Proposed HF Changes to bring voting back In line with its intended purpose - rewarding quality.
Overview:
Steemit is designed as a social media platform where you can earn rewards by posting high quality content, and making a valued contribution to the Steemit community in general through posts and comments. The delivery method of these rewards is done through gaining votes, from other users, according to how they value your post or comment. The quality of your post is a subjective matter; what you may think is good quality, may not be seen the same way by others. Those who share your views and interests will vote for you, and those that don't, won't. Voting rewards are also dependant on how much Steem Power a voter has. Someone with a lot of Steem Power would, potentially, deliver a higher valued vote than someone with lower Steem Power and reputation, but there are certain flaws in the code which allow for the abuse of the voting system for easy personal gain rather than for the long term good of the platform.
Here is a snippet from the Steem Whitepaper:
And...
The problem: Self Voting and Follow-Voting Bots
Self votes account for almost 10% of daily votes, and has increased since HF19, and tends to go up and down in line with the price of STEEM. The higher the price of Steem, the greater the percentage of self voting. This has the potential to worsen over time, especially if the price of Steem does what everybody would like it to.
This is a simple graph showing self upvotes vs normal upvotes:
To some that may not seem all that big a deal, but let's look as the percentage of the daily rewards pool being taken as self rewards. There is a risk that as the STEEM price goes up, the culture of self voting will accelerate, and the rewards pool will become distributed between fewer voters, as the self voters gain more power and vote for their own content, regardless of the quality of their contributions to the platform. There will be a greater divide between the big earners and the minnows trying to move up the ranks, risking disillusionment and users starting to exit the platform. Their needs to be a measure in place wherby the voting system operates in a way that is congruent with the Whitepaper's intended method of distributing rewards. To self vote is to defect from this process.
Follow-voting bots do the same. They are delegated Steem Power, and vote after a certain voter, often copying a self voter.
The Current Situation:
The way it stands now, voting power recharges at a rate of 20% per day, allowing you 10 100% votes at a cost of 2% Voting power each (let's assume this is correct or close enough for the purpose of this exercise). This is what the votes would look like for someone with 50000 Steem Power. 1SBD = 0.99USD at the time of these calculations.
Now, if this voter used all these votes on himself, the author rewards for the day would be a minimum $53.69. If nobody else voted on the post then the curation reward would also entirely go to this user, making a total of up to $71.58 per day. That's a little over $2100 per month, and with no accountability to have to produce good quality content. This is what most people find wrong with the current voting system. The system allows it, but that doesn't mean it is is the way it was designed to be used.
A lot of you may argue that these are my vests and I should be able to do with them whatever I want. Well, yes they are, and yes you can. If you obtained them through upvoting yourself, then you got them by dipping your hands into the cookie jar. You didn't earn them, you took them. If you invested money into Steem, then good for you!! You bought the power, but it is up to you to invest it in the system the way it is meant to be run. You will still get a very good return just through curation. Heck, if someone dropped a $10 upvote on me every couple of posts I made, I would feel I owed it to that voter to follow them and upvote their content if I liked it. It's a long-term win, win situation!!
A Potential Solution: Diminishing Returns on Self Votes
Having read many posts with various ideas for solutions, including a newly created bot to flag high-powered self voters (I don't think the bot is a solution, and we will probably see the bot itself flagged out of existence if it posts anything), there doesn't seem to be a simple solution to this, and it may take an approach from a few directions. Here is my recommendation of a framework to encourage voters with high Steem Power to use their votes on posts other than their own, by discouraging them from voting for themselves. It is a simple process of diminishing returns for self voting over a rolling 24 hour period, and works like this:
- Self vote 1 - Maximum Vote Weight is limited to 50%, and consumes 10% of your Voting Power
- Self vote 2 - Maximum Vote Weight is limited to 40%, and consumes another 15% of your Voting Power
- Self vote 3 - Maximum Vote Weight is limited to 30%, and consumes another 20% of your Voting Power
- Self vote 4 - Maximum Vote Weight is limited to 20%, and consumes another 25% of your Voting Power
- Self vote 5 - Maximum Vote Weight is limited to 10%, and consumes another 30% of your Voting Power
- Vote 6 - you have run out of voting power and need to wait to recharge. You vote for anybody is not worth any reward.
