Announcing Steem 0.14.0 Release Candidate
Steemit is proud to announce a major upgrade to the Steem protocol today. It is our desire to give everyone in the community ample time to review the code and upgrade their software before any hard-fork occurs. Our release process will go as follows:
- Publish Release Candidate (Today)
- Confirm Release in one week (9/9/2016)
- Protocol changes effective 9/13/2016 at 11 AM EST (3 PM GMT)
New Features
Escrow Transfers
The Steem network now comes with native support for advanced escrow transfers of STEEM and Steem Dollars. The purpose of escrow is to facilitate peer to peer trade with untrusted individuals.
Someone wanting to pay via escrow will create an escrow transaction and specify who should receive the funds, who the escrow agent is, and the terms of the contract. The escrow agent and the receiver must both accept the terms within the specified time or the funds are returned to the sender.
Once the terms have been accepted by all parties, the funds are considered to be “in escrow”. Once in this state the sender can release funds to the receiver, or the receiver can return the funds to the sender. If either the sender or receiver has issues they can raise a dispute at which point in time the escrow agent has authority to release some or all of the funds to either the sender or the receiver. If no action is taken for a specified period of time, then the funds are released to the receiver.
This process directly mirrors the basic escrow contracts used in real life escrow transactions. This will facilitate the creation of craigslist or eBay like websites powered by Steem.
Savings Accounts
Savings accounts allow you to protect your liquid STEEM and Steem Dollars in the event your account is hacked / stolen. All transfers out of savings accounts have a 72 hour delay during which the sender can notice, recover their account, and cancel the transfer.
This feature is hugely beneficial for any and all exchanges using Steem. The vast majority of their holdings should be kept in savings accounts to minimize the potential loss from a hack. Users should strongly encourage exchanges to adopt Savings accounts and be wary of maintaining deposits on exchanges that do not adopt this security feature.
Revoking Voting Permissions
This feature is useful for those who want the economic benefits from Steem without the legal liability associated with the political influence holding Steem Power grants them.
Custom Binary Operations
The semantics are the same as the custom json operation, but with a binary payload. The json deserialization has a non-trivial cost associated with it. This operation will allow for binary deserialization of plugin operations and should improve overall performance of plugins (subchains / sidechains) that chose to use it.
Witness Scheduling Updates
Witnesses that have not produced a block or updated their witness data in at least 24 hours will not be scheduled until they show proof-of-life by updating their witness data. Witnesses can now voluntarily retire from their position at any time. This should improve the overall network reliability and reduce the total number of missed blocks.
Bug Fixes
Steem Dollar Stability
Starting when Steem Dollars are 2% of the market cap, a portional of content rewards will be awarded as Steem instead of Steem Dollars. The rate at which Steem Dollars are printed is 50% of the reward at 2% or less market cap and 0% at 5% or more market cap, linearly extrapolated from 2%-5% market cap. So, at 3.5% market cap content rewards will be 25% Steem Dollars, 25% Steem, and 50% Steem Power.
When Steem Dollars reach 10% of the market cap, the price feed will jump off the peg to keep Steem Dollars at 10% of the market cap and will return to the peg when the reported price feed goes below 10%. Witnesses should still report the real dollar value of Steem for their price
feed. The median price feed is automatically capped regardless of what witnesses report.
This change is designed to protect the blockchain from a theoretical, but highly unlikely, event where by the SBD debt would completely devalue Steem. Steem holders are now guaranteed that SBD holders will never be entitled to more than 10% of the market cap.
Cleanup of @null
Balances of the null account and zeroed every block. Because any funds in the null account are inaccessible, they are removed every block and the dynamic global property object is updated to reflect the actual totals. This will remove funds from the supply, slowing the rate of inflation.
Target Votes of 5 per Day instead of 40
We are changing the target number of votes per day from 40 to 5 so that more people keep their voting power below 100%. The purpose of this change is to rebalance power toward normal users and away from bots. You can still vote as often as you like, this change merely impacts the speed at which voting power is consumed.
Miscellaneous Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug that was preventing votes from being completely removed from a post.
- Posts are now editable up to the second payout when they are archived.
- Removed legacy PoW operation from witness plugin.
- Increased the irreversible block threshold to 75%.
Future Roadmap 0.15.0 and beyond
There are a number of features that didn’t quite make the cut for this release, but will be ready for the next release scheduled for mid October. These features include:
Lost Password Recovery
Any account can nominate another account as a lost password recovery agent. This agent will have the power to request a reset the owner key after at least 60 days of account inactivity. If the account is still inactive 30 days after the password reset is requested, then it will take effect.
Users must opt-in to this feature. By default the recovery agent will be @null. A user can opt-out of the feature at any time by changing the agent back to @null.
Proposed Transactions with Chained Confirmation
This feature will work very similar to the proposed transaction feature found in BitShares but with the ability to confirm multiple chained transactions in a single step. This feature will greatly aide the development of side / subchains.
Feedback Wanted
Our team is always looking for new ideas and feedback. Please review the code, test it out, and help us find and fix any undiscovered bugs between now and the final release confirmation.
I strongly oppose the "5 votes a day" target.
I thought one of the greatest changes to be implemented so far was when that target INCREASED. People have not been so stressed in the last month or two about curation rewards; they just vote for what they like and have fun.
I don't think Steemit will be FUN anymore if there is an expected target of 5 votes per day. People will spend much less time on the site. They will vote for predictably popular content. And we will be right back where we were a couple of months ago.
No, it will be worse than that. Because 20 votes a day used to stress people out. 5 votes a day? NO ONE can do any real curation under that scheme.
As an individual and an established author, the 5 votes a day could be great for me. If we go back to the days when everybody upvoted the same posts, then maybe I'd get all those votes again. I could quit my job and write for Steemit full time.
And we'd go back to the days when emerging authors and artists got far fewer votes and rewards.
As far as curation and voting bots, they are being used for very good purposes also. Rather than turning our tails and running away from them, why don't we use them for the greater good? I think the mega-whales' curation teams are doing a far better job than ever before at redistributing rewards; I make nothing from being involved in that effort, but I think it is working quite well. Give the vote sliders and the voting bots more time; Steemit's front page is finally diversifying and newer people are getting rewards like never before.
One more thing: Redistribution of Steemit's resources from big whale accounts to the masses MUST be one of our top priorities. How does this help? I understand that big whale accounts may make less on curation rewards, but I think few of them are concerned with this anymore; they're trying to channel their votes to worthy posters. They have recognized that their big stakes will be worth nothing unless we make this thing succeed.
Under this scheme, the big whales will need to sell the max on exchanges every week and other people buy their Steem for any real redistribution to occur. That will hold down the price and our competitors will zoom right by us.
Steem Team, I understand you are trying to solve real problems with these tweaks. I don't normally comment on them because I feel that Steemit is good enough that there is some margin for error with these back-end decisions. But this is far, far too severe a change for the platform to absorb.
If I am wrong, then I'd love to hear that from the community, and I am open to learning from other views. Give us time for this discussion, please, before forcing through such a change. Until then, I oppose this change.
Well, it looks like I'm late to the party again. The 40->5 vote change is needed and I'm disappointed that your comment appears first, because it will give the community the idea that it's not the right move.
People need to stop getting all panicky when new updates are proposed, understand where they're coming from and what they attempt to solve. When disagreeing, try to bring up a potential solution to address that problem instead of outright opposing any change. This is how we will progress effectively.
In this case, the goal is to increase organic voting power vs bot power. I think everyone will agree that this is positive. Now, how do we improve the implementation?
The solution is simple.
All we need is this:
This way, new users don't get confused. Serious curators can get the most out of their daily upvotes. Bots have less influence on the network. Everyone is happy.
