Guardian of the steem universe : A different perspective on the role of whales within steem ecosystem [ part 2]
This is a follow up to a post I made a couple days ago. The idea was very well received by the community which encouraged me to dig even deeper into it and explore different possibilities. Some feedback and comments have been very useful for me to come up with what I believe would be the best design for steem.
Before we get into the actual proposal I want to explain why I think steem in its current form will have a very difficult time to go viral and reach mainstream adoption. I will then explain how the proposal addresses all of these issue.
Steem is still very complexe and difficult to understand
Steem is still very confusing and hard to grasp for people. These are the kind of questions users often ask themselves: Why do all the votes on my post come up at the 30 min mark ? Why does this post with 20 votes have higher reward than this one with 180 votes? How can my post have 4 views and 70 votes? Why did I receive a smaller payout than what was advertised on my post? Why do most comments have no rewards? What is a curation guild and why should I care ? Why isn't counter moving up when I upvote things ? Users shouldn't have to ask any of this.
Steem price is held back by flawed incentives
Like I said in part 1, the current set up is totally meaningless to the average user. The incentive to buy steem and power up in order to gain more influence is clearly not working. 99.8% of steemians have basically no influence in the system. They would have to spend huge amount of money to be influential.
I like to compare steem power as upgrades and power ups options in video games because they have a lot of similarities. These options are how game developers get paid, they are the source of their revenue. Now imagine if these things would cost a fortune to acquire nobody would buy them and game developers would go broke. Steem is no different, it needs a revenue model to sustain itself, if no one buy steem power steem the token will end up worthless.
Steem is not scalable
The vast majority of the steem power is held into very few hands, 0.2 % of steemians own 85% of the total voting power.
The narrative has always been , just give it time it is going to redistribute itself. This is false. I have written an entire article explaining how the redistribution of power will be a perpetual issue due to the price increase. You can read more about it here
https://steemit.com/steemit-ideas/@snowflake/what-if-i-told-you-i-ve-uncovered-a-top-secret-community-this-community-is-so-secretive-that-if-you-want-to-work-your-way-up-its . The higher the price of steem the harder it will be for people to gain influence in the system, this also reduces the incentives for people to buy steem power which is another problem.
Also one thing that has been overlooked is the fact that whales will often sell their share to buy it back at a cheaper price.
Here is a quote from @abit which is very telling :
If I see there is an opportunity that I can buy back same stake at a lower price, or I think the price will go down and have little chance to come back in the future, I'll sell some for sure.
By doing this whales increase their power and influence in the platform. I quoted @abit here but he is definetely not the only whale doing this. This is the mindset of pretty much every trader, but whales are more successfull doing it because they have the money to move the market.
Curation guilds are a good initiative, they have done a lot to improve reward distribution but they are not a real solution. These guilds do not incentivize people to buy steem power, they make the system even harder to understand and they take the natural process of upvoting away from users. They are also a centralized solution and not accessible to everyone. Don't expect people to submit post so they can be voted on , this concept is flawed for mainstream adoption.
A scalable design also means that the system can accommodate all users. More specifically that users are able to send themselves a few cents without having a whales swimming around.
Facebook records about 40k post every second, can you imagine 200 whales or maybe a few thousands going through 40 000 post per second? The day this happens this is how they are going to look like
Steem is run by bots
Bots are just the manifestation of a broken system. To me a bot vote is like a fake vote, it is meaningless especially to the content creator. You might say it is not totally insignificant because it adds a payout but when you get 100+ votes and a mere couple cents added...most people would take 100 real views over a few cents any day of the week.. How can steemit earn the reputation of being a site for quality content when most of it is voted by bots?
Steem is not fun
There is no real excitement in being part of steem because 99.8% of users can't play the game or don't understand the rules.
Steem is like playing a video game , being stuck at level 8 and being required to pay $10 000 to get access to level 9. Actually it's even worse than this because on steem you never even get to go to level 1, you are just stuck and so you leave the game.