The following table shows votes 1 to 5 with this measure in place:
With diminishing returns for self voting, the users now has to concentrate on posting quality content, and rewarding others who post good content. By doing both, the former "self-voter" still benefits from a good curation reward, and gains a bigger following, which in turn should boost author rewards by gaining their upvotes. The voting could look like this:
20 Users will have received a good reward , and would in all likelihood engage with the voter, and probably follow back. In time that $3 upvote would be repaid in kind many times over.
What about the bots and Delegated Steem Power:
Many users have identified the aboility to delegate Steem Power to another account, and have that account vote for their posts, or stup bots with delegated power etc.
My recommendation for this is that should a bot ro other account vote for you with Steem Power delegated from your account, the weight of the vote would be calculated by the total Steem Power less the delegated portion from your account. You can still get a vote, but not with your own Steem Power.
This may cause some accounts to power down and transfer Steem to other accounts to be powered back up. This would take a long time to accomplish, and severely dilute their own power. Getting it back would take just as long, and so only the very dedicated account holder, with multiple accounts to use would venture down this path, which would be easily picked up by analysing voting patterns, and would be a very low percentage of users.
Conclusion:
While self voting is still a relatively small problem, it is a problem which has been appearing and discussed more and more in recent weeks. There needs to be some mechanism which promotes curation over self voting, and the best way to do this is to discourage the latter by means of a sliding rewards benefit, whereby the more you self vote, the less your reward becomes, and the less you are able to engage with the community by means of curation etc.
It brings voting back in line with the way it was initially intended to be executed.
The numbers I have put into this example may be perceived to be a little (or a lot) harsh, and there may need to be a gentler gradient to not completely disengage and take all power away. It would be a lesson quickly learned and adjusted to the way it is now though. If we want a culture of promoting quality over greed, there needs to be some way of making it more difficult to abuse the system for personal gain. This is just one of those measures.
Many will agree, and many will disagree. That is great!! In the end we all want a better solution for the majority, and I suspect the majority wouldn't really be affected by a change such as this.
Thank you all for reading my proposal. Steem on!!!
@bmj This is a great post. Lots to think about in here. Something has to be done if there is to be growth of good content in the platform.
I get a little dismayed when I see someone comment on a post, then upvote their own comment and not upvote the post. Some comments often have a better payout than my whole post. Something to ponder.
I saw a conversation the other day with someone upvoting himself $5 every comment. He made about 20 bucks out of his comments, and the post itself was way less than that. Just plain wrong. The only way to get some traction with this is to get it out there. Hopefully the rifht people will see it before it goes too far down the feed.
Hopefully. There has to be a solution somewhere. Lets see what happens!
Perhaps this is one part of the solution. If nothing else it will encourage discussion around the topic. I haven't seen many other solutions offered, so give this one a resteem if you would like to see something like this implemented. If nobody speaks up, nothing will change.
Very good read. I do have a concern though and I am not sure if it is one that can be handled by the developers. However, I find it rather appalling that people whom seem to be 'eye candy' (male/female) get way more upvotes and interaction than those that aren't. To me this seems like a severe disadvantage.
While somebody that has great value to bring to the site may not get exposure, some 'eye candy' could bring no value to the site and capitalize.
Seems to go against the grain for the SteemIT ecosystem.
Thanks @sreepyeldarb, I appreciate your feedback.
As for controlling what other vote for.... There's not much anyone can do about that. Voting is a very subjective topic, and what works for some, doesn't work for others.
Steemit is still growing, and growing fast. I don't have the "eye candy" factor, as you put it, so I don't worry about that. I post what I want to talk about, or share, and those who like my content will upvote and follow me. Those that don't, won't. I don't mind that at all.
