A Declaration of Principles
Principle 1: The Core Game should be simple and accessible.
New users need to be able to come in and vote and post and not be put at a colossal disadvantage by the system design. I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to explain to @timcliff how the curation changes in Hardfork 20 will affect optimal voting strategy, and he never got it. Since Tim is one of the smartest people here, I can only imagine how difficult it's going to be to get any new user to understand it.
I am really, really good at using the overcomplication of the system to my own advantage and the advantage of the users I want to vote on. I am good at that now, I will be good at that when it changes. I promise you I have a huge edge over users who don't figure out all the intricacies of how voting works, who don't do math and build spreadsheets and snoop the blockchain and run separate accounts just to do experiments.
I think that's a bad thing. That edge I have is a giant curb that new users have to jump to be competitive here. I've encountered many users who've been here far longer than I have who still haven't jumped it, who are still frustrated and confused. We need to allow people to come in here cold and be on an even playing field with the experts, at least in the very simple game of creating, finding, and voting on content.
1. A vote is a vote is a vote.
A vote should always have the same total value no matter where or to whom it is given. A voter shouldn't have to think about how many votes a post has, or how old it is, or who posted it. Their decision should be simple: vote, don't vote, how much. This would allow a brand-new user to understand the basic voting system in seconds rather than months or not at all.
For those who want more human voting, the best way to get that is to make voting operate on a human scale. If you need a spreadsheet to decide where your vote goes, most people aren't going to bother.
2. All information for optimal voting should be easily available.
One of the things that annoys me about the change in HF20 is that in order to vote optimally, we're going to have to snoop the blockchain to find the times of earlier votes on that post. I'm sure before too long someone like @steem-plus will put out a plugin to do that in the browser, but even that's unfriendly to new users.
All information that matters to how much a vote is worth should be within the post's display in the condensers. If @steemit wants to change that in the back end they should also change it in the interface. Conversely, if it's so complicated and non-intuitive that putting it in the interface is a bad idea, putting it in the voting structure is also a bad idea.
3. SBD should be fixed.
A lot of the overcomplication in the current system has come from SBD being overvalued by the market while the system continued to value it at $1. There are several options for fixing this; my preference would be to dump SBD and USD entirely, and just run everything in Steem, but absent that I support repegging efforts, and I would support a system change that tied the system's value of SBD to the market value.
Principle 2: New users should have an easy path to effectiveness.
The price drop has made this a much smaller issue than it was when I joined, and you could put $500 USD into the system without seeing much of a difference in your account or your interaction. These days that's still a lot of money but at least it gets you a decent amount of effectiveness.
But as we seek large-scale adoption we need to make sure that we aren't just dropping new users into a system where they can't do anything, and don't have any clear, direct path to being able to do anything.
1. Encourage smaller buyins.
My days in online poker, free-to-play games, and on Patreon suggest that there are some inflection points in people's willingness to put money into a system. For USD thinkers those seem to be at $5, $20, $50, $200, and $500. The smaller numbers especially can be things people do as a weekly or bi-weekly investment.
Even with the price drop, someone who puts in $20/week isn't going to see an immediate, week-by-week benefit of that buyin. Which means even if they try it once they aren't going to get the reward cycle going and become consistent small-time investors. If Steem is going to be successful long-term we need to be more attractive to those people.
2. Encourage powering up.
Some of us can see the long-term value in powering up our account to increase our effectiveness here, but that's a sophisticated attitude, and one that requires a certain amount of real-life privilege. We need to get more authors powering up their rewards rather than cashing out, in order to take roles that include voting, community support, and participating in decisions about the future of Steem.
3. Create more structures of consistent support for excellent new users.
Once someone is here, and producing good content, and interacting, and looking like they could be a long-term asset, we need to treat them like a long-term asset, and make sure we offer them enough rewards, social and financial, to keep them here. We especially need to be training more people into leadership positions, and making the people who build leadership positions for themselves more effective.
This is the one I'm actually using my stake to build right now. I can only catch a few dozen users at a time, but that's a few dozen more than zero. Hopefully the effect will be exponential as those users grow and offer their support to others.
Principle 3: Rewards should narrow the class divide, not increase it.
The single biggest issue on Steem is the massive gap between rich and poor. The idea that a middle class is necessary to the long-term success of Steem has been gaining a lot of ground lately, especially thanks to the writings of @tarazkp. As one of the early members of that middle class, I strongly believe that we need many more people at this level, and soon. Relying on a few dozen whales and orcas to drive the whole system is a huge weakness; to have a healthy economy we need hundreds or thousands of dolphins. The rewards distribution should support that goal.