Here is a quote from @son-of-satire who definetely gets it
I really like your line of thinking, and empowering the minnows would most definitely have a positive effect on the community. It must be so satisfying clicking the upvote button and seeing that you have given someone else a reward. I imagine that would get addictive before long, and people would want more and more STEEM power to increase how much of a reward they can give.
Give the minnows some power, some purpose, and they will give so much more back to the platform. More minnows will arrive wanting a piece of that power for themselves, and they will stay once they have had a taste of it. Many of them will love it so much that they will invest their own money into STEEM so that they can award people with a dollar, or two, or three, achieving a higher level of gratification each time.
People are sick of centralized power. It's all around society and people have had enough. If Steemit can find a way to decentralize the influence, then we will see people swarm in by the millions. That's what I think at least.
I totally agree with @son-of-satire and he is 100% right. Steem has the potential to be something so much better, we could create a whole different dynamic where steem power becomes addictive to people, the more they buy the higher the steem price goes, the bigger they can give with it and so they will want even more. That's how you create a steady demand flow.
The steem power token was meant to be a tool to enable people to reward each other so why are only 0.2% of people able to use this tool?
I want to propose a totally different design, one that will re-align the incentives with the vast majority of steem users, create a more scalable system, fuel demand for the steem token and make steem more fun and engaging. This proposal will also address the bot issue and make the system a lot easier to understand for newbies.
The idea is very simple.
2 categories of user will be created : Users and moderators.
Users (all accounts < $8000)
Users can upvote/downvote as usual
Users won't receive any of the inflation nor will they receive curation rewards.
Users will just upvote for the things they like and downvote for the thing they don't like.
Users's voting influence will be proportional to the steem power that they have.
Moderators (all accounts > $8000 )
Moderators can only downvote ( moderate ) content
Moderators will receive inflation proportionally to how many steem power they have.
Funds that were previously allocated to curation reward will be distributed to moderators in proportion to their steem power.
I don't know what exact inflation percentage should go to moderators but we could always increase it if the incentive to remain in that category isn't strong enough.
Basically only moderators will receive inflation, they will have a financial incentive to use their account to moderate only.
Moderators who still want to use their steem power to upvote content will be able to do so by splitting their account, but they won't receive any financial reward when doing so and their vote might get moderated ( especially if they abuse it).
What interface changes would be needed to accomodate the new system ?
- First of all I think we should replace the word downvote with moderation vote.
At the blockchain level a downvote has only one purpose, reducing the rewards, which is why I think a moderation vote is more suited. It is also important that users do not misinterpret the action of moderators. Downvote has a bad connotation that I think we should get away from. Moderators will be the guardians of the platform, they will ensure that the best content gets the best reward and that everyone is fairly compensated, this adds tremendous value to the site and has a lot of merit.
- Payout amount information should not be visible on the interface until it's actually paid out, the only information visible on a post during voting period should be users's upvotes/downvotes and the amount one’s own vote added to the payout. The purpose of this feature is to hide moderators's action during voting period.
Moderators vote should not be visible on the interface at all, not even after reward was paid out.
A post during the voting period would look like this. Below you can see I have added 5 cents to this post but have no idea what the payout is or will be.
The total payout will be revealed only when voting period ends.
- A report button on posts would be useful to facilitate moderators's work. This is not really needed right now but when moderators are hit with 40 000 posts per sec you will understand its usefuleness.
I'm sure you have noticed that in the proposal curation rewards have been removed entirely. Let me explain the reasonning behind the decision. First let's see what steemit says about them.
Earn STEEM by being the first to upvote popular content
Every post submitted to STEEM is voted upon by users. These votes help other users identify content that is worth their limited attention and bring significant value to the platform. Steem recognizes that sifting through the abundance of new submissions is work that deserves to be rewarded.
So essentially curation rewards have been created to help sort good content from trash content. But is this really a problem? When you go on other forums are you overwhelmed with garbage that you can't view the great content? No. Do you usually see crap articles on the reddit trending board? No. This is because upvoting good content is a natural behaviour, people will do it regardless of the incentives. To me curation rewards are trying to solve a problem that really don't exist and they bring with them a lot of bad incentives.
