Announcement: All votes will be up to 8 times more powerful in new hard fork!
There has been a lot of misinformation about the new voting power changes, and I'm here to clear things up. This will be quick, because I'm crazy busy and can't really spend much time on it. But here's the message you need to get:
The only change to voting power is that your votes will be worth up to 8 times more.
That's literally it.
Now, how does this work? When you vote, a fraction of your voting power is spent on your vote; this amount gets multiplied by your Steem Power, and that's amount gets factored in to the value of whatever you voted on.
Today, the fraction of your voting power that gets spent is a 200th. Half a percent. In these examples, when I write "power level," I mean the number that you can look up on steemd.com or steemstats. So if your power level is at 100, one vote is worth 0.5 points of voting power. If your power level is at 50, one vote is worth 0.25 points of voting power.
Once the hard fork takes effect, the fraction of your voting power that gets spent goes up to a 25th. Four percent. So if your power level is at 100, a single vote will be worth a whopping 4 points of voting power. That's 8 times more powerful than it is now! If your power level is at 50, a single vote is worth 2 points; at 25, it's worth 1 point, and if your power level is at 12.5, a single vote is worth 0.5 points.
See what I did there? In the current rules, your voting power has to be at 100% for your vote to be worth 0.5 points. In the future rules, your voting power only has to be at 12.5% for your vote to be worth 0.5 points. That is, in the new system, if you vote enough to keep your voting power around 12.5%, your votes will be exactly* as powerful as they are under the old system.
That's because your vote is worth 8 times more under the new rules than it was under the old rules.
*Not exactly. There's a minor thing in the code that actually makes your vote slightly more powerful than a simple 25th of your voting power. But it will be very close.
You are missing the point that minnows have so little power, that it makes no difference, they still won't get a curation award, and hence it's not worth it for them to vote.
If you have about 1000 steempower you can deliver 1 cent in your vote and earn 0.001 steempower curation award. Minnows by definition have less than 100 steempower, new users get 3 steempower. Telling people "you are going to get 8 times more of zero than you do now" is a bit daft, no? It would need to increase by a factor of 10 to 300 to make it worthwhile.
Say you have 1000 users, 5 of whom are whales, 10 of whom are dolphins and the rest are minnows. Minnows soon realize that no matter how much they vote, they don't get a curation reward. So they stop voting.
So all the curation is done by whales and dolphins, who are all voting about 40 times a day, distributing 600 votes a day, some of which are spread widely, but a lot concentrated on a few posts.
Now restrict the votes to 5 a day. the minnows still won't vote as it is not worth their while, they don't earn curation awards. So voting is left to the whales and dolphins, as before. But now they can only distribute 30 votes in total. Most of which will be concentrated on a few posts -as each of these votes will give a large reward, those few posts will earn fabulously. The rest will get zip.
Tl;dr the current system is better for minnows because it means the whales and dolphins vote on more posts per day.
I have a few points I'd like to make here:
When I had just 1000 SP, I would often get a curation award far greater than .001. In fact, it was almost never that low.
The truth is you will now be able to make a single 100% upvote worth 8x whatever your vote was worth before. If your vote were worth 1/8 of a cent, you'd now have the option to make it worth a penny.
If your vote were worth 10 cents, you'd now have the opportunity to make it worth 80. Regardless of what your vote was worth before, you'll now have the option to make it 8x more.
Curation awards have little effect on my voting habits. Sure, curation rules would have more effect on my voting if I had a ton of Steem Power (10s or 100s of thousands). However, just because I can't get much of a curation award doesn't mean I don't vote. Similar to Facebook, Reddit, or Instagram, I upvote things when I come across something I like. I get paid nothing on all those platforms, but still use and upvote things on them.
Lastly, I think most people don't realize the power of minnows. Get votes from a handful of minnows in a short period and it can be enough to push the post into the "hot" category. When a post shows up in "hot" it is much more likely to be upvoted by a whale. Furthermore, whale and dolphin bots are constantly on the lookout for minnows who are consistently upvoting future-popular content. When a minnow is great at finding and upvoting the best posts, bots start to follow the actions of those users.
