RE: A Radically Updated Steem Whitepaper
@smooth can you confirm for me that this change to a linear reward system thus means everyone can reward themselves with the full weight of their STEEM POWER?
If yes, then this exemplifies the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dilemma that I had reasoned about in my 2016 blog Blog rewards CAN’T be widely distributed.
@sigmajin wrote:
that is to say, under n^2, the abuse was more concentrated. It was a very few people making six figures annually (steemguild, curie, etc).
Linear weighted rewards means that mathematically the whales (or cartels) no longer have a disproportionate advantage but it also means everyone should be economically motivated to only vote for themselves (or their cartels). Yet if all users don’t realize this, the disproportionate advantage returns to those whales and others who realize they should always be voting for themselves. Ruthless whales retain a disproportionate advantage by always voting for themselves and because their (perhaps sockpuppet) content rises in the rankings and thus more users who are unaware that they must always vote for themselves, thus vote for the whale’s content.
Note for naive readers, by disproportionate we mean a share of the minted tokens rewards that exceed the proportion of the STEEM POWER held. Disproportionate rewards means that the money supply concentrates more and more in the hands in the few (or they’re holding their share of the money supply constant while selling the excess for Bitcoin siphoning off the value from the ecosystem). This concentration can be hidden with sockpuppet accounts.
This is what I mean when I say Steem’s design is insolubly broken and can’t be fixed. It was clear to me in 2016. Note I know of a different design which can fix resolve this dilemma and drive 10 – 100 times more revenue to everyone (content creators and upvoters) without debasing the money supply! The psychology aspect is the most important for the designer of such a system!
Btw, this change to linear can explain why I receive much fewer (in number, not SP weight) upvotes than I used to, although it might just be that my recent blogs have shifted to negative vibes.
@mkdouglas wrote:
I think accounts should not be able to upvote their own posts.
Sockpuppets can always route around any attempt to make such a restriction. Such a restriction gives the whales more disproportionate advantage because they’re aware that they need to create sockpuppets (up to 8000 daily currently).
Realize that by making this change to linear rewards, we have forced STINC to take control over rewarding the faucet signups to themselves via obscured sockpuppets. Because if they didn’t then some other nefarious group would game the signups (email address and phone numbers are available for free in bulk). So imagine they have 8000 signups per day of sockpuppets with ~120,000 SP added to their balance daily. By having their sockpuppets upvote their sockpuppet content, they are extracting most of the voting rewards (both of the author and the curator). Everyone else who wants a Steem account has to pay for one and purchase SP. Then finances the ongoing extraction of Bitcoin value from the system. Dash has an analogous extraction scheme via the masternode concept.
@quinneaker wrote:
if it wan[t] anonymous then people could just go and down vote anything they didn't like all day long and no one would then be able to hold them accountable.
The fact that Steem relies on downvoting to curate content and bad actors is very deleterious. Downvoting is very negative and turns discussion into nasty fights that nobody is interested in viewing. Makes the site look bad and encourages crab bucket mentality for curation instead of encouraging people to apply their energies to positive curation. My project will have no downvoting.
@sadekj wrote:
Low-quality content is being rewarded more than high-quality content. I am sure Steem was not designed to do that.
Au contraire, the original whitepaper stated that Steem was designed to do that.
Steem was designed to be a whale controlled power vacuum. Period. Some of you may be blinded by your idealism. Wanting Steem to be something that it isn’t and can’t be.
P.S. given how well Steem is doing in spite of the massive amount of corruption inherent in it’s design and launch, this exemplifies how powerful this concept of social media/networking on a blockchain can be! Very exciting.
Yes. Actually more because not all SP votes, so there is a net subsidy being fought over. It's a large incentive to various reward harvesting schemes which bloat the blockchain.
I would say this is not all bad. All the schemes at least keep (some) people engaged in a sort of multiplayer social game. They also pump up the transaction counts where Steem can claim to be the blockchain with the most throughput, a form of promotion. Overall, I think its kind of bad though, but as you say it is still doing reasonably well despite.
That’s another case to add to the generalized point that asymmetrical advantage exists because not all users are equally informed, motivated, or have sufficient economies-of-scale. Disadvantaged from a token ROI perspective are the users who don’t: create sockpuppets, join cartels, and vote (for themselves/cartel) as often as optimal.
The lack of economy-of-scale means that most minnows and even dolphins have no motivation to upvote themselves when they only muster a dollar or two per day for that effort. Thus the whales maintain the asymmetrical advantage in rewards even after the change to linear weighting.
And yet it’s still worthwhile to some of those “disadvantaged” users.
I agree there’s another level of usership which is gamesmanship. But I would argue that is not a popular use case that could involve millions or billions of users.
We also have Yours.org and Kik probably entering the foray. Ned points out they are not rewarding tokens in a decentralized manner. Perhaps ditto for Minds also.