For example curators are encouraged to vote early, more precisely around the 30 min mark in order to earn the highest curation reward, this has turned the platform into a completely fake system where everything is run by bots and driven by money.
Curation rewards is also the cause of the general users confusion
See what I wrote earlier
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?
All of this is caused by curation rewards.
As you can see a problem also caused by these rewards is that nobody votes for comments because users have no financial interest in doing so. What once used to be a natural behaviour has now become a restricted one..steemit created curation rewards to improve content selection but the incentives made it worse.
If you want the best content the last thing you want is have bots sort it instead of humans. Bots are programmed to vote for posts that will earn the highest curation rewards not the highest quality content. The only reason bots havn't turned this place into complete shit yet is because there are still real humans running them. You know what curation rewards remind me of? A bribe. You basically vote for something not because it's good but because you will earn something out of it if you do, a bit like lobbying a politician.
So how does this proposal address all of the issues referenced above. Let's go through them one by one
- steem is still very complexe and difficult to understand
It will remove all the complexity, particularly the one introduced by curation rewards. It would make the system a lot more familiar to what users are used to on other forums and social media site.
- steem price is held back by flawed incentives
The proposal will re-align the incentives with the vast majority of users, they will finally have a good reason to buy steem power and understand the purpose of buying it.
- steem is not scalable
It will allow steem to instantly adapt and handle any increase in the amount of posts/users. Not a single quality content post will be left without payout because at least a few people will see it and vote for it ( every vote will now make a difference) The report button will facilitate moderator's work by bringing overpaid content to light.
- steem is run by bots
Most bots will go extinct the minute curation rewards are removed. Some users may still be running them to make sure their favorites authors gets their votes everytime but bots won't be a nuisance like they are today.
- steem is not fun
Following the analogy made earlier in the post, new users will be at level 1 by default. In other words their vote would and should be worth at least 1 cents when they register so they understand the rules and get a real taste of the game straight away. Steem power should be like a product that you want to sell, you give users a free degustation or a free trial so they come back for more.
The proposal will also solve a few other issues :
It will increase comment voting, no longer will users want to preserve their voting power to vote for something that will earn them curation reward. Voting power will be seen as something that you spend and buy more of. The devs wouldn't have to create a seperate pool for comment reward (which I consider band aid solution similar to curation guilds), people would just upvote comments instinctively.
It will solve the issue where a steem price increase would make gaining influence more and more difficult which would reduce incentive to buy steem power overtime. The $8000 number that seperates users from moderators is an arbitrary number and could be increased or decreased, this will allow steem to realign incentives if necessary as the platform grows and always meet users expectations.
Hidding payout amount as innocent as it seems, will turn out to be a big positive for steem. It will make the site a lot less focused on the money aspect and a lot more fun to be part of.
I've been thinking about these issues a lot, I've tried to offer some alternative solution but most of them were vulnerable to sybil attacks. I am convinced that such design would work as intended.
Everyone needs to understand that a system like this would benefit us all including the whales. Whales really will not lose much as they could still split their account if they really wanted to use their voting power to vote. It's just that the incentives will be constructed in a way that makes it not the most attractive option.
I've always said that if we want steem to evolve there will have to be some trade offs along the way. I believe this one is very good because it doesn't take away much from anyone . Essentially what the proposal says is that you either curate and have power or moderate and have money, but it also gives power to moderators because they will still have the same voting weight that they currently have that they can use to moderate content.
A design like this would be really easy to implement and could be tested on the real network without any code modification, all it would take is 'moderators' to stop upvoting for 24 hours and see how users vote and moderation is handled.
Users sceptical with regards to the motives behind me wanting the change just need to look at my wallet, this proposal would put me in the moderators category and I am also subscribed to biophil's bot so you would think removing curation rewards and bots from the system is the last thing I want to do. It is NOT because I understand all the positives that would come out of that and see the bigger picture.
Devs want to make steem as simple as possible, you can't get simpler than this and the fact that the proposal happens to solve so many issues all at once tells me it's the right path forward.
