RE: Stake-weighted voting is a neo-fascist abomination: anti-liberty, anti-equality, anti-humanity
The change from 50/50 to 75/25 author/curator which occurred earlier in Steem's history was never justified on sound economic grounds. It was simply wishful thinking to 'reward authors more'. In reality, it has done the opposite as a huge and increasing portion of stake has decided a 25% curation share is insufficient and demands that authors pay 100% of their rewards back in order to get votes. To get any kind of visibility in most cases, authors are now forced to do so, and end up with less than under a working 50/50 system (granted there is no guarantee that a 50/50 system works either).
The proposal to return to 50/50, whatever its other merits (and it can be justified on economic grounds as well, as @kevinwong, @trafalgar and others have done, and I would direct anyone interested in learning how to apply system-level economic thinking to this problem to those posts), is more than anything else a reversion of a tweak which was tried with good intentions but did not produce the intended result.
I mostly share your views on superlinear. FYI there is little to no support for superlinear (see for example @cervantes posts showing a chart of witness opinions, IIRC all or nearly all opposed) so I'm not sure why you are bringing it up.
In no way does this bear any relationship to SMTs, positive or negative. Work on SMTs will continue unaffected in any case. There is no legitimate question of 'focusing resources on SMTs' (regardless of whether one feels that would be a good thing or not). since the developers working on SMTs have nothing to do with the community-driven effort to improve the base-level Steem economy and vice-versa.
As I have clarified elsewhere, those were merely examples. It doesn't matter what they are, I'm opposing a bundling of multiple major changes into a single hardfork without adequate simulation and stress testing audits. That's all.
I'm not being ignorant, I have followed @cervantes' post, and the entire matter at large, and thought for several weeks about it before offering my response. And yes, I've had countless discussions with @kevinwong and others privately. The measures being taken are reminiscent of the past, and all the unintended negative consequences they have brought. I disagree with wishful thinking, or making any changes without proper simulation and evidence for the consequences of said changes. I could just as well twist 50/50 into wishful thinking of "reward curators more". (Though to be clear, I do agree it could be beneficial, and you may recall I have argued for it as far back as 2016; so I'm not interested in debating anyone over the merits or drawbacks of this change.)
There is always an opportunity cost. The community-driven effort could be diverted to SMTs instead, to get it ready sooner, and/or with better quality. Whether it's a better allocation of resources is a different argument. On that note, I'm well aware that at this stage I disagree far too heavily with fellow witnesses, and as such realize that the best course of action would be to reject the next hardfork and protest by the sidelines. That is the point of this post, I'm committed to that. Of course, there may come a point where the disagreement is too vast, and I will simply quit the platform.
PS: And no, "going back to the original vision" is irrelevant. One word: Hyperinflation. It's a completely different context now, and it should be treated as such.
Then I presume you will likewise be opposed to hard forks which include SMTs? Because there won't be 'stress testing audits'. In a system like this it is impossible to truly test economic changes without putting the into production and seeing how both the existing community as well as prospective participants respond to them. The best we can do is rely on models and reasoning, but in the end that comes down to a degree of (hopefully educated) guesswork.
Again, how is this standard applied to SMTs?
No it can't, and that makes no sense whatsoever. The community effort has nothing to do with developing SMTs, and can't do anything to improve its quality. In fact, just the idea of wanting it ready sooner (if turned into action, though thankfully that will probably not happen) would as a matter of software development process, more likely impair its quality. SMTs are a development-stage project being pursued via a specific process by Steemit Inc without direct community involvement (nor am I aware of any way in which community involvement would help at this point, or is even feasible).
You may agree or disagree with any specific hardfork proposal, but on the idea of SMTs being a "tradeoff" here is based on a misunderstanding of the process at best. They really are separate.
I'm not suggesting anything about original vision. I'm stating, as a point of fact, that the original change from 50/50 to 75/25 was not justified on any basis other than wishful thinking for an outcome which has never been borne out (not in the hyperinflationary era, and not now either). On that basis alone (and even if not backed by sound economic reasoning, which it is) I would support reverting it. We ought to be more far willing to accept when we make mistakes and revert them (ideally not after waiting two years, but better late than never).
You would be wrong, since that's not the basis on which it is proposed nor considered. That was however the best possible spin on how we have 75/25 now though. Arguably the reality might be even dumber than that.