Minnows have a lot of value to the dolphins, as you say. But there is no incentive for minnows to vote, so they stop, especially when everyone is ignoring them... They're going to get even more ignored now that the restriction on votes means that the total votes will shrink by 87%. That's 87% of articles not getting any votes at all...
Your 2nd bullet point for the win! The rules change is strictly increasing the number of options available to people.
My highest curation reward was around 11SP - if I had 1000SP it would have been around 0.7SP as a curation reward. So about 700x your estimate.
It's all about timing with curation rewards.
This update is good because it gives more power to less active curators. The more active curators can just reduce their voting power and vote in the same way.
What is your average curation award? You can't base a big change like this on a one-off which happens once a month. Especially as we're trying to analyse daily votes. If a person votes 40 times a day, that's 1200 votes a month.
I just had a look at your account and you have 14,000 of steempower. Are you really claiming that a minnow with say 10 steempower or 50 steempower can ever duplicate your one-off curation reward of 11SP?
I think this change will really help the whales and the dolphins, and a few posts will end up getting huge rewards. But saying to people "you are going to get 8 times more of zero, isn't this exciting", is a bit of a con...
Yep, you caught me - I'm a con. ;) Just trying to pull a fast one on everybody. But you're arguing a different point than I am. Your complaint is fundamentally with the "1 SP = 1 vote" principle, not with the details of voting power.
Average is much lower, I just used an extreme to illustrate a point. What I'm saying is that an equivalent vote for someone with 1000SP would have been a 0.7SP reward. You said this ...
"If you have about 1000 steempower you can deliver 1 cent in your vote and earn 0.001 steempower curation award"
Which is wrong, you can make much more. Now someone with 1000SP can vote like they have 8000SP so the case I explained they'd get 5.6SP.
It gives people more options. I agree it was framed badly though - they should have called 12.5% the 'default mode' then ... 100% the 'super charged mode'
It means dolphins can really boost a post from a new minnow. Curating for profit is only worth it when you have enough SP.
Not quite. Vshare=Rshare^2 10X more SP, iiuc, = 100x more reward
True-ish. If you have 3 SP, the change won't affect you. If you have 300 SP, you'll go from not mattering to suddenly mattering. That's huge, imo.
What percentage of this site has more than 300 steempower? 20% max? That means it's not worth it for 80% to vote. And the change means that the total amount of votes will shrink to 1/8th of what they are now. So the number of posts getting anything will also shrink drastically (by 87.5%).
Is it not worth it for Reddit users to vote? They get paid nothing.
Is it not worth it for Facebook users to "like" something? They too get paid nothing.
The reddit guys aim for karma. Each site has it's own definition of "value".
Once you set "value" as $$$s, it doesn't work when you say to some people "you should vote without regard to money in order to make me money". See the problem?
That's not what anyone is saying, so no, I don't see the problem.
Thanks for this update, I'll make the appropriate changes to the FAQ. Is the following accurate?
If you can currently place 40 votes worth $0.10 each, with this update, each day you'll be able to place:
If a user wants to place five votes each day, she can do so at 100%. She also has the option to place:
Yes, that's all approximately correct. There is another option: leave your slider at 100%, vote 40 times per day, and your voting power will equilibrate somewhere around 12.5% and it will be as though you've been voting with the slider at 12.5%.
The difference is that if you adjust your weight with the slider (like in your examples), your account voting power stays high and you leave yourself a reserve (so if some spectacular post comes along and you want to give it a massive vote, you will be able to). On the other hand, If you vote a lot at 100% and just let your power equilibrate wherever it equilibrates, you will have spent that whole reserve already.
If I could sum it all up, I'd say: "vote however many times you want; voting at full power is better unless you're sure you understand the tradeoffs; don't ever let your voting power recharge to 100%."
Somebody had to explain it the "right way"! I believe you did it better than I could have ever done it! Good Job!
I've been shocked at how poorly the dev team has handled PR on this. It's made me wonder if they don't really understand the dynamics of voting power themselves.
Them not understanding will be more than odd.
I think they do not want to change the narrative from the simple "One should vote N times a day, ideally" to " "Here is your voting strength. You can vote as much as you like but if you do, here is how your voting strength will change with each vote, and here is how it will regenerate... one can also vote with less than 100% of his voting strength..". Not hard to understand I think, but they believe it is.
