A case for eliminating curation rewards
I know this topic has already been discussed at length in the past couple weeks but I want to revive the debate as I firmly believe that eliminating curation rewards is essential for steem to move forward.
Let's see how these curation rewards negatively impact the platform.
Curation rewards create a lot of complexity and confusion for new users
These are the kind of questions newbies ask themselves: Why do all the votes on my post come up at the 30 min mark ? How can my post have 4 views and 70 votes? Why do most comments have no rewards?
Curation rewards only benefit a small numbers of users
The vast majority of curation rewards are earned by a tiny minority. These rewards are also based on a specific algorithm. The algorithm defines the rules of the game. Most users have no idea how the rules work and the average joe won't care enough to learn them.
Curation reward discourage whales to spread their upvotes
Because of the reward curve whales are encouraged to vote at 100% weight to earn the max curation rewards, so posts either gets a few pennies or tens of dollars.
Curation rewards creates centralization pressure
Guilds were meant to spread the rewards around but because of curation rewards they ended up doing the opposite. Guilds owner are encouraged to not spread their vote because if they do they will lose out on curation rewards.
Curation rewards have turned the site into a fake system run by bots and driven by money
No businesses is going to touch steem in its current form.
Curation rewards have forced users to change their voting behaviors
Recently I noticed something very telling is that everyone was voting at 1% on my posts. So I looked into it further and concluded that these were not bots, they were real individuals voting because vote were all made at seperate times.
I'll be the first to admit that I often vote at 1% especially on comments. These are the signs of a broken system.
The argument for keeping curation rewards is that investors won't have any incentives to buy steem power if we remove them.
This assumption is incorrect, it is based on the idea that investors care about growing the number of their steem more than growing the value of steem. There is a very vocal minority in this community who are very self centered and believe that growing the number of steem in their wallet is the end goal. It was the same group of people that were bragging about HF16 because they wouldn't receive their inflation anymore. These individuals don't seem to understand that 1 000 000 steem is worth as much as 1 steem when the price is zero.
Another argument for keeping them is that steemit's model is based on rewarding people who contribute to the platform and curating is a form of contribution. I don't disagree with this however curating doesn't solve a real world problem, good content naturally rises to the top. To me the major innovation of steem is that it creates a new model that rewards content creator without directly relying on advertisement.
There are also a few individuals that have been very vocal against removing these rewards, these people so happens to be among the small minority that benefits a lot from curation rewards. There is definetely a conflict of interest going on there.
If we want steem to reach its full potentialwe will have to get past this and think how something can benefit the platform as a whole, not just a few persons.
Here is a quote from @denmarkguy which describes perfectly the current situation
Steemit is reaching that tricky stage where early adopters become resistant to change in service of "protecting their existing benefits" while also being aware that continued growth depends on making changes in such ways that the community becomes attractive to newcomers.
The value of the platform will be a lot higher in the eyes of investors if curation rewards are removed, no more bots, quality content, fairer distribution, less greed mentality, more appealing for other website to integrate, more comment voting, less confusing for newbies, more engagement,etc..all of these will make the platform a lot more valuable than it is now.
Eliminating curation reward will also improve one major issue which is power concentration. Without curation rewards whales will be upvoting a lot less and will spread their vote a lot more which is essential for retention.They will also be a lot more likely to delegate their voting power because doing so will be a win win, they won't lose out on curation anymore and will finally be able to focus on growing the value of steem.
It will also increase engagement a lot because active users will have a lot more stake to vote with since bots won't be voting anymore.
Votes will be a lot more meaningfull and users's reputation will be on the line when they vote for something.
The comment pool will be totally unnecessary, if curation rewards are eliminated comments will be rewarded a LOT more.
I have been very vocal about this comment pool because i think it is a terrible idea, it is not KISS at all and do not solve the underlying issue.
I thought it was pretty bad without curation rewards but now they want to make it with curation rewards, this is even worse basically it will replicate the exact same broken system in the comment section, you will see comments worth $30 and other comments worth a few pennies, you will see whales downvote a lot and people whining even more, all this pool is going to achieve is increase infighting and unfair sentiment within the community.
Eliminating curation rewards is a much cleaner and elegant way to deal with this problem.
Here is an interesting read from @timcliff about eliminating curation rewards
https://steemit.com/curation/@timcliff/elimination-of-curation-rewards
You can go check it out, I am going to address here only the arguments for keeping them
Curation rewards are currently one of the only reasons to power up / remain powered up.
