Hard Fork 20: Is this the time to improve reward distribution system?
Greetings Steemians!
With the announcement of the much awaited Hard Fork 20, by the official @steemitblog in their post, good news came after a long gap for the well-wishers of the Steem platform. It took months for the preparation of this Hard Fork. You can learn more about it in the official blog post of @steemitblog.
If you like you can also see @therealwolf's post
Photo credit
The key features of Velocity Hardfork aka Hardfork 20 are:
- It is scheduled to be taken place on Tuesday, September 25, at 11:00am EST.
- Changes will take place only after the approval of a super-majority (17/21) of the witnesses voting in favor of the Hardfork.
- Implementation of a new-and-improved system based on Resource Credits (RCs) in place of the existing Bandwidth system.
- New methods of account creation.
- The Dust Vote Threshold: This will enable the users with any amount of SP to cast their votes as long as they have sufficient RCs.
- 30 minutes curation window has been changed to 15 minutes to benefit human curators.
- Self voting issue has been addressed to some extent.
- Expiration of internal market orders after 28 days.
- 20 second comment limit has been removed. Now anyone can comment just when the new block is created i.e. 3 seconds (will it not encourage spammers?).
- Delegation cool-down period has been reduced to 5 days from 7 days.
- After HF20 upvotes and downvotes will both be allowed during the last 12 hours of the payout period with their strength declining linearly with time.
- Other miscellaneous issues related to witnesses etc. which are not important from the point of view of an ordinary user.
However, we were expecting something more regarding improvement in reward distribution system, a limit on the numbers of daily posts, control over self voting, circle jerking, and downvoting issues, etc. I had a conversation with @timcliff on these issues. @timcliff is a nice person who was busy on answering many questions of the Steem users. He asked me for the solutions but I was not in the position to mention everything in a comment. So I am proposing some solutions in this post so that this platform may get rid of shortcomings and become the most successful social media and blockchain platform. - Multiple posts on daily basis- users should be allowed to made maximum five posts and three resteeming within 24 hours time limit. This will make other users' posts more visible and also control reward pool raping. Also, the users should not be allowed to post the same comment on multiple posts which can check spams.
- Self voting and circle jerking- @jga has proposed in his post (https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@jga/steem-proposal-to-reduce-voting-rings-and-self-voting), a mechanism to combat this problem. According to his proposal:
Each user will have 20 "resistances" that represents the amount of voting power spend in a particular user. For instance, Alice has a voting power at 100%. If she votes Bob the voting power is reduced 2%. This 2% is added to one resistance called "Bob". When this resistance is above 5% the worth of the vote is reduced proportionally to this percentage.
And how is the percentage of each resistance reduced? The same amount added to one resistance must be subtracted from the remaining 19 resistances. In other words, the 20 resistances represent the distribution of our votes.
Also @smcaterpillar had proposed similar things in his post (https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@smcaterpillar/steem-improvement-proposal-revoting-power-to-counter-upvote-circles-and-bid-bot-abuse). According to him:
For example, author @alice publishes a post that curator @charlie likes. He upvotes it with 100% weight at 100% voting power and 100% revoting power, giving @alice effectively a full 100% strength upvote (100% * 100 % * 100% = 100%), the highest he can do. As a consequence, his voting power decreases to 98% (the current system). In addition, his revoting power on @alice is halved to 50% (the new adjustment).
If curator @charlie voted again on another article by author @alice with 100% voting weight, he would grant her a much smaller total vote strength, namely 49% (voting weight * voting power * revoting power = 100% * 98% * 50% = 49%). As a consequence, his voting power would further decrease to 96% and his revoting power halves to 25%. His voting power would recover in about five hours. To recover his revoting power on @alice, @charlie needs to wait 58 days to have it recharged back at 100%.
Both the users came with pragmatic solution of self-voting and circle jerking problems. Developers can apply or devise any method to resolve these issues as per their need.