But I agree - deciding to put it as "We have reduced the targeted votes from 40 to 5" is one of dumbest way to announce it.
Pretty much what I wrote a few days ago
https://steemit.com/steemit/@sc-steemit/1-5-10-500-votes-per-day-it-doesn-t-matter-and-how-to-solve-the-issue
So today i seem to get around 35 votes if i vote slowly over the course of 24 hours (or during my 5 hour session) per day. These votes recover faster the less I cast them and always repair to 100% value after 5 days ?
Is this correct? So how many votes will I earn per day with this new voting power ? (currently as I said 35 votes) how might this change ???
Your votes recover the same speed, no matter how many you cast. Always. If you like voting 35 times per day, keep voting 35 times per day. In the new system, your voting power will be under 20% if you vote that much, but there is nothing wrong with that! In fact, if your voting power is ever at 100%, you're not voting enough.
I publish a novelty blog about
Steemit College level education hints and tips. Not because I know anything worthwhile, but to convince people Steemit is not a get quick rich scheme.
Becoming a journalist, marketing ad visor, accountant, or any other skill that requires commitment like teacher college takes years of hard work, money and study.
Currently I am watching two new people recently joining Steemit rise through the ranks. This is because they have spent years learning writing and presenting to earn those skills.
So my writing sucks; as you can see, so I vote. I vote to keep my steemd.com voting power between 87 % and 97 %, not to high = wasted at 100 % and not to diluted when low, this equals 35 votes per steem session . . .
Thank you for the Hints : )
/ hugz ; )
Sounds like a good strategy! After the change, you could adjust your target to between 10% and 20%, and your influence will stay about the same.
Voting is virtually worthless as an income; right ?
The money comes from Authoring and Curating, voting is simply a novelty factor as far as making gold here on Steemit ? Correct ?
Put another way is voting even worth trying to do financially : )
/ hugz ; )
Voting = curating. That is how curation is defined in Steemit, it´s not financially a good investment of your time if you have a small amount of SP (like myself). Of course you will receive little to no reward if your vote is not timed correctly.
You see what you learn by opening your mouth and asking . . . I thought authoring was blogging and curating was posting with the votes being some separate bingo raffle lottery draw type thingy.
So having 300 steem power it is almost useless trying to have any noticeable impact with voting ???
So trying to be efficient with strategic voting is just like walking around the shopping mall picking up penny's ; hoping for that nickle or dime to be overlooked by others . . .
Is that a fair comparison ? : )
/ hugz ; )
Yes and No. If your goal is to make money out of curating then unless if you have a fair amount of SP it´s not worth it to just vote. A better strategy when curating if you do not have a sizable amount of SP is to comment on posts in addition to voting. In this way if your comments are insightful you can start building a reputation and networking with others by following and getting others to follow you. In this way when you post an articule it´s easier to get others to vote for you.
It´s all about how much you invest and the best investment is time in others in my opinion.
I know you were one of the people who did a good job arguing for the voting power change. Now that the dust has settled a bit and the community is not in crisis/reaction mode, I thought it would be good to open the discussion again. I tried to create a fairly balanced post outlining both side's positions. I would appreciate your thoughts and comments if you have time to take a look :)
The Battle of Upvote Weights - Reviewing the Arguments with Extreme Use Cases
Thanks for the explanation. It was getting a little confusing. I see the good side of it now I guess. But the slider isn't available to you until you get up to about 300 STEEM POWER I understand?
I didn't know that - but it's a good thing. Minnows should never use the slider anyway, because it makes their weak votes even weaker.
When would this fork be working?
I believe it goes into effect next Tuesday, in 1 week.
Ok, tank you :)
Thanks for sharing this perspective on the new voting rules! I feel a bit more comfortable about it now. I don't intend to change my voting habits; I don't feel I'm particularly stingy about spreading the voting love, but given the limited amount of time I can spend on Steemit each day I don't think I've seen my voting power fall below 90% yet. It's cool to think that with my first few votes of the day I'll be able to punch above my weight, so to speak. I'm still a bit worried that people will vote less than before, but they wouldn't if they read this article. So the more visibility this gets the better!