From the perspective of growing your steem it is a good reason, however the goal should be to grow the value of steem. If the platform becomes more valuable, more businesses will be interested and investors will come. With curation you are targeting a very small group of investors. The majority of investors are not interested about setting up bots or curating a few hours a day, they want passive income.
There are a huge amount of users that are actively involved in the platform through curation activities (developing bots, curation trails, guilds, manual curation, etc.).
Users involved in these activities are wasting their time because they are not adding real value to the platform. Bots are actually undermining the credibility of the whole site and guilds are increasing centralization. Imagine if all these users were working on productive things to increase the value of steem.
Curation rewards provides a financial incentive for users to spend a very significant amount of their time discovering good content.
This is completely unnecessary, users will upvote good content regardless of the incentives. Also due to curation rewards 'good content' as turned into 'content with high payouts' so you end up having people voting for garbage content just so they can pocket a lot of curation rewards.
The goal of the platform is to reward users for their contributions for the platform, and curating is a form of contributing.Lots of users find earning curation rewards fun.
The majority of users earn very very little from curation rewards. There are only a tiny minority who makes decent amount from curation. I don't think many users find it fun because almost everyone is subscribed to bots. And many don't have a clue about the voting algorithm.
I am convinced that eliminating curation rewards will be a big positive for steem, I am myself earning a lot of these rewards every week but i can see the bigger picture and want to grow the value of steem. I know there is a lot of support in the community for eliminating them, Dan the creator of steem himself is in favor so let's do this guys!!
Oh, for goodness sakes, not again. Where to begin? Obviously, I can't respond to your whole article in one comment, but a few points.
-1-
When the whitepaper was written, people could be rewarded for witnessing, market making, mining, curating, or authoring. After hf17, only witnessing, curating, and authoring will be left. When you take away curating, how far behind do you think the author rewards will be? Your arguments all apply to authors, too. People write for free on other web sites, and the rewards distribution changes the things that they post and write about. Why shouldn't authors be satisfied with the same long-term increasing value of their steem power that you expect the voters to be happy with?
-2-
Writing a bot and keeping it running is not "passive investing." It's taking an active interest in the content on the blockchain. To get a reward, the bot needs to predict what people will vote on. And yes, someone who invests the time and resources it takes to do that well should be rewarded. The better the voting, the bigger the reward.
-3-
Look at the "Blockchain Operations Distribution" chart at the bottom of this page - https://steemdata.com/charts
And your conclusion is that the author rewards should stay and the curation rewards should be eliminated? That slice of curation rewards is an awful lot of unhappy customers to alienate all at the same time. Who, exactly, do you think is going to read the articles if just the writers are still here using the site?
-4-
Finally, the 1% voters are not manual voters. They're bots in pursuit of something very similar to your own goal. Here are the announcements. And Dan's comment is very disappointing (frightening, actually...)
Guild owners voting with their clients's accounts to skew public opinion is a pretty desperate and dishonest behavior.
This is one of those thing that you get with curation rewards..
Agreed. I would downvote it to zero if I saw it earlier.
Agree it's frightening. I think curation rewards are the most innovative thing here. Everything else has been done somewhere else. Lots of places don't pay you to vote. Lots of places pay you on views. Curation is only originality of steem (sbd are also original but not being used well)
Steem is a new protocol for rewarding content online. It is a technology that turns the advertising model on its head and give the power back to the people. It hasn't been done anywhere else.
Its similar to a DAO ( decentralized autonomous organization ) where users are the stakholders and the influence is based on their stake in this 'organization'.
If you think curation is the only originality you are missing the point of this technology.
Agree! 😆
But disagree that it's always the case that
Not all bots directly attempt to predict what people will vote on.
True. I oversimplified that a bit.
This topic has been debated a lot, but I do feel that many of the problems you point out (correctly) can be fixed by a better system. The pro-curation rewards side will say it's what will attract most people to join, by lowering the barrier of entry to participation, and many support increasing rewards to 50-50. The anti curation rewards side would say it's a waste of resources that feeds bots and the greedy. The truth is in the middle. Curation is a valuable service require a lot of time and effort if performed consistently and correctly. Those who do so deserve a reward for their services. The current system is broken, but the idea is not fundamentally flawed. Things will get a lot better with the new rewards curve in HF17, so we are making progress.
These are obviously false even today. Curators stands to earn far more from voting on new authors who don't get much votes. Or whichever post has the least vote competition from bots etc. In fact, some have started spreading their votes through comments as they are mostly all unvoted.
