Wholesale witness voting changes.
Per this chart posted by @cervantes, I have changed my witness votes around to support only those witnesses who have voted "disapprove" on both the 1.3x rewards proposal and the 50% curation proposal. I'm glad to see that most witnesses have the sense to disapprove the change to superlinear rewards, but am dismayed by the support for increasing the percentage of rewards going to curation.
While Steem advertises itself as "proof-of-brain," curation rewards are almost entirely tied to stake. They're essentially useless for anyone with a low amount of stake. Prioritizing them degrades the social information-value of outgoing votes. This is paid for by removing that value from post authors, which is the value that drives new user acquisition and small user growth. This is essentially a proposal to give more rewards to the people who are already heavily invested in Steem by limiting the growth of the userbase and community.
If you've been watching Steem content over the last few months, and especially since Hardfork 20, I don't see how you can be unaware of the large danger Steem is in of becoming a content desert. Even Open Mic, which once was a flagship participation community, has seen massive drops in participation over the last few weeks. Other subject-based curators have been talking for months about not having enough content to vote on.
The content drop is an emergency, and our representatives are not only ignoring it, they're acting to exacerbate it. My witness vote may not mean much, but I consider this unacceptable.
My five-figure investment may not mean much, either, but it will be exiting Steem if 50% curation becomes the consensus. This is not a path to becoming a thriving social system with diverse voting patterns, it's a path toward giving rewards to a few privileged authors while boxing out everybody else. While I could probably become one of them, I'm not interested in that.
I agree that the results would be less quality and more redirection of rewards to larger stakeholders. While quality is in the eye of the beholder, and I realize my work here is not everyone's cup of tea, I spend 10-20 hours on most of my posts researching. I do not believe that half of the rewards should go to those who read it and upvote. It suggests that those curating are as responsible for the quality produced as the actual producer. This applies to anyone who spends serious time putting in effort into their posts. Artists, musicians, writers.
Due to the depressed valuation of Steem, the majority here vote at dust thresholds. While it is true that for posts this will not stop them from receiving curation, half of almost nothing doesn't really move the meter much. This scenario seems more about putting more rewards into the hands of the largest stakeholders to compensate for the loss of the bidbot profit machine they were using before.
In a gifting economy, which I see some tout this being, the votes cast are a gift, a thank you for the effort or an agreement. An appreciation for what was produced. This is a reverse scenario, saying reward me at an equal value for enjoying what you have produced.
I also know that there are some like myself who take the gifting idea a step further. I have given roughly 20% of my rewards to worthy causes that I hold dear here. This idea would cut greatly into that.
All in all, I agree with you. This change will make sure that those coming in leave in higher numbers as the higher curation on low stake is laughable, those who spend long hours putting together their posts will think twice about how many hours are put into the posts, if they are made at all.
Hm. Do you see that as true for a traditional publisher as well? Because in some sense the people voting on you here are providing the capital for the publication of your work in a profitable environment. It's not just reading and voting that's happening, there's economic background work being done as well.
I'm not necessarily saying that makes curation rewards of any sort make sense, much less increasing them. But it's not as simple as getting paid for reading.
Yep. There's really no getting around the fact that this is redistribution of rewards to larger accounts, and that nobody who comes in here cold is going to see significant curation rewards for a long time, if ever.
No, but many who were using traditional publishers now self publish. Self publishing via Kindle nets the author 70% of sales. For those who realize that they are the driving force behind sales they can keep it all by selling from their own website, or do a variation using companies like Streetlib. I was of the thought that curation was to reward those whose posts were enriching, either because they are informative, entertaining or exhibit a talent many do not possess (like artists, musicians, etc).
In my first several months here, my curation rewards were almost nonexistent. It wasn't until I sped up my growth by investing a little bit and rented delegation that it began growing, and even now it isn't all that much. One of my typical posts now will lose more under this new dynamic than I make in weekly curation. Definitely this is a money grab to shift the pool more to those with higher stake. There are several that I follow and upvote whose posts make very little, and if you look at many here that is normal for many. This will simply make many of them ask why they bother (I often wonder why some of them aren't already asking). I know for myself if this does shift, it will alter a couple things for me:
I will no longer spend so much time researching posts. I would be better off self publishing again.
I will no longer be able to gift to charities here as I do now. The proposed % decrease is more than the 20% that I have roughly been giving.
Now I get that many of those at the top of this chain probably could care less whether these changes occur from me, however as I have said before, at some point you can't keep creating bad will among those first couple million and believe that there will be hundreds of millions in the near future.
