The maximization curve
One thing that came up in a few conversations I have had is the strategy of earning passive income. I have some things to add to the conversation in this area for the future, but I thought I would remind people of something that many seem to miss. As humans, we all want to maximize our returns and minimize the effort it takes to get there, we all want to take the smarter, not harder approach. However this is always going to depend on our starting resources.
The example I will use for this is the delegations to bidbots. Even though it is a straight line return for the most part, there is a difference if someone delegates, 1M, 100K, 1K or 100 SP. Each will maximize their return on the stake delegated but that return is significantly different.
What people seemingly fail to realize that even though the option maximizing return on stake is available, that is rarely the best way to maximize value earned from the blockchain unless one is already highly staked. The value of the blockchain really is the community and what that means is the value is in the relationships and network that ties people together.
All of this is dictated by game theory and there are many paths and while a large stake can earn enough for themselves passively, a small stake rarely can. Maximizing the direct return on stake comes at a cost to being able to reward the community directly and instead it turns a blind eye to the network yet, still distributes. This makes it very hard to build a personal network of value when one essentially says they they don't value the community enough to take a hybrid approach.
I myself delegate to @ocdb, the whitelisted @ocd bot that supports previously curated content. It is not the highest return for delegated stake but, it is going to people who have proven themselves at least once on the blockchain they can create decent material. I don't do this to maximize return, I do it to support content producers and hopefully help build a strong community of future curators. However even then, I am never going to delegate my entire stake to them as I want to be active, I want to be sensitive in some way to the community and of course to my followers. As a result, less than 25% of my active stake goes to this path with the rest used for community and personal growth.
The games people play with their stake are a large part of their experience here and those who are absolute maximizers often forgo the potential of building valuable relationships. Many forget that there are many views of the blockchain these days and it is easy to see how people interact. Just like when people who abuse bidbots or use them exclusively rarely build a strong community around them, those who delegate to them exclusively without adding any staked value to others often find themselves somewhat of an island. Islands that require to be fed from a pool distributed by community rarely are going to get enough.
What I would like to see an increasing amount of is small staked users pulling their delegations back from bidbots for a time and use it to reward the content they actually like, the content they connect with and want to consume. Yes, the content is free to view and consume already but one can't expect to get value added to their content organically while delegating personal stake out to automated voting. For those who consider themselves decent contributors, having stake to reward readers can be a vital part of network growth, just like an app that has stake to distribute is.
Of course, this is just a recommendation based on my own approach over time and no one need take it but I do think that if at the lower levels the stake were to be actively used within the community, other factors will come into the light that will increase organic curation. It might not be a great deal more but widening distribution at any level is better than concentrating it predominantly on a very narrow band of users, many of which are only part of the community in order to extract value, never put in.
There is a lot of power in the community that goes beyond stake but how one uses the stake is a pretty good indicator of how one views the community as an individual. This is a a blockchain of options but it doesn't mean that the path taken by one is going to lead another to the same place and therefore, each user can take the time to work out what is the most beneficial path for themselves. Sometimes what appears to be a path of smarter, not harder is actually a position of limitation that sets a hard ceiling on return, which is fine if that ceiling provides what one needs under it, if one needs to raise the ceiling to get enough though, maximizing can be detrimental to well, maximizing.
As I and many others have said, the value of the blockchain is the community but a community is made up of active participants who provide some portion of the work the community needs. On the blockchain, part of that work is in curation and network development and if one doesn't take the time and effort to develop and build relationships. There are many ways to do this and lots of ways to approach being part of the community but this is a stake based platform, and if those with stake are only looking for passive income from their own but expecting active income from others, there is a conflict of philosophy and approach.
One thing that can be said about Stem though is that with so many ways to interact, everyone should be able to find a path that both allows them to grow and helps others also. Finding the balance is a continual negotiation and the dynamic nature of change i the system means that what is suitable today might not be tomorrow. The responsibility of the individual is to do the best they can and the best is rarely to be completely passive and blind.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
Manual curation is important. I created a small helper that helps me to upvote an interesting post after 14 to 15 minutes without waiting and forgetting to upvote it eventually.
$rewarding 14min 100%
I have something like 45,000 votes cast and besides a couple very short experiments, all are manual. It makes a difference in my opinion as it connects me to people I connect with. Blind voting doesn't represent my interests and therefore those it votes on aren't likely interested in me either. No commonality, no relationship, no network.
What would be interesting is if an interface like @steeveapp could implement it into their UI so that I could set it, read an article, vote and it would automatically delay it. Possible @void?