This is why curators that vote for semi-established authors (Steem Guild) made a tiny fraction in curation rewards compared to curators that spread their votes on new authors (Curie or blocktrades) or curators voting on comments (abit).
As a matter of fact, the opposite problem is true - curators are too heavily incentivized to spread their voting rather than continue to support good authors. Of course, this is another problem that can be fixed with a simpler system.
How is curation a valuable service? Valuable to whom?
To me the concept of curating is flawed because it forces people to vote for stuff they are not interested in. It goes against the natural will of people. As more and more content gets published on the steem blockchain the less sense it will make to curate, why would you upvote family pics from people you never heard of? People are going to form their own little communities and upvote within that community, curating content on the whole blockchain makes no sense.
There is a nuance between spread and diversify. What you refer to is diversification. I am talking about the weight guilds put on posts, they never vote under 100%. They put all the weight on the posts that they vote to pocket max curation rewards.
Curation is valuable to the whole platform.
//Edit: to be clear, I'm not talking about the "curation" happening now on Steem, but the natural curation behavior.
Image a new user come to this website to look for popular contents. She'll see the trending page. The posts are there because the curators (voters) have done their work.
Image a Q/A post which have thousands of replies. It's the curators that brought the most valuable replies to the top, so saves later readers' time.
It's not the concept of curating that is flawed, it's the curation reward distribution mechanism that is flawed. A bad-designed incentive mechanism brings bad results. IMHO it's better to make the incentives aligned, but not eliminate them. I strongly suggest you to read my post and the discussions there: https://steemit.com/curation/@abit/benefits-of-pure-linear-reward-distribution .
Good content naturally rises to the top, there is no need to incentivizes people to vote.
Also currently it is not 'good content' that rises to the top , it is 'content that will earn the most money'. The platform don't really reflects what most people want.
It's a valuable service to the community, as many have stated before. Again, that's a function of the current system rather than the concept of curation rewards itself. You are right that in July 2016 the curation landscape was really messed up, and only 20-30 authors were being upvoted regularly. The bots were all swarming to these authors, while the rest of the community went unrewarded.
However, things have changed dramatically since. With the emergence of curation guilds that focused sincerely on quality and seeking out new authors, bots have had to adapt and use clever algorithms to determine quality and vote on posts by new authors. Indeed, this has also encouraged manual curators to vote on good posts they like, because they know a curation guild or whale would be looking out for these posts.
Today, the curation community is so efficient that it is almost impossible for a new author creating good content to go unnoticed for long. This is because the curation rewards allow incentive for intensive curation. Several curators spend several hours every single day trying to find the best quality posts and they'll stop doing so and switch to casual mode without an incentive. Casual mode is where votes keep on piling on the same authors over and over again, with no one bothering to dig to the depths to find great content that was lost.
Without these curators, Steemit would be the wasteland it was in July/Aug 2016. Thousands of users left ignored with zero exposure. Today, while influx of users hasn't happened, many of them have been at least discovered and given a shot at being retained.
I will agree though that with the Communities feature incoming, curation rewards may not be required for voting and could be restructured to actual curation, Communities moderators etc.
This is also demonstrably false. Steem Trail does vote with most posts at 100%, but Curie's average strength has always been about 40%-70%, while Steem Guild was about 25% for many months. Steem Guild has since changed their focus, but your claim of "they never vote under 100%" isn't true at all. That said, the top independent curators blocktrades and abit do vote 100%.
I agree with a lot of things you said , you made a good analysis of the situation.
However to me this is the wrong strategy for mainstream adoption, because it only attracts money opportunists who have no interest in developing their friends/family circle on steemit. They come here with only one purpose which is to make money. This is why steemit is not growing because people see steemit as a site to make money, a bit like gambling, they don't see it as a social media site.
You said
This is good actually. If a new users doesn't get any reward it is a good sign, however when a newbie receives 20 votes at the same time from random stranger the system looks fake af
In any social media site new users have to build their audience, they have to build their communities, their friend,family circle in order to get upvotes. Here on steemit they don't need any of this, it is just a lottery, you post something, sometimes you win sometimes you don't but there is no incentives to build your community.
If curation rewards are eliminated it would allow for natural growth, active users would have more power and people who post here will have to engage more to get upvotes, they will have to bring their family/friends over in order to get upvotes from them, and since users will have more influence it will encourage everyone to buy steem.
