Changes to be made to the platform

Currently I have perceived that there is in the environment a need for changes to improve the platform, in this sense the user @kevinwong has proposed a number of changes that are being discussed by witnesses for implementation. I am not a very influential person in steemblockchain however I am a lover of this platform and I would like to humbly explain my idea hoping it can be read and analyzed by someone important.

The changes proposed by kevin are as follows:

Increase curation rewards (50% is a good start)
Move away from pure linear and into something like n^1.3
Subsidize downvotes (cheaper downvotes, separated pool)

In this article I intend to make an analysis of the problem from my point of view and to evaluate the viability of these solutions, as well as to propose another type of solution.

link picture

The problem since my point of view

The first thing we must recognize is that the steem platform has evolved over time, it is not the same to start now than 2 years ago. First of all because two years ago you could invest $100 and get a large amount of steem due to the low price that steem had, it is true that the earnings by votes were lower but it was a small community and steem worked properly, then a good content got good rewards and this group of users who started by then became very powerful when steem price increase, something I consider fair because they bet on steem and won, today is very different because steem is more expensive and having large amounts of sp involves investing large amounts of money, I would say it is worth making the investment but the problem comes when we do not have enough money to invest. Secondly, the supply-demand of content is much higher, the number of users has increased and we have reached the point that not only is it necessary to write good content but also to be lucky that someone interested can find it. According to these two aspects, uploading to steem today is much more difficult than it was two years ago, especially when a high quality publication is just a grain of sand inside a spam sack. My point of view is that of a person who is almost a year old on the platform and has observed and analyzed the behavior of most of the users he has seen.

In 80% of the cases that I have seen users do not go after good content but after good reward, consequently only the big SP headlines receive votes and comments, I have seen publications that are just a title and have a lot of reward and I have also seen users who have 6 months on the platform writing good content and have not come out of the reputation of 25. Then ocure something that @ned I quote in a comment:

New user A sees veteran user B’s low quality content. User B low quality content is getting big pay day. User A makes post that is 100x better (even by measurable SEO Standards) and yet get paid ¡zero!

What really happens in steem?

The good thing: There are users who bet on taking the platform forward, review the content of others and give them nonprofit support, I've seen many projects supporting specific tags which I have been able to verify that are active. Foundations and many forms of support for users and good content, in that context everything works well but we know that there is a current problem with distribution of rewards based on quality of content.

The bad: Most users go after a great vote instead of good content, in this sense only those who have enough SP have an audience regardless of the quality of their content, in fact I've seen articles that only have a title and nothing else, then carry great rewards and many users under SP commenting and actively participating, if you are one of those who have enough SP and you think this is a myth then create a new account, do not tell anyone that it is yours and publish exactly the same content to see how much you receive. As I said before, there are great SP headlines that make the difference, but many of those who have been here for a while have already made a circle of people they vote for (I don't criticize this but I put it as an example to highlight that this is not going to change by applying a 50% curation). And I have seen users who carry big rewards in garbage items based on bidbots. So, we must understand the problem before looking for a solution:

• Users who publish good content and receive no rewards.
• Users who get rewards for junk content using bidbots.
• Users who get rewards for junk content only because they are in the circle of other users with enough SP.

The consequences of these points are disastrous and are in my opinion the cause of the platform not flowing according to its main purpose being difficult to attract new investors.

My opinion on the three solutions presented by @kevinwong

First of all your initiative to identify problems and propose solutions is very good, it is good to have on the platform people who care about continuous improvement and debugging errors. I believe that the last two points can counteract some effects by giving us the freedom to punish abuse on the platform with flags (although evildoers are going to enjoy the same privilege). But no matter how much I've analyzed it, I can't understand how taking 50% of the authors' reward and giving it to those who vote will solve the problems raised.

We can rely on the hypothesis that people will feel more encouraged to vote for others by receiving half of what they give, but people are already voting. We don't have a problem with people who don't vote but rather where their votes are going. Doing this 50% is a solution that will result in users who are receiving little rewards receiving much less, that's a sure effect. The positive effect that is sought, that users receive more reward because others decided to give them support motivated by the curation received is likely but not certain, if users with SP go after a reward do not do more than vote for themselves, if they go after the good content will support people regardless of receiving only 25% cure and as I have seen we can say that a large number of users do not go after the good content but behind the rewards.

