RE: HF 19- The Clu$terf*ckening and Unintended Consequences
Interest should be at 0%. Why we're paying 7% of the reward pool to SBD interest is a bit of a mystery to me. I'm worried it's based on legacy policies that haven't been updated for like a year by some top 49 witness accounts that are driving percent interest above 0% and forcing the community to give a bunch of SP to SBD holders where it's really not necessary. Either they change or we vote them down in power and we can recapture a lot if not all of this 7%.
The SBD interest is currently 0. It is also not part of inflation. The interest that is paid from inflation is SP interest - which goes to all SP holders. THe witnesses have no control over this.
Spread out voting power to 80 votes instead of shrinking to 10
How many users do you think will actually vote on 80 posts per day? How many bots do you think will? Which one of those two groups do you think will be doing more voting on the same authors over and over?
I think it will force the need for mutual fund like trails. Or you can spam votes on the same people. Maybe we wouldn't need 80 votes if the pig pile incentive was gone. But that's why so many people want 1 variable at a time.
I'm not sure what you mean by pig pile incentive. It is actually setup the exact opposite. If you vote on a post that already has high rewards, you get practically no curation - it all goes to the people that already voted. At that point you are basically hoping for more people to pig pile, because that would be the only way to make rewards in that scenario. It is a very misunderstood aspect of curation.
Tim. You're a good author and everyone loves you. I know that when your next post hits it's going to make 1k or more. I'm going to put a lot of my power in there between the 20-30min mark to try to sneak in and get as much of that reward as possible. Lots will follow. yes, I'm only incented by the people that come after me, but I'm gambling on pot odds that since you're adored that folks will follow. If I bet on a minnow it probably dies there. So, my incentive even after a bunch of big votes have been cast on you is to stay the course and pile the pig.
Thanks. I do agree that there is a fundamental problem with curation in that it is more about trying to predict winners than it is trying to identify good content. I've written a few posts on the subject. I don't have a good solution, but I also don't really think that HF 19 is really going to make the problem significantly worse either. There are actually some hypothetical changes in user behavior where it could get better actually. (If you are predicting that I'm going to get 1,000 - what happens when a large portion of my regular voters have already spent their 10 votes for the day..?)
They aren't going to spend their 10 votes for the day. They are going to wait for the 10 highest posters post and gamble on them. Their won't be any power left for a minnow. If you have 300kSP which is like top 100 account or so you can make 2800 on 1 upvote... It's going to be insane. if you have 40 votes or more you can't just upvote the same 10 people all the time. You have to dig to find people to support.
It won't take long to see this Tim. The scoreboard, ie trending page, will reflect it within a week is my guess. A week for payouts, and a week for the start of the exodus from "why the fuck am I bothering to do this"
With the removal of squared rewards and a switch to linear, the upvote of a single whale is no longer going to have as much weight - especially when it gets added to a post that already has lots of votes.
I'm ball parking squared to linear will take the rewards pool control of whales from 99% to 93%. It's not that big of a change. So the math is a $50 bet x4 is now 200 *93% = 190ish. The pile on will be bonkers.
That people need to consider the relative value of their curative reward in their curation debases the value of curation. Posts aren't upvoted because they're good posts, but because it pays better.
This kills good content.
Why in the world is there a reduction in the value of votes for an article that is already showing it has value? This reduces the reward for posts that are of higher value, and reduces the reward of curators that see this value.
Make it simple and fair. Let value be determined by the curators, rather than tricks.
Sorry for the double reply. I am also against having voting trails be the solution. Organic voting where users are actually engaged is really what we should be pushing for IMO. There is nothing wrong with voting trails, and I'm fine that people want to use them - but a voting formula of 80 votes where it is basically required to be able to compete is a no-go for me.
So riddle me this. How will going down to 10 big votes help minnows get more bites? That may not be everybody's primary desire. But that's what I want to see and that's what my 500 Discordians in PALnet want to know. And I'm honored to have you on my wall. So you can replay however and whenever you want :)
The 40 vs. 10 votes is less of a 'whale' vs. 'minnow' change as it is a "casual user" vs. "power user" change. For those of us that are heavily involved in the site (we spend hours a day here, we use tools that let us form curation trails, we are part of guilds, etc.) - it isn't that hard to spend 40 votes per day. For a casual user though (someone who pops in and spends an hour browsing when they get home from work) they probably aren't going to find 40 things to vote on per day. They are going to leave a lot of their voting power on the table 'unspent'. By changing the threshold down to 10, it is basically allowing users who aren't as hardcore to still be able to use their full influence as they see fit.