If steemit want real growth influence will have to be made available to active users so that these users can build their little communities and grow from there. This is the only way you are going to scale to millions of users and make steemit attractive to the average person.
This site assumes that people want to share stuff with strangers,etc..some people don't want to be part of the whole thing they just want to be with their friends and upvote each other's content. To me this is the only logical way to scale, because it is a natural way, whether their is money or not involved that's how people use social media site.
I feel everything you are looking for is actually achieved by the incentive of curation rewards. I agree with most of it, and I'm confident that curation rewards go some way in achieving our common goal.
The big elephant in the room is the complete lack of concerted marketing and outreach programs to actually bring in new users. Indeed, curation rewards are a novel idea that may encourage millions of users to sign up.
Let's see how the system functions at a representative scale - millions of users. Again, like I said, with the Communities feature coming in the end of the year, we can think of eliminating voting rewards for more direct curation/moderation rewards.
Till then, we'll have to agree to disagree about the impact of curation rewards. :)
Curation rewards encourages people to vote for post outside of their circle/communities, they achieves the opposite of what I am looking for.
Most of the voting is done by people without an incentive because they get near to zero rewards for it anyway. Many people pick up good authors and resteem them to give them exposure, without a financial benefit.
I think people vote because they like the content, and they will continue doing so without financial incentives. Perhaps the ones that vote for incentives/rewards can be missed.
There are very few independent voters with big wallets, I wonder what somebody like @blocktrades would do if there were no curation rewards. Maybe he and his better half would merrily curate along, in the interest of the platform and the price of Steemit.
[Nesting]
But why not reward the people who have done their work well (assume it has really been done well)? With a "right" reward people will feel even better, so more engagement.
To be clear, I'm not saying trending in current system is natural. But current design is not good doesn't mean changing it to anything else is good.
It seems some people's thinking is stuck in an economic model despite its not working, and that could well stifle any discussion aimed at improving things, leading to ineffective, polarised debate only.
When a model doesn't predict what actually happens, or enable what you want, you change it. You can go to a linear curve, you can abolish curation rewards, etc. Both are better options than continuing with what we are doing. I'm in favour of a linear curve now, but if it turns out it doesn't help, I'll start opposing the idea in stead of blaming reality for not cooperating.
I would then be even more in favour of abolishing curation rewards, mainly because I have other ideas about what makes people invest, what motivates people to curate, and what damage bots and reward hunters are doing.
I will freely admit I am stuck in another economic theory for now, one that takes a more anthropological approach and includes non-financial motivation, group dynamics, and fun. I may well be proven wrong also.
Because there is no standard to tell what 'well' is , 'well' is subjective, some people might think well is this and other may think well is another thing, there is no way to define 'well'.
I don't want to change it, i want to eliminate it :)
Maybe in the future we could find a much better curation rewards system but meanwhile it is doing a lot damage and is undermining the credibility of steem.
This is why we have voting. We're trying to define "well" by "quantity of people/SP upvoted minus downvoted". If you disagree with this definition, then we have no base to discuss.
It's still a change.
By the way I just found that you replied to my post earlier, so it's my fault to link it here for several times, sorry.
This is the problem 'well' in the platform is currently defined by being 'content that pay the most.' not ' content that people like the most'
[Nesting]
Sounds like you want to get rid of stake based voting. That's interesting. Ask Dan?
IMHO without stake based voting Steem is no difference than reddit or other sites.
I don't want to get rid of stake based voting. It's the whole point of buying steem, to have more influence than others.
I want a system that do not use money to change people's voting behavior , I want a natural system where people upvote for stuff they like.
[Nesting]
Yes, with stake based voting, naturally you'll have some person has more influence than others. Then naturally you'll have 'content that pay the most' as the 'content that people like the most'. You can't have your cake and eat it. What do you really want indeed?
Use money to encourage people to vote for better content is not evil. BTW "better" is defined above.
I'll say it again: this can be done with a linear rewarding mechanism.
It is extremely valuable to users and to the platform itself. Any site with a large amount of content would be a complete jumble of unusable nonsense if there weren't some form of curation. Most successful (centralized) sites explicitly use a combination of human and algorithmic curation, or algorithmic with some degree of user input. They spend a lot of money developing maintaining and operating these systems. BTW, another word for algorithmic curation in the context of a decentralized system is bot voting.
Reddit has a large amount of content and it's clean. The upvotes/downvote system works well.
A site would be messy only if more people where upvoting trash than good content, also like I said many times in this thread 'complete jumble of unusable nonsense' is subjective if it s stuff that people have upvoted then its content that they want to see and if they havn;t upvoted it then it will be ignored and left in a little corner.
