The New '5 Vote Target' does NOT Reduce Rewards - It Democratises Steemit Curation!!
After talking to a number of users regarding this topic, I thought I would do a quick post explaining why I believe this Update to be a Positive one for the Steemit community.
It was a conversation I had with @razvanelulmarin which eventually convinced me to cover this topic. Although he had all the answers, he had received conflicting information which was confusing matters..
This change was announced by @steemitblog in the 0.14.0 update here;
Target Votes of 5 per Day instead of 40
We are changing the target number of votes per day from 40 to 5 so that more people keep their voting power below 100%. The purpose of this change is to rebalance power toward normal users and away from bots. You can still vote as often as you like, this change merely impacts the speed at which voting power is consumed.
A number of users thought that this update would reduce the rewards being allocated to Curators and Creators on the Steemit Platform. This is not the case.
The Contribution Rewards ‘Pot’ in it’s entirety is not impacted by voting. Curations and Creation rewards (in total) are the same whether there is 100 Votes or 1,000,000 Votes. Curation and Creation rewards are currently being produced at a rate of 40 Steem per minute on the Steem Blockchain.
Some users believe that less votes means less total rewards,...not true. Rewards (in terms of $ amount) are only impacted by the Steem Market Cap. Less votes will only result in each vote being worth more to the beneficiary.
Who will the Change Impact?
This update essentially depletes active users voting power quicker. This doesn’t mean that, after 5 votes, a user has zero voting power, however it means that, users voting power will begin to fall much quicker than it did before with a 40 Vote Target.
It’s worth remembering here that, voting power directly affects curation rewards. The more voting power a user has, the bigger the share of the curation rewards pot they receive, everything else being equal. It is also true that, the more voting power a user has, the more funds they can allocate to an author with an upvote.
Where some users lose voting power, Other users gain.
Because there is a fixed pot of rewards, devoid of voting activity, if some users ability to allocate these funds is diminished, other users ability to reward Creators is synthetically increased. This update is thus, a redistribution of power on the Steemit platform.
The Losers
- Curation Bot’s: These user accounts will be the biggest losers. Bot’s voting 00s of times per day on author lists will see their voting power diminish far more rapidly than before. This may result in these accounts having to adapt their Curation strategy to be more focused…
- Active Curation Humans: These users will also be losers. This new update will (I predict) trigger these users to become far more precious over their up votes, only uprooting content and authors they really believe in.
- Authors on ’The List’: These users will see their author rewards fall, as the bots and curation humans voting power is diminished.
Essential, the users which this impacts in a negative manner are those who have been doing very well for the past few months. Some of this extraordinary performance is being reallocated to...
The Beneficiaries
- The Average Curator: These users voting power will increase, and thus they will gain a larger share of the curation rewards.
- The Average Creator: Because voting power will be distributed more, the average creator can expect to see their rewards share increase. I expect to see creation rewards spread further and wider than they were before.
- The Steemit Platform - Everyone: More democracy, and fairer platform for everyone. This can only be good for the Steemit platform moving forward. This is a key point of interest impacting Steemit's level of success moving forward.
Summary
Small changes like this moving forward really help the distribution of Steem and user retention on the Steemit platform. Curation Rewards have been very centralised (the 1% doing very well, the masses not so much) for the past few months, so it is good to see the developers stepping up and making a change that will create a more democractic Steemit moving forward.
High levels of Distribution and Circulation of Steem is key to the success of this project. I see this as a small step in a marathon long journey towards achieving these end's...
I also support the change, but not for your reasons. The dev team has consistently left out this fact about the change: the only thing that's changing is that a 100% vote will now be 8 times more powerful than it was before. This uses up your voting power 8 times faster than before; that's why people will run their voting power down faster. If you liked voting the way things were before, just vote at 12% power and absolutely nothing will change.
But this is spectacular! It means that people who have so little SP that they currently can't really earn curation rewards will suddenly have curation rewards opened up to them!
The only reason people are mad is that the dev team are public relations idiots. The announcement should have been: Hardfork inlcudes update that makes minnow votes 8 times more powerful. Then there would have been dancing in the streets instead of pitchforks.
Well said. I've been waiting for someone to say this. Although I think the dev team does this on purpose to create drama and discussion, which ultimately leads to a deeper understanding for early adopters. At least that's what I would do. Who really knows
Hah - I guess that's a fair approach. Could be! It slightly makes me want to fork their code and go start a STEEM clone where things are actually documented.
That's a good summary. But let's not forget that this changes comes together with the "slider" so even active curators will do as well, and can continue to support authors they like by voting %.
