Why n^2 ?
In my last post I tried to show, why I want 'non-linear' rewards back.
It seems that this idea is not well received.
Most people argue, that their votes would be worth less then.
But that's some serious nonsense.
The amount of r_shares you can allocate towards a post depends on your Steem Power, your Voting Power and the Vote Weight.
Given all other factors are the same, an account with 2x as much Steem Power can allocate 2x as many r_shares.
And this is the same with n^2 or any other 'curve.'
I am arguing to change back how the rewards get distributed based on r_shares.
With n^2 it is true, that your vote will be only worth 1/4 of the rewards of an account with 2x as much Steem Power on a blank post.
But that is a very unlikely scenario.
The whole point of n^2 is to reward stacking of votes.
If you were to use your vote on a post with already a bunch of r_shares, then upvoting that post would allow you to allocate much more rewards than if another account with 2x as much Steem Power voted on a different post with no other votes to stack on to.
The problem
The real reason, why rewards were so 'unfair' before hf 18 is this:
A few accounts hold most of the Steem Power.
No change of the rewards distribution can change this imbalance overnight.
The trending page might look better to some now, but consider how many of those posting rewards go straight back to the whales, who sold their vote.
The Steem shares are distributed very disproportional right now.
In my view, this has been the main cause of problems and will be for quite some time.
There is just no way around it.
But we can not fix this problem by employing a broken rewards distribution algorithm.
It just does not make any sense to me.
I feel like most people prefer the change that came with hf 18, because their vote is worth more now, which you can see above is false unless you enjoy voting on comments and posts, that nobody else wants to reward. *
* abuse/self-vote
I will give you the benefit of the doubt and will assume that you are not a notorious self-voter, bid-botter or other sort of rewardpool-rapist and I will continue to blog about this issue in an explanatory manner, but I feel like most people understand it well enough, but just see their own rewards and just look at their own wallets and misunderstand these posts on purpose.
I hope to see you next time, when I post more about n^2.
I'm with you, and therefore you are my ewitness proxy. But I dont spend much time for these discussions.
I really appreciate that.
So...what exactly can we do about this, except voting for you as a witness and spreading the information?
I mean right now, it's a profitable approach to ignore the community and reward yourself by voting only on yourself (bonus ignorance points for leased SP...). In a short term view you are pretty much printing money with very low effort. People who are commited to this method probably won't just step down...because it works for now. They're also setting a questionable example for others who then might try the same approach, which could snowball out of control.
Of course in the long term view, if everybody did it like this (the german term "Heuschreckenplage" comes to my mind) steemit would fail, but everyone who did use steemit like this and already paid out his "earnings" would come ahead on top.
What can I do to support this view? Are there more witnesses who think alike? Maybe a post with all witnesses supporting your view would be an idea, because it shows that not everyone agrees on the current system. Might get a bit more recognition as well, instead of just one person posting his reasonings (of course if there are witnesses who want to keep the current system, they could also share their view and reasoning).
Thanks for taking a stance on this issue, you already have my vote though. ;)
Good idea about the witnesses who support a curve away from linear reward. We'll work on this.
The current systems is at the expense of the majority shareholders and to the advantage of everyone else. If the majority shareholders were to understand the issue they would soon vote to change the reward curve.
Hopefully this should be relatively easy to achieve if people are well brief on the subject.
I just left a comment to explain the issue.
Thank you for your support and understanding!
Thank you for chiming in to this important topic. That's the part I really like about this network. You don't feel as helpless when you see that valid concerns of the users are seen and evaluated critically. I hope that the other witnesses follow this example and explain their reasoning about the situation of the reward distibution.
In my view this is a conflict between people who view Steemit as a short term cash grab opportunity who just move on once the system fails (though I could give them the benefit of doubt and assume they are not even realizing the long-term consequences).
On the other hand you have those who believe in the value of a decentralized social network. This is a long-term strategy focusing on sustainabilty. The social aspect would fail, once even more people realized that social interaction and good content is actually not the best way to advance on Steemit. Yes, they might find friends and learn new things on here. Maybe that's enough for them, they just bury their head in the sand about the bigger picture and focus on those great parts (a pretty common strategy actually as far as I have seen).
But while they care about communication and the content of the users, those who don't do this just overtake them left and right which might in the end lead to discouragement of those users from the second group, who are the ones creating real value (and therefore stabilize or advance the overall value of steem).
Of course there are also people falling kind of in the middle between those extremes.
However, it is possible I am missing something important out of the bigger picture, so I am looking forward to the discussions. I'll keep an eye out for more opinions on this topic.
I only know of @teamsteem, who sees this problem and wrote about it.
There is a lot of work to be done convincing the right people and I think @ned needs to approve for this to ever happen and it doesn't look like he would support such a fork ...
Technically, a majority of the top 20 witnesses would need to support the new fork.
Alright. I've looked at the introduction and some posts of @teamsteem and voted for him. I hope some of the Top20 witnesses (and others as well) see this post and share their views on the situation. I thought about mentioning them in this post, but I'm not sure if they would appreciate this. I would like to get an opinion of as many as possible though, because I do agree with you and @teamsteem about the fact, that if the economics of steemit fail or give false incentives, then no amount of nice tools/inventions from the users can make up for those failings.
Steemit has a big head-start from the view-point of user base, but there are other options of blockchain-based social networks evolving. If new users see those alternatives and feel like the reward system there is more fair, they might very well decide to make the switch.
