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RE: The HoboDAO Contests Begin!
To be honest I'm not a fan of steem basic income and view it as some elaborate form of a vote trading/vote selling scheme.
These things really undermine honest curation in the long run. If people write well enough they should have enough confidence in this place to know that through persistence and consistency in quality, your writing will gradually get more notice and bubble up to the surface.
Your feelings on SBI aside, I'm asking about your support for the @freewritehouse community.
While I disagree wholeheartedly with your assessment of SBI, I'd like to separate that from the idea of supporting @freewritehouse with your curation if you like the work we do.
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It's quite difficult to do as I'd be inadvertently supporting a scheme that serves to undermine this ecosystem
Maybe if I run into some of the freewrite participants organically without knowing it's part of the SBI ring. But I can't do it directly as supporting vote selling schemes, even those that provide good content, inevitably leads to a deteriorating of content over time.
ie. If vote selling pays more than curation, over time who's going to curate? Without curators, what is the incentive to produce good content? As you can see it's just a downward spiral that prevents me from supporting even 'good' content participating in these schemes
I see. We disagree entirely on what SBI is, both in purpose and practical application, but I respect that you are acting on your beliefs. If you're ever interested in why I think SBI is good for Steem, let me know! I'm around!
I am. Right now.
I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong and that it's not, at least in part, an elaborate vote selling/vote trading scheme.
Whenever you're handing out votes for reasons other than your subjective appraisal of content but instead, for example, an amount proportional to their delegation or the 'share' they have of a voting account, then you're at least in part undermining honest curation. And that's exactly what I think SBI is, even if it has the most benign intentions (which could be the case).
But I'm right here to have my mind changed. Maybe a high level explanation of how the scheme works and why it doesn't effectively do what I just stated is a start. Its intentions are irrelevant (eg. discovering, supporting and retaining good writers), only its economic effects please.
Excellent!
I'm about to go to bed, so I'll just start with point one and leave the rest for tomorrow.
Point one is this: in hf21, niche content suffers disproportionately from the new curve. If I like something but I know it's not widely popular, voting for it is the economic wrong choice. It's going to be way down on the rewards pendulum, so my otherwise $0.10 vote is worth only $0.05. It under-rewards the author relative to my stake, and if I'm trying to make good choices for curation and play the game of honest curation you're promoting, I'm going care that I get less in curation rewards, too. I can instead sponsor that user for SBI and get 50% curation, and know that I'm giving them the same value as if they were posting about things that were mainstream popular. I think of this like the subscriber model on Twitch.
That's use case 1. Feel free to respond, but I'm going to bed and will write more tomorrow.
Give me a high level quick explanation with how it works first
Circumventing the rewards curve is precisely something we don't want people to be doing. Every post goes through that dull period at the start where you're getting half rewards. How would a process that circumvents this be seen as fair?
Well, as even supporters of the rewards curve have noted, one of the unintended consequences of the CLRC is the lower rewards to non-abusive authors. Many users will not ever get posts above 40 steem, not because they're posting junk, but because of a ton of factors that have little to do with quality: the small target audience, the large target audience of small users, whatever. So I think a whitelist of users who are at the bottom of the curve but not abusive is a good idea, and I think SBI helps those users stay invested in the platform while they build an audience that will boost them above the 40 steem level or if they're a consumer and will stay small forever, so that they can have a lasting impact on other users.
And that's only one use case of many.
But that's not the discussion you want to start with. You want the nitty gritty technical economics, right?
I'll do my best, though @josephsavage is the economist behind the program, so he not only understands the working parts behind the program, but has an even deeper understanding of the economic impact of SBI throughout the steem ecosystem. Tagging him here so he can explain better.
Here's what I do understand.
A sponsor sends 1 steem to sbi with the name of someone they want to sponsor into the program. Assuming neither user is on @steemcleaners or @buildawhale blacklists, SBI begins a tally of rshares (see @steembasicincome for math)
SBI uses that Steem to purchase delegations on dlease.
When the rshares tracked rises above the dust threshold and then some, they use a vote on the curated author and sponsor's most recent post to send that value.
It takes approximately 2.5 years for 1 SBI to accumulate 1 Steem, so it is not a program for short-term gain.
While convergent curve has the negative side effect of hurting lower payout posts, it's necessary for the intended consequence of bringing all profitable behavior into light. If you attempt to circumvent it, you're putting yourself at greater exposure to downvotes, and it comes at the cost of an honest distribution of votes by intentionally funneling votes into one post to beat the curve.
You've also described precisely an elaborate vote selling scheme.
Money that someone has paid going into a pool that leases SP to vote on posts authored by an account nominated by the initial person who paid the money. This is content indifferent voting. There's really no other way to look at it.
White/blacklists/standards don't do anything in a vote selling market. They're either just empty virtue signalling so they don't do anything, or they actually raise standards and in doing so, get out competed by those who don't. Bid bots like the one you mentioned understand this perfectly well.
Whether you know it or not, you're part of a scheme that's undermining honest curation here.