Yes reddit does, and curation is extremely valuable on reddit too (which was the question you asked). It isn't incentivized on reddit but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be. Again, many other people have pointed out to you that reddit doesn't pay for posts either, and has plenty of those. The argument is sound that just because other sites don't pay for X and get X does not mean that X shouldn't be paid for.
And BTW, reddit doesn't rank solely based on votes either. Votes are fed into a secret algorithm that produces a score which is displayed and used for ranking. As I mentioned elsewhere, the analogous concept of an algorithm used for ranking on a centralized system is vote bots that provide algorithmic input to ranking a decentralized system.
The reason it is valuable it is because it isn't incentivized. People are voting with their hearts not their greedy minds. If you were to create a curation rewards system on reddit you would have the exact same problem that steemit has and the site would turn into shit.
I don't know why people keep repeating this, how is this relevant to the discussion of eliminating curation rewards? My argument for removing curation rewards has never been that people will still vote even without rewards. This was just a response to someone who said nobody would vote if curation rewards are eliminated. All the reasons for removing these rewards are in OP.
[nesting]
I would argue the same about posting. A lot of posting on Steemit is just doing what "greedy minds" think will earn rewards (often correctly), and not what they enjoy posting.
Because ultimately a lot of the same reasons apply. Most people participate in social media for enjoyment and social interaction. Even a lot of blogging is basically done for enjoyment outside of a few professionals who already monetize one way or another. The idea that non-professional social interaction in the form of posting is going to be paid introduces many of the exact same distortions that you claim occur with voting (i.e. decisions made by greedy minds rather than hearts), with the main difference being that even if you are the #1 best poster on the site (unlikely being the best curator) you have no incentive to buy or hold STEEM/SP because it doesn't help your earnings.
With greedy mind but writing a rewardable post is much more harder and requires significantly more costs than click upvote button or enter your posting key and rules into voting trails.
I want to tell here the newbie point of view: If humans and/or bots vote without even looking at the content then what does this upvote say about the content ? What does it do? a) unsharpen the cristallization of real good valuable content because nobody looked at it and it was more a question of united voteshifting,trail&whale strategies and not about the quality of the content. b) If i don´t look into the story how can i tell if it is worth gaining reputation ?? I know cruelsome newbie questions but how does a bot/algorhythm define if it is worth gaining repution or being upvoted ??? I thought in the beginning curators are persons watching the content and checkmarking it as usefull. So i did a lot of reseach last 72 h but still I dont understand some
mechanism like STEEMvoter. If i sign up there steemvoter votes for me and as it says in the rules 1 Vote every day steemvoter will use itself to promote$$ itself. this end up in massive downpowering and wealth export as i saw in the steemvoter history. I do not understand the genius advantage behind this but I´m open to learn more. I expressed my fears in the following grafics. Thank you for the attention
NO, in terms of financial amount, the curation reward is far from enough to incentivise any users, including whales, to spend their time on the job.
When we talk financial, it's not the absolute amount that we should be looking, but the return-on-investment (ROI).
Just have a look at how much a Top curator can earns: http://steemwhales.com/trending/?p=1&d=1&s=cr
The average rewards received by the top-10 curators (my bot is among them) are somewhere 0.05~0.1% per-day, which translated into and ROI of 20~40% p.a.
While this figure might sound attractive to some guys, it's not attractive at all if you take into consideration the risk associating (There's high possibility that your SP will become valueless if Steemit couldn't turn out success).
And bear in mind that these return-rates can only be achieved with bots which mainly bring negative value to the platform. Most curators (including whales who running bots) are having an ROI lower than 15% p.a.
Those who honestly do manual curation will hardly get any better than 3%p.a.... and for the coming HF17 with more linear curve, we should see the rewards spread more evenly, which will result in overall lower ROI even for top curation-bots.
Any incentive that couldn't beat the minimum interest-rate or inflation in our real-world, is considered negative incentive.
IMO, the curation reward is never going to be a main reason that's drive people to do the curation.
I agree with you, generally. But I disagree with the claim that human curators can't earn as much ROI as bots. I was right on the heels of @biophil's bot for a few weeks until I had to back off a liitle of the time I was putting into the platform. I was right there earning ~25%+ per year. On a regular curation day, I can still earn over 0.05%, even without using my 40 daily votes.