In the future, we could add the option to "Opt in" to have a voting slider. I think this would be a plus, but isn't 100% needed. In the same way, I think we should allow everyone to vote with full power on a single post per day if they want (comes down to the same as limiting # of votes/day to 1 and allowing full range to vote weight)
I'm all for decreasing bot power, but not at the cost of human curators who make the Steemit community thrive with diversity. As I mentioned elsewhere, there are at least 50-100 posts worthy of upvotes every single day.
Targeting 5 votes per day is a slap in the face to every serious curator on Steemit. It's clear from the comments that a vast majority of regular curators are heavily opposed to this - we're simply being encouraged to stop curating content.
The hidden gems which can only be found by looking at each and every post round the clock incoming through the "New" feed will be lost forever. No casual curator who's only voting 5 times a day or under will ever bother with full time deep curation.
It's not 5 votes per day. It's 5 votes at 100%. Just reduce the slider to less and vote more and you keep your power within the 20% recharge range. Otherwise, if you want to vote for 50, the vote for 50 and deplete your power quicker. Manage the power and responsibility to upvote.
5 votes will get your voting power down to the same area as 40 votes do today. That is unsustainable when there are 50-100 posts worth voting on every day.
I disagree, I'm open to discuss this further on the chat. Limited by reply depth here.
How can new authors (like me) ever hope to be noticed and upvoted by whales, if the target becomes 5 instead of 40?
It's already damn near impossible at 40. I don't see how lowering it to 5 will help.
The idea behind this is to make people buy steem power.
create your audience, build notoriety, it will come.
but it takes times, work, and luck
Yes! A settings tab for each account to set the default voting power would be very helpful! A separate setting for comments and posts would be nice too.
That would be an added set of "nice to have" features and provide more flexibility. Does it solve whatever issue they are trying to address with the proposed change? I'm not sure it does, just like I'm not sure their main proposal solves very much without some cost. I thank you for some good ideas, which the community should consider. I also hope people see @liberosist 's short comment that is buried somewhere deep below this post, which suggests a couple of simple ways they might be able to thwart bots without causing such an unneeded overhaul as the one they propose.
Ultimately, the main issue is giving the community time to consider and debate these proposed changes and discuss them before having them magically take effect with the assent of witnesses who do not seem to have vocal opinions themselves.
Won't this result in the botmasters making more bots? 8x more in fact.
No, because they'd have to split their stake and that voting rewards are stake based with slight incentive towards having it all in one account.
I do believe that 40 upvotes/day is a high target to reach for most organic voters. Much easier to achieve with bots.
Just did and replied to both, thanks for pointing out their comments.
Totally agree. I do feel like announcements are mostly made here when they're close to final, which is unfortunate. It leaves little time for discussion. That said, I do trust the better judgement of the smart people who spend time discussing them directly on github as soon they're proposed. In technical/innovative fields like the one we're in, I'm not sure that relying on popular opinion is always the best decision.
What about thinking of it differently? I think boring was just marketed poorlywhy 5 votes are good but marketed poorly
I included your idea in the latest edition of the Steemit Wish List.
I must say I agree with @donkeypong on this, it just feels like we have turned a corner with the diversity of content on the site, and this tweak threatens that. I can't see how reducing the influence of whale votes whilst hardly increasing the influence of mass-minnow votes, gets to the root of the problem.
Surely we should be looking at increasing the voting influence of new users who have proven themselves as reputable accounts.
Hopefully this change won't set us back to vote bandwagoning and a top heavy trending page.
Cg
I also for the most part agree with @donkeyong
On top of that one of the main problems we have is that there are a small group of people who get A LOT For their posts because people bet on the post making money. Most people are using their vote to get curation reward and don't even read the posts....Lame.
What's even potentially worse isn't hat there is a already little incentive for UPvoting comments and this would make it even less...
So now there is MORE incentive to just UPvote the big boys posts to get curation rewards and LESS incentive to UPvote quality posts that might not be big earners and even less incentive to UPvote comment so.
We need NEW users to be valued to grow the platform and we need comments to bring depth to already wuality posts.
If there is little to no value for making in depth comment Then they willll be les and less. Then we have a shallow and fickle platform with bots and money hogs...
But @quinneaker, I think what people are missing here is that you can still vote all you want. And your votes still count. It simply gives you the option of using your voting influence how you choose--so you can use up all your daily voting influence in 5 votes, or you can spread your influence over more votes. This is GOOD news, especially for whale votes, which could use some diluting. IMHO. So, don't fret. Keep curating like mad. And if you want to keep one particular vote worth something, THEN you can preserve. But just keep doing what you are doing. It is designed to ward off the power of the bots so WE can have more organic say around here. I think this could be a good thing. Too soon to tell.
@littlescribe
Yes I see. Gives more control and also variables to how we vote. I can also see how it can impede bots a bit.
Well we shall see how it goes!
Thanks for the comment!
Agree with you very much about increasing new user reputable voting, and happy to hear it is something wanted. Has seemed a lot like a game lately.... Really can vote for almost anything without reading it and be assured it will trend of by a certain author.
yes if people are limited to just 5 votes a day, they will only vote on authors that i think by now we all know the names in a swarming to the best possible curation rewards. So this will infact i feel further damage the chances of most importantly new unknown authors and certainly us authors who just dont seem to be able to be seen at all and get little support. I would say we need more votes but reduce the power of the votes to allow people to take a risk on " unpopular " posts and so this would encourage the spreading of wealth to all and not just focus still more the power of steem to the fastest horses on the track ! For me this could be a serious problem personally as i have already explained above. But for new hopeful users..... well they just won't i feel get in the game and just sit on the sidelines as the Steemit stars take even more money from their posts .............
I 100% agree!!
I agree.... 5 a day without significant recharge boost..... Seems it will hurt. Even just hearing 5 a day will cause some not to do more, even at 40 would see in comments "I would upvote but....."
This is insane! 5 Votes is nothing...
wow there goes my reason for having bought a lot of steem pwer and to be able to profit from my curation rewards !! I am not really a writer but i love reading the stuff. This gives me little reason if i can read but no longer vote after five votes !! Tell me this is not happening.?? Was not informed at all of this !!
I think you just were informed by this post :) I agree, it is frustrating.
Ok well i have returned to say what my reaction to the new control on curation power to each vote after my day of curation voting . ! i love it !!!! You decide now on each vote what pressure in Steem power you wish to hand over as opposed to the steady more linear decline in voting power of before. For say a comment I can choose to give say 15 or 20 percent depending on my reasoning, reasoning being the key word here !! For the posts where there maybe be hopefully much more input and work iinvolved i can updose to say 50 or 60 percent vote when major but perhaps a smaller reward to a new user that shows say more promise but not quite to the top of their art !! So all in all I am convinced this new pressure dial on my Steem station of curation is a great improvement actually and in many ways by carefully reasoned decisions which are say more heart attached i can spread the love in a more dosed and effective way now !!And here i make a two percent vote to myself to help push my comment up to a more visible spot hopefully of the author. Can be useful no ?? So all cool by me !! Great work developers of Steemit !! Steem Up and On !!
The dev have been really quick to revert the payout from 12h back to 24 hours so I don't see any reasons why it would be different with this change if they notice an negative effect from this change.
I'd say let's see. I agree that 40 is way too much right now. I was able to do 40 semi-meaningful votes per day when steemwatch was up but now I'm not even trying even if I could use other tools to achieve similar results.
Why start with such a drastic change? Why not cut it in half to start and see if there is a positive effect? Deincentivizing engagement on the platform is not a good way to handle bots.
I think too often with steemit the users are tossed out with the bathwater in an effort to curb bots.
