Three examples from the early voting penalty change in HF20
So I've written a lot about complicated parts of this, and I thought I'd try to make it a little simpler, to show what's being lost from post rewards. One of the things that's going to change is that author rewards will be completely capped at 75%.
This makes it possible to roughly estimate how much someone will lose by just looking at their past payouts and dividing. The actual effect will doubtlessly be smaller, because most voters who are voting early to help authors earn more will eventually learn not to, and voting behavior will change away from early voting at all. But this can give us a rough guess.
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmPbej1Nkmmg3t5RH9dPgUnqbME7rTxCxu1Yk1pMtjm7p9/hf20silentscreamer.jpg)
I'm starting with @silentscreamer because she brought it up on the last post, and because she's an ideal candidate for a control. Marica is a successful Steemian who got there without doing a lot of peering under the hood. She's the poster we want to advertise to the world - come to Steemit, be excellent, make money! She doesn't bot-vote, and she self-votes early but her vote isn't very big - two cents or so. The vast majority of her support is organic. As far as I know there's nobody specifically targeting her for support at minute-zero; she passed up an opportunity to apply for my program so that users without as much established support could have the spots instead.
She also uses beneficiaries a lot, which screws up the calculations, but I found a post without any. On this post of a total value of $35.24, Marica ended up with $27.85 rather than the $26.43 she would have gotten under the HF20 system. That's $1.42 that will just go away under the new plan - 4% of her post's value. If you voted on that post, only 96% of your vote would actually go to it.
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmT1xCFjrFXr8wLyViEpyQnLw26MxnvJzQ6FNwrX1iJx5h/hf20luz.jpg)
I promise I did not pick this example already knowing it was there. I only knew that I was supporting @luzcypher and the Open Mic contest with minute-zero autovotes, and that some other people were too. The result here startled me.
Luz doesn't self-vote, and doesn't bot-vote. The only reason these posts have early votes on them is because of people like me who value the Open Mic contest and want to support it. This is entirely the community deciding that he deserves more author rewards, and the community has been super-effective. Of $48.57 total post value, Luz ended up with a whopping $45.23, or 93%. Under HF20 he would only receive $36.42, a decline of $8.81, 18% of the post rewards going away completely.
Not only is that a huge number but it's huge for Open Mic, because under HF20 there's no way for us to modify our votes to get that money back. If we all vote after 15 minutes we'll get it ourselves in curation rewards, but it won't go to Luz and it won't go to the Open Mic prizes. Since every Open Mic week involves seven posts, that's a ton of money that won't be within the Open Mic ecosystem.
I honestly did not go into this post thinking I was going to find new information that made me think it was worse. Wow.
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmVsZND1t5ZJ8uQUwRk2VUJzpLrUsyF6GTKJzSgFGTAfPw/hf20me.jpg)
The third example is my own post. This post was the culmination of a series of experiments with exploiting this bug based on self-voting and chaining bot votes. I'm not doing it maximally, because I limit myself to a few discounters rather than using bid-bots, but I worked pretty hard to hit the post early with a big vote and then hit it late with several large adjusted votes to get more profit out of them. Because of this the goal was to have the largest total amount go to me rather than the largest percentage, but the effect is still pretty big.
Of $250.18 on the post I ended up with $212.30, or 85%. Under HF20 I would have gotten $187.63. So the adjustment would have taken $24.67 away from the post - a little less than 10%. Naturally I'm not actually going to be doing that under HF20, however.
It's worth taking a look at your own posts to see how you'd do. Any post that has paid out will have this display, and any post that doesn't give part of its rewards to a beneficiary (like dTube, Busy, Steempress, etc.) can be easily calculated this way.
Interesting to see some examples. Thinking it might be helpful for some to see, I calculated a few from my blog taken at random (excluding DSound posts.)
(I never use bots or self-vote until after the 30 minute window to give my curators the maximum curation possible. I thought the numbers might be interesting because of that.)