I'll be writing up a more in-depth look at it next week when the new rules go live; I'll promote that one hard and try to get more exposure than I have with this one.
This is an outright lie. I just hope users remember in the future that you helped provide propaganda for taking away their vote.
Its based on the absolutely false notion that 8x fewer votes (i guess 1/8, 8x fewer sounds weird) will be cast after the hardfork than before it.
Oh, you are fun. :) I'll reply to you, but don't worry - I won't get into a flamefest with you like that other guy you tried to burn down. And anyway, I'm not really writing this for you - it's for the next person who comes along and thinks you might be right. Don't worry, kind stranger - @sigmajin is mistaken, but I think I understand why and I'll try to explain this carefully so you don't fall into the same trap. This is why:
Today, if your voting power is P, and you cast a vote, your vote is worth about P/200. After the hard fork, if you cast a vote and your voting power is P, your vote will be worth about P/25. That's where the factor of 8 comes from; 200/25=8.
Now, today, if you vote 40 times per day, your voting power should hover just slightly under 100. So each of your votes is worth about 0.5. After the hard fork, if you vote 40 times per day, your voting power will hover just under 12.5, so each of your votes is worth, wait for it, 12.5/25=0.5. I suspect this is why @sigmajin is confused, because he thinks it's worse to have 12.5 voting power than 100. But 12.5 under the new rules is exactly the same as 100 under the old rules, because a full-power vote is worth the same amount.
Here's where the new rules become very powerful: Suppose you actually want your voting power to be at 100, because you don't like 12.5; but you still want to cast 40 votes per day. You can do that! Simply cast every vote at 12.5% slider power! Then your vote will have the same power that it would have had if your account power level were at 12.5. Why would anyone go to the trouble to put the voting power slider at 12.5 every time? Because now, you have the option to cast a vote that's worth 4 (=100/25) by putting the slider to 100, which is 8x more than the 0.5 your vote would have been worth under the old rules.
Now that I've shown you that nobody loses, you can rest easy. @sigmajin, I'm really not inclined to answer any more of your attacks because I've seen the kind of mess that gets people into.
INcidentally, just as a side note i do completely understand the fictional scenario youre making up. You want to convince people that in the new system voting at 100% will be just like casting a vote at full strength 8 times on the same thing in the current system.
Thats a nice fantasy, (and something that i think it would be great to implement) but its just that. A fantasy.
When I show you the commits in which the above are implemented, will that suffice for you to pay me the $400?
I like that, and it's about what I expected. As soon as you find out I have code to prove that I'm not making this up, you rescind the offer of $400.
I apologize, I had not noticed this reply earlier, and would not have rescinded my offer of a bet if I had.
WHen I rescinded my offer, I assumed you had not responded to it yet at all. Because you replied to my proffer, I will honor my initial offer of a bet, as stated.
No, to me the code is not sufficient, because I am not an expert in coding. I would be curious to see what in the code you have to support your thesis, but the bet i offered stands on its original terms (which do not strike me as unreasonable. after all, if you wish to prove a single vote is worth 8x more, the best way to do so is to cast that vote once before and once after).
EDIT: is it this?
https://github.com/steemit/steem/commit/6500bb65eb6282866f3c6f356cbcbe09fd03c7bf
Also, since you're so fond of analysing my history, i should probably note that I have made precisely one bet on this platform. It was with @bacchist. We decided to allow @smooth to settle it.
Even though smooth called the bet a draw, after looking at the explanation provided, i decided to pay @bacchist anyway, because it seemed to me that he had been correct. So no, me backing out of a bet is not what one would expect.
As I said in the other thread, I spent 8 years as a professional gambler. I don't freeroll people and I respect the gamble.
Thank you for re-offering me your bet. I'm going to reject it as-is, even at the risk of making myself look like a spineless weasel. I may propose a slight change to your bet; see what you think about it below. For what it's worth, it's a very well-designed bet, in that it's helped me to refine exactly what I believe is going to happen next Tuesday. It has also helped me see that you and I are thinking about this in subtly different ways, and that I've been miscommunicating to you (and, I'm afraid, possibly to others as well). I'll tell you precisely why I'm not taking your bet in a minute. After the following wall of text:
The commits you linked to are were exactly I was talking about. If you analyze the code, you'll see that I wasn't actually talking out of my ass! The situation I'm describing is exactly how it's implemented in those commits.