People use social media spontaneously as a way to document their lives or share experiences and moment with friends,etc..social media is all about natural interactions, to me it was always a bad idea to mix money with social media, because I thought it would take away some of the authenticity and genuineness. If you want money to be integrated in a social website it needs to be abstracted as much as possible so it doesn't become the primary focus of the whole site. Steemit has turned the social media experience into a weird thing where people discuss, flag, bots, whales,etc....sure some people may like it here but in the current form steemit is not ready for prime time.
Please share, resteem and make your voice heard if you want to see this happening. I am only one voice among many.
One idea (not so thought out):
The main reason whales are upvoting is curation rewards. If we remove them entirely and implement your idea I think many whales will abstain from voting which will give more power to the minnow. I think your idea is a very good balance, basically even minnows who want more power could just stop upvoting and they would receive more share than other. The problem is that curation rewards offer an incentives to still upvote, if you want your idea to work better you need to remove them entirely so that people have 0 incentives to upvote ( like my proposal did) Seriously talk to the devs about this, and tell them to remove curation rewards. Idk know if you read my post entirely but i explained why curation rewards are bad and serve no good purpose at all.
check out how much most whales make in curation rewards and you might change you mind about this position.
I don't think he is incorrect. A large portion of the whale voting power that is actually deployed (largely through guilds and bots) does generate large curation rewards, even if not all individual whales do.
Well my thoughts on this heads in the direction of what is best for everybody. In my experience without being whale status is this: I vote without even thinking of what is in it for me but instead vote because I know the content contains love, integrity, and understanding. I use Steemit because I love the knowledge base it shares while allowing "me to be me."
Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc... are all designs of a social experience where no truth can dwell and no though can shine through because all lies seperate in the end... Meaning,
Yes I meant in this proposal to remove curation rewards. Although I have mixed feelings about that, as I do feel that curation rewards (in some form, maybe not the current one) serve a useful purpose. But I do agree the system could work without them.
Have you ever discussed this proposal with the devs or did you just come up with the idea?
Also curious to know how curation rewards would serve a useful prupose?
Some similar ideas have been discussed in the context of having "investors class" of SP/VESTS that would incentivize opting out of curation (also something @arhag has discussed/proposed). This particular variant I just came up with.
I don't really have time to get into the question of curation rewards, but some aspects of it are pretty obvious: motivation to buy SP (though as you say, only in large quantities), for those who are good curators, incentive for stakeholders to actively vote and not succumb to voter apathy, etc.
@smooth There is one thing though that your idea doesn't address is that when the steem price increases it makes it more difficult for users to gain influence and so the the incentives to buy steem power will go down over time.
Another thing also is that the influence of minnow will fluctuate a lot more than in what I proposed. I still think the idea has merit though.
it doesn't. At least, not really.
for example, lets say there's 1 trillion vests in the whole system. Steem costs $1. I buy a .001% share for $10, 000.
Now lets say steem doubles in price to $2. You're correct that now, my $10K only buys me a half sized (.0005%) share.
But -- its buying me that share in a double sized system. A system that offers twice the rewards.
FOr example if my $10,000 .001% share of steem buys me a vote worth 10 cents when steem is worth $1, my $10000, .0005% share buys me a vote also worth 10 cents when steem is worth $2.
DOes the guy who bought his $10k worth of steem first, when the price was lower, have an advantage over the other guy who bought it when the price was higher? sure. So for example, if you buy $10K at $1, then i buy it at $2, youre going to have twice (actually 4 times because of quadratic weighting) as much influence as I am. But thats the way its supposed to work
Not 4 times. That only applies to the extent you are the only one voting on the post. If A has 1, B has 2, and C has 3, then A+C yields a reward of 16, but B+C yields a reward of not 64 but 25.
Overall your point that buying influence doesn't suffer much as the price goes up (but does a little, and that's okay) is a good one
You are right about the fluctuation at least. Switching this on or off on say a 24 hour basis might be too much, and the "investor VESTS" idea might be a better way to go. In that case the obvious approach would have it taking 13 weeks to swtich between classes of VESTS, so there wouldn't be wild fluctuations but more likely some sort of loose equilibrium (as there is currently with SP vs. STEEM)
well, maybe author rewards are also evil then ? )
Since people would keep voting for posts even wuthout curation rewards, I think the same would apply to authors too, they will keep posting even without rewards )
Curation rewards create a lot of bad incentives ( mainly they encourage bot/fake voting), author rewards don't.
