distributed, as with any business (although it isn't so common with most businesses that every user can earn or buy a larger stake in the platform). (Again, I'm referring here to how it is supposed to work and not how HF19/HF20 was working, which was indeed very poorly.)
No it isn't. I am a stakeholder, and note that I don't care if my stake increases in value. I also note that disregarding rhetoric enables me to observe that HF21 appears deliberately designed to decrease the value of Steem, and thus to reduce the value of all stakes. It is designed to increase the concentration of Steem in the wallets that hold the most of it, and this directly decreases the value of it.
Not anymore.
Previously, whales extracted ~90% of rewards through the magic of stake weighting. That remaining ~10% was not 'plenty'. Under the current rules that will drop below ~5%. It is difficult to conceive of a mechanism that will more discourage adoption and retention of Steem social media. However, I am sure better minds than mine are hard at work doing so.
Extreme edge cases don't matter. The vast majority (particularly when stake weighted) does care, and even if it weren't a majority, it is still the main point of commonality which means it is where votes will most align and the where most rewards will be directed.
Don't disregard the rest of my comment. Despite the fact that edge cases are perhaps the most important to consider, as they reveal potential paradigm shifts, the fact that almost all rewards inure to whales and HF21 more than halves those escaping them is highly relevant.
The rest of your comment is old news, and we don't even disagree that a lot of the reward payouts have been captured by large stakeholders. We disagree on what HF21 is attempting to do (IMO it is specifically intended to moderate this, in its overall systemic effect). What it does or not will play out over the next several months.
Originally, it seems that the Steem Upvoting System was always about a reverse auction or some kind of betting game. Of course, there may be better systems out there. But Steem was always about a system that is all about gambling, betting, as far as I can tell. I am ok with bots.
I disagree. It will shortly vanish.
Thanks!
See, oddly enough, that is one thing I don't expect. And I'll tell you why.
The lightly distributed nature of the Steem blockchain means that all it takes is a handful of true believers to keep running the servers and basic functionality can continue for a truly disturbing amount of time. There are more involved zombie projects that have been running since the early 90s with only a handful of users and the occasional nudge.
The Steem blockchain could easily become one of those things. Eventually, it probably will. Unless the developers and users get extremely lucky and someone hits on a killer app that gets the right amount of traction, that is the future inevitability.
In my mind, that's worse than a crash and burn scenario. That's just a long, slow trudge into the sunset, with continuous cheerleaders popping up in the cryptocultist community. That's a terrible way to go.
That's what we're looking at.
I note that the data on the blockchain includes evidence of criminal and tortuous acts, and thus expect the blockchain to no longer be funded due to liability of ninjaminers motivated to eliminate that data. I think that's what HF21 was all about. We'll soon see.
While I have no doubt that there is evidence of all kinds of fun crimes hanging out in the Steem blockchain, I don't think it's likely that Steemit Inc. or other major stakeholders expected HF 21 to be of any use in dealing with that fact. Mainly because to get rid of the evidence would be to get rid of the blockchain and there are way too many copies of it floating around for that to be very effective.
Radical transparency is one of the few things that this place has going for it and I don't really see anything in HF 21 that was intended to actually change the historical data that way.
Now, if one of the new developments as a way to essentially "checkpoint" the blockchain, consolidate all the old blocks into some new kind of "checkpoint" blocks which stand as computational cipher and capitalizations and allow the chain of blocks to be rolled back to that point and still checksum, then I think you might have a strong argument that some folks in the blockchain were trying to get rid of information they didn't want seen. As it stands, since that is not a technical possibility, suggesting it is a bit of a stretch.
It would make for an amusing conspiracy theory but not really a failure of the kind that we normally see playing out here.
Defunding those effecting the blockchain is one step that can be taken to prevent that evidence from being used. It isn't the only step necessary to do so. A journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step.