We will research it, but you would need to store private secrets on the backend, which is often not something people want to do and it is much more risky for us since someone then may decide to start attacking our servers, for example.
From the technical perspective, there is nothing like that implemented in Steeve yet, so it would be a non-trivial effort. Considering our limited resources right now, not sure this is really feasible right now. But @mor created an issue in the tracker:
https://bitbucket.org/steeveproject/steeve.app/issues/134/enable-automatic-postponing-of-votes
Anyway, what is the benefit of doing this exactly?
Edit: Right, to skip the first 15 minutes...
Posted using Steeve
It would be rather easy, though, to do it on frontend purely, i.e. the queue would be in your browser and you would be voting from the web app still. But closing the browser would postpone voting until your start it up again.
Posted using Steeve
I think for many people that might be enough. I actually don't mind the timing so much as I don't worry too much about curation. I don't vote early though because I don't want to close anyone out.
The possibility to postpone voting is a great idea, we'll think about the possible way of implementation and hopefully get to it as soon as possible. :)
Posted using Steeve
Without giving @rewarding posting authority, it can not upvote delayed in your name.
Without posting authority, rewarding will reply after 15 min. and mention your username in the comment, so you can manually upvote.
$rewarding 0.03$
(This command calculates the vote percentage so that the upvote is 0.03$ worth, delay is 15 min.)
I wanted to test what would happen as I hadn't given authority yet but I am glad it does what it does. I would add a comment in the steemconnect page to say "make sure this is steemconnect" to stop @rewording/rewadring etc.
$rewarding 15min 4%
@tarazkp, you can upvote the parent comment/post now.
You can give rewarding the posting authory for an automatic upvote (steemconnect
I was hoping it would do this @holger80 thank you :)
I like this approach as I have tried to do the same. I have delegated about 20-25% to communities that not only help me but also others through curation. The rest is really for me to manually curate and engage actively as I think that is what it is really meant for. Some concentrate so much on the the optimization of their reward that they forget the other value being created in relationships and knowledge that we get from engaging. I still think that there is still room for more investment like stakes that could provide passive income while also helping the ecosystem grow where it is most needed like new users.
In my opinion, most people need not worry about curation returns until they have significant stake, instead they should concentrate on finding and engaging with people they enjoy.
I think a big part of the equation is how long someone has been here and who they are connected to within community. Also what level of rewards the person considers to be worth the time investment. Regardless of how much we enjoy socializing, most people have to be a bit practical about how they invest their time and factor in both enjoyment of the community and financial returns.
You are fortunate in that you've been on this platform long enough that people you started forming relationships with when they were also new have all grown with you to have considerable stake. You also have a lot of followers. This allows you to post multiple times per day and know you'll get a decent payout on each one. So in your situation, the value is definitely coming far more from community interaction than you would ever get from delegating or vote selling.
I'm fortunate that while I wasn't nearly so early as that, I was able to buy a considerable amount of SP. For a few months I also was a part of a community that provided large once-daily upvotes. This combination gave me the ability to be generous with my upvotes, building my community connections more. I still delegated about 25% of my SP because I wanted to be a part of some communities that required the delegation, but with dolphin stake, it wasn't a big deal.
But then the community I was in provided upvotes with no delegation lost its major delegation. But I was still held to just one post per day by my participation in the other communities. Suddenly I was not making enough for the time investment for me to consider the endeavor worthwhile. At least not as a regular thing. I then wound up changing my delegations to more like 65% of my SP, which in combination with the decreased price of steem, has made my upvote pretty tiny again. It's back to being like a minnow.
Other people are less fortunate than either of us. They joined after RCs were introduced, so came into an environment where they could do less AND where there is simply less activity on the platform overall. And I'm not just talking about missing spam. There is less genuine engagement also. So it is much harder for them to earn on their posts than it was for either of us. Even if they buy lots of SP, the chance that it will come back to them through others finding their content is very low. If they want any guaranteed returns at all, they'll need to delegate in some sort of way.
Tricky business.
Indeed it is and this is why people have to better consider their actions here. As you said, I and you are fortunate in many ways which allows the luxury of passive action but, it has also come at a cost. For you it has been a financial one earned through sweat in the real world and allowed you to take different paths here, me it was a sweat to earn on here through consistent activity. I think that those who have come in after RCs and can't power up from external sources need to think through their expectations and wills at this point although there are possibilities to come.