That could be disputed. For example, authors with a following milking it but posting crap because they know their followers often upvote regardless of quality or have low standards.
This is a good idea. So when their share is temporarily deprived it would go to all other accounts that havn't upvoted instead? I think you are onto something there smooth. Assuming there is still curation rewards the penalty would have to be greater than what people earn by upvoting with curation rewards?
I believe that curation rewards should go though, the idea you propose would be much more efficient if curation rewards didn't exist, they are very bad for steem and serve no purpose beside creating bad incentives. Curation rewards should just be distributed as inflation to SP holders.
Yes exactly.
Nice insight smooth, if I understand correctly, Please tell me if I am thinking of this correct:
Since minnows making 15% on $10 don't care, whales are going to not vote just to collect 15% annually on their asset that they can afford to sit on because they are well enough off? I totally get this. If you were already a world traveler, then why would you want to take time away from your lifestyle to get paid an extra 5% to whatever the high end of this range is (what is it?).
Would you give this this up for another 5% annually on your already fat stack:
oops, sorry, smooth, maybe I should put
just to be politically correct.
Yes that is basically the idea. Encourage whales to opt out of voting by providing passive income as an alternative (exact mechanism TBD, and that is often the hard part)
Oh, so that has NOT happened yet? Sorry, confused..
No it isn't. This post and my reply to it were ideas how to improve the situation.
How about if we just got the whales together and had them create multiple steemit markets using alternate cryptos but all under the platform of steemit..
This is really the big argument against the proposal that I keep running into. It is a valid concern.
Assume that we have everyone in the system playing 'fair' and following the 'rule' where all users above $8k are mods. Then assume there is one smart malicious user with $80k of SP. This user is able to produce a bunch of sock puppet accounts with 'OK' content. Stuff that isn't bad enough to warrant downvotes, but not hard to throw together..
If that user split their SP into 10 user accounts, their upvotes would be a much larger portion of the total voting pool, and they would be able to siphon off a very large portion of the rewards pool compared to today when many other whales are using up the majority of their voting power.
I don't know if the amount they would get from moderator rewards would be enough to incentivize a selfish user to keep all their SP in a moderator account.
...
I want this to work, but I also do not have a non-subjective/non-opinionated rebuttal to that concern.
I know what you mean. It would be interesting to make some calculations to see how much a user could earn by doing this and how much he could earn by being a moderator within same time period.
I also think that the reputation system could help identify such behaviors, if someone is constantly upvoted by accounts that have not introduced themselves or just inconsistent accounts.
I've done some 'fuzzy math' in my head, and I believe it would be a lot more if they could get away with it. I think the real undecided factor of this are how good of a job could moderators do catching this behavior, and how many people would prefer to try this over just taking their moderator rewards.
So how about allowing a user to take a portion of SP and transfer it into a new account that is set with an instructional guide on how the account should be used. This will give the whales an opportunity to use their knowledge base in the form of instruction, also creating a new and improved ecosystem..
Sorry, I don't really understand what you are proposing.
Whale= power
minnow=imprisoned
dolphin=bridge to understanding
If whale fundsdolphinaccount then minnow account uses ether smart contract to ensure that minnow account has structured guide to become new whale...
I am working on the development now @ https://github.com/MELCHEZEDEK776
Sorry that was butchered but my conscious is Quantum computing
I think your ideas are very good and agree with some points you made. Especially, I support removing curation reward part and I believe this will reduce many problems we currently have, such as bot-domination and just following whales' vote.
Regarding complexity, Korean community members and I discussed about the n^2 reward calculation these days. Obviously, superlinearity is one of the most affecting factor that adds the complexity, and if we can remove Sybil issue by moderation I think linearity will meet KISS.