Here's what I haven't figured out yet:
If you and other users are so adamantly against voting incentives/rewards, then why aren't you declining payout on your posts? Surely, you don't want to be contributing to the greed of voters who will earn ~12% of the total rewards allocated to your posts, right?
And if the argument continues to be that voting is done on other platforms without voting rewards, then let's also get rid of posting rewards - since posting on the most popular social media sites occurs millions and millions of times per day without rewards for doing so. Let's remain consistent here, shall we?
And if we're going to remain consistent and be opposed to rewards, why are we here? Why don't we have @dan rewrite the code and make this a free platform like all the others? I suppose Steemit would then just have to attract a larger user base with only its fantastic UI functions and design.
Has the "revolution" already ended? Did I miss it?
To be honest I don't care about the money from post, I never think about this when I post, i think of the comment response. If you look at my history you will see that I hardly ever post compared to people who posts everyday.
Also you fail to understand that I am not against curators personally, I didn't create this posts because I wanted to eliminate their gains. I created this post to improve the system and increase the value of steem.
This is not the argument actually. This is a response to a stupid argument which is that people will stop voting if curation rewards are eliminated.
Posting rewards do not harm the system in any way, they actually bring value to the site unlike curation rewards.
Your argument would be valid only if posts had the same bad incentives that curation rewards have which is not the case.
There is only a tiny amount of people who actually make any significant money from curation.
Curations rewards are not the same has authors rewards, please don't take things out of context.
Yes, and your plan to "increase the value of steem" is by eliminating the incentives for curators - to "eliminate their gains."
No, that was a response to the notion that "rewards aren't necessary because people will vote anyway." You have argued this point repeatedly - that users don't need monetary incentives to vote for content. The exact same is true for people who post online and do it without monetary incentives. There is no difference at all in the two arguments. Since this system is based on incentives for both content creators and content consumers, because they both perform necessary tasks of creation and evaluation, the reward incentives are for both types of users. If you eliminate one or heavily favor one over the other, then the incentive structure becomes imbalanced and the results become skewed, as we have observed.
What is your proof that the existence of curation rewards "harms" the system? And why do you believe that posting rewards do not? And are you not aware of the spam, plagiarism, and sybil attempts to game the system? I don't see how you can simply say that one incentive is bad and the other is good when both can be gamed, both are gamed, and both were designed to achieve specific results for the platform. But for all of the gaming that occurs (and was known would occur), the incentive structure has been proven to work for both creation and curation.
My argument is valid because people do post and do vote on other sites without monetary incentives. This is a fact. Let's not pretend that voting is done on other sites for free, therefore, we don't need to incentivize it. And let's not pretend that only voters are driven by the desire to earn. This isn't why curation is incentivized on Steemit. It's incentivized because this platform was created explicitly for the purposes of rewarding social media users for their social media activities.
This is irrelevant. The average user isn't supposed to be making "significant money" from upvoting posts in the first place. And I would argue that the average user isn't supposed to be making "significant money" from posting either. But users do have the opportunity to earn some money from being active on the platform. This isn't a job and this isn't supposed to be a UBI. It's simply an onboarding mechanism for a cryptocurrency. That's one of very few things that this site actually does well, in my opinion.
Nothing was taken "out of context." I was simply applying the arguments to posting rewards.
Which in turn will increase the value of their steem. Also there is only a tiny minority earning decent rewards from curation.
80-90% of voting is done by bots, curation rewards do not incentivize voting, they incentivize people running bots to earn money.
The structure is unbalanced today because of this, comments gets a few views and hundreds of votes, you can't get any more unbalanced than that.
Read OP please
Posting rewards and curation rewards are not comparable. There is no algorithm for posting. They are two very different things with different incentives.
Thanks for validating my point.
90% of curators are bots, and so inactive on the platform.
I want to add more. If one posts garbage, it can be downvoted and ones reputation will be harmed. There is both positive/negative feedback system on posting reward. However, there is no feedback on one's voting itself, and there is no costs from voting.
Equating no curation reward with no posting reward does not make sense IMO, and I agree that badly designed (mis-aligned) incentives is the target here.
Actually authors have nothing to lose, because authors don't need to buy STEEM to be able to post. Write good contents then earn more, or write garbage then earn less even nothing, but it is still no financial cost.
On the other hand, for voters, they have financial opportunity cost as a whole, voting badly (or others voting badly) then STEEM price go down, but voting better doesn't mean price go up, just my speculations though.