Simulations can be run using neural network models on testnets. There should be a beta interface where the public can also participate in the testnet. There can be a variety of models to test, and any major negative consequences will be immediately obvious. There will, of course, be outlier scenarios that simulations may miss - it's a given; but we shouldn't have to deal with the showstopping issues we have seen in previous hardforks.
If a major change was truly impossible to simulate, I would like to see them done one at a time. Bundling multiple disparate changes into one hardfork is something I will never support again. We have had this approach fail too many times.
And yes, of course, I would be looking to see the results of SMT testnet, which Steemit Inc has announced will run for over one quarter.
Leaving whatabouteries aside, my pledge is a simple one - don't support a hardfork if it bundles multiple disparate changes, with no peer-reviewed simulations and audits done on any of them. It's as simple as that, and I need not discuss it any further. If it turns out simulations are truly impossible, I'll reject the hardfork anyway.
I stand corrected regarding SMT's development. I have seen Steemit Inc looking to hire, and thought witnesses could either join the SMT development team or hire developers to do so; instead of committing the resource of human developers to making changes for the hardfork. Also, do note that this is the first time that the community is developing something, so the separation between Steemit Inc and witnesses/community is new and unclear at this time.
Nevertheless, there's always an opportunity cost. It doesn't have to be SMT. I'm of the belief that these tweaks are a waste of time on a fundamentally broken concept, were the goal to be better rewarding content and engagement as a social network. Were I a top witness, I would spend time and money researching an alternative system. I fully respect witnesses continuing to iterate on existing system, of course. I will dissent, but while we fail to change each others' opinion, we'll just have to agree to disagree and move on.
Your hypothetical neural network models don't exist. They won't be used to test SMTs or anything else. There will be a testnet, but as with previous efforts at a Steem testnet as well as other cryptocurrency testnets, the issue of lack of real economic incentives limits the ability of such a testnet to do much other than serve as a vehicle for functionally testing some aspects of the code (as opposed to how external actors interact with it). I've been involved with numerous blockchain testnets and without exception their usage is never representative of a mainnet with real value attached to it.
On the matter of the proposed economic changes, they are certainly not 'disparate'. They are a package designed to shift incentives in very specific ways. Bundling them is really the only way that makes sense. Indeed some of the changes on their own might well produce worse results than the status quote even if (hypothetically) the underlying theory behind the package is entirely correct and the bundle would work great.
Actually, this is the natural continuation/evolution of a process whereby several community-sourced changes got merged into HF20. That was, to my knowledge, the first time features sourced from outside Steemit Inc. have gone into production, and the current initiative (which may or may not actually proceed) is an effort to take that process that one step further with a community-sourced hard fork proposal (which, indeed, ought to be something that, at least to an extent you might support since it means considering these changes separately from a bunch of other changes being concurrently proposed by Steemit, unlike the way it was done with HF20 or every other hard fork).
From what I have seen, and been told, Steemit's process is very much focused on their own full time employees doing the core blockchain development, in this case SMTs. Much of the progress and process takes place in in private meetings, using internal methodologies in a way that isn't conducive to direct community involvement. As far as I know, none of the witnesses are interested in and/or in a realistic position to consider being hired by Steemit, including several with relevant development skills, so there is no particular overlap here to Steemit's own SMTs development. We have the option to pursue non-overlapping, minimally-disruptive community sourced development, or alternately wait patiently for Steemit to complete their work and package a release for witness consideration. Both are being done to some extent.
I respect your views on not even bothering to make any changes to the existing system even though I don't quite share them.
Yes, I know - simulation, quality assurance and testing processes need to be developed. Frankly, it's shocking they weren't, and explains why after two and a half years the network is more broken than ever. (OK, hyperinflation was worse.) Simulations are never ideal, but they do greatly help develop sustainable, if flawed, systems, that are easier to iterate over. I'm not a software developer, but the same tenets have worked across most professions since the dawn of the industrial age.
As far back as 2016, I have been asking for proper testing processes and peer-review of Steemit Inc's code. If the agenda is to continue whack-a-mole experiments without any evaluatory processes - I suppose it is now time for me to give up and move on. All the best, though, I'd be delighted to be wrong and bidbots dramatically decrease in influence (adjusted for the natural downtrend over the last few months) or disappear in a few months' time.