Edit: Here is my full post on the 5 votes https://steemit.com/steemit/@contentjunkie/5-votes-is-not-enough
Yes, that's absurd idea is limited our votes by 5 votes. This is not democracy economic anymore. That's okay, we have limited vote but....... for 5 votes...... Good bye steemit. :)
Not only that, but it will decrease payouts, meaning fewer people will be focused on quality content. This seems like a bad idea. For such a libertarian platform, this feels pretty damn draconian.
I'm undecided about the vote power change, but I wanted to respond to this;
This is absolutely what is needed. There is no substitute for redistributing the stake if you want a fairer system with less concentration of power. Even if every whale did this (and they aren't) and even if it were at the maximum rate in all cases and completely uninterrupted (which it isn't), it would still take a full year to redistribute half of the whale stake.
This maybe isn't what people want to hear in terms of trying to drive up the market price but this is the bitter medicine that Steem/it needs to thrive more than anything else.
FWIW, I happen to believe that the path to higher market prices comes from increasing demand by creating a better system -- including a better distribution of stake as soon as possible (which as as said above, still isn't particularly soon) -- and not from trying to reduce supply by holding back redistribution. If the path to a successful outcome is clear, the market will reward that with higher prices, regardless of the amount of whale selling going on (or indeed because of it).
"There is no substitute for redistributing the stake if you want a fairer system with less concentration of power", i strongly agree with this. From the outside, people see the platform as a clssic MLM strategy disguised in a a social media platform. The see it as a scam. For us who trade at polo, its really hard to sell the idea... i think this platform is revolutionary, and the only thing that makes people to hate it is becuse of its distribution. Its a caste system rulled by whales. Which reminds me of NXT which had all the fundamentals to succeed but did not, because of how it was distributed from the start.
@tjpezlo
Bam!
Smooth, good point and I mostly agree with you. It's a fact that selling is the main way to redistribute, since voting simply generates more curation rewards for whales. But I've worked with a number of large whale accounts on curation lately and I've admired what you are doing with your own curation also. If there's no reason to vote much and stick around, then I think it would be a loss for Steemit to have the large accounts staying dormant and simply selling the max when they could be actively using their scale for good work.
Plus, if you really want this platform (and your stake in it) to succeed, then you have incentive to build it, and I would hope that you are spending some of your curation rewards to make it better for others. That has the same net effect on redistribution as selling does.
Every economic system has its rich and poor; Steemit at least gives the poor a chance to rise. Redistribution can occur at those middle levels, too. It would take so long to fully redistribute resources that I'd rather you guys just continue your good work and help the platform that way, while selling some of your gains. If there's no reason to vote and stick around to make it better, then the max selling is about the only activity we'll see.
Both are useful: Literal redistribution (by the largest stakeholders selling) and voting with an intent toward widening the base of rewarded posters. But rewards themselves themselves are relatively modest.
A total of about 20 million Steem will be given away in rewards over the next year (57600 STEEM per day x 365 days = 21024000 STEEM; for simplicity we can assume that curation rewards have been entirely eliminated and this all goes to posters), while 180 million is distributed to existing SP holders (mostly whales) in the form of antidilution payments. That will make the supply about 320 million, of which 20 million will have come in the form of rewards. Some (in fact a lot) of those posting rewards go back to current whales (think about this the next time you are voting up one of Dan's posts, or mine should I make any) or to established, successful posters.
Nearly all practical redistribution must come from selling.
I agree with everything you said about the improvements to curation that have already been happening. I very much disagree with the constant shifts in the rules just as people are starting to work within the existing rules and we haven't even seen the results of those efforts yet (for example the new Project Curie program). The constant tweaks create way too much uncertainty for those trying to build initiatives and business models that are reliant on the platform rule set. It is for this reason I have already curtailed some of my investments into curation-based initiatives. Not only this change, but potentially others that may be coming soon (see Ned's reply) make it an unattractive environment to try to operate.
I cannot agree enough. This was the same problem experienced with BitShares as projects that were building applications for BTS suddenly were informed that the rules/code had changed.
Moonstone is but one example. The abrupt changes from the onset, up until Dan chose to focus on Steemit, set them and others back and completely eliminated a few projects altogether. I think it's safe to say that a large portion of the BitShares Community was not pleased with what appeared to be an unhindered desire to make drastic changes to a system many felt was fine as it existed.
Whether or not the changes were ultimately the best decision for BitShares the platform, the Dev's or the Community is completely subjective and an entirely different discussion from how those changes affected the projects attempting to build upon the platform as it existed.
While I agree that changes need to be made to create the best system possible, I feel that those decisions should have been made prior to a public release and especially prior to allowing any third-party to begin building applications around the platform.
Slapping "Alpha" and "Beta" next to a logo, while still pumping the platform to the masses in the press is a bit spurious. On one hand it allows the Devlopers to say, "Well it's still in alpha/beta". On the other hand they are out there pushing this alpha/beta onto the masses inviting them in before the basic structure of how the platform will work has been settled.
Some may argue that they need that wider user base to determine what changes need to be made, and that may be the case. But at the same time the types of people that are being invited in (no offense to anyone) to this alpha/beta platform have no clue what they are getting themselves into most likely and I feel that the Developers are well aware of this fact. If they aren't, then that's ... well I'll just leave it at that.
And at the same time you have companies attempting to build their own business models around an ever changing set of rules and they are being invited to do so. Those companies are of course assuming all of the risk themselves and can choose not to build upon the platform until a more stringent set of rules are adhered to for longer periods of time, but there are no guarantees on that either, as we saw with BitShares.
I'm sorry to say that I don't have a solution. This field is not my expertise. I'm merely offering up my observations from the past/present and how I see things unfold, and how I see the same scenario playing out once again at Steemit. The good news is, it can only get better (I hope)!
You make a good point that selling is the most effective way to redistribute. The problem is, what is the incentive to buy if the curation rewards are restricted to 5 votes a day?
@smooth But surely the "meat" of the curation award is really in voting and then having a lot of people voting after you. If no-one is voting after you, you might as well use your five votes voting on your own stuff. Restricting the votes defeats the whole point about crowds discovering good stuff together by voting.
@alyssas it is 5 more powerful votes per day. Also you can vote more often if you voluntarily reduce power per-vote using the slider. 10%-power votes after the change will be about the same as regular votes now.
I think people are getting a little confused. Of course the changes are somewhat disruptive, but we have to remember that the 5 votes are really just 5 more influential votes per day, as @smooth reminds us. We can still vote all we want. It just becomes more diluted as we vote, which is not much different. The only difference is that our 5 votes we actually have some control over. Which I don't know. I think that's cool. It makes me feel dolphin-ish.
So are you saying that you feel increasing the supply of STEEM on the market will increase the number of new investors? IIRC, you've stated repeatedly for months that few new investors existed.
Do you now feel that a lower STEEM price will make new investors suddenly want to grab it up?
Personally, I don't see people saying, "If only the price of STEEM would go lower, then I'd get on board!".
Where were they when the price was at .30 cents? Although debatable, I feel that not that much has changed in the platform between now and then and generally people don't like catching falling knives.
IMHO, a lower priced STEEM will simply be grabbed up by the existing true believer whales at the lower price after selling off their STEEM at a higher price. I'm fairly certain that's what most of us that believe in the platform are doing. But I don't see many big new investors coming on board.
What may be considered "big investors" that are coming on board are simply posting for thousands of dollars per day and powering up or cashing out. I don't see those accounts buying STEEM. In fact, I see them basically defending themselves to anyone questioning them for being here by boasting about how they've put nothing into the system out of their own pocket.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you that the scenario you describe is what "should" happen, if others saw Steemit the way we do, but I am simply pointing out what "is" happening from what I can tell, and the perception of others is usually entirely different from those of us that have been here for a while.
