RE: Definition of a Whale and a whale-like group and the Math Behind
Thanks for the explanations! I´ve been a fan of this experiment right from the start and I am still. Here is a suggestion (an idea) regarding the power and influence of whales:
With greater power comes greater responsibility.
Exactly. That´s why I believe that whales should have influence on the evaluation of content as well.
What if we didn´t give them voting power, but let them mark content they consider worth voting for - and pay them a special type of curation rewards back according on how many users followed their recommendation? Means: the more popular a whale, the more followers, the more curation rewards for the whale.
Nice side effect: if a whale needed to become popular to improve his own curation rewards, he surely wouldn´t ever abuse on his power (and flag without any need, for instance).
Then the rewards pool would be distributed by the dolphins and minnows (more responsibility for everyone), and at the same time powering up would be rewarded as well (investment would stay attractive).
I am not a developer and don´t know if such an idea would make any sense from a technical point of view or if it could even be implemented.
However, I believe that whales need to have a certain influence on the evaluation of content. Evaluation of content doesn´t necessarily mean distribution of rewards. A voice can be worth something in many ways.
I like experiments too!
Your suggestion reminds me somewhat of what @complexring was doing. I guess it was a kind of experiment by him. He would resteem a post that he planned on voting for in a few hours. He evaluated the post as up vote worthy but provided that information for others to act on, before he acted. I personally made some nice curation rewards from this. I didn't automatically up vote everything he resteemed but it got my attention because I felt he was a good evaluator and I did find most of what he resteemed to be of value. The effect of his experiment was to get more steem in the hands of those with less SP. I would like to see one of the top 10 whales try this experiment for a while and see what happens, while we're experimenting! :-)
Of course if someone did this, someone else would make a bot to up vote everything that person resteemed. But then the whale could make a bot to implement this at random; maybe for random time periods and not all the time. Then the bot maker would improve his bot to detect when this is active and when it is not. Then someone will also make a post that the implementation is currently on, and everyone else will know to look at the resteems. This becomes a form of variable reinforcement schedule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement) and everyone becomes addicted to steemit, checking it often to see when to check the resteems, and forgets about their facebook addiction and moves a billion people from facebook to steemit. Maybe! :-)
EDIT: Here is the post where @complexring talks about his reblogging / resteeming experiment:
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@complexring/witness-update-how-i-plan-on-using-the-re-blogging-feature-and-other-miscellaneous-items
Thanks for the up vote of this comment, complexring! :-)
Thank you for the adding, that's really interesting!! I hadn't seen this post yet.
I guess whatever features developers may plan to implement, they have to be kept simple, easy to understand and to handle. We always have to bear in mind that the great majority of users won't have much time neither will to study an algorithm.
Instead of resteeming the content (since resteeming is also a feature used by minnows), whales may select their favorite pieces by giving them "points", like we use when evaluating services and products. A highly recommended article may reach a maximum of 5 points (stars) which could be indicated close to the payout and vote counter. That would simply indicate high quality to minnows and dolphins. The decision to upvote would be still on them.
Furthermore, besides a trending page we would have a recommendation page (or however we may call it), where whale picks would be listed.
Like that, rewards distribution and curation would be perfectly separated and both - the most powerful and those who want to become powerful - would have a relevant influence on the overall performance and distribution of wealth.
Thanks for your thoughts in reply!
I get your point on keeping things simple, but for me, I love the technical and complex aspect of steem and steemit! Would it be so bad if steemit was a place with a high concentration of techy folks who also enjoy up seeing and up voting non-tech content? Do the non-tech people really need to understand how things work here, to post and enjoy recognition and feedback? How many of us have a clue as to how our computer of phone works? :-) Yet we use them all the time.
Also, regarding simplicity, some people would like a simple reward system - you get a lot of votes, you get a lot of reward. Personally, I like the randomness of the rewards! I love poker too, and a great hand does not always get a great reward. The variable nature of it can be addicting, see any casino for example. Yet, there IS a formula! So us techy people can and have figured it out to some degree. We like solving puzzles like this and find steemit to be intellectually challenging just from the perspective of figuring out how it works.
On YouTube, they initially had a 5 star rating system. Most people gave one or 5 stars, so they went to thumbs up and down. I think if a whale, or anyone, resteems a post here, it is the ultimate way to select it as a favorite. If they further make it known that they will be up voting it in the near future, then they are in affect giving an easy opportunity to get a curation reward which redistributes the SP in a way that gives everyone a chance to haave more power here in the future.
It says "beta" under "steemit" in the upper lefthand corner of the page, so let the experiments and the games continue!
I like this idea. Would think about it more and see what I can come up with. Not anything technical too though. Lol.
Looking forward! ;)
How to define "more followers"? A whale can create thousands of accounts to follow himself.
True! Then what about defining the quality of a whale's vote recommendation like that:
Let's assume that you - being a whale - recommend to vote on a specific article. Then thousands of minnows and Dolphins plus your own bots "follow" this recommendation and upvote the mentioned article you pointed your finger at. Now your payback / reward (for having recommended the article) would be defined according to the articles result. To avoid that your own bots are taken in consideration, your reward could be given according to the article's final position on the trending page. The "trendiness" is not depending on the no. of votes (including your bots), but on the rewards given on the content itself and on comments, for instance. That last point is an indicator of the quality of social interaction and which cannot be manipulated by (your) bots.
Does that make sense?
I didn't see the difference.. A whale can still upvote and follow with sock puppets. So the upvote will be confirmed, so the reward will be high, so the post will be trending.
You are the one who started with this idea. Why do you pass the ball back to me? :) Be creative. The experiment has shown that there are ways to distribute power more equally (= more fairly), thus it´s worth to keep thinking in the same direction.
Flags are surely not the solution, they were an effective short term instrument to wake us up. But I am sure you agree on the fact that they have caused a lot of trouble, too.
Try to bundle your smart forces in a healthier way and this is going to succeed.
Peace!