Proposal: Change Up and Downvotes to bids
Hi everyone,
The Problem:
People don't seem to get how downvotes work and see them as personal attacks against them or their content or even worse as an attempt of silencing or censoring them.
The problem I see here is that up and downvotes are not very flexible.
Short example:
Post A has a value of 20$,
In my subjective opinion I believe this post should not be worth more than 10$
I downvote it to 19$
A whale comes along and downvotes it to 0$
Now I have to go back to the post and remove my downvote since I don't agree that it should be worth 0$
How likely is it that I will come back to a post I downvoted later to check if it turned out a reasonable price?
- Highly unlikely
My Solution:
Thus, I believe that the way Steem should work should not be by up- and downvoting but by bidding on content.
And the weight of the bid depends on the quantity of SP the user holds.
Short example:
Post A is valued 20$ (Let's assume all voters up to now bid the post to 20$)
I bid that the post should be worth 10$
Post goes down to 19$
A whale comes along who wants to bid the post to 0$, he not only has to counter all the 20$ bids now, but also my 10$ bid since the value he considers is below the one I bid for the post.
Why would this help?
You might ask now, why this would make any difference, if the whale wants he can still downvote the post to 0$.
And I say yes, he can, and that's his right, he purchased a ton of Steem and if he believes a post should be worth nothing he can try to use his power to do so.
The difference of this system is two fold:
It will be more difficult to completely zero posts since some people might agree that rewards are too high, but most people don't believe the person shouldn't get any rewards at all.
Most importantly, this will change the culture of Steem, people will see that it is an actual bidding process on each of the posts. Thus, people won't be mad if someone places a lower bid than what their post is currently paying out.
Since these people are just evaluating how much they think the content is worth.
At the moment we also have this bidding process, but, the problem is that
a) This doesn't appear as clearly to the user
b) It is not very flexible as I showed in an above example
Image from Pixabay
I think this idea has a lot of merit. A user views a post and chooses to assign a "value" to it. Their VP is then used to push its payout up OR down at payout toward that value, according to all the other users assigning value to it (and their SP). It might be tricky to implement but it IS do-able and it could help resolve the downvote stigma/drama.
This is an interesting idea – but there is an inherent problem with it.
It's not a bid. It has nothing to do with bidding. Bidding is the process of transferring some sort of value from a pool you control to a pool someone else controls as a wager on the outcome of another event. While I have repeatedly described the functionality of the Steem blockchain as "a bidding game," the bids are not made via of the proximal mechanisms of votes in that sense. I would say that the underlying point is that they are implicitly relative.
That's not to say that you aren't on to an important facet of the failure of the design by pointing out that it is repeatedly sold as the idea of "this content is not worth more/is worth more than X value" while the vote itself doesn't actually communicate that at all, not least reason being that "X value" is not a stable expression within the context of valuation of a post. (After all, the actual reward value of a given post isn't the only thing that changes – the underlying value of the token can change rather aggressively from moment to moment, so just saying "I don't think this is worth more than $10" doesn't communicate enough in the context of mechanisms available on the blockchain.)
What you're talking about isn't bidding, however. It's a far more elemental part of communicating value – pricing.
What you're talking about is explicitly telling the system what you think the value of a post should be. And then your idea is that the system should mechanistically apply your voting power to push the value toward that desired price. Which is an interesting idea, except for the fact that in actual use it would be pretty cumbersome. Rather than simply signaling to apply a portion of your voting power to changing the value as you saw it of a given post, it would require you to specify a value for every post you see, and that kind of cognitive overhead and mechanical overhead just leads to people not engaging with content.
Imagine reading Reddit and instead of upvoting or downvoting content, you had to put in a desired/intended number of total votes. You just wouldn't engage with the system because it's too much mechanical overhead to deal with.
In a system in which you were only expected to interact with 10 or 15 pieces of content a day, and assigning a value to half of those, it could work. But that is not how social media consumption happens, and because of that it's not really a feasible design. Interesting, but not feasible.
At this point, I maintain that there is already too much cognitive overhead when dealing with upvotes and downvotes on the blockchain as it stands. "Is this currently under or overvalued?" "How much of my voting power should I use?" "Is it within seven days of creation?" "How much of my voting power do I have left for the day?" If I were going to re-work the voting system, part of the core of doing so would be to remove most of these questions entirely. Simply keep a sliding pool of voting power, let people vote for as many or as few things as they feel like, and divide that voting power equally over everything that they have voted for, up or down, over that particular window. Oh, yes, and eliminate the seven day voting requirement and reward content if it had a vote during that cycle. Done. Massively less complicated and much easier to deal with.
Unfortunately, we will never see this.