1. Support egalitarian rewards over stake-weighted ones.
Rewards that are determined by the power of your stake simply drive the class gap open further. We should direct as many of the rewards as possible to participatory actions available to everyone rather than to stake. In practice, curation rewards are incredibly stake-weighted, while author rewards are more egalitarian, so I support author rewards whenever possible. Hopefully we will see an expansion in the universe of participatory action rewards when SMTs come.
2. Broaden the rewards base rather than narrowing it.
Many of the proposals you may have seen around have the end goal of distributing more rewards to the most popular posts. They tend to be obfuscated in different language. "Superlinear rewards" means distributing more rewards to the most popular posts, and they're at least honest about it. "Returned to the rewards pool" also means distributing more rewards to the most popular posts, and that one isn't as clear.
This is backwards. A healthy system is one in which we have a wide variety of content that gets voting support, and many users who are able to grow through producing that content. Giving more rewards to popular posts distributes power to high-stake, sophisticated, experienced users at the expense of everyone else. It also currently means that the few popular topics we have stay popular, and any topic that doesn't have substantial support has a hard time getting traction.
Principle 4: We should embrace automation.
By being on blockchain at all, we are early adopters of the most-easily-automated system ever invented. We need to treat this as a feature, rather than a bug. Easy automation is one of the most important characteristics of a system based on on open ledger, and fighting it is essentially trying to turn that open-ledger system back into a closed-ledger system.
There may come a time when blockchain-backed social media is the only social media. (That seems unlikely; one feature Steem can't have in its current form is private posting, and people want that.) But until then, what's special about this platform is the very fact of its open ledger and open access, where anyone who wants to can access the back end of the system and write software to interact with that.
This is awesome, and revolutionary. It will allow us to build things that have never been built before, to do things on social media that have never been done before. Like any brand-new engineering field, a lot of the things we do might end up not being particularly good ideas. But this is not a reason to scrap the concept of automation.
Wrapup
As I said above, these are the principles that guide my actions when participating in the conversations around the future of Steem. I hope that my writing has led you to think about them and embrace some or all of them, but I'm here to convince you, not to force them on you. One of the great things about this platform as it currently stands is that everyone has the opportunity to participate in determining the principles by which it goes forward.
I can argue with people over some of these, while also building structures with my own stake that allow me to take action on some of them without anyone's help or permission. That's not entirely new, but you generally need a lot more resources to do that in a real-life social context. The promise of being able to take meaningful action towards my goals in a simple and effective fashion is what drew me to invest here and what will keep me here long-term.
I've been here for about three months and I completely agree that the curation process/culture is minnow unfriendly, and in fact I outlined a post about this on my whiteboard last night. I've found some tricks to enhance minnows' voting power, but they do require rejecting the common folklore taught new users. I'll post this later.
It is worth commenting here that, in my opinion, much of the damage done to Steemit in particular comes from the folklore passed to the newbies. I don't think that this folklore exists to intentionally damage new users and the platform, but the strategies fail when everyone follows them. Of course, this is true in almost all markets.
This deserves to be at the top.
Absolutely spot on. Followed you and looking forward to the post.
I agree with pretty much everything but especially 1.1 and 2.1.
If the red fins and minnows don't buy in then the whole thing will crash and burn.
Yep. To actually get anywhere in terms of social effectiveness, the finances need to be driven by punters and hobbyists, not crypto millionaires and obsessive full-timers like me. $20/month isn't a lot but there are way more people who have $20/month to spend on a fun social media game.
Unfortunately I've found 2.1 the hardest one to generate ideas for.
Getting fiat into crypto in general is still way too difficult. Getting fiat into STEEM is about 3x harder due to the additional steps.
The few easy options have ridiculous costs.
So just spitballing here, we need a Steem-denominated non-cryptocurrency asset that we can sell through Paypal or ACH or whatever without incurring regulatory issues, and then users could sell them for Steem. Essentially the equivalent of pachinko prizes, where you're just winning the prizes, you're not actually gambling! Until you take them next door to a completely independent establishment where you can trade them for cash.
Hmm... I like it
#monsterbanking comes to mind with a couple tweaks.
The main problem with using Steem Monsters is that as far as I know there's no trustless method for sending packs to other people. I could set up a middleman next week to sell packs for USD but what stops me from snooping the packs before I send them and keeping the good ones?
@yabapmatt, am I wrong about this? I might actually be interested in doing it if that hurdle could be cleared. I have an S-Corp and $10k or so, it's essentially trivial.