Tuck your words continue to be wise and sharp. I will keep following your commentary wherever it may be~
Thanks~*~
I'm the village idiot. Be careful my friend. ;)
Every single trade has a buyer and a seller. Unless you think that whales are going to buy back their own or other whales' coins (IMO not a chance, and certainly the evidence with 95% of whales powering down doesn't suggest it, but I guess you disagree), any selling by whales can only improve the distribution. Mathematical certainty. It may (and perhaps probably will) happen at lower prices, but it will happen.
If it turns out that you are right and only existing whales want to own this coin, then we are dead. There is no way to improve the distribution it will simply collapse into one big circle jerk singularity. The last remaining whale can autoupvote his own posts all day long.
Also, yes I have said there aren't many new investors. This coin is unfriendly and unappealing to speculators, who are most (but not all) of the investors in the crypto space. Whether that is by design based on an anti-speculator philosophy or an unavoidable side-effect of other design requirements, I can't really say, but it is clear that many speculators pass it over (as they should IMO).
There are some long term investors who appear willing to buy in and power up. I guess we have to hope there are enough of them and they continue to find it attractive. No other practical method of redistribution exists. I debunked the notion of meaningful redistribution via rewards alone over a reasonable time period in another comment here.
Only a whale with little to no belief in the platform (or lacking the funds to do so) would not buy back his/others coins at a lower price. I believe (and again, this is simply my own perception of the current situation), most whales are overtly aware that the price was much higher than it deserved to be (as I've pointed out elsewhere on Steemit) at this early stage due to the FOMO effect combined with a well timed pump capitalizing, like every new coins shrewd investors do, on imprudent investors.
I would have to say, of course they are! Who wouldn't sell at .007-.002 if they perceived, through experience in this cryptocurrency ecosystem, that they could buy back at a fraction of that price in a short period of time? Obtaining the same amount or more coins, while also being able to gain more BTC or fiat currency, is a no-brainer for many.
I would have to surmise that most all of us with any experience in the cryptocurrency ecosystem would, and therefore think that most all of us are doing just that. And in that line of thinking, it ends up being a self-fulfilled prophesy.
If I assume it's going to happen, I must be assuming others are also considering the possibility, and as the number of people who notice the trend accumulate, it happens.
That being said, I would also not have been surprised to see STEEM rise to $10 during it's climb. The problem it encountered was the one you brought up back then and continued to do so for some time, the lack of new investors. And by you bringing up that concise fact, repeatedly, I feel it in itself contributed to many people realizing the time had come to begin selling off to buy lower or otherwise.
I'm not suggesting that you caused the price decline, I'm simply expressing that wise investors reading another wise investor voice that opinion simply reaffirmed their own feelings that the bubble was about to pop. And when that feeling happens, those wise enough tend to want to get out before the others. It's a completely natural cycle as I'm sure you are aware.
lulz, you've summed it up nicely there. Of course I hope that is not the end scenario, but currently I see no evidence to the contrary. There is plenty of time for that to change though. We are in the very early stages of Steemit. One change can at times whip up a frenzy in the masses and new investors come flocking, even if for a quick in-n-out.
Generally when that moment happens it leaves the price 10%-30% higher than it previously was and then the project either continues to build or it goes stagnant and ultimately dies from lack of continued innovation.
I don't think a lack of continued innovation will be the case with Steemit, as testified by my post concerning too many changes too quickly may be a problem. It's a balancing act that no Dev team has yet perfected, and how could they? No one is perfect and no one knows what the others are thinking at any given time. That's what makes this so much fun! :)
We're all just speculating. And at times, people are saying things to make others contemplate what's been said. Those reading others thoughts are left for themselves to judge why anyone is expressing a certain opinion at any given point in time and act accordingly. Gaining as much information as possible from others is never frowned upon. :)
@tuck-fheman
Most whales are highly overinvested. That is why 95% are powering down. They may, at some point after lightening their holdings, buy back at a lower price. That certainly possible. The best thing that can happen is to get that point as quickly as possible, not discourage or avoid the selling that is absolutely necessary to get there and in doing so suffer the many disadvantages of a horribly broken distribution any longer than necessary.
Selling when one is heavily overinvested in a single asset and not buying more is not indicative of having no faith in the platform. Nor does it indicate a desire to sell off ones entire position. Everything in moderation.
I agree with you that there is no lack of innovation, and there may well be a rapid and significant influx of new investors leading to significant price increases including when least expected.
OK. Then what is it indicative of? Do tell.
@donkeypong @smooth I'm against this new 5 vote rule. I think it won't solve the power concentration problem, only make it worse. I think trying to "patch" the current system won't do it either, a new solution with a fresh start to the power distribution must be sought or the platform will wither and die, and competitors will just fly past... I wrote an article that you may find interesting based on the anthropological approach of the disrtibution of power in a society/ecosystem https://steemit.com/steemit/@webosfritos/thoughts-on-steemit-power-distribution-and-steempower-an-anthropology-based-approach which at the end of the day is what's happening here, nothing new, this type of problem has cursed human societies and structures since the dawn of time.
The system is getting more complex every day. Now people need to think about how many times they already voted today, and instead of voting being a binary choice, it is a 100th degree choice.
Bots will just continue voting with 12.5% vote percentage, while regular users get hurt in UX.
Yes one big part of the fun for me is to just vote for whatever that tickles my fancy, even comments. 5 a day would sap the fun out of curating without being too calculative.
im already getting losing the fun with voting slider, getting annoying how it pops up evrytime i'm just voting on this post lol
Same here.
Sometimes I upvote 90% of the comments in a post, if they're all good!
As a strong proponent of this change, my thoughts are here.
Looks like your link is broken.
This link works:
https://steemit.com/steem/@theoretical/learning-to-love-the-voting-power-equilibrium-point-change
5 per day is the wrong way I think.....i like to upvote comments a lot to express agreement/approval or thanks or simply to help distribution of Steem to those who are engaging and making an effort with Steemit. in addition to normal curation of posts I like, that's a lot of votes. If this change is to go ahead, the issue of showing approval or enabling low SP holders the ability to distribute rewards or views is a must. Engagement and building community is everything....we need the tools to be able to communicate effectively with each other. For too many, the experience on Steemit can feel worse than Reddit and Facebook when the impact of their engagement is minimal or they get hardly anything for their content, (and we all know it's not always a question of quality) because they have higher expectations. Encourage more engagement, not less......though I appreciate you are trying to make it harder for bots.
Comments are one of the mot valuable parts of a good post. There is already WAY TO LITTLE incentive to UPvote comments because there is not much profit in the UPvoter, this only makes even LESS incentive for UPvoting comments. This is not good because it will reduce the motivation for people to make VALUABLE comments.
How do such smart people with such access to opinions make such decisions????
I'm not one to start any rumors, but..
Check out my analysis. I agree this is bad and doesn't seem to have much effect.
Totally agree with you @donkeypong. In fact I was shocked when I read it here. I couldn't believe my eyes. All my concerns have already been so well put by you so I won't bother.
Hope the team looks at this very cautiously as this is very very important and directly connected to Steemit's success.
I assume flag votes will count in the five? So will this mean people will be reluctant to flag problematic content?
The 5 votes per day is augmented when one uses less than 100% voting power. Optimally one could vote 20 times per day with 15-40% voting power. We're moving the threshold for using the voting meter at time of voting to 1mVest (~300 STEEM) so most anyone can use it.
People who aren't good curator won't be whether or not there is the slider so it wouldn't have made sense not to add the slider from most everyone.