Both authors and voters don't have to buy STEEM if they signed up via Steemit. There are many free accounts using Steemvoter service (while they barely get curation reward, they are doing because they can earn anyway).
Generally, writing a post consumes tens of times of time and energy more than reading, or infinite times more than bots because they don't read. While, there is an argument for tipping-based system as well and I understand it's reasons, I would say rewarding author is essential.
Bad voting doesn't directly decrease the price nor good voting increase it. But degraded platform by bad voting can drive away users and consequently harm the price.
Except...this isn't true. If one continually makes bad votes, then they risk losing out on curation rewards because other voters may likely disagree with their choices. The result of that is not earning a curation reward and the cost is losing that voting power.
Let's not continue to make arguments based on the skewed results we see today due to disproportionate pre-mined stakes and imbalanced incentive structures. Why do some people continue to confuse cause and effect?
That's true only if one makes very bad votes 40 times everyday. If they do not make such a mistake, there are some profit.
Many for-profit bots are from non-pre-mined accounts. Curation reward is a separate issue; not heavily related to fairness but related to wrongly designed incentive system.
Lol, I'm crying
lol
This is the saddest part actually, people are fighting for crumbs and they want these crumbs so badly that they can't see the enormous value that would come from removing these crumbs.
No, the saddest part is that the rewards are only 12% because they have been reduced from 50% to 25%, minus the reverse auction. This is the reason why you're seeing more automation for voting. It has to do with that whole incentive thing. When the rewards for spending time/energy on a specific task are reduced, you tend to get less of it or a lower quality, or both. Or you get automation, which can result in the same outcome.
Hence Linux?
There are other rewards and motivators than money. As long as you do not include those in your economic thinking, I predict your predictions will not be very good.
Yes, but on this platform, the incentives are the cryptocurrency. It's the entire purpose of the token. It is meant as an onboarding mechanism for social media users, hence the payments in STEEM, STEEM Power, and STEEM-backed dollars.
As long as people refuse to acknowledge the purpose, I predict that their solutions will not be very good.
Many debating tricks and very little reasoning in what you write here, and I suspect you know that. Very un-gentlemanlike, I'm used to better from you.
That's impossible. My profile specifically states that I am indeed a gentleman.
My apologies. It must be true, then.
Wow, what a post I stumbled upon here. Great points.
Obviously there are many businesses now using the curation reward system but also many new apps build on Steem like Dtube, Viewly, Steepshot, Zappl and now Mangosteem Chat. Also the price is way up to when this post was written.
Regarding all that, what are your thoughts on curation rewards now after half a year?
As a newcomer to Steemit January 2017. I looked to the voting on posts as a measure of progress with my writing,but am now disappointed to read that the voting can be manipulated by bots and other means,so if the system is flawed and voting discontinued,then what is there to inspire challenge?
It reminds me of the Stalin quote -"It isn't the people who vote that counts,it's the people who count the votes" -
And - "The more things change the more they stay as they are"
https://steemit.com/@ijavee
This is a good point. In a usual social media site your circle will grow organically and you have to engage a lot in order to get votes but on steemit you don't have to, you just have to be lucky. It's like a lottery. And there is no way to measure progress because you posts will either get pennies or tens of dollars, there is no organic growth its a flat line ( luck/no luck/luck/no luck)
Thank you snowflake. That explains it perfectly.I can now tell friends and family why there can be such a discrepancy in posts that receive similar number of votes but wildly varying rewards.I'm not sure yet that I see this as a positive as you do,but I like Steemit, so onward and hopefully upwards.Cheers.Ivor.
Something you havn't yet been given the taste of, which is called influence.
If curation rewards are eliminated you will see what it is, it's pretty cool and you will always want more of it.
I have another proposal: Build a competitor to Steemit on a different blockchain with the incentives built the way you wan't them.
There is a license that prevent this, without it people would have forked long ago.
Your proposal is aiming for an entirely different product. Not a product that I would place a bet on, but no license can prevent you from building it.
Yeah we are watching out for your new blockchain killer product @onthewayout - nice steemname btw :-). Curious to have an analysis of how many posts on steemit cover the topic and platform steemit - I guess 80%? This might not by nature attract new content creators #justsaying
I disagree that the curation reward should be completely removed. It would certainly be a good idea to consider reducing it to something like 10% or 5%. The code is already there and an infrastructure was built around it. I can think of many inefficiencies that can be resolved by that extra incentive. (I'm not an expert and didn't think everything through, but that seems like a safer alternative)
The way the reward curve was made combined with curation reward meant that cabals would make money by colluding to upvote the same content, no matter what the content was.
