RE: My New Steem Resolutions: What will you do in HF21?
I would also be curious to hear what you would like to do differently in HF21 as your newsteem-resolutions.
Voting for a post like this would be a start for me I guess. Finally voting honestly rather than selling or self voting doesn't feel prohibitively expensive.
On OCDB, while I applaud it's altruism compared to the other voting bots, I don't think it's really any better for the ecosystem as a whole. As a point of comparison, self voting entirely shifts 100% of a stakeholder's voting rewards into their own pocket (bad as it turns votes into staking returns and renders most of the inflation redundant). Selling votes through a voting bot takes 100% of the voting rewards and distributes it between the stakeholder, bot owner, and vote buyer, the latter two arguably even less deserving than the stakeholder. If the bot owner surrenders their cut, it just means slightly more for the other two, neither of which can be seen as doing the ecosystem a favor. The only way vote rewards can have value is if it reflects one's subjective opinion of the content itself, something that self voting and laundering votes through vote selling fails to do entirely. Again, I appreciate their altruism, but please correct me if my logic is wrong here.
This is why the EIP was necessary. They went with my numbers entirely so I have nothing to complain about. Ideally, I wanted to introduce a system where downvotes are also rewarded curation as it would introduce an opportunity cost to non consensus downvotes (if you could make money through good dvs, you're less likely to use them recklessly and/or selfishly) but limitations to dev resources prevented this. The numbers we ended up going with seem to be a sound first attempt. I can't think of a way in which we can come up with an economic system that has a half decent chance of keeping most stakeholders relatively honest without trade offs like authors and lower rewarded posts taking a hit. The idea is minimize the negative side effects while still having a good chance to get everyone using this thing honestly.
Overall, I believe the economics of this system should not be an afterthought like it has been and still seems to be. Far more resources should be devoted to theorizing and implementing improvements in this area instead of solely focusing on SMTs etc.
I'm very interested in how you would have altered and improved the EIP.
Finally, I'm surprised our platform hasn't taken off considering we have the actor who played Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies advocating for us.
Cheers,
Sorry for the late reply. Spent the past weeks in bed with a flu. So limited myself the last few days to doing only the most essential stuff (downvoting shit posts). And I thought your questions deserved a more thoughtful reply than what my feverish brain could put together.
First of all, I was in no way trying to make a case in favour of ocdb as something positive. It is still inferior to having the same stake used by individual curators to curate content. For the reasons you’ve stated, which I agree with 100%, but also because less people participating in the intended curation game leads directly to less engagement. Having people spend time finding content to vote on it makes them more likely to leave comments, and thus more life to the platform. It’s just that ocdb has a few less negatives than other bidbots, since it doesn’t contribute to the problem of promoting garbage to Trending the way that others do. I just thought that was worth pointing out to not lump them into the same bag.
In any case, I believe serious economic change was needed, which is why our witness (@steempress that I co-run with @howo) was in favour of the EIP back when Cervantes did the poll. (I don’t think we were as close to the top 20 back then, so perhaps our opinion wasn’t noticed by you). We’ve also been vocally against bidbots and in favour of manual curation and community use of downvotes. That’s why we recently launched the downvote management tool publicly despite knowing it could result in backlash against us. It’s also why for a year now we’ve supported 24 different manual curation projects and communities by trailing their vote on content published through our plugin. This to 1. Help make curation more rewarding and thus competitive with content-agnostic alternatives (self-voting/bidbots), and 2. Because we want to support the idea of proof of brain by letting a wide variety of curation projects looking at different topics contribute to our own curation.
I was hoping to have a chat with you about it, since we’re about to launch a new referral program and curation dashboard where people can support active curators. I would love to know which subjects you would be most interested in seeing us work to onboard, and if you would be interested in curating content from those areas should we attract quality creators.
So back to the questions about the EIP:
My main beef with the fork is mostly the fact that all the changes got lumped in together at the same time. I know they are intended to be complementary, and have read your post, but imo this makes it hard to isolate which of the actual changes have made positive or negative effects on curation, behaviours, and other KPIs. Perhaps it’s just the scientist in me who prefers a cleaner experiment! I also mentioned that I am concerned about the effect of the new curve on smaller users, communities and the curation of good comments. As you’ve said, there will be some trade-offs on the way to a system more functional, so this is where I would question if the trade-offs could outweigh the positives of that part of the EIP change.
At the end of the day I am more focused on the behavioural economics than the macro at this point. I want rules and incentives that are aligned with a growth strategy to improve user acquisition and onboarding above anything else. That’s why I believe we should be careful to make changes that have trade-offs which negatively affect the grassroot communities. Growth always happens at the margin, so even if the EIP reflects the best possible end-solution, one has to be careful with the short term implications if they result in user frustration or reduced motivation to stay at a time when users are most desperately needed.
With that in mind, if I were to look at the benefit / cost aspect of the different parts of the EIP that make the most combined sense right now. I may have suggested first going for free downvotes and improved curation rewards. Imo those are the two that contribute the most to provide the benefits that I know both of us wants (punishing content agnostic bidboting and circle jerking while incentivising good content discovery). I just think that most of the benefits we’ve already seen over the past week could have been accomplished by these changes alone. So while they are responsible for the benefits, I see the curve-change as the cause for most of the negative side effects without contributing as much to solving the problems as the downvotes and CR do (although this could only be short term).