This will solved the voting on comments problems. There's so many comments I'd like to upvote for 1-2 cent and I feel like these could add up if everyone did this. Surely everyone will have an incentive to upvote the best comments on their own posts and this would surely lead to more meaningful conversation.
wow. it's already ON!
Wait, what?
Hi Ned. Listen to this: right now I have invested into ~8800 Steem power. I spend each day a lot of time curating stories. If i'm very lucky I earn 4 Steem power a day for that. However... I also get ~72 Steem power per day just because of holding this 8800 Steem Power. This shows that the job of curation is actually marginally profitable. Why spending all this time curating stories to get only a little 5% more Steem Power. Why actually spending time pressing upvote buttons if you already get 95% for free?! Lowering this daily reward for curators will do a lot of bad to SteemIt, is my believe! I know its all a balancing game, but I think this will tip the curator job out of the steemit picture. Just my 2-steem-power-cents.
I saw a video interview with a witness who said that if you don't log in, the steempower doesn't go up every day just for holding steem. It freezes if you don't log in. So logging and curating is actually helping you earn the "free" steem.
Don't worry... steem-power going up according to your holdings is baked into the back-end of steem. Has nothing to do with steemit front-end. Steem however stays steady, no matter if you login or not. That's normal. Nobody has promised anything different.
Bad things will come however when the payment structure is drastically changed, while investors invested in steem based on suddenly obsolete rules. Trust will drift away from steemit this way. So its importing in my opinion that Steemit doesn't change too much in too short time. Changes are good! But with respect to the reward system, move gradually. Maybe from 40 votes per day to 20 votes per day in 2 steps in half a year time for example. Steemit payout system is VERY slow (2 years), so changes to the payout structure should be slow also respectively. You need to respect investors, and give them a change to make the right decisions on the true facts.
I guess that was me.
It's not a freeze. The Steem Power will still grow, like anyone else's. But the others wil grow faster by earning rewards. Every three years all the Steem Power is divided by 10.
So when someone is inactive, their power goes down in proportion to all others power. And when someone disappears completely, their stake will vanish over the years.
Won't bots just do that?
Also, I feel it's much better for community building spreading small votes around than casting 4 big votes.
well i have used the thing today and to great effect i would say !! I have formulated my own personal voting dosage to maximize the effect desired and related to the style of particular comment or post !! Any control further must be seen as a good thing by all the community !! see this thing more as a pressure dial for each time you vote, its up to you right if you tickle or blast the love !! But its all good when its love that you spread to a great free minded community who think like you and share the vision and goal of this blockchain. Today with this feature i saw the light and it was Blue !! Go Steem !!
@ned - I am still undecided on how I feel about this feature. I keep seeing pros and cons, depending on how user's alter their behavior once the change is implemented. Right now, the biggest argument against it seems to be this. Do you have a good response?
While users can effectively still vote on 40 posts like they do today by reducing the voting power they spend on each vote - what is stopping the average 'heavyweight' voter from just finding the 4 posts that they think will have the best chance of curation rewards for the day, voting on those, and being done? Doesn't the new system encourage users to vote on less content?
Thats what i think. some voters may vote and curate less, and the problem we have is not enough voters and curators and too many posters trying to appease whales. we need a system with people having far more votes with less weight so theres more distribution to more users and less ridiculous amounts to single posts. this new idea may be trying to do that but because there is a choice then some people will choose to vote less. and what about users who when curating can only give a small reward like myself? my voting only gives 1cent. does that mean i only give 1 cent to 5 people now? all seems a bit too complex to solve the issue
@ned, offtopic but I noticed that overnight the 'home' and clicking 'steemit beta' brings me back to my own feed.
Being a new user this is a problem, there really isn't anything there yet.
But even if there was, doesn't this promote "inbreeding" behavior ? More and more people will only see the posts on their feed.
At the very least, I think this should be a configurable setting. I'd prefer 'home' to not be my feed, I'm sure many others agree.
Can I ask for a post with a little more detail on this? I am a very active user.... On a good chunk of every day, so if I am never at 100%.... It'll never matter?
Ned, everyone should have the voting slider and I support that. But if we use the slider (as many of the large accounts have been doing, including with their "good guy" voting bots), then we don't really need this change.
No, no, no! In that case, simplicity over functionality! the most basic behaviour on platform has to be one click and one click only!
Yes, I've just been given a slider and it's a pain. I'd prefer not to have it.
What about what I just proposed in this comment thread?
I agree.
It's already getting so confusing as it is - too many rules and knobs and gimmicks, all changing every month.
Overengineering.
that's a cool feature, why not mention it too?!?!
Beginning today, all users with approximately 300+ SP have the option to adjust their voting meter. Therefore, people can still place as many votes as they want, but should adjust their voting meter accordingly. Granted, for the whales, it would be nice to have an option less than 1% since votes will now be worth 8x as much.
As someone who is very active on Steemit, I fully agree with this post.
Even though I haven't usually stressed all that much about my voting power and curation rewards since my SP is pretty low, I have instead put a lot of time in to welcome new users with votes and comments as much as I could. This new change seems to counter my activity and tell me to leave Steemit cause my continuous tries to be welcoming and helpful to legit new users to the platform will be limited to 5 users per day, sort of.
True and this was with vacation for 2 weeks for me which got my voting power above 50% for the first time in months.
If this change is really just to get rid of bots, I think over time its something that will fix itself and shouldn't be altered this way. Like people used to say, in decentralization there is both those that want to use it for the greater good, and those who just want to see the world burn. But over time, like the use of bitcoin, the greater use of it will outweigh the evil use.
I think the #1 goal should be to attract and keep contributors. If I'm not mistaken, that would benefit all classes here (Whales, Dolphins, Minnows). In order to do this, we need new contributors to have more opportunities to earn around $50 on a post. It seems like limiting votes will make that even less likely... and makes my vote that I worked so hard to get to .01-.02 pretty much worthless if I vote for more than 5 posts. I am honestly confused. I can't see who this benefits.
You are not wrong. You are absolutely right!
When I vote, I vote because I like the post, the comment or want to encourage the author.
I don' count the votes. I don't calculate the percentages or the voting power. I just VOTE!
You can't even see your voting power without going to steemd.
That describes me exactly.
I completely agree with you @donkeypong with this everybody will be using their votes more selectively, only for content in certain topics hence bringing down the diversity in Steemit again! Having to calculate and select the weight percentage of your vote for each vote in order to vote more than 5 times is non sense.
Speak for yourself in all aspects please! I have not gotten any exposure let alone whale votes, EVER. You can look at my post I GTD I have one at-least worthy of making decent money but guess what? No. I love putting energy into something I gain energy from so to be real i'm not complaining, just would think one-time I could have a financial prestige on this Great Platform! Cheers I respectfully disagree.
well i hear what you are saying. Wow i went to see your stuff, alot of good posts ( 1500 posts in all !!! ) it seems to me. you have a lot of followers but the rewards yes are not there. A little like my experience i must say. I have purposefully invested in steem power as i saw it as the key ingredient to this pie. But now it seems it means less than owning lots of SBD,S which lets face it you only truly get if you receive large author rewards. Steem power was supposed to be the safe option and for this it takes 2 years to power it down to steem tokens or dollars. !! So this just enriches the authors and takes from what i,d call the curating real hard money investors to this site which by the way pay the sollars to the authors.
Thank you for that amazing comment, I must say I agree on everything you said 100%, Cheers!
it will be a boring platform if they pursue this....
Steemit is dead.
Ok that was a huge reply but I agree olso . I opose 5 votes a day olso.
Technically you could just mis-understand the new functionality.
