Steem Whale's Voting Perspective
As a whale my votes tend to hand out between $50 and $100 worth of rewards with every vote. This how I view voting at this point in time.
There is not enough content
The number of posts that are worthy of $50 or more is vanishingly small. If I only voted on the highest quality posts then my voting power would be much higher and they would probably receive $500 per vote. That said, these posts get enough support from other community members that they receive thousands of dollars anyway.
By spreading my votes around to many people it builds the platform by encouraging more content.
People matter more than content
Attracting people matters the most while Steem is young. Any time I see a honest post from someone new they get a $50 upvote. This will give them more influence in the future and gives them a taste of what is possible with Steem. After their first "hit" they are more likely to come back for more.
Precision is not necessarily better
As a voter it is very difficult to make fine grained subjective valuations. I can see some benefit for having the ability to vote with different weights, but I am not sure it would really improve the platform. The feeling someone gets when they are randomly "over tipped" for a small job can be addictive. This creates a lottery effect where posters know that they could get $50 for something as simple as posting a link to answer questions from a new user. Often they don't see anything, but occasionally they get a big bump and that makes all the difference.
Equal Pay for Equal Work doesn't Work.
What if I told you that we developed a perfect AI algorithm that would rank and score every post based upon the exact value it brings to the platform. All of a sudden the payouts earned by many top posters would fall from thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars. Most other content would see payouts well under a dollar. As someone participating in the system you would be guaranteed to get paid exactly what your contribution is worth.
This would make the platform much less interesting. People come here for the chance to get paid much more than their effort is worth. It is the oversized payouts that give people hope and drive the most engagement.
Vote for everything with any value
As a whale I choose to vote often. This spreads my power around and effectively lowers the payout-per-person. I am afraid that everyone is so worried about curation rewards that they are ignoring the bigger picture. You should vote for everything you think adds value to the platform and not restrict yourself to 20 votes per day.
Response to Proposals
Many people have been making proposals on how to enhance voting and to solve the problem of "passive whales". The truth is passive whales are best "not voting". When you refrain from voting you delegate the curation task to everyone else.
Others have proposed that whales should be able to proxy their voting power to others. This concept has some potential if it is kept simple. My feeling is that this feature would add complexity that only benefits a hand full of people.
I think Dan is right from a psychology perspective. Studies show that the lottery effect is real and it is why people like casinos and slot machines in particular. In addition there are already places where people can go to make $10-20 per 1000 words. Only on Steem can someone make $50 for a single post which may not be anywhere near 1000 words. It could be that the words on Steem are over priced but it's also possible that the words on other sites are under priced and the only way to determine is to let the participants decide how much a post is worth organically.
One thing about voting is it's something the voter shouldn't have to think a lot about. It should be something like a first impression or instinct thing and how much power the voter has or whale power should not be a concern of the voter doing the curation. I think proxy voting is fine if people want to delegate their voting power but if it's concentrated around a few whales that is fine too as long as the whales actually vote. In the end eventually there will be more whales and the system balances out.
To the people who have made $1000s on a single post then congrats to them. It only markets Steem for the new users to see that some post made $1000+ from a meme, or a picture, or a joke. And it might be that in the future a single post could make $100,000 and who are we to argue with subjective value? Art sells for millions of dollars and it's subjective too.
I'm happy we have Whales like you around! I was just commenting on another post that I believe having Whales is a good thing because, to get to Whale status you have to be quite smart and wise! Money alone wont bring you this power.
What you say is really on the mark and I'm happy to read how you hold this power responsibly and for the greater good!
it seems that actually just whales votes count at this point
Unfortunately, the gamification aspects of Steem really haven't turned on yet. Since no payouts will be made until July 4th, Steem is a little bit of a caste system where the only way to increase your stake is (1) buy in on the exchanges, or (2) produce blocks. I'm taking route 2, but I'm a software engineer and sysadmin, so that's easy stuff for me. The average user doesn't have a VPS lying around that he can throw a daemon on to make him money in the background, and wouldn't know how if he did.
After the payouts start, I hope to see the caste broken, and brand new users with their free stake start developing much, much higher stakes, and thus becoming more powerful voters. For now, though, if you've got a small stake, it's just gonna stay that way unless you invest more than just posting/voting.
Consider my lottery proposal https://steemit.com/steem/@liondani/lottery-rewards-every-24-hours-for-10-lucky-curators I think it will work better than you tipping "randomly" ... Because many will thing you are not "objective" with tipping at some point of time... They will not blame the blockchain...
Interesting article. I think one main problem is that currently there are not enough articles about other topics than Steem. The makeup article demonstrates that you can get a lot by posting some good content. Hopefully my articles will be another example :-)
But Dan, what if you could use your whale power to grow the community horizontally, incentivising investors to build their own interfaces and applications, instead of locking investors to giving every odd user a winning lottery ticket?