Right now a user's earning depends on his/her SP holding. A system can be made in which the voting power will increase with the amount of SP but it should not be linear. Suppose voting value of 100 SP is 0.01 then Voting value of 1000 SP will be 0.1 and that of 10000 will be 1 but its rates should not be the same for the large SP holders. It can be reduced to 8 form 10 for 100000 SP holder and so on. It will be like income tax on yearly income in which tax rates are higher for the higher earners. It can make this platform more democratic and user welfare oriented.
In my post (https://steemit.com/downvoting/@akdx/this-is-enough-flagging-should-be-removed-from-steem), I had suggested some methods to solve flagging issue. I don’t think ‘great people’ will ever bother to see what I had proposed. I am repeating what I had written earlier.
- Flagging should be allowed in exceptional cases and for specific categories like spamming, scamming, fishing links, plagiarism, NSFW (where NSFW tag is not used), spreading hatred, etc.
- Flag should not affect potential payout. However, it may affect reputation score.
- For downvoting purpose every user’s vote should have equal weight. However, users whose reputation score is below 40 should not be allowed to downvote. It will stop bots to downvote.
- A user (including bots) who has made no post or comment should not be allowed to downvote.
- There should be categories for downvoting and downvoting should fall under these categories only. Downvoted category should be clearly visible a 'tab' or ‘caption’ near upvote button, so that others will know the category of the post or comment in which it falls. Also, the number of downvote received by the post or comment should be visible there.
- If a post has received more downvotes than upvotes, then that post should become invisible as it happens now.
- Downvoting should not be a tool for the bullies to harass anybody. It should not be allowed to impose gag order on any users.
There are many issues that can be solved but first of all we have to accept the problem. Some people says, "If we stop people from self vote or if circle jerking is discouraged, the clever persons will open multiple accounts and carry on their work of raping the reward pool."
I want to tell them that instead of operating single or a few accounts, it will be difficult for them to work with multiple accounts because they’ll have to manage so many user names and passwords for the same thing. Also, it will not increase their reputation score as the newly created accounts will have low reputation as well.
Right now it is working as the most extreme form of a capitalistic society. This is not democracy. This platform needs to be mold as a true democratic platform. This feat can be achieved if consensus for the implementation of reforms is made democratically. For this purpose Steem Inc. can adopt the recourse of plebiscite or referendum. In this case every voter should have equal vote value. I don't think powerful elites will like it or not but I am confident that it will make this platform more democratic. It is not good that few people work hard and others enjoy the fruit of their money.
All other photos have been credited from pixabay.com.
Also visit me at https://www.steemhost.com/steem/Host.aspx?Host=@akdx and earn Steem Power delegation.
You can get free Newyork Coin by joining their discord app channel and avail free raindrops there.
https://discord.gg/hmbHgN
Also see my post on steemit https://steemit.com/steem/@akdx/can-steem-ecosystem-be-a-true-democratic-system
Thank you for reading.
This post has been rewarded with 100% upvote from @indiaunited-bot community account. We are happy to have you as one of the valuable member of the community.
If you would like to delegate to @IndiaUnited you can do so by clicking on the following links: 5SP, 10SP, 15SP, 20SP 25SP, 50SP, 100SP, 250SP. Be sure to leave at least 50SP undelegated on your account.
Please contribute to the community by upvoting this comment and posts made by @indiaunited.
Congratulations @akdx! You have completed the following achievement on Steemit and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Click on the badge to view your Board of Honor.
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOP
Nice post
Thank you Arvind ji.
Hi @akdx, pondered a bit about your posts cap per day proposal, as a news publisher (as in real life news about global events) I'd feel it would be extremely limiting to have a 5 post cap (although I understand your visibility concerns). So unless AMN switched to recaping news that already happened rather that the breaking news format, steem would be pretty useless as a platform. I feel the visibility issues you describe is more of a design issue of the steemit UX etc. I.e multiple posts from one author such as @amnlive could be condensed into one main article (updated with the latest) and a few sub articles in one block and wouldn't push one articles per day authors off the top lists. Just a thought.
Yes, your proposal is also very nice. Stinc Can think about it.