If you apply the 50% curation may be that you get the desired effect but in my opinion the votes will continue to be given in the same places that are given now, that way instead of solving the problem what we will do is make things worse.

An idea to make this a better place

I know very little about programming and I don't know if what I'm going to propose is possible and how difficult it would be to implement it, but for sure it wouldn't be easy.

The first point is to force users who want great rewards to create good content, this happens by modifying in real time the amount of rewards that a user can give to an article based on its quality, the quality of the article can be standardized based on the number of words contained in the article subtracting those that are part of repeated phrases to prevent abusers create articles with many repeated words as part of a copy and paste only to meet the requirement.

A limit of 500 words can be standardized (in my opinion), a proportional scale per word is applied so that each user can grant a vote equivalent to 0 to 10,000SP proportional to a content of 0 to 500 words. Content containing more than 500 words are free to receive the rewards that users want to give them without limitations.

If I am an abuser and I publish an article of two words each user will be limited to give me a vote equivalent to 40SP ((10000/500)x amount of words). for my article to reach high must vote many users and in this case I will not be profitable to use bidbots because the same system will prevent me from getting votes greater than 40SP.

What happens with the user who votes is that the system will not allow him to give a vote with a percentage higher than the allowed based on the number of words. To make a simple explanation let's assume that user A has 100SP, and user B publishes an article with 3 words. User A tries to vote for user B with 100% of his voting power but the system has restricted the rewards a user can give to that article based on the number of words applying the proportional formula ((10000/500) x Number of words in the article), that is ((10000/500) x 3)=60SP. When user A with 100SP tries to give user B a 100% vote the system will restrict it to 60% (which is its equivalent to 60SP), this way this user will have 40% of that vote for another article.

If a user C with 100,000SP tries to give a 100% vote to user A, the system will restrict it to a vote of 0.06% which is a vote equivalent to 60SP for a user with 100,000SP. As a general formula the maximum vote that a user can grant in an article containing less than 500 words is (if words < 500 then the maximum % that a user can vote for is = (100/SP of the user who votes)[(10000/500) x Number of words in the article)].

If this is applied the effects will be as follows:

• We won't see any more simple articles in the trends.
• Abusers will find it harder to make a profit on junk items. They should dedicate more time in the elaboration.
• When a user with a lot of SP votes on simple articles he will not be able to give a 100% vote, consequently he will have more voting power to support other articles.

In order to avoid a bypass by means of comments these should be limited to a fixed reward value that each user can give with their vote, in this case without taking into account the number of words written in the comment.

When cheetah marks an article the reward given should be reduced to zero because it is obviously plagiarism.

This is my idea to solve the internal problem of users who misuse the platform. I also have an idea to attract investors and eliminate selfvotes.

STEEM's savings function is not very used, I particularly prefer to have my STEEMs in the SP part and that's where I'm putting my savings because they can generate profits for me. Thinking about this, I think that to attract investors it would be convenient to eliminate the savings function and that instead the SPs that a user has can grant him daily interests as if it were a savings, even if the user cannot withdraw the total of his SPs immediately and a user that invests in SP is betting on STEEM, besides taking into account that he has made a risky investment with the current instability of the crypto currencies. A person can save money in a fixed term bango and receive interest earnings, if we do the same in STEEM it is likely that the platform can attract new investors, in exchange for this eliminates the option that allows a user to vote for himself because he receives the return on his investment in the form of interest in the form of SP.

These are my ideas, I don't know if it's possible or viable but I hope someone can polish them and use them to make this a better place. Thank you for taking the time to read my article!

Related Articles

• @kevinwong: Understanding Steem's Economic Flaw, Its Effects on the Network, and How to Fix It.
• Answer from @ned: in comment
• @cervantes: Witness consensus status to fix the actual steem’s economic flows (ENG)