Here's some calculated percentages:
79.2%, 78.8%, 78.1%, 78.7%, 77.4%
So it looks like, for those using this type of strategy, the difference would be rather negligible. Perhaps most people don't use it, but some definitely do.
(I also meant to mention that barely anyone has me on autovote early on. Most of them come through from 19-29 minutes)
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What I agree with you most about, so far, is the sheer overcomplexity of the system which discourages adoption. It ought to be straightforward. Dynamic, sure—but it's awkward already as it is to discover a post and not vote on it for a while. The only improvement about the new scheme is reducing the window to 15 minutes so you don't have to sit around and wait forever.
3-4 percent still seems like a lot to me. That's 18% of curation.
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Interesting stuff @tcpolymath. Some thoughts:
I think the impacts will be comparative. Assuming your three examples were the only posters in existence, luzcypher would be much worse off, but silentscreamer would benefit, since the rewards returned to the reward pool would (over time and multiple future posts at least) increase her payouts by more than the amount she is losing. So it will depend on how your personal curation percentage compares to the overall stat. When I looked at that stat a long time ago it was 18% (so 82% author 18% curation across all posts). Of course at HF20 behaviour would change but it's not necessarily all bad news.
For luzcypher, if you want to support them at 100% still then I think (again I'm not entirely certain exactly how it works) that it's possible to set up posts (comments at least) with no curation rewards - check the payout on this post:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@espoem/utopian-pay-2018-4-12-comment
So all they need is some nice dev so set them up a platform with this functionality from which to launch their posts, with an additional comment underneath - "upvote here if you want to support at 100%". Someone at utopian could probably help with that. This subverts the entire HF of course (particularly since you could do all kinds of things combining this with beneficiaries payouts) but it's one possible option to investigate.
I think partly that's because those two are middle-ground examples. Some posts in the middle will come out about even but the big posts should get more benefit while the smaller posts get less, which is a big part of the problem.
In any case just because it's maybe only as bad as the current system isn't a good reason not to do it right and give all the post's curation to the curators.
I don't really understand that at all. It makes sense that there would be near-zero curation on it because the utopian bot made the comment and immediately self-voted it. But there's a 15% beneficiary to utopian on it that didn't pay out? Does the reverse auction apply to beneficiaries as well as regular curation?
I don't see anything in there that would allow a post to be made without regular curation rewards, though. I think that's just the action of the current early vote penalty. Showing another example of someone using it for community benefit.
I've never modelled the reward pool but in my head these impacts are proportional. So a high SP holder who is self-upvoting at time zero and gaining few other votes will lose around 25% of their post value under the HF20 changes. They will gain back a percentage over time due to the funds returned to the reward pool, something like the difference between 25% and the 18% overall curation stat, but much less than they are losing. I'm not convinced it's as simple and big posts v small posts.
If you look at steemd there's a flag setting the curation rewards to zero. On most posts this flag is set to true.
![Screen Shot 2018-07-01 at 15.02.14.png](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/QmaFmNRM5ZbJcvqdn7yYebFUPRGabod43v7BqS6HRKz2Ad)
Now how this works exactly, I'm not sure. I'm hoping the curation rewards aren't just being burned, although that would be weird. I'll try to find some more info.
Interesting, SBE doesn't show that flag. The post did pay out 100% to the author, it didn't lose anything to burning, so that's not what's happening.
If we can just remove curation from our posts without telling anyone that's kind of a big deal. On the other hand the devs could just use that to default to no curation on comments and kill one of the worst side effects of the change.
Sorry! Having spoken to @crokkon and @espoem and some people at Utopian the answer is that, whilst there are no curation rewards on the post, the author doesn't benefit. The curation rewards are simply not paid out (so they stay in the pool I guess). Not what I thought after all.
The thinking is that it's not possible to give 100% to the author under HF20, even if you are willing to sacrifice your curation rewards. So you're right, that is a step backwards.
disabling curation rewards (in the current HF19) is actually even worse for the author if there are votes within the reverse auction time. In that case the author gets exactly 75% of the pending payout, also the unclaimed curation rewards are not payed out to the author. here's the source
the beneficiary share is taken from the author rewards after the unclaimed curator share from the reverse auction time were added to it. source
That's how I thought it worked in general - but that is not what happened to that comment. Something prevented the beneficiary from paying out. Now I'm very curious as to what.