Thanks for the comment, Yeah, I don't care how you actually name it, but you got a grasp of my core idea.
I agree partially with you. I think there is already a lot of complexity going on. Thus I also agree on the importance of:
Now, distributing the share of the vote over all votes you cast without a VP limit is complicated, it would mean that your past upvotes will become worth less because you are upvoting more which itself is something people wouldn't get easily I guess.
Tbf, I don't know, right now out of my head, a solution for this complexity.
In terms of the complexity of the system I am describing, I think the frontends could guide the users through this, how about the frontend offers you a value +- the value the post is currently at.
Let's say the post is at 5$, it would offer you, on clicking the vote button a slider around the current value.
Maybe, if the value is under the median value of that user or of that category/community it could further indicate certain things.
I do agree it would be a bit more difficult cognitively, but I also do believe that it is the only way to fix the "game theory" of "upvote/downvote" which actually almost no one seems to get on this platform.
I really like the idea of signalizing your “reward target intention” when casting a vote. Could
be game changer in terms of accepting downvotes / avoid retaliation.
This strikes me as an even more clunky Rube Goldberg machine than what we already got.
At least with upvotes/downvotes, it only asks a user to consider if they liked or disliked something. A bidding model, in theory, might solve some of the problems he mentions. But now everyone has to make up a number for what dollar value they believe something is worth, a lot more work and cognitive load. And if you really liked something, it would just mean you put a very high bid, so that you don't risk yours becoming a future "downvote" should others vote it higher than you originally did as an early curator.
In any case, for something to actually be a bidding system, it has to be that the curator actually makes a transfer themselves. And don't allocate from a rewardspool. Perhaps an idea for how to let multiple people bid for a sponsor role in a community?
My solutions is 1. that we just remove the inflation-based rewards pool from STEEM completely after SMTs are here. 2. That we focus on non-inflation-based ways to run a successful platform economy in which we make use of the fast and fee-less SBD and the removal of middlemen to allow more efficient, fairer, and better connections between advertisers, sponsors, promoters and other clients and the content creators. If creators who get good amounts of views are able to monetize their work well thanks to Steem without needing new tokens to be printed, then the whole worry of downvotes goes away anyways.
Even if we go for an SMT based system, there will always be this fight about up and down-votes and how much SMT something is going to be worth. It is not going to solve this problem, but shift the problem away to a different "currency".
I do agree that the base concept of it has a higher cognitive load though, but, as I described in an above comment I believe that a lot of it can be solved on the UI level.
You could have a slider similar to the voting power slider which might be centered around the current value and give some indications of the median value of this particular user or community. I do think that most of these complexities can be easily adjusted on the frontend.
Reddit works fine with up and downvotes because actually people don't see who casted this vote and no money only visibility is involved. This makes their system inherently simpler. Imagine how toxic reddit could be if they actually displayed who up and downvoted your content, imagine how many toxic DMs you would get. That's why I think, even for an SMT, the concept of only "up or down" is not helpful.
Thus, my concept would remove the concept of down or up-votes from the system, yes, of course, someone can just put a ridiculous value. But if he doesn't, his vote will never turn to a "downvote" because this concept doesn't exist. If I vote 5$ on a 50$ post, maybe I am shifting the average a bit down, but at the same time I am guaranteeing the author a minimum value. If I don't vote 5$ on his post, and a whale votes with 0$, he might get 0$, but if enough people assess it with 5$, this will be much more difficult for this whale to counter. Thus, I am helping the author to guarantee this minimum.
I personally think that would vastly improve Reddit. I might even have a look at it then, because it would become a less toxic echo chamber overall.
It is an echo chamber that's right, but it would definitely cause much more toxicity.
I think you misapprehend carrots and sticks. There are toxic snakes. Because of this people avoid pissing them off. This decreases the toxic behaviour snakes have to endure.
On Reddit, enabling folks to suffer the consequences of their toxic behaviours would reduce the toxicity of their behaviours.
There are downvotes on reddit, but you can't see who upvoted or downvoted it.
Just... No. Unless you just propose that Steem is no longer availed a voting mechanism at all, and all of the functionality of voting is completely removed from Steem itself and becomes solely the province of SMTs. That is an enormous sea change for Steem that completely alters what it is and everything about it, which requires an equal amount of detailed consideration.
Yes, besides it removing one of the biggest incentives of holding Steem power right now, we would need a strong shift to a RC based system before doing so.
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This is a sympathetic idea, but it will be complicated for both developers and users. What's worse are the game theory consequences. If there's only one vote, can you give yourself $1000? In your scenario, if the whale downvotes to $0, you can try to reach $10 by bidding a much higher price. Others will program a bot to respond immediately or at the last moment to such bids etc.