I am also vary of how while solving one problem, we may create new problems when it comes to having people “vote honestly” to reflect their subjective judgement of what is good. With linear, it seemed more people were happy to just vote on comments they found nice, or small posts by people who they appreciated having on Steem. While arguably not contributing much to content discovery, I still see this behaviour as valuable in retaining users and making Steem a place where people find conversations and engagement more valuable to have. So if these votes starts turning into users instead auto voting the same popular creators, who usually get high rewards, at the 5 minute mark to get more curation rewards, then it will be a very costly considerable trade-off imo (like this example here https://steemit.com/newsteemit/@fishyculture/my-list-of-whales-to-curate). I even find myself doing it (although only on creators I find worth something). I’m not sure if you’re fine with that, assuming the content they auto-vote at 5 minutes is seen as quality by the community and not downvoted? At least in my mind, I would rather have many users just voting what they believe brought value to them. As I think this is good for user retention. When people try to get ahead of the pack on the popular Steemians, it results in very few getting any rewards and getting seen. So I would just like to see a system where people are more focused on 1. Curating whatever they liked for no other reasons than that they liked it (honest curation). And 2. That the way people vote helps improve the positive experience of more people on Steem, improves user retention, and thus allows the platform to grow.
So I guess my preference would have been to introduce the free downvotes and increased curation rewards in this fork, and considered having different reward curves with SMTs to observe what makes the most sense.
In any case, this is not arguing against your model when it comes to how we can improve content discovery, but it takes a few other factors that I see as important into consideration. At the end of the day I believe the only way to tell what works is to give it a whole-hearted attempt, which I intend to do and am doing.
And goddamnit, now I can't get that comparison out of my mind..
Great response fredrikaa, I didn't know you guys were behind Steempress and have given your witness an upvote.
Howo and I had our differences in the past, because of my high levels of self voting for around a year and a half. I can certainly understand that no one's a fan of that. But those economic rules seriously punished good actors the most. It seriously made it near impossibly expensive to do anything other than join the bandwagon and exploit. Once you see the equivalence between self voting and vote selling, then by some counts around 75%+ of the active stake were participating in this, all the way to the top.
Fighting abuse was going to basically cost you hundreds if not thousands of dollars a day out of pocket to downvote a random target just so 75% of those rewards saved would go into the pockets of other abusers. The common knowledge of the futility here prevented the system from self correcting.
The only rational course of action were to sell out or to join the abuse. And in hindsight I made the incorrect choice of those two options. If we rule out all the people who were too wealthy to care or had a stake too small for vote selling/self voting to be appealing, not that many were left who truly did not compromise their integrity (I think maybe literally less than 5 on the entire platform, don't quote me on that, it's a guess).
I did fight for economic reform for pretty much as long as I had been self voting (it wasn't that much at the beginning but grew as the entire platform got worse). I really thought it was so obvious that Inc would implement econ reform within a couple of weeks, at most a couple of months, and had every intention to stop as soon as a sound set of economic rules were introduced (as I did).
Sigh, it took waayyy too long. Anyway, it's not really the best justification I know, but that's where I was coming from.
There's a few things I'd want to reply to you about the economics and explain my choices in more detail, but not in public. Most of it I've justified and you've fully understood and agree with a lot of it with the exception of the curve. And even there, we sort of just have different predictions on the cost/benefit aspect. While I stand by it, mostly for reasons I've revealed as well as reasons I'll tell you in private, ultimately we may never know the road not traveled. But when we get a chance, we'll have a chat and hear each other out in more detail.
There are MANY economic improvements I'd like to make. They only wanted to spare very limited resources on this aspect of the blockchain. Overall I think the numbers were fairly sound considering they were a fairly blind speculative guess, and that they were made with considerable constraints in development resources as well as the constraints of the initial design.
https://steemit.com/golos/@ackza/buying-600-more-golos-staking-100-into-golos-power-and-earning-a-few-hundred-gbg-since-golos-classic-fork-when-golos-is-on-steem
this is the reaction u elicted from me, but i understand now u were just trying to steer the direction of teh content like u said... and u have 75K mroe SP than me so that also :)
By teh way I gave everyone in teh comments a few cents worth of steem upvotes! :)
i was madc but u came to steemspeak at least, ok good explanation, u can be picky i guess with ur 75K+ Steempower, but just write comment with flag plz
but about ur worry about engagement,m asking why used booster on a post with "0 engagement" well the boost si whatr will help me get mroe...
, not everyone can afford the type opf engagement u want theers not enuf users on steem... we need to do more of what im doing create content thast useful , im posting tools, ways to buy and sell stuff, people copy me and do what i do, it works, you will see my engagement comes back as more people come back to steem but EVERYONE is getting low comments right now.but read betwen the lines, look at what im doing with my INV tokens, and TASK and twitter and discord and banjo on those discords, sionging peopel up to steem en mass or tryingto set up systems to allow that, im trying to buy at least 1000 INvc every month or so, so i can get 10,000 a year onbaorded, if just a few thousand people start doing this with me it will make a big dent
i can see the path to actual organic demand for steempower bringing price up once @steemit @steem are done selling which is up to them but imn guessing they want 10% like @block.one