Interesting times. Thanks again for explaining your reasoning.
Thanks for the replies.
Some of the comments I get for this are so out of this world that it feels good to meet someone who understands the matter instantly.
17 out of 20 would be needed.
Edit.....another query for you.
Are there any plans to limit the amount rewarded to a comment made on an out-of-date post? or is there a reward? Have come across those who spend a lot of time posting comments on older posts.
Thank you for posting about this issue @felixxx.
Appreciated reading the article and your reply to @croctopus.
Will give teamsteem a look and read his view as well.
Wishing you all the best in your endeavour to bring this problem to awareness.
Cheers.
I just left a comment explaining my views on the subject. Thank you for your interest.
The payout window of a comment is not connected to that of its parent post.
Writing comments under older posts is fine and can be rewarded by votes.
Thank you for the support.
I completely agree that linearity is a problem, but a lot of people are clearly concerned that n^2 is too extreme. What do you think of n^1.5?
I think it's also important to bring back a serious vesting schedule so that more whales actually think about long term value when they're deciding how to use their stake. 2 years seems reasonable to me.
Now we are talking.
Sure n^x is an option.
I am mainly for non-linear rewards.
n^2 was a brilliant idea and is worth trying out again, though.
Yeah, I don't object to n^2, but the main issue is that we need an exponent greater than 1 to provide incentive for consensus. I'm also interested in curation rewards for downvotes to fight spam and curation penalties for voting against strong consensus. Interface sites should have highlighted 'controversial' sections to embrace the vote wars and catalyze consensus formation on community values/standards.
I didn't mention it in this post, but n^2 would affect flags too - flags being much more potent on overvalued material.
Rewarding consensus would also affect curation rewards indirectly.
Yeah, I get that. I still think the change to the short vesting schedule was also a mistake and that the curation system could use some additional work beyond reverting to an exponential curve.
If the only change made was going to n^2 I think we'd see a lot of whales just harvesting and no one would have the incentives to stop them. A lot of users get very discouraged by that sort of thing already.
Right now it just isn't as obvious.
If you were to try get the most impact out of your votes, flagging the most exposed material will have the most effect.
Like I wrote:
All the linearity does is cloak how much money the whales can sifon out.
Hey @ned, ...
Thanks for bringing the subject up. So voting power varies linerarly with Steem Power now, is that it?
I left a comment giving a bit more explanation above.
Under n^2 reward curve, if you have 100 SP your vote is worth roughly 100100. If someone else as 50 SP their vote is worth 5050 or 4 times less. This is also a super strong incentive to give 100% upvote.
I gave more details about why anything away from linear reward is better that linear reward and linear reward is economically unsound.
Okay, thanks. I'll read it.
No.
Posting rewards vary linearly with r_shares now.
Okay, thanks. Do you have a link to a paper that explains the difference?
There is no paper for this, unfortunately.
I recommend you try to look into posts about
r_shares- there are some good ones, but I can not recommend one.I will keep blogging about this, too.
Thanks again. I just hit up Google for "site:steemit.com r_shares". That should give me enough to go on.
But @felixxx i don't understand why you think this will help against self votes for whales ?
If they have strong account than they will have enough r_shares. Do you think that it's a problem for them, to make few other accounts with SP delegation to those accounts to "spread" the r_shares among votes?
And bots selling votes could easily do the same. You "pay" for the vote and you get 10 votes from different accounts. Wouldn't that exploit the n^2 as well? the only thing you would do with this would be taking those couple of cents that minnows get and are more than grateful for them. Even if it's from themselves ...
But what you would get with this is, that "Steemit elders" who vote for each other would benefit exponentially as they did before. Wouldn't they?
So much talk about the reward distribution change. I believe that the community is the only one possible to handle this. Not changing reward distribution. It's the only reason we need laws and police in real life. PEOPLE WILL CHEAT if possible and it's always possible, so they need sanctions. Some strong steemit accounts are already flagging self-voters, and I strongly believe that an "authority" is the only way when dealing with greed and money. Whales who thinks the same should form an alliance similar to @steemcleaners. But that is only going to help a bit and stop those with a bit of conscience. Because those who want still can post 30 comments and upvote them last second before payout lock.
Maybe it would be smart to allow flags for the last 12 hours after the upvotes are "closed" ... That could give the "authority" some advantage for last second upvoters. Because they could downvote it in the last 12 hours.
I did not explicitly mention how and why it would also stop self votes for whales, but will explain that in my next post about this topic.
Cool I am looking forward to it! :)
The downvote window is already 12 hours longer than the upvote one. Exactly those last 12 hours
So there actually shouldn't be any problems. We are given all the tools we need to stop self voting. But we as a community are not using it (yet ?).
_
...by removing the Prompt while Posting?
Because of Whales i'm an Fan of using an Sigmoid Function:(as statet in Detail in my Comment a Mile below from here). :D
Its important that we talk about things like the "unfair"reward system. I just made a post about a similar theme, the reward timeline, which in my eyes is complicity for this contraproductivity.
I am not arguing for linear rewards but one of the benefits is a much more stable post payout estimate. Since Hf18 your estimated payout doesn't drop in the same way it did previously. Before I found if you got a big upvote you would get a boost to your estimated payout but it would decay away until the final payout. I found this really discouraging, maybe in part caused by the longer payout windows in the post. it seems more stable now.