Actually, running a bot could be a way to adapt your own vote automatically according to a target value. That way, you could give a subtle downvote without changing the rules at all.
Of course your vote can not move the value by more than your vote is worth in any direction. So if you vote 100$ with a 1$ vote it will go max to 1$, same in any direction
basically the idea is that your vote is still worth a fixed amount, but it has a tendency into a certain direction. (Around the value you set for the post). To make sure its not over or under.
Of course you could setup a custom frontend with a bot which makes sure your vote is like you want it. But undoing unvote to upvote etc costs a) RC and b) voting power
Your vote does not have a fixed value. The value of your vote varies by three different metrics: the first is the SP you possess, the second is the weight of the available VP you assign it, and the third is how depleted your VP is from casting votes,, or becomes during the vote window as you cast votes thereafter. Another issue is that some folks have even more variables they consider prior to voting, such as curation rewards. Some people only vote because they get paid. This is already a nebulous target, because it depends on who besides you votes how hard and when they do so.
I'm not even going into circle jerks, purchased votes, or promoted posts, and how this might complicate them.
Most people have but little idea of how to calculate the third variable, and even for those that do know how, the work to do so if not often undertaken. I don't undertake it at all, and just always vote at 25%, because I have discovered that if I vote at that weight, I generally remain within VP that can recharge in ~1 day, which maximizes the VP I have to vote with.
Finally, I have to agree with @lextenebris on one thing: voting is already too complex (witness my rule of thumb regarding vote weights) and this would make it more complex. I do not agree that people don't vote at all due to lack of robust comprehension. I observe that even idiots express opinions, or vote, despite demonstrable complete lack of comprehension of relevant issues and consequences, so reckon very few people actually even vote less when incompetent to do so rationally and well.
I was simplifying it for the sake of simplification in the comment, I'm well aware that the value varies based on many things (VP, reward pool, curation, SP, etc).
But, for sake of simplifying the implementation, all this "could" stay the same, the only thing changing would be anchoring the value around a certain value the person assigned to the post.
The algorithms that compute the value of your vote on a post do not generalize that value. They set it precisely. Since the target value you assign a post is attained, or not attained, depending on all the votes cast on a post, the calculations become impossible as the VP of voters is depleted or recharged by voting.
Multiple variables that are calculated exponentially increase the complexity of the calculations to account for each other, and this level of complexity is unattainable with our present tools.
But the same problem exists at the moment too.
No. Your proposal adds a layer of exponential increase in calculation difficulty. The decay of VP is calculable since there's only one factor to calculate. By introducing the target payout of the post, you multiply that calculation by all the VP applied to the post. This is incalculable.
OK, that makes sense. But if you have $100 voting power and you want to change a post from $0 to $10, it's still in your interest to bid higher against a whale than the value you actually want.
No, you can vote 100% on 10$, and you will guarantee with 100% of your stake the 10$. That would be the idea of this proposal.
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I haven't read the comments yet, but I do find the idea intriguing. One issue with the bid process you describe in part, is that say you think a post has a higher/lower value than you have the SP to deliver. What does your bid mean in that context? What weight is your bid given? You are able to cast 10 100VP votes per day. Are your bids 100% votes, or 25% votes, such as I have long delivered, or .001% votes as some deliver? I don't think this is an insoluble question, just one that requires greater thought before it is more than a idea, and capable of being an actual proposal.
Thanks!
Actually, the system I am proposing would not be too different from what we have now, you got votes which are worth a certain quantity of vests depending on the vests and VP you got and the % you vote with.
The difference is that this vote will evolve around a fixed point (the value you set).
Meaning, if the value of the post is under the value you set, your vote will contribute to add more and if the value of the post is above, it will remove from it.
So, that basically renders the algorithm that will calculate VP deployed per post utterly incalculable, given that you vote on more than one post and others vote on those posts. The change in payout value will change on each post and change the calculation of how much VP to assign to that post. It will do this simultaneously on all the posts you vote. Each assignment of VP will then change how much VP you have available for each vote, and then have to change again on all posts every time someone else votes.
Not even the best quantum computer in the world can do this. It's basically an insoluble mathematical problem.
Nono, the quantity of % of VP you add to it will stay the same always. The thing that changes is the actual value of the post itself.
The quantity of VP is not stable. Every vote I cast at 25% VP changes the value of every other vote I cast, because my VP is depleted as I vote, and recharges when I don't. It's not possible for VP to remain the same when it is depleted to vote.
It seems you envision the VP slider eliminated. Not sure I like the idea of only being able to vote at a level set at the factory. I settled on 25% because that best fits how I use Steem, allowing my VP to recharge nominally to keep my votes relatively equally valuable.
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