A sort of voting cap ($8000) was also discussed in Korean community as well, and we think it would be good if Sybil is moderated here again.
Please keep in touch (on steemit.chat?) and I am looking forward to more discussion and brainstorming.
Keep in mind that superlinearity is not there to combat the sybil issue (in fact, its what makes the sybil issue an issue in the first place. A sybil attack wouldn't make any more money than regular voting without the n^2 curve).
The purpose of the n^2 curve is to remove the incentive for self-upvoting. And it doesn't even really do that for everyone, just people with a small enough amount of SP not to be able to get a payout on self upvoted posts.
This is a problem that the founders double solved -- because both the ability to downvote and the n^2 curve are sufficient to police self upvoting. But the n^2 curve has the negative side effect of exacerbating the already very serious problem of over-concentration of SP.
Here's what i suspect happened. Ive read that originally they wanted to make a system without downvoting. To stop abusive self-upvoting, they created the n^2 curve to reward consensus. Then they realized the n^2 curve made the system vulnerable to sybil attacks, and that they needed downvoting to close the vulnerability.
What they might not have realized is that the downvoting that they adopted to address the sybil vulnerability was also sufficient, in and of itself (and in fact better suited) to combat the self-upvote vulnerability that the n^2 curve was created address.
I might be unclear on Sybil part, but I mentioned what you pointed out, especially Sybil with split accounts.
Downvoting and n^2 are all shown in the white paper. I also remember in the beginning steemit has downvote button next to upvote one, but didn't remember why it was disappeared.
IMO, n^2 system surely prevent self-upvoting but also makes people to follow whale's voting. Also given the uneven distribution of voting power, as you mentioned, it makes the game more unfair and complex.
One of the most problem of n^2 curve is helpless feeling of minnows and dolphins, which bring about less incentives to buy more SP unless it is hundreds of thousand dollars. Many people realized that buying hundreds dollars of SP never meaningfully increase their voting power. In this sense, I like @snowflake's ideas of voting cap.
Feel free to contact me @snowflake on steemit.chat
It's a cool idea. I've only skimmed it for now, but I will come back and review it in more detail later. Also resteemed :)
Some initial thoughts:
(Sorry if any of these were already addressed and I didn't catch them during my skim)
either that or just hardfork it.
that said, i agree there are a lot of sybil issues that the OP doesnt address.
Whales don't downvote shitty content because they'd rather save their power to upvote but in a system where they can only downvote they would do it a lot more.
Can you elaborate on this please?
I don't know how the math would work, but I suspect a whale splitting their SP into hundreds of 8k accounts could probably earn more by upvoting sock puppet accounts than from the interest they would get by being a mod.
The counter to that is that hopefully the other mods would be able to catch that and do their jobs as moderators.
Great! Hopefully we can get the whole community behind the idea :)
Yes that's the idea. Moderators would downvote content that's overpaid. It doesn't really matter if it was upvoted by many sockpuppets, if the content is shitty payout will go down.
We would have a system were post would go through a lot more scrutiny, which will increase the quality of content selection.
Another incentive for whales to not split their account is that by letting other users vote they will increase the demand for steem and so the value of their account.
And the "evil whales" running the split accounts would astroturf the downvoted content, and say look at poor XXX hes getting downvoted by the big bad moderator. Dan is such a troll. Then dozens of fake voters would say "oh noes! we're being oppressed" And the moderators would back off.
If TPTB had the spine to downvote overvalued content, the system would work fine as is.
The whales (most of them) might agree to this increased scrutiny in principle, but they won't put it into practice.
If the whales were willing to downvote shitty, overpaid content they would be doing so now.
Count me in on team @snowflake for this one! I don't have a lot of influence, but I'll push for it as much as I can :)
I hope you don't mind, but I wrote a modified / TLDR version:
@snowflake's really interesting proposal - Turn whales into moderators and give dolphins all the voting power (TLDR Version)
foundation
This has not been enough of an incentive for many of them to curate responsibly in the past, and there is no reason to believe it will in the future.
If my account was worth $80,000 and the limit for curation was $8,000, then I could theoretically just divide my balance across 10 accounts (each being $8000) and still have the same impact (relatively) as one account worth $80k.