Me and clains propose proxy voting, and believe we are making a good case for it. I don't see how it would only benefit a handful of people. Horizontal scaling would certainly benefit the Steem community as a whole. The success of Steem hinges on being able to be flexible and evolve into something better before a competitor does just that. Asking passive whales "not to vote" is not a viable solution. It is like asking them not to get the most of their investment, and could certainly drive passive investors away. The right incentives must be in place, and there is a very specific way to open up for it, namely Proxy Voting.
Please read the case we make in this post:
https://steemit.com/steem/@spectral/growing-steem-to-its-full-potential
I understand where you are coming from. My perspective comes from creating website that sell stuff : Always assume that the person that use it has an IQ of 85. Everytime I violate that rule, the user gets lost and doesnt buy.
Complexity will kill adoption and Steemit is already way too complex to attract "normal people". Development at this point should focus on how to make it more simple(or intuitive)...not more complex.
Maybe a third party service could provide that but keep this feauture away from steemit.com
I think I must be one of those 85's. I couldn't even figure out how to comment directly to the post. It seems that the 'tell your story' button is what I'm looking for. Oh well, I just like this content cause of the awesome steampunk whale-ship painting. PS- I still don't get where the money comes from :/
Hey, I'm not even considering anything to do with steemit.com, I'm talking about STEEM. The whole point is to incentivise "third party services", i.e. horizontal scaling
I think a smoother user interface will reduce the practical complexities considerably. The average mouth breather doesn't use betas very often anyway. Not that 85 is a mouth breather, I hope that didn't sound too demeaning. But I get what you're saying. As a full time writer, my job is half simplifying my text to make sure its attracting the widest possible audience, without losing the "readers" among them.
I will put some more thoughts into what make sense here.
Thank you. Keep in mind, we're approaching that point now where we must decide if we can invest time and resources into third party services to the platform. If we could bring a proposal to an investor involving such an opportunity as outlined in our post, that could significantly increase our chances, and in turn benefit the platform.
It's not difficult to install the sort of proxying you are asking for. It requires a vote bot for whales that up votes what an ambassador up votes - effectively making you an ambassador for Norway that votes with a portion of Steemit's stake. It is very difficult to install protocol level proxy voting to maximize investor returns on curation as was argued in the post. It's also counter to the idea that people matter more than rewards. Protocol changes should also be avoided.
That doesn't really solve the most important problem with e.g. starting up in Norway.
Edit: Yes, it might actually do that...
The point is that an investor should be able to distribute her voting power to her user base. Not all votes for one user, but distribute e.g. 100k STEEM voting power between all its users based on a formula that the investor chooses. The formula could for example incorporate reputation and/or identity on an application level, without the need to touch the protocol.
The effect of proxy voting would be horizontal scaling, giving entrepreneurs the opportunity to lower the entry threshold for its new users.
So is the problem that users wouldn't get rewarded for writing things specific to Norway or that users from Norway wouldn't be able to meaningfully up vote each other's content about Norway?
I apologize. I didn't really explore the potential of a voting bot, which may be huge. A lot can be achieved with voting power distributed evenly across a large group of users. It goes a long way towards the ideal that we are looking for, for a company to be able to distribute its voting power among its "verified" users. It is definitely something we will look into.
There was a conversation about this in slack between your brother and a few of us last night .. http://steem.herokuapp.com
You didn't just write this because of my gif, did you? ;)
I would like to point out your self-downvote for this post.
I think this says a lot about your truly efforts and curation attempts looking at the bigger picture.
Some should definitely learn from this.
hi @bhuz, please check my latest post out. I wrote it to you and the other whales. Maybe you will agree with it :)
https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitpolitics/6rqxnc-to-the-whales-get-your-head-out-of-your-ass-and-vote-good-content-up-you-are-harming-steemit
Just found this and it's a very good post, it seems the whales know exactly what they're doing.
I recently got a massive tip from dantheman, did I deserve it? i don't know, but it sure didn't feel like I did at the time!, so what did i do? i've decided to invest everything I got into Steemit, money? don't have a lot of that, but time, energy and passion I have infinite amounts that will now be poured back into Steem.
Not only that but 2 days ago, people wouldn't hear a bar of it, they called me all sorts of things "Idiot, dumbass, gullible" etc etc, just because I believed in Steemit, a platform they'd never heard of lol. Well, how do you think those family and friends feel now that I earned enough money to survive off for weeks in a SINGLE POST....
I'm not sure how they feel, but I know they all have Steemit accounts now.
I m videographer and I just started posting on steemit. Finding your article give me courage to continue . Thanks.