RE: Improving the Economics of Steem: A Community Proposal
I honestly think the only way to fix it at this point is to make actual curation more profitable than self voting, which requires a return to exponential curation curve and around a 50/50 split. I honestly don't know if anything will fix this shit at this point because like you said voting collusion trumps content quality for passive investment, but the fact that we literally have to build a second layer protocol to disregard the distribution of the first layer protocol because it is so fucked is simply hilarious to me. We've gone full circle to the point where we have no value proposition over someone creating their dapp and community on tron, eos, neo, or countless other blockchains. Three years of running a company like a personal piggy bank and then lobbing a hail mary by allowing people to circumvent the distribution is a joke at best.
This does not even impact curation for content quality at all. It merely changes the financial equations governing how profitable corrupting curation is.
We can eliminate financial incentive to corrupt curation altogether. We should.
Omg, this hurt to read due to the truth in building a second layer protocol to fix the first layer. I had never thought of it that clearly...
It's painful
This is a good idea in theory but in reality whales eventualy just vote for the same people because they think other whales will as well, in an attempt to maximize profits from curation. This ends up a few lucky authors getting most of the rewards as everyone piles in to get curation. We saw this happen when this platform first launched. In my opinion they are trying to solve a problem that may not be fundamentally solvable. I don't think stake based voting can work. Sounded good, but when money became involved, it changed everything.
Plus the post literally says...
Are people deliberately skipping this part?
I'd say most of us that have been around since the beginning realize that it's a bit "too little too late" considering the middle class on STEEM has basically been taken out to pasture and there's not much left besides mega-whales and plankton. If they made these changes years ago when plenty of us were asking for them and telling them explicitly that this (the situation we now find ourselves in) is where it leads, the warnings were not headed. You can't wait for a house to burn down and then realize you need to call the fire department if you want a chance to save anything of value inside.
We actually proposed something very similar 2 years ago as well:
https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/details-on-proposed-comment-reward-curve
I hear you, I spent way too much time and energy trying to preach to people that their greed was destroying a potentially world changing technology, but none of them gave a shit as long as they could get theirs. There's no doubt why people left and it's not just the price. Whale games are whale games and if you didn't get in first or fuck people over for stake you ain't getting shit out of this place. Unless you live in Nigeria, Venezuela, or the Philippines (or somewhere equally impoverished) this technology isn't changing your life and empowering content creators. The greatest lie ever told on this platform was "bid-bots are for promotion." Why the hell would anyone come here and promote to a community of a couple thousand people that are pretty much smart enough to avoid the trending page unless they had no following to begin with. I literally don't even care to rant about it anymore, but I'm right there with you, we tried to stop this shit and the people that had the power to change it did what was in their best interest, just like they always do, and got rich off the illusion we (the community) were pedaling for them.
I hear you, but the problem isn't precisely greed, it's designing an economic system that's more resistant to game theoretical pitfalls like the prisoners dilemma or tragedy of the commons.
It's not that I don't understand if we all stopped and voted honestly, we're all better off, but individually I know that if i did that, everyone else would still just keep milking. So the options to me are join the milking or abstain and lose your share but not make any material difference to the failure of the platform overall. I bet many other stakeholders are in the same boat.
Good news is different economic incentives vary in how resilient they are against these game theoretical pitfalls. This is fixable :) I finally got Inc to listen to me, so that's a great start
@kevinwong said you were a smart guy. He"s right!
Posted using Partiko Android
I'm supporting a 50/50 split
Exponential curve is likely too strong because n^2 means someone who has 100 times more SP than you has a vote that carries 10,000 more weight than you. Now that people are more sophisticated, this perhaps would open up to even more abuse than the current system
But indeed some level of superliniearity is necessary. I like the convergent linear curve proposed by vandeberg as far back as 3 years ago. It has a superlinear head that forces all profitable spam into the light, and a linear tail so no collusive piling on between whales/bid bots
I also think a moderate amount of free downvotes are necessary. Basically every measure helps, but every measure has their own downsides if you tune them up too much. This is mostly an optimization problem.
I broadly agree with your points and think it's better late than never. I share your frustration as I've been proposing this for over a year, and I'm grateful that recently @justinw, @andrarchy @vandeberg and other inc members became receptive to these ideas
Sincerely, I hope it's not too late, but after years of being ignored and no delivery of promised updates it's hard to be enthusiastic about anything at this point. I guess time will tell. I agree we never need to revisit the old exponential curve, my thoughts were more slightly exponential, but I think the vandeberg model is fairly close to what I was thinking.
Yes, yourself, van and me are no foreigners to feeling that we have an answer but being told to go beat it for long periods of time
But now that we have Steemit Incs attention, it remains our best play. Incentivize the behavior we want. Each measure that does this (curation, free downvotes, superlinear) have their own drawbacks as you increase their intensity. So it's an opitmization problem of maximizing benefits - costs.
I believe this is a broadly fixable problem and yes, i feel it's overdue by a couple of years, but it might not be too late to turn this ship around
Isn't that behaviour development that imbues the underlying investment vehicle with greater value, creating capital gains? Let's do that instead of corrupting curation with ANY financial incentive through which funds intended to market Steem are instead gamed for profit.