That's how sybil would play out here. You can get around the new set of rules simply by creating more accounts.
One thing that I missed on my first pass through was that there would be no more curation rewards. Users with a lot of SP could split into multiple accounts and gain additional influence, but there would be no financial benefit to doing that other than the ability to vote on your own (and friends) posts.
I totally missed that too!
Here is my reply to @timcliff
Yes you could split your accounts but there won't be any financial incentives to do it. Overtime accounts that have chosen to split will lose power over accounts that didn't.
I don't think they'd necessarily lose power over accounts that didn't.
Given two situations:
It's very likely that you could create a voting algorithm that would outperform the proportional percentage of inflation. So in fact, a smart dev could probably earn more by dividing up their stake into smaller accounts and continue to play the curation game just like they do today.
I'm happy to be wrong here, but until math proves it, I've got to believe that the system that's based on performance (as opposed to flat percentage) will be more profitable.
To be completely honest, the only solution I see to the problem you present is to completely remove curation rewards. Whales would stop voting on content to just earn rewards, and would leave room for the actual members of the community to vote on what they find interesting/valuable.
unless they got kickbacks from the posts they rewarded. thats the thing, youd be giving the 80K guy (not to mention the 800K guy) a huge amount of influence if he elected to split his account into smaller accounts. he be able to assign a massive amount of the reward pool with noone to gainsay him.
Man, did you read my post? :-)
Hahaha, apparently not good enough! It was uh... before I had my coffee :)
jesta's comment covered my idea on how a sybil attack would go.
An absolutely transparent sybil attack might be downvoted by the moderators, but i seriously doubt one with even the flimsiest pretext of being a legitimate post would be.
Moderators would downvote overpaid content, this user would be wasting his power if he was upvoting shitty content. He'd better off rewarding real content that's not going to be downvoted.
Allocating a good portion of the reward pool to yourself is something whales could do today so why don't they? There is multiple reasons for that but the primary one is that they are going to be downvoted if they do. So it really is no different to how the system works now.
You mean the witnesses? I think the community needs to be more vocal about this, because it really would benefit everyone. Like I said we need to think about the bigger picture. Whales are the biggest stake holders and would benefit the most with a proposal like this because it will increase the value of their stake.
If the limit is in MV, the limit would have to be reajusted every time the price of steem increase. Why do you think it would be better for scalability?
Because all those small accounts will not receive any financial benefit from doing so. The inflation will only be allocated to account > $8000 and it will be higher than it currently is because it would include all current curation rewards . Also the more accounts decides to split the more inflation will be allocated to the one who don't. Basically you would increase your power by only using it to moderate. Another incentive for whales to not split their account is that by letting other users vote they will increase the demand for steem and so the value of their account.
Yes, I believe so. Money is really what matters to most people at the end of the day, and the fact that moderators will still have their power to moderate makes it a more attractive option.
Well, while this could be done without a HF - to do it right, a HF would probably be required. So witness buy-in is required.
They are not the only stake-holders though. You would also have to convince a majority of the whales, as well as the dev team to take it on.
Just because it is a good idea is not a guarantee that you will get everyone to buy into it. Getting the consensus of the community will be half the battle. (There is still a lot of convincing that needs to be done.)
I think having it as a percentage of stake makes more sense than a dollar amount. If STEEM is worth the same as BTC one day, would that mean everyone with more than 8 STEEM would be a moderator?
Having it as an adjustable witness parameter might not be a bad idea either.
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The rest makes sense.
I will say, I do really like the idea. If you would be able to get buy-in from the community (mainly the whales and devs) I would support it as long as there aren't any major objections to the idea that someone brings up (which I am not able to think of myself).
One last thing though - you have two completely separate proposals here mixed together. There is the moderator part, and then the hiding of payments. I'm actually against the hiding of payments part.
I'm not sure how I could convince people... If people can't see for themselves that the system is broken then I can't really help them. I guess we will have to wait until the current design shows its limitation. People need to see it to believe it kinda thinking.. maybe when the price hit $0.001 they will start wondering why..