I don't think you'd need a pure trustless system. Just a standard 3rd party market maker.
I agree with what you write here. I saw your exchange with @timcliff and was, frankly, dissapointed with his responses. I came away thinking either that (a) those making the fundamental decisions on Steem rule changes don’t really understand what is needed, (b) they get it, but are too busy protecting their profits, or (c) you and I don’t really understand what will work or not work. Steem IS too complex. As you write above, if you want people to use it, it needs to be simple and transparent. Steem is based on transparency of the block chain, but fails when it comes to transparency of the effects of user actions. It is also heavily stacked in favor of those with large stakes instead of those with quality content and interactions. Perhaps it is time to team up with others that share your views, such as @kevinwong and @scipio who had all proposed changes that appear to address some of the shortfalls in Steem.
That's funny because I couldn't be more opposed to Kevin Wong's proposed changes. They go directly against all of what I've written about here. Scipio's is much more interesting but I wish he would write about it more clearly. I'd be curious to hear @markgritter's opinion on it, as he's much more the graph expert than I am.
To be fair to Tim, curation is a fiendishly complex topic. I don't think Tim is actively out to hurt anyone, that seems entirely against his style. But he seems not to have put in the time to understand what this proposal actually does. Maybe if more of us write about it he will be inspired to do so.
From what I understand, Scipio is proposing a PageRank-style system in which rewards are based on the product of "user authority" (a reputation score derived from follower relationships) and SP. Leaving aside the technical challenges, this is probably still a "rich get richer" scheme. We could probably run it as an experiment across like a week of data and see what it would result in; I'm not sure I see any evidence Scipio has done that.
Even Google does not use PageRank-as-originally-described but has put a lot of work into link farm detection and other anti-spam techniques that do not fall out automatically of UA as Scipio claims it does.
The fundamental problem in assigning a base weight (the value of 1-d is greater than zero) to everybody is that there is literally no limit on how large a Sybil attack may be. Perhaps the account creation fee outweighs this, but it isn't obvious to me. But if cost of creating an account < benefit of a single UA follow from that account, spammers will create fake accounts. Whatever pattern of "real" follows is rewarded, a spammer could just create a copy of that and get an equal reward.
I think you can show that in the UA scheme, the net UA per user is about 1 (assuming no leaves that nobody follows) and all you can do is change the distribution, but a closed network can achieve that all by itself, and 1 UA per user times as many users as the spammer can afford could be very large. The spammer doesn't need to concentrate all that in one user to be effective, if sum of UA is used to calculate rewards. But that's just playing around with an Excel model, not solving the math. (If we view it as a probability distribution, the number 1 makes sense.)
For example, is there any reason to believe half of the accounts on Steem couldn't be spammer-controlled? Then they would get half of the UA. I think this applies to smaller fractions as well.
I was wrong about the leaves, they don't decrease total value, but popular accounts that don't follow anybody do create problems. Unfollowing can decrease your own value! Here's my spreadsheet model (1-10 are legit users, 11-20 is a spam farm)
User 4 is following 1, 2, 3 (they're part of a whale clique) and is sitting at 2.079 UA.
If user 4 unfollows just one or two of his clique, total UA is preserved and 4 stays about the same, but the remaining members of the clique go up.
But if user 4 unfollows all three, then value is actually destroyed. He's sitting at 0.923 instead, and the total UA for users 1-10 is 4.77 instead of 10.0. (I assumed self-follows were not allowed.)
User 4 can use this to his advantage. Say user 20 is a sybil controlled by him.
When 4 follows: 1, 2, 3 in this model he has 2.366 UA (the bump is from the blank user.)
When 4 follows just 20 instead, he has 3.785 UA and his sybil account has nearly as much, 3.367 UA. Not a very robust system at the small scales we can easily explore. A popular user can "defect" and capture a lot of the UA.
Isn’t this why we need one human = 1 account only? Oracles can do that, by there is no plan to change Steem to support it. Unclear why other than to support bots or special projects, but those could be treated like corporations with requests to create them.
I don't know of any online service that has successfully managed to implement such a rule. Maybe match.com? Identity checking is hard and spammers have ready access to fake credentials such as phone numbers.
And there're good reasons to have multiple account, or at least sub accounts. Eg keeping your blog on topic if you cover a range of things. I have plans to use steem for all sorts of things beyond just blogging and for that reason it is logical to have multiple accounts.
This could also be solved by UI changes to one of the front ends, perhaps combined with backend changes to support multiple channels from a single account. Ultimately, I think we need one human = one account AND one corporation = 1 account. With a solid process for identifying humans and a solid process for registering corporations, that would be possible. The blockchain would need to be modified to handle creation and destruction of corporations as well as "legal" oversight of both.