Initially it will feel like they are shortchanging but on the long run, their % will value maybe as much as the full vote now due to reduced whale voting.
In the long long run, I think there won't be many losers.
I agree. The only 'losers' are the bot's. Everyone who hold Steem Power stands to gain from a more engaged community on Steemit
Not sure the bots lose anything. They don't vote with full power anyway, so they will be able to hover around a VP% they choose.
Bot's do lose out with the current change. There voting power diminishes quicker with the 5 Vote Target, compared to the 40 Votes Target that was in place before. The VP% they chose will have to be lower, or they will have to vote less. Both of these changes will result in losses
Yes, but each vote is now much stronger, even at lower VP, assigning more reward shares to the vote. I simulated it and very often it's higher even at a higher voting frequency. Also, hovering at 10% VP (for example) has the same effect as voting at 10% to keep VP full.
At first I was conviced that this new feature will have negative impact to unnoticed athours, but now you explained me that it makes sense. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
Given that "Active Curation Humans" are responsible for the vast majority of actual curation...
I'm talking about the users who are voting 00's of times a day. This will change as the user base increases. Steemit ideally needs 00,000's or Millions of users voting on 3-10 posts per day. This mechanism is bring the curation rewards system more in line with where Steemit is going, and making it a fairer and more level playing field, and helping the Steem Digital Token distribute as far and wide as possible.
It is pointless to have a system where a few users receive all the rewards, this will make the Steemit user base tend to zero...
In reality, the users who are voting on 3-10 posts per day are casual voters who pile on the votes on Trending material. It's the active human curators who dig through "New" and find hidden gems which a casual curator never would. A utopian situation of the users voting 3-10 posts per day would each vote on entirely different posts simply isn't realistic.
As an active human curator, I know there are 50-100 good posts per day beyond what is Trending. Who is going to vote on these other than an active human curator? They are just going to remain lost, and the user base is going to shrink and lose diversity.
Not at all, You can still vote on all of them, You should still vote on all of them. Your voting power just diminishes with each vote, a little quicker than it did before. All that's happened is the curation rewards, for the same activity, have been reduce a little and redistributed to more passive users.
Call it a small tax on good performance. But this tax is not gobbled up by some centralised monster, it's redistributed to valuable community members.
It is passive users (in their millions) that will make or break this platform. NOT Active Curators (in their hundreds)
I'm talking about the author rewards, which is what gives the authors exposure and the community diversity. Let's say 10 active curators were voting for a well hidden post. Earlier these two curators would discover it and get it to $20 or so. That would give the post a fighting chance at being discovered by more casual curators.
Now, to vote on 50-100 posts, this post would only be $2 (or whatever) by these curators and get lost in a sea of overlooked posts. Curators will no longer have an incentive to curate, and will simply give up.
At this scale, the voting power does not diminish "a little quicker", but very significantly so.
We have seen earlier during the days of more restrictive voting that there was no diversity whatsoever. Since the voting was opened up, at last we have active human curators and groups, and more diversity starting to flourish. This move will just take us back to a Steemit with less diversity, where casual voters pile it on the Trending posts.
I agree that bots need to be stopped, but not at the expense of actual curation. As people have suggested, there are pretty easy ways to differentiate bots from humans. Heck, Steemit itself has a mechanism in place for new users.
Do you usually vote at 100%?
Even at much less then 100% voting power each vote will weight more than it did before. Granted other people's vote will too, but I'm worrying much less after looking at it like I posted above.
I understand your point of view, and I know it is shared by others. You have been on Steemit for sometime and I respect you opinion. I do however, see this from a different angle.
I think the curators will be forced to up their game, vote slightly less, however vote on only the 'creme de la creme' of content. This may have the impact of good content doing even better, at the expense of average content.
I also think that, another group of user that hasn't been mentioned is the 'whales' who have a lot of voting power that can be redistributed from this update.
I am not doubting the value that Human Curators add to Steemit. I'm just not concerned that some (a fraction) of their rewards and voting power is being redistributed to the community.
I love that the team behind Steemit constantly tweaks the algorithms, to optimize towards constructive incentives. Steemon !!!
I think you are right - if you assume that everyone uses their mx number of votes a day.
In truth minnows hardly vote as they don't get much of a curation award, and this won't really change.
There's no max. Minnows benefit because their votes will be 8 times more powerful than they are now.
You are assuming everyone votes in the same frequency, and therefore withholding votes from whales will increase the value of the votes by minnows.
But what if minnows don't vote?
Say you have 1000 users, 5 of whom are whales, 10 of whom are dolphns 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 spead 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.