Concentrate on what you're doing and don't get caught up on posts that you feel don't deserve to get votes. You'll find your niche, and those interested in what you have to say will follow you, and then the votes will come.
@bmj, I think this is quite a worthy proposal-- and I'm glad it got some attention from several of the witnesses.
What I especially appreciate about it is that it would solve the self-upvoting issue at the code level, and also that it keeps in mind the underlying spirit of the original Steemit Whitepaper.
Thanks for taking the time to read this @denmarkguy. Hopefully it has got a few of the witnesses and devs talking in the background on the subject. I see more and more posts about self upvoting, and bots and "name-and-shame" tools, which I don't think will fix anything. The change needs to be at the system level. This may only be part of the solution, even if is watered down a bit.
This was an excellent post on the matter. Thank you for dropping by my blog to encourage me to review your article as it was well worth the time. I also gave you a 100% upvote due to how impressed I was with the way that you shared the information and made your point.
Thanks for taking the time to read it @mrwalt, I appreciate your support. The only way for something like this to get some traction is if enough people get behind it. Hopefully we can get to a workable solution in the not too distant future.
@bmj yeah something definitely needs to be done and your idea was a good one that I think will satisfy both sides which is why I thought it was such a great article.
Totally agree, I was thinking some days ago in this because I'm quite new (just a week into the game) and when I posted some dyas ago I saw that I can UpVote myself... and I knew it because was something automatic as I saw, so I thought.. Wait.. it's not good. And I found this writing as an excellent solution. I think it should be taken seriously...
My 95.66% were for you in this case... go ahead!.
Thanks @leotrap. Hopefully enough people out there will speak up and we can get something like this put in place.
Hope so! keep trying this.
The solution proposed with the weight reduction on self-vote is interesting. On the long run, I believe it could be hugely beneficial to the future and quality of steemit.
That's 100% correct. The long term value is what this helps to secure. When the price of Steem goes up and the reward pool thins out because of the rapid growth in new accounts, if HF19 is anything to go by, we will see a lot more self voting going on, and quality not being reward by its fair share of rewards. Random rubbish commemts will get more reward than the post utself. We need to have the measures in place to prevent that before it becomes a bigger problem.
It is an issue that needs to be addressed as soon as possible before it becomes a sort of core right, which will make it tougher to regulate in the future and might be one of the causes of the end of the platform.
Prevention Is Better Than Cure
Well, it's more about getting things to work the way they are intended to. There will always be those who abuse the system for their own personal gain. We don't want a highly regulated system, but we do want to have it working they way it was originally intended, which is quality is judged, and rewarded by others, and not the author. This brings the design of the voting and rewards system back to it's original purpose, and in so doing prevents the culture of self voting from becoming mainstream. Thanks for your support!!
Speaking of excellent content. Great post. This (or similar) needs to happen.
Thanks for the compliment @thinknzombie. The only way for it to happen is for more people to speak up about it, and help the message reach the right people .
Great post. I have started using steem voter more so that I can reward the authors I consistently like since I miss a lot of posts.
I'm also not opposed to bots.
I have no problem with bots that are helpers or voters. They generally only vote with a small fraction of their power, and their voting distribution is good. There are good bots and bad bots...
Sounds interesting at first sight. From a functional point of view it may be useful, but I think at the blockchain level there are a few extra steps necessary. I don't know what this implies from a coding perspective, but I can think of at least an extra check (if (article.author == voter) for each vote, which may significantly impact speed. I
will think about it. Thanks for your contribution.
The performance overhead may make it a tricky one to implement, especially using a rolling 24 hour time period.
There would have to be a count of votes where author=voter and timestamp > now-24hours, and combine it with an if(1,2,3,4, or 5),then ..., and calculate it on the actual weight used to vote with, unless you ignore the weight used and have all self votes assumed to be 100%.
One other way would be to have a self vote counter which resets to 0 every 24 hours. It takes away a lot of the checking and just looks at the current vote plus the count, and executes the weight and power deduction based on that.
It can get really complicated when you look at all the variables, which would see a significant impact on speed. The simpler the better, but it has to have the desired affect.