Revisiting Curation Reward: Hot Coffee, Cold Coffee, and Lukewarm Coffee
Hot and Cold Coffee in one Cup
Everyone has preference. Some people like hot coffee, some like ice coffee, and some like both. But if one likes both hot and ice coffee, will lukewarm coffee satisfy him/her? It won't because it does not mean both but it just means neither hot nor cold.
Interestingly, we are able to find hot and cold sides in recent debates on curation rewards. For-content people view the current problem of Steemit is too many bots that generates voting noise and impede proper contents filtering mechanisms. They are more likely to contend removing curation rewards in order to drive away voting bots. Meanwhile, for-profit people argue that removing curation rewards will cut financial incentives and hence discourage holding Steem Power, resulting in a considerable price decrease. You may think one of sides is correct, but I would like to say both arguments are true and they have no problem at all. The real problem is lukewarm coffee, that is, these hot and cold coffee is mixed in one cup that is called curation rewards.
Two Motivations: For-profit and For-content Users
The goal of for-content people is to find good contents and more profit is lower-priority for them. Their main source of satisfaction is "psychic income". When they feel good contents are discovered, the authors are rewarded, and they are influential in that process, they will gain the non-financial income. For-content people consume contents and usually spend money. In active form, they give tips, and in passive form, they can give up potential profits. In Steemit, I believe they will continue voting even though there is no curation rewards.
On the other hand, for-profit people seek more earnings. In Steemit, their votes aim to gain higher curation rewards. A quality of contents is less important for them. Instead, finding high-paying is the most appropriate task for their purpose. They are not consumers but rather investors. If curation rewards are removed and no incentives are given with votes, they tend to give up voting and furthermore they may sell Steem Power.
Currently, curation in Steemit includes both consumption and production in a badly manner. Ideally, higher rewards should given to posts that provide greater satisfaction to contents consumers and add value to Steem. But now, higher rewards are also given to posts that provide greater financial benefits as curation rewards.
We Need Two Cups
Here, I would like to provide my simple suggestions to separate profit- and content-oriented motivations.
- Removing curation rewards
- Adding investor's reward
- Investor's rewards are only given to accounts whose voting power is not used in a period. So it can be called as "inactiveness reward". The distribution is proportional to Steem Power.
What will happen then? If one is purely chasing profit, he/she will choose to be inactive and earn investor's reward. If one doesn't care profits but wants to curate and reward authors, he/she will choose to vote while giving up financial benefits. Voting bots for profit will be stopped (unless the owner isn't too lazy to stop bots). Curators' influence will increase relatively. Investors still have financial incentives by the new kind of reward.
Summary (TL;DR)
- Current curation is mixture of motivations for financial benefits and for picking good contents.
- To satisfy both, we need to separate these two motivations.
- Adding financial incentives on "not curating" while removing incentives on "curation" can achieve this goal.
Edit
A modified version with remaining curation reward is posted
https://steemit.com/steem/@clayop/diversifying-curation-reward
So basically, you want to pay money to the people who contribute nothing (except their inactivity) but for the people who actually expend effort, you want the effort itself to be its own reward.
Why not go a step further. many people write because they enjoy writing and because they find the proccess of communicating with others to be rewarding. Why don't we pay people who want to make a money profit an investors incentive for not posting, and for the people who want to post, their remuneration can be the psychological reward of having written something good and shared it with the community.
Edit to add -- upvoted and resteemed for discussion though. Clayop is one of the good guys, and even though i don't agree with all of his ideas, i agree with the motivations behind them
I think you just solved Steemit's problems. They can eliminate incentives to do anything at all. They can create the coins through inflation, nobody can do any work, and magically, investors will show up and buy all the coins, making everybody rich!
Post HF17 steemit. Join the movement indeed.
It's revolutionary!
It's got electrolytes?
Very sad when you put it that way. Not much left to justify hanging around here if curation rewards walk the plank.
That's absolutely true, if you're a non-blogger. Basically, those who argue against curation rewards are saying that people who want to invest their money and simply upvote content provide no real value to the platform. They obviously miss the point that the people buying STEEM, powering up, and voting on posts are actually the ones providing the "money" that others are able to quickly cash out and realize as profits.
It says a lot about a user or a platform that is willing to shaft the actual investors and reward those who have no incentive or need to invest. These suggestions/proposals are reckless, in my opinion. The platform is based on incentives for both creating and evaluating content. To advocate the elimination of rewards for either one - but especially on the investment side - demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding economics, the purpose of the platform's incentives, and how the platform actually functions...not to mention that they miss the actual causes of the problems that they presumably want to address.
And to make matters worse - these suggestions are being pushed by witnesses. This will certainly influence my witness voting, as will other issues, such as the willingness to accept hard fork proposals that I believe will be harmful for the platform.
Well said.
I couldn't agree more.
@ats-david for Governor of Steemit
@craig-grant
I'm not a tyrant, Craig!