Those with small stakes have to consider how best to use their stake. There are many options here but it is difficult to do what is best for the individual if they don't understand all of the possibilities, implications and ramifications of their behavior and the external influences that affect them. I am not judging people, I want people to find options that best satisfy their needs and many are unknowingly using their stake in a way that doesn't necessarily get them to where they want to go.
There are new options coming that will change this but that is going to come through new interfaces and SMTs. For many, the better use of their resources at this point might be to support and earn future SMT stake or hold @steemmonsters cards. Every position has risk and reward involved though.
You seem to know what you are talking about so I would like to ask you a question if I may.
500sp was a 5 cent vote, now 1000sp is a 4 cent vote, if this is based on the external price today of 62 cents for steem, I used world coin index for that just. Then if it keeps falling will my 900 sp actually be in minus territory should we hit 0.7 cents like some years before?
lol, I don't think it can go into minus. What people have to remember is that what is actually voting is vests, not price.
imagine voting power is 100%
500 SP = ~1000 Vests
a 100% vote has 1000 vest pull on the pool regardless of price. What this means is that all things remaining equal, whether Steem is $10 or 10c, the draw on the pool is the same which means it will reward the same amount of Steem from the pool. Price doesn't matter so much until selling although SBD printed will be lower at lower prices.
What decent posters will find is that as price decreases, supporters might increase their voting percentage. What this means is that they are actually using more vests to draw from the pool which increases steem reward. For example, I will go from 3% comment votes to 4 or 5% depending on price. What this means is that essentially in Steem, people will earn up to 66% more steem from a comment even though the payout value is lower.
Okay I sort of get that, though why is the vote value going down so much? What is the factor devaluing sp so that 500sp was a 5 cent vote and now a 2.5 cent vote. It all seems to tie in with outside prices, as steem price sinks, vote value sinks, and post rewards deflate.
I am watching post rewards go down by the minute, not hour.
Yes. The values shown are tied to the price of steem externally so will be affected on a 3.5 day moving average.
The current feed price is 73c but the external price is 62c i think so over the next days it will drop lower.
Superb thanks, I thought that was the case regards rewards.
I am though still no closer to solving why vote weight values are deflating also on a massive scale. All in the code I guess.
Vote value is tied to price too so if Steem was 1 dollar and the vote is worth 2 dollars, when steem is 10 the vote is 20. All things equal.
Let's say you go 50/50 reward. Sbd is always calculated at 1 remember.
Example without factoring curation and only one voter.
@ 1 dollar steem
A 2 dollar payout is 1 sbd and 1 steem
1 sbd can buy 1 more steem so the payout is worth 2 steem.
@ 10 dollar steem
A now 20 dollar payout is 10 sbd and 1 steem.
10 sbd can buy 1 steem so the payout is still worth 2 steem total.
However, obviously with the second example the sbd can be sold externally for 10x the value of the first.
Make sense?
I am trying to get there honest lol, I get lost at the point where I think steem was worth 0.7 cents, yet way back when, people were getting $1500 posts, without bidbots.
Now there is more steem on here, more people with over 500sp, yet the vote value is not enough to see those massive post returns.
Maybe the bots killed it, I do not know, though if steem was worth only 0.7cents which it was, and votes were worth a lot more, that is where it all gets lost on me.
If we reach 0.7 cents for steem and 0.10 for sbd, then will we have a broken system, or one that functions still, as when it was last at said point?
Sorry for so many questions, just trying to understand it all, thanks for being patient with me.
When Steem was 7 cents huge posts were around the 50 dollar mark. one of my few times in Trending was a 25 dollar post. If I remember it took a whale or two and curie to get me there. The massive posts at the start was because there were few users but they were distributing the whole pool. As more users come on with stake, there is less high reward. currently the bidbots are the only ones who can get posts to 1500 and that is stacked with multiple bots, never organic.
THe system is designed for essentially whatever price. if you remember not too far back SBD stopped printing. That was because of a debt system that ensures SBD won't get over produced as it is backed by Steem.
Essentially though from my perspective is, unless selling, don't worry too much about price (or payout values) and play your game well.
See, reading some Steem related material can help from time to time ;P
You got a 58.56% upvote from @ocdb courtesy of @tarazkp!
@ocdb is a non-profit bidbot for whitelisted Steemians, current max bid is 12 SBD or the respective amount in Steem. Vote value is 150% of the bid.
Check our website https://thegoodwhales.io/ for the whitelist, queue and delegation info. Join our Discord channel for more information.
If you like what @ocd does, consider voting for ocd-witness through SteemConnect or on the Steemit Witnesses page. :)
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