RE: Improving the Economics of Steem: A Community Proposal
I still think the best way to Fix the curation issue that everyone seems to be so concerned about is to simply write in code that completely randomly starts the curation payout timer. With that one simple action then curation becomes a reality because there is no way to game the start time of curation.
Right now almost everyone thinks the 12-17 minute time frame is the absolute best time to vote to maximize most curation rewards. Vote buyers and sellers and bots and vote trails all shoot for this time frame, vote trail votes are not curation, vote bots are not curation,vote buys are not curation.
Curation is people voting for content they like regardless of what time the post was posted. That is curation. Can you imagine what the trending page would look like if you completely ignored the number of votes a post received in the first hour? It would be a real trending page then.
I understand the random start time of curation reward payouts will never be a reality, at least not on steemit, after all look at your post a free downvote pool, yes by all means lets reward bad behavior, and there is a lot of bad behavior downvoting going on whether you or anyone else wants to see it or admit it.
People are punished forever for a error in judgement, look at mack.bot, it does not matter if the person changed their ways, they are punished for ever until they simply give up. A downvote needs to be for a cause, and downvoting a comment someone made simply because they made a comment is wrong, Down voting a post that does not violate any of the suggestions for a reason for downvoting simply because of a bad decision in the past is wrong.
I would like to think the downvote pool is not a done deal, but the writing is on the wall and it seems the decision has already been made.
A "flat" curation system, under which all voters receive the headline curation rate (currently 25%) could be a simpler way to implement this. The timing of each vote and the current post payout then become irrelevant, leaving manual voters free to vote on content whenever they find it.
The incentives of the current non-linear curation system only reward curation bots, whilst disincentivising manual curators to vote on popular posts. There is very little manual discovery.
Manual discovery is the only true curation. Anything else is just someone pretending to be a curator to make money.
Innovative thinking regarding random timing.
I completely agree regarding flags. It isn't necessary to make a bad decision to get flagged. Sometimes flags are flown for bad reasons. The downvote pool is a solution in search of a problem IMHO. It will only encourage flaggots.
Trust me on this. I know.
Oh I have seen it in action. iflagrewards and mack-bot are in my opinion a problem not a solution. There are very very few places where an individual is crucified over and over and over again for the same mistake. No flag should be allowed with out a person commenting on why it was flagged, that is the first issue with flags, if you an not give a justification for it regardless of how lame the justification is, the flag should not be allowed to stand. The blanket party flagging that goes on is useless. There was no justification for any of your comments to be flagged in this stream. there was no reason for sift666 comments on another stream to be flagged other than someone did not like his responses to bot style suck-up give me a vote I left a comment comments.
Each and every flag needs justification behind it, and it need to be justifying what is being flagged, not some post or action yesterday or a year ago, but the comment being flagged.
Seems logical, but how would you do anything like this random and not transparent on the blockchain. While people initially wouldn't know when it is, people after a while would develop interfaces which display the random value and bots which can read them.
Use a hash of the block before the payout block as an input to identify location on curation start-time graph.
Totally unsolvable in advance (just like you can't solve a bitcoin block until the block before it is available), but super easy to validate after-the-fact.
Ah, to be defined after the 7 day period passed. That'd be possible. I didn't think it from that side.
I am not a computer programmer, how many bots defeat the random dice generators? Yeah they would be able to see the formula for the curation reward, but how would that help them defeat and build a bot to beat the random start time.
The post does not pay out until day seven, Rewards are not paid out til day seven. On day seven the algorithm kicks into determine the start of the payout timer. How would having a bot help beat that?
It's not like the bot can go back in time and adjust the time that it voted. The random value may be shown, but it will not be the same for each and every post, and it would not be shown until the post pays out.
It doesn't matter how many times I tell @rollthedice to roll a 2 it will roll what it will roll. Is there a bot that knows what it will roll?
Shake shake shake, you roll the 6-sided die.
You rolled a 4.
Yeah, I only considered calculating the time for curation to kick in before payout and not after payout. This way it is almost impossible to cheat out of that. Good idea.
The 15 minute curation tax timer are one of many other secondary issues that deserve another look at, but they're not what I call core economic issues, that is I don't believe they'll materially affect the content indifferent voting behavior problem we have
Curation is about incentivizing stakers to actually vote on content which they believe others would agree is appealing by rewarding them for it. It's true that established authors can become very 'sticky' but this is also true for all other platforms. It can incentivize people to build a long term reputation.
I also think that mobility away from established authors to uncover new talent is a good thing. Some amount of free downvotes is one mechanism that this can be done, as people will be more liberal in their use to bring down posts that are overpaid, and curators over time will learn this and adapt their behavior.
I am, of course, sensitive to the downsides of additional downvote incentives. We will try to work with a moderate amount of free downvotes, just sufficient to keep stakers mostly honest and no more. There are costs to all these measures and the challenge is to find the right balance
I have not seen that very much in the past almost two years I have been here. There is no incentive to find good content, if that was the case then there would be many more post that get voted on day 4 or 5 and that simply does not happen. Even the post that are on the trending page rarely get votes on day 3 or 4.
I have yet to see a post that was on the trending page be down voted other than @haejin. All incentivizing downvotes will do is lead to more bullshit down vote and tack on downvotes such as what the @mack-bot does. @mack-bot does not stop punishing a person at all from what I have seen. A downvote is for a piece of content, or an excessive reward or the other reasons listed.
What purpose does a forever downvote serve? You are no longer downvoting content or reward, you are downvoting an individual when that is allowed to occur. If an individual is that bad then steem should prevent the account from posting anything at all. If they can do an account recovery then they can do an account rights to post take-away.
I have yet to see a single solid reason for rewarding downvoting. It does not matter what the community wants in regards to downvotes, it will be incentivized simply because it provides another method for the stake holders to make more money. Downvoting has never been about a post payout. It has been about bullying and someone getting there way for the almost two years I have been on steemit and posting to the steem blockchain.
Downvotes are not about content quality either. it is about a bullies idea of what should or should not be allowed thought wise on the steem blockchain.
But we will never see eye to eye about downvotes and how they are used on steemit, I will see them the way I do as bullying and you will see them as you do about rewards and content quality.
Blacklist do not work, and should be banned.