Add advertisements to increase even further the investors incentives and you just invented Facebook!
Think reversely. Actually, the purpose is incentivising inactivity but charging opportunity costs for doing votes (exchanging with "psychic income"). And from other point of view, inactive users still hold Steem Power.
That's how the many other content systems work, so practically possible, and some authors already doing by declining rewards. But the difference is they are more likely to "create" contents while curators basically consume contents.
You may say finding good contents is also a hard work. Then, in the current system, does majority of voters put meaningful efforts to find good contents? Some may do but at least voting bots pursuing curation rewards don't.
Actually, no. Voters provide tiny fragments of information that are all gathered up and used in the curation process. If we discourage voting, we'll be left with passive readers who provide even less value than voters (if we're lucky).
Please tell us another example from economics where quality is improved by eliminating incentives or creating disincentives.
Voters should not be expected to work hard. Small rewards == small work. Maybe one voter is a stickler for grammar. Maybe another wants to support a particular category. Maybe another likes the color blue and the number 17. It's the aggregate of all those diverse and incomplete voting decisions that becomes the curated product. For better decisions, we need more voter diversity, not less.
Please tell us another example from technology, business, or social sciences where unassisted humans provide better quality than humans with tools.
This is yes and no, which is my point. Voters who don't read post, don't get any satisfactions, but just upvote provide any information about content itself. Their sign is mainly about payouts, e.g. if an author obtain high payouts repeatedly this type of voters are highly possible to upvote. I basically agree it has less financial incentives for other human voters. However, I expect their dissatisfaction from voting bots (e.g. concentration of votes on same authors) will be reduced and the overall they have more benefit.
My point is differentiating incentives into financial and psychic. However, if there's any way to enforce people to read posts to vote, I rather support it. Unfortunately, this is impossible on blockchain.
If you want to more understand my statement, please look at the number of votes and number of views on this post.
Imagine that I'm a fiction writer, and I want steemit to be a more welcoming place for other fiction writers, so I write a bot to upvote every post in the fiction category, whether I read it or not. Maybe I put in some basic checks for grammar and image files and length of article. Over time, I begin refining my bot to become more sophisticated about the content that it votes for. Even though I didn't read those articles, I still derive satisfaction from those votes. I'm also representing the views of some other group of non-voters, who would be attracted to the platform (if my votes prevail). It's the curation rewards that tell me (and steemit) how much of the community shares my interest (leaving aside the [n2] distortion). It's also the curation rewards that enable the whales (major longer-term stakeholders) to shape the platform content. Anyway, even if curation rewards didn't provide those services, shouldn't I get rewarded for my acts of representation?
And there is the crux of it. You don't like the way people are voting, so you want to force them to vote differently or stop voting. Even though, as @sigmajin already pointed out, the bandwagon voters don't actually influence rewards distribution anyway. And what are you going to do when you take away curation rewards and people continue to vote in ways that you don't like?
Those votes don't count. They're just here for the profit. ; -)
Edit: To put it simply, using this framework, your proposal might decrease Type-I voting errors, but it would do it at the cost of a huge increase in Type-II voting errors. IMO, that trade-off is contrary to the health of the platform.
Your framework borrowed from statistics is interesting, and thanks for your example. But please take my point: the issue is mixture of motivation. If you want to upvote every post in fiction tag, that's not because you want to maximize your curation reward but because you have some satisfaction from doing that.
@sigmajin's post is interesting too. But if no curation reward exist, the $160 might go to other posts by for-content curators. So they already meaningfully influence reward distribution, as well as voting counts.
The problems I perceive are, our filtration system for good contents are distorted by hybrid motivation. At least 500 bots (clues from votes on @steemvoter's posts. Maybe less but still hundreds I think) are round and casting votes for "profit", not for "quality of contents".
Yes, i understand it works both ways. Youre trying to get people to pay to vote. Now why would someone pay to vote?
One potential reason, as you pointed out, is the psychological reward. The warm peach fuzzy feeling that comes from supporting quality content.
Another potential reason (one which will, IMO, attract far more steem power) is that the money you can make by misusing your vote is greater than the money you are giving up through opportunity cost. Either because of kickbacks or because youre paying your guild payroll or whatever.
And i will point out once again that most of the whales voting for the worst content on steemit are, in fact, paying a non-trivial opportunity cost to do so. Disregarding this type of voter, and his maginified effect on the system after the honest voters are converted to investors, is just another canopener youre assuming.
Yes mostly the first point.
Second and third point seem remain with curation reward too. The magnitude can be different but we cannot tell it will be greater or smaller.
You hope.
The magnitude might be the same, but the effect will be magnified because youre taking the honest (but profit motivated) voters out of the system. That is to say, the bad fish might be the same sized fish, but theyll b e swimming around in a far smaller pond.
