RE: Locking stake for 100% passive income, improving content, helping apps
I'm not a big fan of these proposals overall, as they essentially just automate what we now would consider "bad" behavior. It's a huge gift to the self voting whales to say, "Here ya go, now you don't even need to spend the hour a day you do shitposting. That was way too much effort to earn hundreds of thousands a year, and as a bonus... you're now unable to be flagged!"
I don't want to cater to an investor class like that. Not all investors are created equal. There's a big difference between venture capitalists who will invest and nurture a startup to growth, and vulture capitalists, who invest only to pick an enterprise clean of all value and ROI before leaving it a destroyed husk and moving on to their next target.
At the very least toggling that switch should also auto toggle posts to be set to "decline rewards." It's a very clear signal that you are not interested in the proof of brain economy and these accounts should not be able to double dip and get their guaranteed non flagable self vote rewards and earn content rewards for posting as well. Alternatively they could forego all Resource Credits. Consider it the "Silent Investor" class. I know I don't want to hear from them. Who wants a troll earning his guaranteed self votes to be able to harass people in the comments with zero chance of financial repercussions? At least in the current system behavior is at least in some way tied to earnings potential. This proposal, if the investors continue to actually utilize the platform, completely divorces the two.
I'm actually happy that more interfaces like SteamPeak are just minimizing the visibility and impact of Trending and presenting better content to new users upfront. Content sorting and discovery will be heavily altered by SMTs and the new generation of front ends that will eclipse Steemit. So again, in my mind this proposal isn't a needed step to fix trending, it's just granting flag immunity to heavy self voters. At least with the current system we get some flag wars brewing and sending a percentage of that back to the organic rewards pool. I'm much more in favor of "flag reform" and normalizing and promoting their use than of placating short sighted "investors."
I also think opting out of voting should remove the ability to earn post rewards and maybe even RC.
I don't agree that earnings by bid bot delegations or selling votes are in any way tied to behavior. The risk is moved to the customer. And that part is wayyyy bigger than obvious self-voters.
Sadly, since post rewards are not stake-weighted in any way, I think these folks may just start posting under another account. Nice idea in theory, but I don't think there is a way to make this effective in practice.
It's a lot harder for a small account which can't boost itself and doesn't give others the hope to get a vote in return to draw a significant amount of upvotes though.
You can boost yourself by buying votes. If you introduce a new incentive to buy votes it is undermining the purpose of the original proposal.
Just keep it simple and make investor class stake unable to vote but otherwise unchanged.
Good point. I'm in favour of small iterations anyway, keeping it simple is the way to go.
This is true. But at the same time, the only real risk right now is that the customer doesn't achieve a positive ROI. I don't have a problem with heavily botted posts on trending getting knocked down a few pegs and losing money, as that at least better falls within the model of bid bots as advertising services. No one should expect to be paid to place their content on trending.
I've always hoped for a revamp of the inbuilt promoted post feature (breaking it out of the segregated promoted tab and into trending content and tag pages) to arise and undermine some of the customer base of the bots. At least then the funds are plainly spent on advertising, are burned to the benefit of Steem price for the whole community and eliminate the bot operating middlemen, and the rewarding votes a post receives from the higher visibility are actually organic.
That doesn't really happen though, and I don't see free flags as a solution. They'd introduce other negative side effects, and his bots would probably just get a little cheaper. We don't have any need for paid promotion besides the inbuilt one (which definitely needs a better presentation).
I think the issue of flags and downvotes could be a very simple solution. A two tier flag system. If a post is flagged for any reason other than rewards, then the author of the post gets the flag. If the post is flagged for excessive rewards, the the person or the bot with the largest reward issued gets their entire amount flagged erased, 0 reward all returned to the reward pool. The other voters that were generic still recieve a little bit from the left over rewards for their curation efforts. If a second person still thinks the reward is to high then the next reward gets removed and so on and so on. It will not take long before bid bots start themselves a list of bad players. It will not take long before rancho type people find another method. If you want fund the new investor pool with rewards that were rejected by the community. Plagiarism and copy paste and spam content will still get flagged and the author still have his reputation decreased, but they would no longer be able to lay the blame of their demise at the feet of an over zealous reward flagger, their rep hit would be well deserved, right now not all people with reps less than 0 are schemers and scammers.
I agree with the flag reform approach , that brings a sense of balance to the forces , maybe a check box in wallet to automatically allocate delegation to a community flag pool ?
I actually need to do more research to find more anti-abuse flagging projects to delegate to. It's hard to find one that clearly articulates a policy and scope of action so that you know what you're supporting. I've also disappointingly delegated to some in the past only to look in and see that they'll be inactive and sitting at 100% VP. It's just a waste of power then! It would be nice if some front ends included information and easy support of a vetted project like the check box you're suggesting.
Concur !!
Ying and yang...
Flags are currently at about 0.1%. Unless downvoting is revamped, they don't play any significant role in expected profits and are essentially irrelevant.
If flags are revamped to make them more normalized and used then you would have a good point.