RE: A Radically Updated Steem Whitepaper
which has led to a lot more widespread/rampant abuse of the rewards system
This is an easy claim to make and when it comes to widespread I would agree it is obviously much more widespread. This makes perfect sense because under the previous algorithm the bulk of the user base (like 90%+) had virtually no ability to grant rewards and therefore no ability to abuse. That's like starving to death as a weight loss diet.
However, when it comes to the 'amount' or 'severity' of 'abuse' it is very difficult to be confident about that conclusion because excessive concentration of rewards and a few whales essentially siphoning off the entire pool (or nearly so) to a few preferred posters could also be considered abuse.
The role of posting, comment, voting, and rewarding in this system is to encourage widespread participation and growth of the platform. The precise allocation of rewards is less important, especially when that allocation is flatter and broader.
The new algorithm requires not a single shred of "consensus" when it comes to the allocation of rewards.
It does require consensus. If A upvotes and B downvotes (with equal weight) then no reward is paid. That is precisely a consensus-finding algorithm. If the community is unwilling to take a stand and downvote, it can't be helped.
Agreed, but please help us by making down-voting anonymous. This way we don't get burned by stepping on the wrong foot. I see worthless posts that really deserves a flag, but then I check their SP, and decide not to pick a fight.
Yes this is a problem for anyone with low SP but at the same time if it wan anonymous then people could just go and down vote anything they didn't like all day long and no one would then be able to hold them accountable.
Transparency is the savior and we must protect that at ALL costs.
I agree that transparency is valuable. Unfortunately, it is making the fight against misuse harder. Maybe we need a more creative way to solve this problem. Otherwise, this problem is crippling the whole system. Low-quality content is being rewarded more than high-quality content. I am sure Steem was not designed to do that.
BTW, I have just read a post by @heavey about a new ICO that is similar to Steem. It is called Red Pulse. They have devised some solutions to guarantee high-quality content. Maybe, we should check them out.
I don't think that transparency is the problem. The problem is that almost everyone is here to make money and as usual willing to compromise honesty, integrity, fairness etc to get a piece of the pie.
I am sure there is already a solution that exists to deal with this and I feel the solution is just that this community curates content they feel is valuable and flags stuff that isn't. Guilds/groups are the way to go.
If a lowly wimpy minnow or plankton finds flag worthy content they can just report it to the group and the group with all the power can do the down voting if the warning meats criteria.
Its actually very simple, then the entire community becomes the security camera that sees EVERYTHING and the whales become the enforcement. Its perfect.
I think accounts should not be able to upvote their own posts. This way abusers will be forced to create other accounts to upvote. Those other accounts won't have a lot of SP and as such won't be intimidating to users who want to downvote their posts.
Maybe in the current situation a lot of people who would have downvoted the posts were scared off by the SP.
Its just as easy to transfer or delegate sp to a sock puppet.
The account posting spam and the account with the SP will be different. Other naive users will be more confident to downvote a spamming account with little to no SP. The SP account might still retaliate but might also have to deal with many naive users who downvoted his Spam account.
Let me try and give an illustration:
Mob boss (SP account)
Puppet (Spam account)
Government contract (Rewards from self voting)
Currently the mob boss can go for government contracts and do a bad job. People will keep quiet about it because they do not want to suffer the wrath of the mob boss.
If the rules didn't allow the mob boss to get government contracts, the mob boss would have to get a puppet to get the government contracts. If the puppet does a bad job, people who are not aware of the puppet's links to the mob boss will act to punish the puppet. If enough naive people act against the puppet, the well-informed might join in to punish the puppet. This is how revolutions happen. It requires enough naive (or brave) people to act.
Moral of this: it is easier to scare off individuals before they act than to scare off masses after they act.
I hope I made sense.
It makes sense but not sure I actually agree it would apply/work here on this platform.
Anyone with little sp/rep will not do flagging if they get retaliated on, regardless of it its from the boss or henchman. People are just as scared of the henchman as the boss. Because everyone knows the boss calls the shots and the henchman dish it out.
Steemit does have potential to be a place of honor and ideals but is currently very far from that. This community would probably actually be a lot better without the money yet none of us want to give it up either hahaha
Unless a spam post has two votes and a big reward, it requires some work to identify henchmen and people are generally lazy.
Laziness kicks in before fear.
Somebody will come across the spam post, check the posting account REP:
Independent of the questions raised about whether this is a good idea, there isn't obviously any mechanism for doing this. To limit spam, the voter needs to be 'charged' for the bandwidth and vote power, which means the voter must be identified. To alter that would require some radical changes in the system design.
Agreed. The benefits of HF-19 far outweigh the negative impact of the spammers.
I agree with this statement in the most literal sense.
that is to say, under n^2, the abuse was more concentrated. It was a very few people making six figures annually (steemguild, curie, etc).
The total percentage of the reward pool going to spam/abuse is, i suspect, probably about the same (and if its higher, ite because many whales got fed up with fighting abuse and now just sell their votes), there are just more people getting some of it. .
Obviously, neither situation is optimal, but if we're going to pay out a significant share of the reward pool to abusers, the abuser community should at least be inclusive.