One possibility is stakes of sockpuppet voters are much greater than curators. But I think abusing the system will bring more stakes from the inactive to curation, especially for moderation (downvote abusers) because abusing consequently shrinks the pie so some investor on the edge are willing to give up incentives to prevent abuse.
Great post! It is definitely worth considering. I like the idea and would be in support of it.
The main arguments against it are going to be that we are paying people to do nothing, and there is a psychological disincentive to voting. Both could be argued to be bad for the platform.
As far as paying people to do nothing - personally I believe that having people who are only interested in making a profit not voting is adding value to the platform.
@smooth also brought up a great in regards to this type of plan which would be that the financial incentive is slightly higher than linear - so that there is actually a small incentive for users to keep their SP powered up under a single account vs. splitting it into multiple smaller accounts.
Wasn't my idea. Dan suggested it might be added later when the original incentive to not split up accounts (higher curation rewards) was removed.
Ah, ok. Thanks.
an upvote and coffee for this man!
The last hardfork took care of all price woes - so not to worry.
Oh, yeah. I completely forgot about that! Thanks for the reminder!
Interesting idea. I don't think it will pass though ;) Rewarding people to hold SP and not vote... while those who do don't get rewarded.... meh... doesn't seem right to me. But creative idea, I'll give you that. Maybe try another go at it but with feedback from the comments hehe.
What will be the annual return for the "investor rewards?" What are the estimated losses from users who will likely power down if the "investor rewards" cannot compete with the rewards from good curation? Why should users favor this plan if they cannot earn more than the (presumably) relatively low amount of return on their investment?
With a model that has no revenue and instead relies on "paying" users/investors through inflation of the currency, what purpose does payment serve for those not actively performing any "work" on the platform? (Currently, those who create content and those who discover/evaluate the content and allocate the daily pool are rewarded for their work. Both actions are vital to the platform and the latter incentivizes holding SP.) What value is added when users instead do nothing and the currency is inflated to pay them for doing nothing?
And I would also like to dispel this notion that more bots are a result of chasing curation rewards. That's actually not accurate. Automation increases when the human time element becomes too costly - or in other words, when the potential profit is too low to justify the time spent on curating. As curation rewards decline, less humans spend the same amount of time curating.
So, the answer is not to eliminate curation rewards in order to increase the quality of curating. You're likely to just get less overall curation and probably a lower quality. Not to mention less investment in SP from people who believe that they can beat the fixed returns from an "investor reward." Most of those users will likely power down, which, in turn, will likely result in less demand for STEEM and a lower price for the currency.
The answer isn't to eliminate incentives. I really don't know why this is being touted as a viable option. Numerous users have already stated what they would do if curation rewards are eliminated. Yet so many people still believe the exact opposite will happen. Why is that?
@ats-david I think you are correct. How does this proposal address the problem of getting new users and retaining them? It doesn't. What I think it is a power play to reduce the influence of the whales.
My opinion is that most users don't post, therefore curation is the only way for them to try and make some money. Then run into the round-down in payout. Zero payout. If you give me some model that allows a decent chance for new users to make a little money that will go a long way to acquiring and keeping users.
It switches incentives from voting to locking SP and giving up being infliential. The APR varies by the ratio between curators and investors.
Is there no starting point for the APR? A best guess?
Rough calculation (possibly wrong): if 50% of current voters become the investor class and the curation rewards becomes investor's reward, 2.5%. If we want to keep the similar reward level, we need to double it (author : investor = 6 : 4)
So, you really expect people to not curate so that they can earn 2.5% instead of the 10-30% that can be achieved now through curation?
It would help if you stated what these different percentages represent.
Current curation reward level I used is about 3%.
9.5% * 75% * 20% (data from steemdb) * 100%/50% (24h active stake percentage)
This is satire, right?
We're not that lucky, unfortunately.
:(
Look, I'm not sure that I think curation rewards are necessary, and I've said as much in the past. But let's think carefully about what you're suggesting: What you've proposed is that Steem pays people not to vote.
Don't you realize that this creates an opportunity cost every time someone decides to vote? It means that you're charging people to vote. Every time I find a post I like, I'll quite literally have to decide whether or not to pay to vote for it. And somehow you think this won't create perverse incentives?
I do. But your statement is not always true. For instance, some people and voting bots have much lower cost since they don't read, don't evaluate, but only following preset rules.
The main idea is psychic income can exceed the costs, and those who have greater psychic income will vote. Psychic income comes with consuming contents and it may lead more interaction between authors and readers.
In my new post, I suggested other numbers (not zero curation reward!)
https://steemit.com/steem/@clayop/diversifying-curation-reward
I like the idea of rewarding inactive users but why get rid of curation rewards.
If you vote you lose inactive rewards
Basically, it's differentiating financial and psychic incentives. If you value the former more, you can give up voting (you are investing in Steem Power, so you are still taking risks). If you value the latter more, you can be a curator.
Steem or Esteem that's the question.Or to Be or To Have?.