Gamification, influence: Importance of a level playing field
I just came accross this post https://steemit.com/steemit/@crowdifywepayyou/the-paralells-between-steemit-and-empire-avenue from @crowdifywepayyou which seems to be the CEO of
https://crowdifyclub.com/auth/login who made an excellent point which I have also referred to multiple times.
Empire Kred and Steemit both heavily reward the early joiners and while this is OK financially it is not sustainable when it interrupts the dynamics of the community on an every day interaction level. This is why our forthcoming "influence" score will start again every month and why nearly all your Crowdify points will disappear every month if you have not used them.
I believe that you have to give an even chance to someone who just entered the community a month ago to someone who has been there 3 years. Otherwise they will become easily frustrated and continually running off to join the next "big shiny thing". Nobody likes to feel small.
He said : it is OK financially but not sustainable when it interrupts the dynamics of the community on an every day interaction level
I 100% agree with this. This is why it is so important to seperate influence and investment. It is OK for early adopters to have a lot more money than other users but when it comes to the influence which is the dynamics of the whole system it is not OK, it's not sustainable nor scalable.
Here is how crowdify addressed this issue : This is why our forthcoming "influence" score will start again every month and why nearly all your Crowdify points will disappear every month if you have not used them.
Similarly steemit will need a mechanism to keep everyone on a level playing field. The proposal I made recently addresses this issue. Instead of removing points like crowdify does it will make 'points/steem power' over a certain limit partially usable. The steem power that's over 250 MV or 100 MV will not be able to upvote but only downvote. The limit will also be adjustable to make sure levels are reachable regardless of the price of steem. This is absolutely necessary to attract new users. Like crowdify said 'nobody likes to feel small' . Right now on steemit 99% of users feel small, especially newbies, they have absolutely no hope to climb up the steemit ladder. If you want to know why the userbase is still small look no further.
The only way you are going to improve user retention is by making the steemit game accessible to everyone, you can do all the marketing you want or create a comment pool if people don't understand the rules of the game or don't find the game appealing they won't stay.
I upvoted your post/mine for the discussion but disagree that there should be different class of accounts / role. Whale will just split their account and will be harder to follow.
With great power comes great responsibility.
We should start by flattening the reward curve. A simple way that could help people not feel so small is to change the $0.00 into 0.0000
Whales would be highly discouraged to split because they won't receive any financial reward if they do.
The more whales do split the faster the ones who don't will build up their power.
If whales were to split and upvote their shit posts they would get moderated by other whales. The system would be a lot more scrutinized than it is now and posts would get paid based on their true value so users who want to cheat the system will have to post quality content to receive good payouts in which case they probably deserve it anyway
And yes I also think the curve should be flattened, removed actually. I'm not sure it would make much of a difference but we will see, it's in hard fork 17 apparently.
Agreed, largely. Michael (Crowdify) does know his community building.
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. "Nobody likes to feel small," yet the system has to be merit/contribution based.... because otherwise, why bother?
The Steemit infrastructure is already partitioned in a working way... with SP representing one's "stake" in the platform and Steem/SBD being current rewards. Couple of things are screwed in the equation, however... one being the imbalance between the weight/influence given to automation/scripts/bots vs. actual human interaction and curation. My actually reading, voting on and engaging in interaction on 50 articles a day seems to have little "value" to the overall picture, compared to an army of bots that clearly do not "read" or "evaluate" or "interact with" the content. As a newcomer I look at that and think "Why should I bother?"
The other missing factor is external engagement. As an experiment, I wrote an "article style" post the other day and "distributed" it to the general public through the niche channels I usually use when I write something. It took about 72 hours to pass 1000 page views, and it's still going. These are actual human eyeballs, actually reading the content, making them actual potential new Steemians.
But why should I bother? I don't even know if any of them made accounts. Even if they DID, I have no way to contact them and say "thanks, and welcome, and I hope you decide to create your OWN content here, feel free to message me if you have any questions!" So, there's that.
Part of the "problem" (I think) seems to be that there's an inherent contradiction between the concept of "decentralization" and "building community." One means "apart," the other means "together." So the real challenge seems to be how to build the infrastructure in a decentralized manner, and yet have the actual execution of the infrastructure happen centrally. Stated a little differently... I don't really *care" if there are 17 independent helper apps that can help me create the effect I want; that's too much hassle. I can just go back to Facebook where everything runs on one platform.
I'm not saying ME personally, but that's how the average blogger/user content creators thinks. And if Steemit can't provide an approximation of that, "thay ain't no way forward," as they say...
Sorry, wandered a bit off topic there...
Couldn't have said it better myself.
This is an excellent point and the reason I proposed to remove curation rewards, I believe they are harmful to the platform and that no serious business is going to integrate steem if it's run by robots.
One thing though, bots don't have more influence per se, it's just that many whales chose to subscribe to guilds which are mostly operating with bots.
I think this is very difficult to do on the blockchain. People could be paid per views for example but the blockchain can't tell number of view..
Something like a referal program could work though, but like I said it would be a waste of time to market steemit right now, it just isn't ready for a broader audience.
I know what you mean but I don't necessarily think decentralization is in contradiction with community building, I think the problem is human nature, humans always want more power and more money. This is why to me the solution is to create a fairer system( based on merit like you said) where the incentives are aligned with everyone ( not just the 0.2%).
Really great discussion.
"This is why it is so important to seperate influence and investment. It is OK for early adopters to have a lot more money than other users but when it comes to the influence which is the dynamics of the whole system it is not OK, it's not sustainable nor scalable." Great point. ~ No one likes to feel small. Indeed. It seems there are some counterintuitive disincentives to wider adoption. A cross-purposes at odds, stagnating the platform.
It sounds as though Yours.org is busy fleshing out ways to get around these bottlenecks.
I think you're right, and whoever solves the problem in a decentralized and trustless way will become enormously wealthy.
The recent proposal I made solves this problem, there are still a few things to work out but the solution is there and indeed we will all become wealthy as it will make steem a lot more appealing for websites to integrate, will increase demand for steem and will make the whole system scalable, fun and sustainable.
non-practical. They can simply split those MV into multiple smaller accounts.
Please check out this post https://steemit.com/steem/@snowflake/guardian-of-the-steem-universe-a-different-perspective-on-the-role-of-whales-within-steem-ecosystem-part-2
The idea is to create incentives to not split.
Adding more complexity on rules & governance is never a good idea IMO...
Resteeming to keep the conversation going.
I wasn't aware of this other platform. Thanks for bringing this to the discussion.
https://twitter.com/Soul_Eater_43/status/835895276556718080
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
The problem with steem is that the outcome is a multiplication of two power functions.
If you read the white paper, there is a wonderful little chart that looks like a hocky stick. It shows the most popular posts get large payouts, and that there is a long tail that gets some payouts. This is a power function.
If you plot the amount of voting power it is also a hocky stick.
When you multiply these together, you get an even steeper graph, with a far diminished tail. And with the steem minimums 0.001 SP and 0.02 cents the long tail gets cut short.
So, if we want the curve to look like the white paper, we need to apply a logarithmic function (opposite of power function) to the vote power.
nice one! could you upvote my post?