This is why the number that seperates users and moderators should be in USD, if it was in SP you would have to change it as the price of steem increases. It would be very inconvenient unless you could do it without forking the code.
The hiding payments part is actually an integral part of the proposal.
If you don't hide payouts during the voting period users would see their posts go from say $1 to $8 back to $2 and back up to $6, users would just be totally confused and it would be playing with their emotions, no good.
I think people tend to think that moderators won't really vote much, they would just check for overpaid content. This is not true, moderators will vote a lot. If they want the rewards to go the right place the will have to.
bait and switch.
Oh buy this SP and power up. Youll b e able to vote to reward content you like.
SIKE! you can only downvote now. You just got steemed!
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but I would not be in support of this unless there was support / buy-in from the majority of the stakeholders. If the whales do feel that this is what it does, then I guess we are back to the drawing board.
I've talked to a few whales, and there doesn't seem to be major opposition that part (at least from the people I've talked to.) Plus, if it really bothers them that much - they can still split their SP into multiple accounts :)
The idea is that hopefully the ability to actually influence rewards by investing in SP will encourage a lot more users to get involved in the platform and invest in moderate amounts of SP in order to be more influential.
This is a laudable goal. But this seems like a very complicated and very exploitable way to try to achieve it.
If giving smaller accounts more influence in rewards is your goal, then IMO step one is to get rid of n^2. Thats certainly less exploitable in terms of self-upvoting than what youre proposing (and the only reason we have it is to prevent self-upvote abuse), and it would probably be way more effective at actually producing a measurable increase in the actual effect a regular user could have on reward distribution.
Though I can't get on board with everything in the post, I will resteem this in hopes of sparking the conversation.
Edit: I just want to say I think it's a good post overall! Many important points and perspectives raised.
Waving my hand at STEEMS CRUISE SHIP captain. This platform is Great! I went back to read one of your very first or second post. I must say I am late to the party, but better late than never. Still going over all your info, which is a lot! Just wanted you to know some of us are actually listening and eager to help. Whale, Dolphins, and Minnows.
Good to hear!
I am still very new to Steemit and the whole system is a lot to take in and understand. One of the things that didn't sit well with me at first was the unequal distribution of power and influence- sounds like the current world 'system'! Although I still don't fully understand Steemit yet I think it is brilliant that people like you are thinking outside the box to try and improve the system.
you nailed it
When I started you could give 1c for about .6vests.
It was really satisfying to pay $400 to move the needle 1c. That's the only reason I added money to make my vote matter. I wonder if the changed the exponential curve to some kind of polynomial if they could let smallish accounts "matter" at $400 and but the whales to takeover in the end. I imagine $400 would be enough to deter Sybil attacks.
Also if the whale down votes were as powerful as ever they could correct obvious Sybil attempts
So basically 0 influence to 1c from 0to$400then it's flat until $5000 or so then it starts growing exponentially again.
This is more simple than your two classses of users method. Just change curation formula.
Would this issue be settled better by forking Steem? In the altcoin world, that's what typically happens.
I would be interested to know about this too. I was discussing this with @smooth the other day. The code is licensed so you need permission to create your own coin. But what about forking the existing code? If the license prevents users from doing this then I would argue it's not really censorship resistant. I would like to hear from @ned or @dan about this.
The idea however is not to seperate the community but work together.
Not necessarily. You could create your own coin on the steem blockchain (as well as your own rewards system) without a hardfork.
Because the steem blockchain allows you to sumbit and vote on arbitrary data, it allows you to potentially nest other blockchains inside of it, like one of those russian dolls.
Good idea.
Okay, got it. But I think it's possible to fork the underlying code, else Golos wouldn't have appeared.
I am not exactly sure about the details but the steem team made a deal with golos which is why they were allowed to fork the code.
Oh, okay; thanks.
It is possible, but only with steemit incs express written permission (which golos had).
Its somewhat debatable how enforceable this license provision is though.
I really enjoyed your post and I totally agree with your observations.But like timcliff said in his comment the question is if the big guys understand this.