Yes, this is all complex because people can often find workarounds or ways to exploit the system that lead to unintended consequences. As for Kevin’s proposals, I’m not entirely sure of the all the details and have not thought through all the implications, but his basic idea that the current rules are incentivizing behavior that is not adding value and that we should try to change them to reward behavior that incentivized quality content and quality curation is spot on. We cannot expect people to just do the right thing. What is needed, as I’ve written elsewhere, is probably a way to experiment with different rule sets in parallel through something like opt-in subcommunities. Ned replied that SMTs + Oracles might enable this. With this approach we could enable competition among rule sets and also gain lost of experience in what works and doesn’t work. My only concern is that it may lead to an infinite regress where you would then have to have a layer to manage the creation of those communities in order to prevent the powerful from creating a community that benefited themselves.
Steem and Steemit are both open source. There's already at least one full clone of the system running out there. SMTs could help but it's possible right now to split off and run one under your own ruleset if you want to, either as a testnet or in actual production. The lower the price gets here, the more practical that becomes.
There are a couple of things I do not fully agree with and others that I thin should be added.
One thing I am not agreeing with is the idea of votes, be it up or down, should always be worth equally. We love the idea of equality, but at the end of the day, we are not. Some people are smarter than others, some do value quality, others do not, some just don't care and some may just be super picky.
Some individuality in some way or form when it comes to the worth of an individual worth needs to be taken into account.
Another thing I would like to see being changed is the idea of having multiple accounts. I think that this is something that should be discouraged.
The idea of a vote being worth the same isn't about everyone's votes being with the same as each other. The basic concept of Steem is that your vote value grows either by investing or by participating and powering up, and I don't want to change that.
That principle is simply: when you're deciding whether to cast your vote on this post or some other post, it should be worth the same either way. You shouldn't have to make a decision that you could vote on this post, but the same vote would be worth 50% more if you voted on that other post, so now which one do you want to do?
Aaah, okay. That I can get behind a bit more.
I agree with everything you wrote. I felt these first hand but found a way to get out a bit with @utopian-io. From where I come, investing $20/week or even $20/month is a dream to some users. It also very hard to buy crypto with fiat. Many aren't really thinking of investing, they are here for quick cash if they are getting any.
Personally, I haven't cashed out anything since joining. I powered up whenever I could, and still looking to get my SP up. But honestly sometimes I feel discouraged seeing what a little effect my hard-earned SP has.
Hopefully, I will continue and earn more SP as I grow older as a user.
Or as in my case the only option since I do not yet understand how to get my money into steem. A lot of that is because right now I am still unsure about investing any money in steem, and I have no reason to try and figure out how to take steem and convert it into money. (USD).
So not so much of a sophisticated attitude, as of a cautious and I don't know what I am doing yet attitude. But that does not mean I will not eventually want to learn how to invest and how to withdraw from steem. I just have not reached that trust level yet with steem and steemit.
It's interesting to me that you see not withdrawing as conservative. I totally understand the not investing part but you could easily choose to take your earnings out instead of powering up.
Maybe you haven't reached the trust-level to invest but you also haven't reached the anti-trust level where you don't want to stay in Steem at all.
It is a balancing act internally for me. When steem was up, the want to learn how to take out was high, but resisted. Resistance was not easy. I would honestly like to see steem and steemit do very well. While I may be missing out on a little immediate income by not learning how to withdraw and invest, as long as I remain ignorant on that part then I will continue to power up, thereby increasing any potential future pay-out.
A silly self psychological game but one that will allow potential growth. If it all crashes to zero in reality I have lost nothing because I have invested no money. I love the concept of steemit, real people rewarding people. It is a shame so many see it as nothing more than a cash machine, but I do not think they understand that investing in themselves will give them bigger rewards.
I would love to see more people look at steemit as a potential Retirement account. In five years if I can continue to keep powering up, and avoid the OMG look at all that money sitting there syndrome, I will be able to then possibly supplement my retirement income.
@nealmcspadden would tell you that most people cashing out their money frivolously with a very few hanging on to it and letting it grow is exactly what happens with retirement accounts.
A psychological game isn't silly if it prevents you from doing that.
That’s true. It’s why so many financial self help books stress mindsets and methods to pretend like your investments aren’t even there. The more conscious control you have over your money the more likely you are to spend it all.
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Great thinking !lets hope for good change!
Something I neglected here and want to remember for next time I do this: A single path to success is a single point of failure.