Agree 100% with you !
@steemitblog says we can vote as often as we like. ???
Just made a post about a possible solution - allow people to select how many high powered votes they want to have available. That way the power users aren't being limited and the less active users aren't 'wasting' their voting power.
https://steemit.com/steem/@steemgrindr/big-changes-are-coming-take-control-of-your-voting-power-a-proposed-solution-for-the-new-steem-candidate
Both @klye and @bacchist have each done exposes where they found accounts that seemed to come out of nowhere to have every post those accounts made up voted thousands of dollars even when using stock photos they didn't credit. So five votes would likely not stop this, but it might make them ONLY vote for their sock puppets. This is a concerning loophole that it seems is being exploited. Have someone create a sock puppet account, very powerful whales up vote it. Instant thousands of dollars. I don't know how to fight this. Yet it seems like 5 votes won't stop this. I'm not 100% yet how this will help. I tentatively am in agreement with you @donkeypong though I do need to watch and see how it actually plays out. Good thing about beta, they can try it out. If it doesn't work they can roll it back or try something different.
Do we really want to discourage active users from actively using the platform? It's one thing to try to penalize bot abuse, (but they will just rewrite the code) it's another thing to discourage actively using steemit. People are upset that their posts only get a few votes now, it will be much worse when they start getting no votes on every post.
And that will be the result. Vast numbers of posts with no votes. Followed quickly by vast numbers of formally active users with abandoned accounts. I cannot think of any single change that will more quickly kill steemit than this one.
1, 5, 10, 500 votes per day. It doesn't matter and how to solve the issue
The escrow sounds interesting but I am also worried about curation. Again it seems like these fixes always 1) have an inordinate fear of bots and 2) address the whales usability concerns first.
The whales are important but they need to think like minnow to make the platform better. Maybe they need a Minnow focus group.
"Escrow Transfers
The Steem network now comes with native support for advanced escrow transfers of STEEM and Steem Dollars. "
Isn't this feature supposed to be integrated into Bitshares? anyway BTS is targeted to be a financial platform.
This change is ridiculous. Don't you think this is something that should have been debated openly first?
I'd genuinely like to know why you think it's ridiculous. Personally I don't mind that the power of my votes will be decreased the more I vote. Right now the current system is a little silly IMHO, I vote like 20-30 times a day and never go below 95% voting power.
what? i'm under 80% at the end of most days...
I've cast 26 votes in the last 24 hours and am sitting at 97% lol
Same here. I usually use at least 40 votes per day - on my blog posts, people who comment on them, curating other content, and occasional comments on those posts. I don't even want to have to think about rationing votes or using a slider for my $0.01 vote.
if this mean, that my vote (if I vote once per day) will be worth 8 times more, then this is great to show users, that they have greater impact! :)
Of course they want an open debate. Thats why they put this issue at the very top of the list of changes.
If they were trying to sneak it though without an open debate, they would have put it at the very bottom, under the heading "bug fixes" or someth... oh hey wait a second.
That's what this post is about. Please note the big Feedback Wanted header. Nothing has been deployed yet. I'm tempted to add a snarky comment about pitchforks, but alas, I have refrained. ;)
Especially given this:
Seems quite clear this is an opportunity for discussion. Steemit is doing on a good job on this one, let's acknowledge that.
Agreed. We've already seen Dan close issues as "won't fix" when people disagreed with the approach. I've been watching the releases and the discussions and I'm quite happy with what I'm seeing so far.
The feature set of a release candidate is usually not up for discussion. They are usually just a final chance to root out any bugs before the release goes live... If the intention is to put this up for discussion, they picked a strange part of the development cycle for it.
You may be right. I interpreted the "feedback wanted" and one-week delay as wanting input but the presentation is confusing and could be done more clearly.
It's a release candidate....
What are your expectations for communication beyond the core development team? What could they do to make you happier? Ridiculous is a strong word choice. Seems accusatory to me as in "worthy of ridicule." I just don't understand where all that negativity comes from.
There are two ways to answer this: Does someone who owns over 50% of the power in a company should ask the community anything? On the the one hand: no.
But on steemit, as we feel are PART of what's happening here - a thing I never felt on FB + I never thought that Zuckerberg should ask me anything - it seems that it will only further alienate the core users [ basically all the people commenting here with 58+ rep ]. Not necessarily because the changes are bad but because we are not listened...
YET!! This is a pre-release and a chance to voice our concerns. So maybe we will be listened to and taken in considerations...
Are we not debating right now? Do we need more than a week debating?
5 posts per day target is far too little. It's just going to completely disincentivize curation. Curation is a crucial part of Steemit. To see it disrupted so severely may lead to a significant loss in diversity and quality of trending posts.
I understand that bots need to be controlled, but this completely takes away voting power from the normal users.
Some ideas - enforce time limits, i.e. 1 vote per minute - something that'll clearly catch out bots over normal users. Or accounts with low SP can have a 5 per day target.
It will discourage voting on comments too. People will be conserving their votes for published content.
I really don't see them implementing a this without adding a way to scale down the power of your vote for each vote. If that's done, I'm really quite confident that it'll help incentivizing organic curation over bot curation.
1 vote per minute really wouldn't do much. At ~40 votes per day, that's about 1 vote per 36 mins. Even taking into consideration peak times where most posts are published, the odds of an "upvote collision" are fairly low. If anything, bot owners will only be forced to add a line of code that waits an extra minute before their next upvote. Make that 2-5 mins and you start seriously interfering with user experience, some posts are pretty short. Also, 1 min/upvote is a problem when considering comment upvotes, you'd have to start considering both as different. Not a fan of the rate limiting idea, I'd rather have lower influence/reward for voting more than having to wait.
Time limit per vote would be best solution.
Wow, this is a lot of absorb, I don't understand:
If you could expand on these two, that would be great, please.
edit:
hmm ok, just read this:
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/324 So it's a way for a powerful account to voluntarily give up voting rights
Regarding the 5 votes a day bullet point - From what I understand, it's how fast your voting power regenerates. Right now you could cast ~40 votes a day, and have your voting power go back to 100% after 24 hours (or close). Lowering the number down to 5 would make it so that your voting power only regenerates 5 votes worth of power each day, thus making it so it's harder to stay at 100% voting power.
The idea is that there's nothing wrong with being below 100% voting power - you can still vote, it just decreases in power the amount you vote each day.
I think it's an experimental change to try and combat some of the curation bots that push the limits of rewards. But I could be totally wrong here :)
There goes one of my 5... Was about to ask / guess this is what's going on. It seems a bit low to me however, I think a number around 20 might be more appropriate. Say you find 20 good posts to upvote a day (easy in my opinion) after a week or so, at this pace, you would find yourself with no power at all. Seems a bit limiting when it comes to rewarding users, however this does decrease the amount of Steem being created which has its benefits. IMHP
If you voted on 20 things, I'm assuming each one of those votes would still be above 85% voting power - which imho is pretty good still. You just wouldn't be able to do that day after day for weeks on end without penalty (like the bots do).
The first day would ofcourse be fine , but since it takes 5 days to recover that power, even when waiting a day that power would decrease quite quickly. I see how this would help with bot voting but also may be too limiting , i feel there is and will be more great content daily that would deserve a good upvote and not 10% of one , but hey let's give it a try I could be wrong.
I agree. Dropping to 5 from 40 seems extreme. It would be better to drop to 20 or 25 and test that level first.
I'm looking at the code, and this doesn't seem to be the case. Aparently the regeneration speed is the same, but more voting power is spent each vote. I'm working out the implications and will write about it soon.
Good to know, and thanks for looking into it!
Here's my analysis.