The whole premise of the change is based on the flawed idea that everyone is voting. Everyone isn't voting, only a few people are, and forcing them to concentrate on only a few articles means that the entire pot will get distributed to the lucky few they bestow their vote on.
You keep saying "minnows will benefit" but no-one with less than 1000 steempower earns curation awards. Minnows will not vote because by definition they 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.
I dont know if I agree. My user retention is seriously under threat. It was worthwhile to me previously when I made a couple of hundred dollars for a post. I put in a lot of hours to research content and write and edit over and over and then find and edit the right pics. I work darn hard to produce a top notch article only to have it now pay me $10 for my efforts compared to what I consider decent value/return. A whale would vote for me and push it into the hundreds previously. That same whale only pushes me to $30 if I'm lucky now becasue they are voting at 10-20%. I too vote at this level - but usually 33% - perhaps in error. It just doesn't seem worth my time anymore to write or curate - sad to say. I do want to though but will become more disallusioned if this continues.
Steemit, on the current model, are going to lose a lot of good writers who deserve to be paid a decent commercial return for their time and craft.
Wishing you well. Wishing you all well.
Cheers
@Booky
Thanks for your post @booky
We need to get a large user base in order to have longevity. I personally believe that, distributing rewards is the best way to get an engaged community, and to have the meritocracy Steemit we all want. A few users taking all the author rewards won't help us moving forward.
The Steemit system is set up in such a way that rewards are bound to drop, and keep dropping. As the user base swells, the rewards will likely not increase at that same rate. Someday in the not too distant future, I expect to see trending posts with <$100 rewards...
Much of your drop in rewards are likely down to the fall in Steem Market Cap, rather than the new voting mechanism which was brought out 3 days ago...
Can you tell me anywhere where writers get paid three figures for an article? Go to freelancer or other sites - it's $1 an article. So all those people makinhg $30 will still stay because it's still way more than they would have got elsewhere.
IMHO, you should focus on voting for people you like at full power. at your current vesting level, voting 33% as whales do is almost pointless. If the percentage you chose doesn't even give a cent, what's the point?
Until the new rules I will mostly vote 100% on posts and a percentage on comments.
This is correct. Always vote at 100%, and never let your voting power recharge all the way back to 100.
You should always vote at 100%. Whales shouldn't. When the new change comes in, people's votes will be 8 times more powerful than before.
I for one welcome the change as it would allow me to more properly reward an author. As an upgraded minnow, 100% of my upvote right now is about 0.01$. With this change in place it would be 8x that which is great from my pov (couldn't vote the same post 8 times in the past even if I wanted to) and overall this means that all minnows can weigh in 8x more on their votes. Their votes will mean more. Power to the little guys actually starts to have a meaning and become a reality.
I would also be using the slider when I want to grant less reward and save on my Voting Power and this is something anyone could do (including dolphins, orcas and whales). It's a click more but c'mon, will it be that much of an effort for the sake of Steem(it)?
PS. Isn't a supersized voting power the add-on people requested? I though I saw this in a couple SIPs.
The effects you mention are mostly true but you don't account for the slider which can undo the change for active curators.
Most importantly this takes power from the whales
Whales are almost always at 100 percent voting power in the current 40 vote system. I haven't run the numbers but I suspect they were getting 90 percent of curation rewards. Under 5 vote system they will often be voting with less voting power.If they average 90 percent now and my 90 percent guess was right that means the other curators will get an incremental 9 percent of total curation rewards.
The 'slider' is reducing users voting power. A 20% vote, is voting with 20% of a users voting power. Thus, 20% of the rewards that a 100% vote would receive, and 20% of the rewards allocation the beneficiary receives. They can spread their votes out more (correct), however overall, it does not impact the curation rewards, or the influence a user has on the Steemit Platform.
I didn't account for this, because the net impact of the slider is zero. It's only a means for spreading voting power. Active users are now spreading a lower level of voting power.
From my experience, over the past few weeks, most 'Whale' votes I have seen have been below 100%. See here
Yes. For most purposes, voting at 20% to keep voting power full and voting full power while hovering around 20% means about the same. I analyzed it recently.
Hey Olli,
Great post. The question is, with the voting slider now available to everybody, if I start voting with only 20% I could still vote 25times without losing power , would that be correct?
The 'slider' is reducing your voting power. A 20% vote, is voting with 20% of your voting power. You can spread your votes out more (correct), however overall, it does not impact the curation rewards, or the influence you have on the Steemit Platform.
you are basically just choosing what " percentage " of your VESTS to use on those. when you use all your vests, you used one vote. So yes, 20% will give you 25 votes and stil be in the 5 votes limit [ note that those 5 votes will STILL lose your power though, as it should ]