TBH, I sort-of lost track of dtube when they moved over to Avalon. I thought their idea of 0% author rewards was creative, so it's interesting for me to hear how things are playing out now.
With your discussion of limiting votes to 1%, it sounds like dtube is still having a similar problem to Steem with self-voting, even with the 0% for authors. It's more profitable for high stakes voters to self vote than to curate.
IMO, there has never been anything wrong with self-voting or bidbots, but the problem arises when people artificially overvalue a post. Whether it's their own (self-votes) or others' (bid-bots).
As a solution to this, on Steem, I have long advocated for something like a second price auction for the rewards algorithm. The point is to make it unprofitable for a voter to reward a post with more than it's "true value" (according to consensus).
A simple analogy is scoring for various sports like karate, gymnastics, or diving. In those sports, some tournaments will discard the highest and lowest scores from the judges and the competitor's score will be average of all scores from the remaining judges.
If Steem/Dtube rewards were awarded in similar fashion, the rshares from the highest voter would get sent back to the reward pool and the payouts would be awarded based on the remaining rshares. That would create a natural incentive for voters to try to be the 2nd-highest voter, in order avoid wasting their voting power.
I don't really have any hope that it will ever happen, but I keep mentioning it anyway. ;-)
What a joy it is to receive a genuine reply!
Thank you, as always, for taking the time to explore my world of blogging and smartcasting.
In the past, I had vaguely heard about this idea of 0% rewards for Authors, but something obviously changed along the way. Now it seems that most of the rewards go to the Authors, and it is nearly impossible to be a good curator. In fact, DTube is experiencing a serious problem with retaining users.
I am trying to learn as much as I can about the system, so that I can better participate as a content creator, investor and curator. I'm having to invent my own strategies for success.
What I continue to hear often is that they spend a lot of time and energy designing the system based on "game theory." I don't know enough about game theory to understand what it means within the context of the DTube platform and the Avalon blockchain.
I saw the movie A Beautiful Mind, which was more of a romantic, hollywoodized version of the story of John Nash. But I know that the real life John Nash was an altogether much more disturbed genius, who didn't necessarily give us something positive to work with. I know about the "prisoner's dilemma," but not much else. And the only other person who I enjoy listening to when it comes to game theory, is Simon Sinek.
I'm trying to envision something more community oriented for DTube, otherwise, I don't know how long they plan to survive with all of this self-aggrandizing behavior. If you don't bring in more curators, then what you will be left with is cronyism and narcissism. Most of which, is coming from the dominate presence of Hive users who are bringing their ideologies to DTube, and controlling the rules of the DTube game.
All things considered, I am enjoying the platform and the DTC rewards. As long as that is the case, I will continue to invest and make use of the service.
A Beautiful Mind is one of my favorite movies. I've seen it many times.
I don't know a whole lot about game theory, either, though. I had heard about "second price auctions" years ago, before I knew anything about cryptocurrency because I read that Google started using them to set its online advertising prices.
Even if that's not the specific answer, I really think some sort of change is in order to incentivize voters to self-regulate the size of their votes. It seems clear to me that downvotes, alone, don't solve the problem of overvalued posts.
I also saw it more than once! It was an exceptional performance on the part of all the great actors that participated.
I've never heard of "second price auctions" so I'll have to look into it, especially if it will help me better understand what the hell is going on with DTube.
The only thing downvotes are being used for on DTube, is for soft-censorship. I'm okay with the censoring of pornography for those who do not respect the NSFW tag, but downvoting RT (Russia Today) because it's considered "Russian propaganda" by Avalon Leaders and other DTubers, is quite hypocritical, and antithetical to the idea of being a platform dedicated to "censorship resistance."
I obviously wish the Hive fork had never happened, but there's a certain amount of toxicity that left when Hive did. I don't miss that toxicity at all. I had forgotten that dtube has one foot on each side of the fence, but now that you reminded me, I can definitely imagine the soft censorship that you describe.
Peripherally related, one of the things I've been expecting from the Tron ecosystem is some sort of integration among dlive, btfs, and steemit. No sign of it so far, though (aside from the side-bar advertising), so maybe that was a bad guess. I keep hoping, though. I think it would benefit all three platforms.