RE: Pre-Release: HF19 Linear Rewards!
The argument why it's a beneficial change (which I'm in agreement with) is that bots currently have too much influence over payouts. The more we lower that votes/day number, the more influence real humans will have on reward distribution, and furthermore, the more curation rewards will go to actual humans.
Why should AI users (bots) who spend zero time on Steemit have a ton of influence over payouts?
Why should a passive investor (someone who's supporting the Steem price) have to spend a significant amount of time on Steemit to get a return on their investment in the form of curation rewards? The current voting rules basically require you to spend the equivalent time of a full time job on Steemit, just to not let voting power go to waste. Decreasing the number of votes to 10 makes Steem Power more valuable, because now it won't take the time of a full time job to get decent curation rewards.
Users who are highly-active already have a huge advantage over less-active Steemians, because they are the ones who are earning the lion's share of the posting rewards.
I hope this was coherent and had at least a little bit of flow to it. I wrote it quickly while at stop lights in the car.
None of that is true anymore, most bots have already left the platform as activity has increased. Can you point out a single abusive bot that is still functioning?
I'm not talking about abusive bots, but rather voting bots. There are still a tremendous about of votes made by non-human curators. My last post had 126 views and 151 votes. The one before that received 65 views and 114 votes. If there wasn't much non-human voting, the number of views would be significantly higher than the number of votes.
What other points did I make that you disagree with?
The issue is 10 votes are too few for humans. It doesn't need a full time job anymore. There are 20,000 posts/comments per day, it's pretty easy to make 40 votes within an hour or so. There's no dearth of good content now. Indeed, I curate less than an hour per day nowadays, and I simply can't keep up. With a 10 vote per day target, I could probably exhaust it within 10 minutes, and that's it. Yes, we could vote with 25% voting power, but that just crowds engaged users out of the reward pool and forces people to constantly ration and think about every vote. Pretty poor design for human engagement.
As for voting bots, firstly I don't see that as an issue, really. They are humans delegating their votes to curators or authors they trust. Humans who have paid for their stake in the network. Secondly, they'll continue doing so, maybe with lower voting powers.
It's ten full power votes but votes are 4 times more powerful. Just cut your voting power to 25 percent. What this really does is allocate influence from heavy voters to casual voters. I think that's fine. Also would support letting small voters use 2x-4x voting. It would do the same thing.
You can continue placing 40 votes a day at 100% if you want, or 10 votes a day at 100%. Either way, you'll be contributing the same amount of rshares to posts each day. If you choose to continue placing 40 100% votes per day, your voting power will normalize somewhere around 25%. If your goal is to maximize your influence, it won't matter whether you vote 10 times per day (at 100% power) or 900 times per day (at 100%), your influence will be the same either way.
The only reason I use Streemian to follow other voters or a voting bot is because I have to vote so many damn times every day in order to not let voting power go to waste. If I only have to vote 10 times per day, I have no need to follow others voting on Streemian because I am on Steemit enough to vote >10/day. That gets rid of any non-human votes coming from my account. Sure, not everyone is like me, but certainly I'm not the only one who changed my use of voting tools because of the enormous number of votes required to use up my voting power.
I can use votes pretty quickly if voting on a lot of comments, but in order to use 40 votes on blog posts alone, I essentially have to be on Steemit all day long.
Why would I want to continuously ration my VP? As it is most newcomers have no idea about voting power, this is just going to be one more barrier to them engaging at will. Not to mention, by voting 25% I diminish my influence, and with inactive curators not doing they same, active curators are crowded out of the reward pool. This means the people who pile on the votes on the Trending pages will be heavily incentivized, and those who dig for good posts will be heavily punished.
And like I have mentioned before, I can find 10 good blog posts within the next 10 minutes now. There are over 5,000 posts per day now, it really isn't so difficult. Not to mention, there are comments on Steemit as well. Like I also mentioned in my last reply, I exhaust 40 votes within an hour or so nowadays. I don't even vote on comments because I'm all out of VP before I can. If I were curating full time, I'd probably need at least 200 votes per day, if not more. This is of course very different to when Hardfork 19 was announced over a month ago. At the time, 10 votes per day would have been adequate for the casual curator.
I have written about this before, and my solution was having a dynamic target by activity. So the 10 votes per day proposed back then should be 50 votes per day now given the 5x increase in activity.
Users won't have to ration their voting power. They can if they wish, but their network influence will be the same regardless of how many times they vote, so long as it's equal to or greater than 10/day.
Any active user would most certainly have to ration. The issue is an active user's influence will now be the same as an inactive user's influence as long as they vote 10 per day. So it doesn't matter if I spend 10 minutes voting on 10 posts/comments or I spend 3 hours voting on a 100. Overall, active users will be crowded out of the reward pool and disincentivized to curate actively.
And this is just now. What happens when there's 100,000 posts/comments per day? That's nothing - it could happen overnight if Steemit were to go viral. Are we really going to force users to target 10 votes out of 100,000? That's absurd.
I don't think it makes a difference how many users/posts we have each day. As we get more and more users, we also get that many more people voting.
Agreed, I could tell something was weird on here when some not that great articles are getting an insane amount of votes, all the flow just keeps going to the top. For this thing to succeed the new people joining need to have an incentive, this will bring even more people. The Whales getting Whaler isn't going to ultimately help the platform. I'm not a Socialist Democrat at ALLL, but for this to work, there has to be some of that in there to help the wee newbies :)
Because there is no "passive investment" on this platform. It's a social media platform with no actual investment product. It requires active participation. That was the entire point of earning rewards, since there is no mining. Creating content and voting on it replaces the need for mining the tokens.
And as @liberosist pointed out - the bot issue isn't really an issue anymore. The automated voting still occurs, but that likely won't be eliminated...ever.