The content upvoted by these guilds is, by internet standard, garbage. They are often the kind of posts that one wouldn't bother posting on their own facebook feed. Yet this "100% original content" get created for the sole purpose of being posted on steem.
Curie has a mission to encourage people who fail. People who manage to fail repetitively but show perseverance get the equivalent of a welfare handout.
How unspectacular is this from the outside world?
https://steemit.com/steemit/@donkeypong/announcing-project-curie-bringing-rewards-and-recognition-to-steemit-s-undiscovered-and-emerging-authors
"Only original content. Articles, poetry, photography, videos, recipes, etc."
There are billions of times more content being produced online that one can consume, 99.99% of this content is made available for free and 99% of this content is being produced for free. The concept of incentivizing the creation of completely original content solely for being consumed on steemit.com (a still half-assed UI) was a bad idea, yet Ned, Bernie and bunch of whales have put their SP behind this concept through guilds. I have no idea to what extent the people at the top of this platform are clueless about content marketing but I am very scared about my investment if it continues anywhere near that path.
In a vibrant market, I would agree with this, but we're not there yet. There aren't enough people here to determine what success or failure really means, so voters and guilds need to make judgement calls about what will attract people who are off-platform and don't have the ability to vote for themselves. Right now, I think that new visitors need to see some, "I can do that" content, and authors need to be encouraged to post about topics other than proposed adjustments to the curation rewards curve and flagging.
I agree totally about the focus on original and substantive content. Even busy.org can't really be like traditional social media, because they share the blockchain with steemit and posts there are probably still going to get flagged by people on steemit for "link spam." It really smothers organic behavior. Of all changes in hf17, I'm most encouraged by the elimination of the penalty for more than 4 post per day.
This is a very, very small community in its nascent stage, so it's only natural that a vast majority of content is mediocre. There's no one "guilds". There can be guilds of various kinds. It simply means a collaborative curation effort. I would love to see collaborative curation focusing on non-original, engaging content. If there's a Curie focusing on original content, there needs to be guilds that focus on non-original content. That the community hasn't bothered in over 6 months makes me fear that maybe people are just interested in original content on Steemit... Yes, the content may be mostly mediocre, but it's the best Steemit can do right now.
Since you seem so strongly against original content and you are on of the top investors, I'd encourage you to take the initiative and promote curation of non-original content etc. I'm doing my bit by voting on such content, but of course, we need like whales like yourself to support such initiatives to have any impact. All the best.
This wouldn't remove any issues caused by curation rewards.
I would reduce the incentive for people to delegate their SP onto guilds for the content reward. I'm not saying it would remove all issues I mean it would reduce it over time.
I don't think it would, people would take whatever money is on the table.
Absolutely. I haven't posted my long overdue notes on my thoughts of the problem with bots, but I have commented here and there on the importance of consciousness to evaluate content that will represent the reality of what is valued.
A site that is being evaluated largely by bots, or autovotes, doesn't represent an accurate evaluation of the content being produced. Of course I concluded the same as you with regards to investors: who the hell would want to invest in a content site that's not even evaluated by human consciousness? Game-picking gambling-mentality free-lottery tickets are also not helpful in that respect, no longer term value and simply a drain of 0 value to the platform. What investor wants that being pumped by whales? SteemSports was the first, but that crap is still around.
Curation rewards drive people to go for valued targets, and inhibit evaluation of content for content, which is another big thing I push. Getting rid of them is good all around as I see, I agree with you.
Regarding comment votes, look at how much I vote for posts vs. comments, and look at my % votes on posts vs. comments. I'll tell you now, I think I vote for as many or possibly more comments in a day. And I usually keep it at 100%. I don't care about curation rewards ;)
Great point!
Same here. Not KISS at all like you say lol. Copies the problem so a separate economic sector, I concluded such in my review of the proposal in the comments when it first came out. It was a very long comment LMAO.
Yup. Wake up people.
Resteemed to support a better step forward.
The current curation awards encourage upvoting and discourage flagging. Because flagging earns no curation. This is actually a pretty big deal for me.
There would be much more flagging without curation awards and this would hurt the platform.
Downvoting is an integral part of the system, it has become an issue because of power concentration.
If you remove curation rewards, users will have a much bigger say and so they would be able to upvote any downvoted posts back up
Please read this post I explained this in more details https://steemit.com/steem/@snowflake/my-take-on-what-happened-to-karenmckersie