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RE: How To Fix Steemit For Communities & Viral Engagement
The community would police this #verification section.
They would also have to police the selling of verified accounts (and I'm sure a market would be created sooner rather than later)... and that would be a nightmare / something very difficult if not impossible.
Good point, but even if selling of verified accounts is not policed, it wouldn't any worse than the power the whales have now. And those sub-communities that want to be functional and rewarded, need real followers, so it would still benefit them regardless. So I'd advocate not inferring with the free market, and do not try to stop the selling of the verified accounts.
These still need to be real people to achieve verification, so the value imparted to the voting power (over some reasonable time horizon) by a unique follower needs to be less than threshold of what they earn to become verified and this threshold has to be small enough that it isn't encouraging professional systems of hiring people to become verified who do nothing else but that, yet that threshold also needs to be significant enough that it isn't too easy to become verified such that is trivial to game it by having a bloc that upvotes #verification blogs (and thus not really be verified). In other words, the threshold can't be allowed to be so small that many can sneak under the radar of the community.
Another problem is that as the usership grows, people could reverify under numerous aliases and the community would probably forget these faces. But even so there is probably a limit to how frequently someone could fool the community. Typically the community rewards a comment post that exposes a fraud.
The game theory quagmire of distributing a pooled debasement of the money supply via voting won't be solvable without some community manual effort. Algorithmically it can't be solved purely automatically, because it is a Tragedy of the Commons self-referential given the externality of the shared pool everyone is trying to game. We have to introduce some external reference point.
The sybil problem is typically solved either by proof-of-identity, or collateral/investment. The proposal revolves around the first method with a "twist" about unique followers. I fail to see why this is necessary anyway. I mean if you solve the sybil problem, then you don't need second-tier algorithms anyway. You can just give a vote to anyone verified and let them run free with those votes. One person / one vote / system working as intended (and free of "inequalities" or sybil-attack).
The huge difficulty is on the verification side (easier said than done) plus not all people want to be verified. I would argue that there is a greater value proposition in even allowing anonymous posters to enrich the platform with their content - as sites like godlikeproductions do, although, apparently, we return back to the issue of "fair voting". I don't know - I'm not really a fan of verification to be honest for multiple reasons.
Maybe, but influence as a function of SP is also intended, both as a significant part of the value of SP, giving a reason to buy it, and also because those who have made more of an investment (in contributions of valued effort and/or money) are more entrusted with influence. In that sense, the system might be working too well at the moment (or at least the whale critics would claim).
There certainly is a system where one person one vote is the intent, but this isn't it. Could that be changed? Possibly, but probably better to just build one with that intent from the start.
Actually I can't think of how to design such a system if the money is taken from a shared pool that is charged to the collective.
The only design I can think of which is one-user-one-vote and doesn't devolve into either a winner-take-all Sybil attack (which is even the case when votes are free such as on Reddit) or no curation at all due to optimum monetary strategy of voting for yourself always, is tipping from your own funds, which has been shown numerous times to not work psychologically.
Perhaps you didn't read carefully the linked blogs at the top of my blog or just missed it because there is so much to read, because it was already explained therein that one-user-one-vote (i.e. a linear weighting of vote totals for rewards) means everyone can vote for themselves as the maximum profit strategy and thus no curation happens at all.
The current voting algorithm is the square of the weighted vote totals. And this is to make sure people have to vote for posts that others also like. And rewarding (for curation rewards) the earliness of voting is so users don't get the same curation reward for just piling on the most voted posts late.
The community is already enforcing verification in #introduceyourself. And those who don't want to be verified, won't get higher voting power (same as it is now). Perhaps you are thinking that the bad actors can get verified (or buy accounts) and the unverified minnions will fall further down in voting power? Well if they are that unmotivated, maybe nothing is going to work.
That can also be a negative and chase away the masses, because they will run away if there is crime on Steemit. The anonymous posters can still post to the Steem database. Nothing stopping them from posting. We are just talking about rankings (that are optional for any UI to adopt).
This is a social network, not Bitcoin.
Somewhat. Mostly it filters out the weakest/cheapest frauds. And the vast majority of the users haven't ever done that (I think at this point the majority doesn't even post introductions at all, and many introductions are lost in the noise). Verification, in general, is an onboarding killer. Even for #intoduceyourself posts earning thousands of dollars there have been debates whether being "too strict" on verification is being too hostile to new users.
@alexgr:
That is what the square weighting does. Linear weighting won't. You are making a non-point. Linear weight by definition means you can profit most by voting for yourself. If you tweak it, it is no longer one-user-one-vote.
Voting yourself can be rectified through relatively easy tweaks (making it unprofitable compared to voting others) so I wouldn't be too worried about that.
@smooth:
Agreed.
I'm not diminishing your point, but I do want to note that if the users can choose to verify later at their time of choosing, it doesn't kill onboarding. Yet the new problem becomes why are they motivated to verify then if there is no urgency?
Btw, I had already thought of this. I will be making a new top-level comment soon to explain the disadvantages of my proposal discussed already and why I already know that we really can't fix Steem for as long as the model is voting to distribute from a pool of debasement.
Steemit became much less interesting to me with everyone worried about if someone is "real" or not over what they had to say. I think in some instances people will want to prove a real identity or ask for proof, but this making every newcomer post an ugly white sign makes it a lot less inviting and interesting to me than tumblr or wordpress.
Too much abuse of the system I guess that then made people ask for proof. But I agree - this is bullshit. Nobody should have to prove anything. Personally I just skipped the "introducemyself" altogether.