So, the question comes back to, "Why is this a necessary change?" If you don't have time to spend on the site and can't participate as much as someone else who does, why should you have the same influence on the system?
One post a week from 7 people is way more valuable a network than 1 a day from 1 person. Network needs to be as big as possible.
"Posting" isn't where the value of the network lies. What matters is how many active users there are so that the content/site/network can be monetized.
But if we're talking specifically about the value of particular users or content, then it's all subjective. And one user who posts popular/subjectively good quality posts every day can absolutely be more valuable to a network than seven users who drop a blurry photo once a week and have no followers.
I agree about posting. Activity is most important. Reading voting commenting and posting. Posting is probably the least valuable activity unless it leads to the others.
My point was that content that is sorted into best and worst by 70k users where they login once a week is more valuable than 10k who login every day.
Of course there's passive investment! There's a lot of people who want to (and are) investing in Steem, but don't have a lot of extra time to be surfing around on Steemit.
Why should someone who is active, but has never invested a dime have more influence than someone who has invested $1,000s? The investor is the only reason the token has value.
The person who is active already has a huge advantage over the investor because the active user earns all the posting rewards.
It's a necessary change because requiring 40 votes a day, every single day, is absurd. If I'm going to be voting on 40 different blog posts in a day, I have to read over 100 to find 40 I like. Do you know how much time it takes to read 100 posts?!? I have to be on Steemit the entire day to read that many posts. It's a completely unrealistic task for anyone who's employed or has a business to run. Requiring a minimum of 40 votes per day (to not waste voting power) is completely ludicrous.
You're talking about speculators, not investors. There is essentially no ROI on this platform unless you actively participate. The only other returns come from an increasing token price.
You're not "required" to vote at all. But if you do, you earn rewards. The more active you are - the more "work" that you do for the system - the more potential rewards you can receive. Doing less "work" for the same rewards isn't beneficial for the system overall. The point of curation rewards is to incentivize the ranking/filtering of good/bad content. Having less of these value judgments is certainly not ideal.
Sure. I agree that spending all day on social media isn't good if you have a job or if you run a business. Playing around on Steemit isn't a job - and it would probably help if users stopped treating it like one.
That's a distinction without a meaningful difference regarding speculators/investors. The only difference is the level of risk they're willing to take in their investments.
You are if you don't want to waste voting power.
That's true, but it comes with a tradeoff. When you have a high vote number, like 40, it means you'll have a lot more rshares distributed via automated voting.
When you have a lower number like 10, it means you'll have a lot more rshares distributed by actual humans than by bots.
I'd much rather have humans determine which posts become popular than have bots/automated voting/curation trails doing that job.
There is actually a very meaningful difference. If you're talking about "passive" income or ROI, then there is none on the Steem platform. You have to be actively involved in order to earn, especially when there is no interest. (And no, the SP "interest" isn't really interest.) Speculating on prices isn't "passive" income and it's not at all related to rewards on the platform anyway.
Whether or not your voting power is "wasted" simply depends on how active you choose to be. If you can't vote 40 times per day, then you can't maximize your rewards. I don't see how this needs a remedy. Maximizing rewards should involve maximizing your activity and the quality of it.
If I can find and curate 40 good posts and you can only find 10, why should your total curation efforts earn the same as mine? That's certainly not "equality." It's essentially a disincentive for the person doing more work.
No - it just means that you'll have far less activity overall. I don't care about bots. They're really not an issue. And I really don't care about the automated voting. It's something that will have less impact as the platform scales and the user base continues to increase.
Humans are behind all of those. At some point, they had to set up the automation. But as I said...it's not a long-term issue. Trying to "fix" a bot/automation issue is a short-term outlook. Hard fork changes ought to be made with a long-term outlook.
The change of the 40-vote target seems to be an attempt to "equalize" the platform when 1) there is no equality and there doesn't need to be, 2) it defeats the entire point of the system and the reward incentives, and 3) it continues to disregard what social media actually is - which is essentially a popularity contest and a time sink. Someone from Steemit, Inc. really needs to understand these things if they insist on tinkering with the economics of the Steem code.
I have to get back to work, so I'm not going to respond to a lot of this. We've been over it and are beating a dead horse at this point. I am going to clarify a couple things though:
Passive investing has nothing to do with earning curation rewards. I think this is where your confusion lies. There is nothing at all passive about acquiring stake and using it for curation purposes. Curation requires active participation/work, whether it's manual voting or setting up and monitoring automated voting.
If your argument is that the vote target needs to be lowered because of "passive" investors, then there is essentially no argument to be made. Those aren't passive investors. They're lazy curators, they simply don't have the time to participate, or the incentive is not high enough to entice more participation.
There is no passive income on this platform. Passive investment is not passive income. Earning curation rewards is neither of those. It requires work...and it ought to require work. That's how the system was designed and how it's supposed to properly function.
This is social media, not a 401K. It's all about active participation.
There are different levels of passiveness. Someone who buys Steem/Power and doesn't participate in the network at all is as passive as it gets.
Someone who buys Steem/Power and gets on Steemit for 20 minutes a day is less passive than the person above, but still far more passive than the person who spends all day on Steemit.
This thread is blowing my mind! Thank you both gentlemen for squaring off and discussing this very topic. It's important because I am spending quite a bit of time now influencing investors, who I helped make a lot of money in Bitcoin and Ether, to now create a Steem Account to diversify into Steem. A reoccurring question is WHY they have to get in and use the Social Networking side. I've explained it many ways... but the simple answer is that Speculation is a anathema to SANE economics. I'm showing them how a Steem account works as a Wallet and a News Feed. It's starting to take shape!
Thank you gentlemen. SteemON!