Now, why I'm not taking your bet. Sorry if I belabor this; I'm not trying to talk down to you, I'm just trying to be precise. There are two ways to describe the "strength" of a vote. The first (I'll call this "my way") is to measure how much your vote changes the
rsharesof the post you voted on. The morersharesa post has, the more rewards it gets. The impact of votes is objective, it's algorithmic, it's predictable, it depends on nothing but the code. My scenarios that I've provided all my math for are describing this way of measuring vote strength.The second way to describe the strength of a vote (I'll call this "your way") is to measure the change a vote has on a post's payout. This is a totally legitimate way to describe vote strength, but it's not easy to predict because it depends on how everybody else is voting. Here's why I might not win the bet: when the hard fork goes into effect, suddenly everybody's votes will be 8 times more powerful (measuring "my way"), and we end up where you've been saying we'll end up all along: if everybody is 8x more powerful, then everybody cancels each other out and voila - nobody is more powerful. However, I believe this effect will be short-lived. After everybody has put a huge initial drain on their voting power, we probably will go back to pre-hardfork-ish levels of voting participation. But this is very difficult for me to predict.
But wait! Before you say "aha, the fool has conceded!" I'm thinking about offering you the bet with this slight modification: we take your original bet, and postpone the second vote until 1 week after the hard fork. So we compare my 100% power vote the day before the hard fork with my 100% power vote 1 week after the hard fork, after the system has had time to go back to equilibrium. We can adjust for any increase in SP that I've had over the week, just to make sure that you don't think I'm trying to rig it. What would you think about that? I'm not ready to commit to this yet because I still need to think it through, but I thought I'd mention it while we're talking.
TBH, i think it will very likely end up as a wash. Note that we'll have to adjust the weight by steem value and by SP, and the SP thing is kind of weird. But yeah ill still take it...
hah i had not seen that. If you look at the threads he was talking about, his math was in fact, wrong. Lying to people about how much their SP is going to be debased is a bad thing, IMO.
The same as lying to people about how much their vote is going to be worth. The numbers you made up are just that -- numbers youre making up. Just like time eventually told with anonymint and his bogus numbers, it will also tell when this hardfork goes through and all the extra vote power youre promising people never materializes.
Are you going to blame it on a typo, like anonymint did?
Where is my error?
Your error is that you made the quote below up. Its completely fictional and based on how you think others are going to vote. Its not documented anywhere, provable anywhere or in any code you can present. Its part of your imagination.
Its based on the notion, which is completely untrue or at the very least completely unproven, that the total P cast by all users is going to decrease by 7/8.
EDIT: AORN bet has not been accepted so im rescinding. I need to do some maths first.
Whats your vote worth right now at 100%. 1.something cents? I'll make a bet with you. For every cent your 100% vote is worth after the hard fork above a nickle, ill give you 100 bucks. for every cent below a nickle, you give me a hundred bucks. I lost my last bet so this should be easy money, right? Thats $400 you make if youre completely right.
EDIT: actually, we would have use a sample from right before the hard fork and right after, so price of steem wouldnt have an impact on cash value.
I would like to know more about your reasoning here. @biophil seems to present a sound analysis of this, if there's any logical error I can't spot it. In order for voting targets to decrease from 40 votes per day to 5, then voting power has to decrease 8x faster than it does now. As an experiment I tried voting twice in a row with near 100% voting power and then checking the decrease in my voting power each time. Although it's not exact, the decrease did seem to be roughly 0.5%. I'm not trying to be critical of anybody here, I just honestly want to understand what the flaw in this reasoning is, if there is one.
you can read about my reasoning here:
https://steemit.com/steem/@sigmajin/what-every-user-should-know-about-the-upcoming-change-in-voting
Still thinks this is a weird way to go
https://steemit.com/steemit/@sc-steemit/1-5-10-500-votes-per-day-it-doesn-t-matter-and-how-to-solve-the-issue