You mean from the utopian mod payout comment from espoem linked by miniature-tiger? This was payed to author and benefactor: https://steemd.com/b/21688715
OK, we're getting closer to understanding what I don't understand, I think. Most past payout displays on Steemit treat beneficiary rewards as curation. Right? I think? That's why beneficiaried posts like this one list author payouts less than 75% and curation greater than 25%. But that one doesn't. It lists author payouts as 100%.
Busy displays it the same, so it's not just a Steemit thing.
For posts that haven't payed out yet, condenser and busy show the pending payout value. For post that payed out already, condenser and busy show the sum of author and curator rewards as the total post value. Beneficiary shares are not shown at all and were already deducted from the author rewards. This way a post can seem to have more than 25% curation share.
The post you've linked has a 25% beneficiary. 5.034 STU were payed out to the author, 2.125 STU were payed out to all curators in total. the 25% beneficiary share to dtube is not contained in either of these numbers. You can reverse the math here: this post had a 5.034 / 0.75 + 2.125 STU = 8.837 STU pending value right before payout.
Ah! Cool, thank you for clearing up where I was wrong. So that original comment paid out its beneficiary but it just vanishes from both the amount voted and the payout display and looks like it never existed at all.
Thx for the nice words. First of all.
Ive read the announcement and it seems this passed by a lot of people. The focus was on other changes.
There is always an adjustment period the platform goes through when these kind of changes hit. Now as i said in your last post... Most people wont bother to look under the hood. The upvote system just isnt straight forward enough and requires additional digging to understand it fully.
That adjustment period is what will hurt openmic more then most.
We shouldnt be required to write on every post:Dont vote before this minute or your upvote is wasted!
All the good intentions aside, making changes like this require more thought on how it will affect everyone, not only the intended targets..
Ill just ping @ned, maybe he reads this and answers. Hes been more active lately.
It passed by me. Both @reazuliqbal and @josephsavage pointed it out to me earlier and I skimmed it and thought "surely they couldn't be doing that." It wasn't until they confirmed in it the recent blog post that I was sure this was what they were really doing.
Definitely.
Nice to see you coming around. I really didn't feel like beating your head with the "I know I'm right" stick... ;)
HF20 is not a done deal yet, at least that is my understanding, so hopefully some common sense will prevail and this part of it will be deleted out of HF20 as being ill conceived.
That's why I'm writing these posts when I'm supposed to be spotting jellyfish.
Not to much longer for the show. Did you get enough names for them all?
Yeah these kind of need to be finished yesterday. Monday morning should do though. I'm cutting it close.
I have enough names but I haven't assigned them yet.
Very informative! Thanks.
I generally realize around 78-79% of my post rewards. I think by capping it at 75% will actually be nice for me, because then I can know what I will actually be bringing in from those posts ahead of time... Much easier to calculate after that.
Now, with it being capped at 75%, that means that 25% will ALWAYS be for curation? That's not a bad idea, and hopefully will get more larger accounts to start curating again.
No, the extra value is being trashed. ("Returned to the rewards pool.") Basically the system will treat that percentage of your post as if it were a declined-rewards post.
This is why I'm so unhappy about it. If the 25% were going to the curators, rock on.
Ahhhh yea, that's not cool. Not sure why they just don't give it to the curators?
Curators are 'voluntarily' giving it up as a bid to get in earlier and win a bigger piece of the overall curation pie.
Except that if most curators don't even know that's happening, is it really voluntary?
sir plz upvote me plz
Well, it's an improvement. I still wish they'd remove superdelegates.
You got a 33.29% upvote from @ocdb courtesy of @tcpolymath!
Not everyone likes to vote, and many do not work on how to use steemi, which makes the problem of voting difficult
upvote for me please? https://steemit.com/news/@bible.com/6h36cq