Hardfork Update - Curation being added back to comment rewards, revised curation and reward curves for both posts and comments
One of the proposed changes in HF 17 was to split comments and posts into separate reward pools, and remove curation rewards from comments. Many users and witnesses in the community expressed concern over this change. Based on the feedback from the community, the Steemit dev team has decided to make some changes.
Most notably:
- There will be curation rewards for both comments and posts.
- A revised reward curve for both comment and post reward pools
- A revised curation formula for both comment and post reward pools
Here is the comment from GitHub:
(GitHub link)
Great job to everyone in the community who has been discussing and advocating for changes. Most notably @ats-david, @smooth, @clayop, @pfunk, @snowflake, @abit, @jesta, @liberosist, and @sigmajin. (Sorry to those I missed - I know there were many more - but these are the ones fresh in my mind.)
Also, a HUGE thank you should go out to the Steemit dev team. I hear complaints from a lot of people that Steemit doesn't listen to the community regarding the changes they, but from what I see - they listen and adapt to what the community is pushing for time and time again. It is very difficult to get consensus from the entire community on any significant change, but I do see them doing their best trying to balance out many competing wants/needs/interests to achieve the best set of changes to improve the platform for everyone.
I for one am now very excited for the upcoming hardfork, as well as the many other exciting changes soon to come!
Related info: the curve is explained here: https://steemit.com/steem/@clayop/brief-explanation-and-discussion-about-new-reward-system
Thanks for bringing these discussions up.
//Edit: self-upvoted for visibility.
Interesting read. Maybe this was a good time to join the community after all!
...
FYI readers, this interview happened pre-hf16.
Tru e. 103 weeks for power down.jajks :)
Good news!
I will never forget that voice.
yeah i hear it in my head when reading this too!
Hey, by the way, I just discovered a new likely use for one of the new features in HF17: paid curation guilds.
Indeed :)
Thank you very much for the information, your work and dedication to the platform Mr. @timcliff congratulations
Welcome. Thanks @jlufer :)
So they're still splitting the pools? Why? Any particular reason?
About 10x more people comment than post. About 10x more people vote than comment.
It's easier for a user (especially a brand new user) to write some snarky one liner comment on something they read than to compose a new, multi-line post in a blank window. We think that rewarding this kind of "drive-by" participation more is a valuable improvement to increase engagement and retention, and to generally incentivize more content and sharing of opinion (which offers more value to readers in turn).
Also, comment threads are fun.
(I was one for a 50/50 split, personally. Comments make the site.)
I support the partitioning of the rewards pool because I think that really comments are a separate type of voting system, and when the two have been together, comments have been nearly completely unimportant for rewards. With a fixed partition there is a more clear incentive to engage with comments.
Maybe the arbitrary allocation to comments will be too low?
I think we should make one significant rule change at a time, in order to be able to see what that change actually does, and the flattening of the reward curve is perhaps the most significant change that has ever been made in terms of the social platform (HF16 was arguably at least as significant on the token/investment side).
Let's let the new flatter curve play out, which will with virtual certainty result in a greatly increased share of rewards going to comments, see what things look like once the economy has adjusted to it, and then reevaluate the need for (and the rules governing) a separate comment pool.
Just remember the share of mining rewards has been taken out of the calculation in HF17, so all the other shares increase by the percentage that mining rewards currently take.
I agree though, it would make sense to limit the amount of changes made in a fork so the changes produce useful feedback.
The rewards that are currently allocated to mining are being used to create a "top 20" witness position, instead of 19.
Sure, but that is quite a small change. Miners currently only get 1/25 of block producer rewards which is only 10% of the total, so 1/250 of all rewards. Other rewards will increase by less than 1/2%
EDIT: I wasn't aware of the 20th witness position explained by @timcliff. In that case, other rewards won't change at all.
Yes, they are. I don't have any info beyond what they reported in the GitHub issue. Based on what they said in the issue, it seems like they want to be able to experiment a little bit more with how rewards are allocated and be able to use different formulas and percentages for different things.
Thank you for the update and continuously parsing GitHub for us dev-challenged folks! This is great news. There's been a lot of antagonism towards Steemit, Inc. of late. I hope people give them credit where it's due.
