RE: Diversifying Curation Reward
bots too need to make decisions to maximize their profits
I think this can be a start point to explain why you may not understand my argument. I fully agree bots need to maximize their profits as like humans do for utilities. But the question is here, what is required to maximize profits for bots (or some humans)? As you mentioned we haven't reached enough to where bots can understand and feel contents in natural language, they mostly vote with quantitative measure. Not only bots, some humans can follow some authors and every 6 hours mechanically upvote all posts on their feed without reading them.
You may think differently, these are mainly generate much noise in terms of qualitative curation based on content. For instance, if I post consisted of random words (e.g. "feawf 23`1908j f;adsofsda") and self-upvote, there will still be tens of upvotes for that post, and probably several dollars from my experience. For many users, especially new users who don't fully understand the patterns of our system, these votes are just noise that hinder efficient content discovery.
The whole point of my post is that it is a normal and actually a desirable thing in a healthy free market to have second order (meta level) agents who do not make decisions based on the perceived value of the asset itself (here content) but on the behavior of other market participants.
Please read more carefully my previous post. I think the analogy with traditional finance should make the unavoidable existence of these two levels very clear and explain why having bots that do not understand at all content is not at all a problem (and actually a good thing) so long as there are enough participants in the market who do, which can only be achieved by diversifying ownership of Steem Power, not by trying to fiddle with the rules to weed out bots while keeping human participants who vote based on perceived content value.
This isn't bots generating noise. This is you generating noise and bots amplifying it because they don't have any other clear signal to amplify and work on the very basic (but historically consistent) assumption that you are a reliable curator and author. If you keep creating nonsensical noise, eventually bots will adjust (either automatically for the most advanced ones, and manually for the managed ones) and stop following your votes and/or upvoting your posts. Granted current generation of bots is pretty dumb, but again the reason is that there is very little competition and it's fairly easy to reap a good curation reward with minimal research effort. As Steem becomes more popular, there will be more bots and more manual curators, so there will be more competition and a better incentive for bots owners to up their game and make more effort discriminating actual signal from noise. Paradoxically the best way to get rid of over-simplistic bots is to encourage botting so that more people will join the game and push the bar higher.
At the risk of repeating myself, you won't turn and immature market into a mature market just by trying to rein in the bots. As you said (albeit not in these words), bots are automated human thought processes. So long as the system will offer economic incentives to humans based on the completion of tasks that do not require self-awareness or involve emotions, it will also by the same token offer the very same economic incentives to bots.
We could remove entirely the economic incentive and make the reward entirely emotional so that it would make the use of bots pointless, but then you are back to the traditional blogging model where people post to share with their peers and gain social mileage, and even that is plagued by bots! Just look at all the click farming for "likes" and "friends" and "followers" and cheer leading comments.
Without economic incentive, the game theory that underlies distributed consensus can't exist. Without sound distributed consensus, you open the door to sybil attacks and manipulation. Back to square one.
Incidentally, as what might be possibly an example of bots amplify bot signal echoes -- check out this thread:
https://steemit.com/f17/@got/combust
Im testing something for a site im working on. If you look at my comments, they seemed to be getting 10 bot votes yesterday, but tonight are getting 15.
Thanks for your points and I agree many of them you made. But I think debates on bot is not a main issue (not even in the title) regardless of their smartness or dumbness. The point is design of incentives.
Numbers can be inaccurate, but for example Steem is giving 0% to whom don't vote and 1~5% ROI to those who vote. So voting is always more profitable than not voting. Rewarding on participation seems good, however, there is no alternative to keep profit other than vote.
The incentive system what I try to design is like this. Steem Power basically has fixed ROI of 2%. If you vote, you will get between 1~5% based on your voting performance instead of fixed 2%. If one is very confident to vote well, s/he will dive into the voting game, but if one prefer more stable income s/he will stay on 2%. That's my main idea of diversifying rewards.
Regarding this, I wish steemit accounts are excluded from fixed income as well as curation rewards because they are not an investor.