As far as I can tell, effectively what this does is have each vote weight 10x as much as previously did (and correspondly as much Voting Power)
And the payout that accompanies that vote. It sucks
The expected result of the change in target votes from 40 to 5 is less discrepancy between top paid posts and the long tail of paid posts by decentralizing the Steem Power allocated by each voter, primarily whales and bots. Under these rules, a person voting once per day at full power will have greater value than it would under current rules. The target votes per day had been changed once before from 10 to 40, however, voting regeneration had also been changed (from one day to five). Changing from 40 target votes to 5 without changing regeneration days allows Steem to ease into more optimal ratios for quality curation.
The Revoking Voting Permission was a simple upgrade allowing anyone who sees regulatory risk in the ability to use voting power to remove voting power from their stake. We do not expect this to be a feature used by most users, and it may not be used at all. We have no plans at this time to bring this change to the Steemit UI.
I would also like to chime in on this topic. As many people have already mentioned, I think changing from 40 target votes to 5 without changing regeneration is actually just going to end up hurting new content creators who do not yet have their foot in the door. I can see a situation where people conserve their votes only for "hot" or "trending" posts or for authors who are already popular. I can see a situation where people only vote 5 per day on popular authors in hopes of gaining large curation rewards. This may create a situation where people may not want to "chance" their vote or give their vote to lesser-known creators.
I rarely look at hot or trending posts. Honestly, I'm kind of sick of seeing the same people all the time. While I do not like the significant drop of target votes, I'm not sure it will stop me from voting quality whenever I can find it. Hopefully there are more like-minded people who actually focus on PEOPLE rather than the bottom line all the time.
I agree, and I think that's unfortunate. It seems to me that the best way to spread the wealth, is to get as many into the upper tier as quickly as possible, this seems to have the exact opposite result.
This was exactly the effect when the opposite change was made a few months ago. With more votes per day and each vote being less critical people were more willing to spread votes around and give them to posts that had a good chance to go nowhere. With greater scarcity of votes that probably won't happen.
A person voting once per day is likely to be a casual curator. Someone who logs in a couple of times a day and simply votes on a couple of trending posts they like. This change severely impacts those who are regular and involved (human) curators, responsible for digging out diverse and niche content that a casual curator would likely miss.
It would be fair to give a restrained curator greater power, but not penalizing regular deep curators so heavily at the same time. It may lead to a significant loss in diversity of content.
i'd upvote this but you see....the new 5 rule....
Right. I'm logged in all the time, reading and curating/commenting periodically throughout the day. I don't see how limiting my votes like this encourages spreading the love around - especially considering the low level of influence I have in the first place.
I think you might underestimate the number/influence of casual curators.
I also think you might overestimate the upvote rate of regular and involved curators. 40 votes/day, every day, is a pretty large amount of upvotes and a considerable amount of time that most people can't spend on the site. Very easily achievable with bots though.
Still, someone who spends more time on the site will be exposed to more quality posts and have a larger sample size to choose from. He will still have an advantage over the casual upvoter. i.e. If I told you you need to find newly created high quality content in the next 30 mins, you'll have a much harder time than if I gave you 5 hours.
40 votes isn't so much. As part of a deep curation team, I'm probably least likely to misestimate the situation. Daily, there are approximately 3000-4000 shit posts, 200-500 posts worth a read. 50-100 are very good - well worthy of upvotes. About 10 are excellent. 5 is nowhere near enough - at that point all curation on the site will grind to a halt.
If you read the comments, pretty much every regular curator is opposing this proposal for this very reason. For me, it's clear there are 50-100 posts every day that deserve my upvotes. With a 40 votes/day target, it's possible to vote on all with voting weight control. With 5, curation - in the true sense of the word - will halt on Steemit.
You make a very excellent point @liberosist
While I'm still a minnow, I'm doing my best to invest back into STEEM and increase my voting power. I also check in throughout the day to curate, comment and upvote the quality posts that cross my feeds.
This is why it is important that getting more filtering capabilities added is so important. In future releases I understand there will be a group system, and this will also help. But something needs to be done to get other interfaces other than steemit.com up and running. I am working on something, but I am not in a position to put nearly as much work into it as I want. Especially for an application like the one I am making - find posts about it under #steemportal - python scripting is very easy to get into for casual coders and making extensions that allow users to use algorithms to filter and search better, would massively help the curation business.
This is true but also decreases the upvote power of a user a lot faster , lowering his /her ability to reward quality content more frequently. I do believe with the increase in users there is also an increase in quality content , limiting votes for users like myself would potentially let this good content go unrewarded or noticed and drive away the users who generate that quality content. I think the number may prove to be too limiting but this is my opinion. On the other hand I do like the slowing of exssesive Steem creation.
The one thing to keep in mind is that this affects everyone voting, so realistically your average curation rewards shouldn't change week over week. You may vote on less topics, but so will everyone else, thus increasing your total reward from each individual post.
This is also something that could be increased at a later date if the community considers 5 to be too low (just like we went from 24h payouts to 12h, and then back to 24h).
Everybody is talking only about posts, what about voting for comments? People will now start saving on their votes and not upvoting comments as they will want to be able to vote for good posts...
I completely agree with you there :)
Yes it's like prospect theory. If you feel like you had 40 votes and now have 5 it's a loss but really it's 5 super votes or 40 votes like you had before. With the bar you can vote as often as before at 1 percent and then actually drop a 100percemt super vote.
Good points. I think we just have to give it a go and find out ;)
But it's not just about curation rewards, it seems to me it will penalize those who count on Whale votes for payouts as well. unless I am not understanding this at all.
Won't this just encourage a sort of patronage system, where those with the power will continue to vote only for those that they already vote for, without exploring further?
Whales don't vote with 100% of their power typically, which will let them vote on more things. 50 votes @ 10% power is the same reduction in power as 5 votes @ 100% power.
I don't think we're going to see a drastic number in the amount of votes being cast, but we will likely see a large drop in votes that are worth 100% of the voters weight.
Jesta I didn't even realize that we went back to 24hr payouts - you really get the feeling that techies are making all the decisions, sometimes easy/softer touches are more practical for average non-techie people
I had this same concern, but I think it will probably just lead to more people voting at, say 70%, 60% or even 50% power instead of ~90%. The rewards are still there, but they may be smaller.
It is 25 votes regenerating over 5 days. You can actually burst vote 50+ times and not run out of voting power. But each successive vote will be worth less.
@ned - Wouldn't this new 5-vote system just incentivize users to only vote on their own posts? If you post four times per day, why wouldn't you use four of your five full-power votes on yourself, and maybe save one for your own comment?
I know there's a long tail, but surely that won't get shorter with less voting, right? New users who have no following or influence will still get very few, if any rewards. But now they won't even be voting for each other. Unless I'm missing something, I don't really see how the tail problem is fixed by this. Is there a more detailed explanation of this proposal?
I think that in this way you are creating more discrepancy... will be 2 o 3 well paid posts and all the rest ignored! I think it is one of the worse ever thing you have done! Sorry! As I said in an other comment... I am not the best ever blogger but I am 100% sure I will not get anymore upvotes anyway I got normally 50 70 90 upvotes per post!
What your saying is, the hope of an author to regularly collect big money goes down. Meanwhile, it was stated that a single vote would be worth more, so please explain how that closes any gap. It seems to me that fewer posts will payout at all. but, I don't know a lot about the technology.
@ned These ideas might help in this particular circumstance:
RobinHood and others similar to this community:
If this 5 vote a day is implemented, it might be important to balance out by allowing Whales to redistribute their voting power. This can help groups like them still seek to help find the unfounded, but would probably require more members in this particular case.