I'm OK with the multiple pools. I can see why going modular can be beneficial for future initiatives. I recall Ned propose short-form reward pools, Disqus-competitor solution etc - they have gotta be considering these. However, I do feel 38% is far too high for the comments pool. We'll see what the stats say, if there's an order of magnitude increase in the quantity and quality of comments, without a decrease in post activity, I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Modular is fine, that's a coding issue. You can have modular reward pools with only one such module instance existing initially. I feel we are much better off evaluating the change to the reward function (which is likely to be a very significant change, with far-reaching consequences, some as yet unrecognized) before also making additional changes and significantly muddying the water.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess there would certainly be an order of magnitude increase in the quantity of comments with the proposed split (ignoring the effect of reward curve). As for quality, well...
Comments that lack quality can simply be flagged. I hear some of y'all are pretty good at that.
Vote power, as well as unrewarded effort, is extremely limited. A few posts can easily be flagged. Thousands of poor and bot-generated comments in practice can not, and even if they were this runs up against the problem that doing so push rewards right back into the comment pool, increasing the incentive for more "replacement spam".
There is no way around the fact that arbitrarily choosing a percentage is almost guaranteed to result in a split that is either too high (attracting spam), or too low (starving comment-focused modes of usages). Given the current user base and UI, short term it would likely be the former.
Perhaps. I think we'll see relatively quickly and can move on to our next round of blockchain whack-a-mole^H^H^H^Hiteration
Exactly, that's why we should try one substantial change at a time, so we can actually understand the effects before pulling out the hammer yet again.
With essentially every proposed hard fork so far (at least those implementing rule changes), the feedback from the stakeholders and community has strongly favored fewer changes being pushed out together as one big package. Sometimes that is impossible or impractical, but here we have a case where there are two completely independent major rule changes (flattening the reward curve and splitting the pool) that can easily be rolled out, voted on, and evaluated separately. I see no good reason not do so.
@smooth (nested reply) I would agree except that we don't have unlimited time. We have to compress the timeline as much as we can.
@smooth Fully agree with 1 change at a time wrt important items such as power and funds distribution; absolutely the only way to find out what the results are. @sneak When rolling out multiple changes a time, what are your ways to determine what are the causes/effects?
@edje By talking to our users, same as always. :)
Maybe we can make a new reputation algorithm, make it part of consensus, and make accounts below a certain threshold ineligible for rewards. Thoughts?
Reputation systems re extremely hard. There are very few that ever turn out to be strongly abuse resistant (and there are other hazards as well, some already seen in the existing rep system, such as creating an entrenched system perceived as unfair or unwelcoming where those with high reputations are strongly favored by the rules at the expensive of those who are new or less well connected). Directly attaching rewards ups the ante significantly. I won't say it is impossible, as I rarely do, but why not try easier approaches first.
I'd even say take away their posting rights, or at least limit their bandwidth severely so they can only make one post/vote per day or so. We have seen some discredited accounts continue to spam randomly and incessantly, often with hateful messages. They give up after a while, but it's an unnecessary inconvenience. No new user posting an introduceyourself message wants to be greeted by a message, even if hidden, saying "Steemit is a scam, X whale is evil etc. etc.". (Yes, I have seen new users respond to these.)
As for Reputation, the current system simply doesn't work. Anyone who makes a lot of posts and gets voted by the same people over and over again stands to gain a high Rep. Conversely, any one could single out a new account, get some help from their friends and repeatedly flag it to oblivion; even with relatively low Rep or SP. As smooth points out, I'm not sure if there can be an effective Rep system, but I'm sure we can do better than this.
Off-topic - I'd love to see you comment more! Not just about Steemit stuff, but in general. Your comments about Vaccination yesterday were a tour de force of rationality - much needed on Steemit. :)
@liberosist Thank you for your kind words.
The problem with the system you propose is that it assumes 1 account per user. It is not resistant to a person who registers a thousand accounts.
Also, I am ideologically opposed to anything that limits posting rights. There are better solutions that involve letting people choose what they want to read via UI.
I think this is a good thing for the upcoming hardfork, but I'm also an advocate for doing our best to "break" Steemit so we can find the weak spots while we're still in beta. Any of these changes to pay/reward structure really isn't going to affect my participation anyway so maybe I'm crazy. I haven't completely ruled that out. lol Thanks for the info, Tim
That's an interesting viewpoint! For sure - if it is going to break, now is the time to make it happen :)
Hopefully it will make more 'regular' users feel like they at least have some say by increasing the power of their votes compared to the mega-whales :)
Good changes. Thumbs up from this guy! :)
BTW, never stop doing these updates. These are so great.