This is exactly why I call this the unintended consequences HF. You're going to fix a curation problem worth 12% and with the changes will equate to 2% of the rewards pool or less while drastically altering the rewards pool worth 72% and shove a huge majority of that into 15-20 people.
There is a premise in your analysis that all of a sudden a majority of the voting stake is going to start going to a subset of popular authors. I'm not saying it won't happen, but it is a prediction in user behavior that is impossible to know. It could very well go the other way too.
Tim. I have to work 2 weeks to make $2800. As a whale I can in 1 click make that in the new scheme. This is going to take exactly 0.03 seconds to explode posts that were already trending at 3k
I don't think that is accurate. Whale votes are likely going to add less to rewards under the new formula (even with 4x) than they are today.
Those casual users that vote fewer times create less value. Limiting the ability to create value to the lowest common denominator kills the ability to create value.
Why limit votes at all? If I spend the time to make 100 votes, didn't I create value with those votes?
I don't see value in funneling wealth to the already wealthy and skipping the content creators. I see value in creating a platform that increases in value, this adding wealth to the wealthy who have invested in the platform.
I do vote on 80 posts per day. Why limit the voting power at all? Why not compensate curators for the actual work they do, instead of artificially trying to limit it when artificially inflating the value of whale's curation?
Eliminate the inapplicable value of wealth in curation, posting, and commenting, and let people add value to the platform by their work doing those things, and reward them fairly for doing so.
You can still vote on 80 posts per day (you can vote with less than 100% power), but you are limited on how much influence you can have on rewards. If users could vote on as many posts as they wanted, and have the same increase on all of them - then users who voted for hundreds or thousands of posts would have more power than people who spent time and found the real gems. There woudl also be ways to abuse the rewards pool and direct a large share to tons of 'sock puppet' accounts. Users are allowed to vote on as many posts as they want - but the amount of influence you have is limited by the amount of SP you have in your account.
I don't see that the present system precludes 'sock puppet' accounts, but rather enables such accounts to avoid the loss in upvote power, by using more accounts. The present reward system incentivizes such practice.
Users that simply blanket the blogosphere with upvotes are clearly not curating well, although if not just selfvoting would increase the breadth of reward distribution, and do certainly pose a thorny issue. Still, I doubt that is so common as to have much of a negative impact on the value of curation overall. Even if it does, is that negative impact even remotely potential of creating unfairness as the present system? Over 90% of rewards go, and will go according to @aggroed, to less than 10% of users solely due to inequity in wealth through mechanisms that devalue quality content, and encourage voting merely to profit.
Perhaps bots might be a problem in this way, but that is a different issue. It may be that using bots to perform curation detracts from that ability of people to discern quality, and should be discouraged institutionally, in addition to posing this hazard.
Those that spend hours and hours reading and commenting high quality content do add value to the platform, yet presently, and as conceived, that value is not rewarded to them, nor to that content they curate, because upvote power dissipates.
There are ways to abuse the reward pool presently, as we are discussing, and I suspect that a broader provision of rewards might result from any particular abuses you might have in mind. I don't ask what those might be, in order to keep them as inobvious as possible.
The idea is that you get more influence by buying more SP, not by voting as many times as you can. I realize that there is a trade off between rewarding power users who find 40 good posts per day and casual users who spend less time on the site. As much as possible we have to try and find the right balance.
meep
Well, there is a simple way to do this that acknowledges that 3 billion people earn less than $3/day.
Those people can't buy influence. This clearly establishes that creating a system that intends for people to buy influence to somehow create a fair distribution is impossible. I would go further and say buying influence is antithetical to fairness.
After all, it's exactly the problem in government and finance today.
The only way to create a fair system is to decouple wealth and speech. Making influence a commodity guarantees that not only wealth will be inequitably distributed, but also speech.
Most new users on Steemit do not understand that this is the case, because they are told that Steemit rewards posters for posting. This is what they come for, and it's a bait and switch. To be honest, tell them what you just told me, Steemit is a place where you can buy influence. See if new users still come.
Those that do will not be taken aback when they discover the truth.
The only fair way to live up to the rhetoric that has driven Steemit growth is to let the value of posts and comments be set by curators that have an influence, an ability to direct reward, weighted only by their reputation.
All the timing tricks, vote spreading schemes, etc. are just veils that may hide the raw fact that the value of speech is able to be co opted by wealth through those methods.
The real value in the platform is that creators create content, and people discuss that content. Creating rewards that incentivize this behavior will grow Steemit and cause the value of Steem to rise.
The influence buying paradigm is antithetical to not only free speech, and just government, but Steemit. No weighting scheme can make it just.
And that we, as I understand it, own the body of content collectively.
Powerful insight!