More of a headsup from what I've been reading throughout the site:
It's important to note that many of the hot topics in Steemit are anarchic and libertarian-based, so it might damage investments as well as faith from the crowd who sort of find it iffy or discouraging when they see their votes limited - the thing they want to avoid when it comes to cryptocurrency living. Liberation in a sense that people can help people out, like in the paragraph above, can balance out the turmoil.
What happens if the rules changed a bit and allowed your author posting per day and your time of existence help improve your voting power? Or at least increase voting reception percentages from a vote? The latter might or might not get rid of the ranging and sliding of one's voting, by simply allowing the power of the vote become natural and automatic depending on the author's activity.
People are stuck on the "40 target" while the key point is "without changing regeneration days" This will contribute to balance voting power by diminishing the impact of whales. The intention that underlines this feature is it seems to distribute more voting power accross users.
I think this is an interesting feature that has to be tested. Let's not prejudge the outcome, we cannot anticipate how each one of us will be affected by this change.
I think that overall the system of weighting votes by stake helps keep the system more fair, though for moderating the effects of whales votes, I think that your idea of modulating vote power based on a users posts and the votes on them (and their rep) would help diminish the giant whack that whalevotes give, and it is not a good thing entirely because it narrows what hits the top. If someone is making a lot of effort and getting good traction posting, versus a whale with 3 posts and a million snarky comments, their vote should matter more than it currently does, and the whale's less. I refer to a particular whale when I speak of this, who has a post whining about being hounded for votes by people. In effect, this would placate this whale and make less people hound him for votes. Stake based voting is very good, and I don't want to see it diminished too much, but I think that reputation and upvoted posts should be a parameter in the formula for generating rewards. This is a means to increasing quality contribution.
I have a better idea. Remove the voting function completely. Oh, you practically did this.
I totally disagree with that, like this if have to think who i will upvote and who not. I use steemit 3-4 hours a day, read and upvote a lot. If this will be changed whats the point to read and curate?
is that mean, that if I vote only once per day, my vote will have 8 greater value?
I'm not sure..
Usually, you will never see me voicing a opinion on these changes, because I trust you guys and I just try to help focusing on the stuff that I'm better at.
Judging by the long list of comments I can understand why people are concerned. So if I may a small suggestion:
Is there any way we can have the changes incrementally decreasing, and gage from there. Or even if the point is to spread the voting power from the whales to the community, isn't it there some way to do it more gradually?
Usually drastic decisions and big changes happen as answer to an imminent crisis, maybe there is one and that's the best decision, I don't know.
What I can say is that personally I much prefer some gradual changes instead of reducing votes to only 5 per post.
These are my two cents for what it's worth, in case you guys are still looking for feedback.
Your comment is right on the money, Adil. A lot of us who don't normally comment on these things are pretty steemed (or steemy eyed) about this proposal.
I thought they were better than this. I really did. Hopefully, it's a one-time mistake and we can go back to some sanity soon.
As I said, I usually never comment on these things, and try to abstain and help without asking questions.
The only way I know to solve problems and disagreements is to offer something else to help make it work peacefully, but at the same time, I really don't wanna overstep in people's plates, but since the feedback is asked this is my take on it:
I hope that there are other ways to address the situation without resorting to this, and in exchange we can help out to make it work? Something else we can do to pull our weight? Whatever you need that we can do to help deal with whatever problem that needs to be solved.
Maybe there is some impending crisis that we don't see that caused this drastic decision, people have their reasons, so maybe there is something we can help with to compensate? Guys, just ask and we have your back! At least some of us will.
We have a great community here I hope that we can only keep growing :)
Trust but verify
Edited: If daily payouts will remain same, then it might not be an issue. I think we must give this new change a little time but overall, whales must re-consider OR at-least get ready to change this rule if it do not works properly. Only time will tell.
I feel very stressed after reading this announcement. Basically, I am struggling to make my votes worth some decent money but it is now limited to 5 at 100% voting power. Lets suppose now that if with time, my votes value increase to $1 per vote, then that means I can only spend $5 in a whole day. Do you think it is justified? Absolutely, NO.
All our efforts for reaching to 20,000 SP (20,000 SP needed currently for $1 worth of vote) will worth only $5 per day to spend which is absolutely a dust. If the idea is to encourage others for purchasing more steem power, then you always have other things to do like offering more features specially for high SP users which will encourage other users to buy more SP to enjoy those features but all I see is, taking the name of bot and implementing new changes on expense of real-human curators.
Just like @donkeypong said above, this will destroy steemit's concept in no time. OMG! 5 votes!!! I still can't believe me eyes. I didn't really expect such things from such kind of smart people. Steemit might lose its active members due to this change. People might only vote for reputable members who often hit the trending page in greed of curation reward and whales who have voting power of $100, if divide by 10% voting power, will make it $10. What a mess! It means, new minnows might never reach to any milestone, steemit will be a less fun, and very few posts will cross even $1,000 which actually was an inspiration for bloggers to reach, but now it might be a dream.
The idea behind this change looks like a capitalism economic system where rich person will become more richer and poor more poorer (or poor will stay poor). And through this post, I just want my message to reach steem developers. Re-consider what you just announced.
Anyways, I apologize if I used any inappropriate word above. I am hoping that steem-team could look at the suggestions because I believe in steemit and I love to browse steemit and spend most of my time here. This is just my opinion just like all other people stated their opinions.
P.S: If I'm missing something, let me know please.
This is a backend update, no changes to steemit.com at this time.
Hi Dan,
it is nice to see these changes.
Talking about 'steemit.com', I could not find a preferred way to make a proposal for it. Could you please advice me on this? I believe there might be an important feature improvement needed.
For now I plan to post it today or tomorrow on Steemit with #steem #steemit tags if you don't mind.
I guess you are busy but if you would like to hear more, share your opinion etc., I am available on Steemit chat :)
#steem #steemit tag are overused by others, so this will be extremely difficult to find any proposal there.
What about rating system? Do you think it's fair?
Are you aware of groups on steemit.chat that are flagging good people and post because they are jealous?
Can you do something about that?
@mahekg, give me several hours, please. I have almost finished a draft of proposal related to this topic.
Thank you, I can't wait to see what system you have in it.
The rules sure are getting complicated!
What has happened with the Feed tab, seems to have disappeared?
link is still working, but you are right. It is not longer there!
For me even the link is no longer working, it shows the main Steemit page instead.
Ok figured it out, seems that the Home link is actually our Feed page with the links to the posts of people we follow now.
Oooh man! Lots of changes, the "Target Votes of 5 per Day instead of 40" will definetly cut the rewards since people will be using their votes more selectively.
The total rewards per day are constant. This only affects how they are distributed.
I'm very concerned that "fewer overall votes" will mean "fewer people receiving votes"
Very reasonable expectation.
I may not fully understand steem and the rewards, but i have been reading up on it and I think i have grasped it a bit.
What about moving to the Flattr model? Where everyone has a voting stake depending on their SteemPower. The more you vote the less each vote weighs? Calculated backwards based on per person voting activity the past 24 hours. Or was this the case all along?
If every rolling 24 hours there is X amount of rewards to be distributed depending on total SP / MVests. And I have Y/X't weight in this total X. The more votes I make the more the (my part) Y get chopped up amongst all votes I made that day? Not sure if this all changes anything .....
Somehow I feel that implementing a vote-weight slider is just an alternative way of moving from 40 minimum votes to 5 maximum votes and if the above mentioned 'flattr model' is already how it works, than by moving the voting slider to 12.5% you can still bring your 40 votes as it was before right?
All in all I think the new 'home' feed redirection is a great way forward to dedicate more attention by default to unread and new items!
What you described is pretty close to exactly how it works.