Can I shout that from some sort of mountaintop?
This "economic" fix seems to be completely ignoring any thought about what the optimum economic behavior actually is under the proposed changes, as opposed to what they wish it is.
Superlinear payouts don't reward quality. It rewards correctly predicting what other people will vote for, which is a coalitional game that can be played by spammers and scammers alike.
Increased curation rewards don't make it more rewarding to find good content. They make it cheaper to run a bidbot service. Today if it costs $X to buy a vote worth $0.75Y and the service gets $0.25Y, the bidbot profit is the difference between $X+$0.25Y and the opportunity cost of self-voting on a spam vote.
Before: X + 0.25Y > Y
After: X + 0.50Y > Y
Result: price ($X) goes down.
The hope that combining the two will magically result in a game that rewards quality instead is foolish.
In fact, I suspect some simple spreadsheet math would show the thresholds at which two spammers can vote for each other in order to increase rewards, which gets easier with 50% rewards.
It certainly discourages spreading votes around. "Curators" are always incentivized to generate a 100% upvote.
A metric that rewards quality would measure whether the result of an upvote (or resteem) was to bring the article to the attention of others who also found it valuable. (I've been thinking on writing an article about Bayesian surprise, but I haven't been able to measure it well on Steem data yet.)
Somewhat valid point. I think there is some effort to think about that, but it is far from clear especially once one goes beyond simple (e.g. hyperrational, risk-neutral) models and considers actual behaviors.
Let's be clear on one thing. Superlinear is discussed in the post but very few major stakeholders nor witnesses support it (as somewhat indicated by the chart). So in that sense criticizing it here is somewhat straw manning.
Support for 50% curation rewards is higher.
I don't think the curation game is anywhere near as simple as you suggest here. Too much vote power applied to a piece of content discourages future votes (and may draw downvotes). It also means (given limited total vote power) that a curator is restricted to putting eggs in fewer baskets, which increases risk.
That is what curation rewards do, assuming the 'others' also vote accordingly. In reality that works a lot better if the 'others' downvote when something of low value is brought up to their attention (which is part of why cheaper downvotes is part of the discussion)
For the categories I am interested in, "Trending" and "Hot" do precisely zero. They're too low-traffic to be worth bothering with. So, voting doesn't bring posts to my attention.
This is in my mind the big failure of understanding in the Steem designers. Upvotes are not curation, unless they affect what people pay attention to. Systems that provide personalized recommendations do this. Steem and the Steemit front end do this... for very popular categories, maybe.
Actual curation on Steemit takes the form of posts with links and resteems. The "proof of brain" treats the former as just another article and the second as nothing. Instead of being rewarded directly, you have to hope that enough people's upvotes on the articles will increase your curation share enough to be worth it--- but if you're being front-run by a voting bot, odds are your increase will be marginal. I bet hardly anybody doing this is in it for the net curation increase over their initial upvote.
My earlier study on curation efficiency suggested that curation went disproportionately to people gaming the system: https://steemit.com/econometrics/@markgritter/steem-econometrics-efficient-upvoting
Steem was designed mostly to find and reward viral content, which means either general interest or at least a large subculture. Some of this is carried over into design of the UI (e.g. lack of much support for categories aside from the lousy tags stuff), some not.
Now it certainly isn't doing much of that and it is debatable whether the user base is actually large enough for viral to have much meaning. It is also debatable whether finding and rewarding viral content is worthwhile or a useful goal. The upcoming SMT upgrade is intended to focus more on smaller subcommunities with their own (interconnected) token economies and individual distribution and voting models. Whether that will actually work out usefully is anyone's guess at this point.
Certainly no one claims that the sort of voting that takes place on Steem is intended as personalization. It isn't that at all. As you say perhaps a personalization engine could be created but there isn't one afaik and it wouldn't be an on chain function anyway. The data is public, you (meant generally to include app developers) are free to do with it as you like, including personalization.
The voting bot which someone developed for that purpose is (though to be clear many of them are quite dumb, but not all), and there are certainly manual curators also trying to do that. The scale of the available rewards limits human time investment though, at least in high cost regions.
Just looked at. Measuring curation as a third party is very difficult. For example (and this is only one of many ways measurements can be misled), I could guarantee a huge return on a small account by routinely voting with that small account and then voting with a big account behind it. From your perspective as an observer the small account would look like excellent curator but from my perspective it would be just sort of value transfer from the big account to the small one.
In short I don't know how to interpret your results although some aspects of it in the aggregate such as limited alpha are clearly correct.
I read that post, left a few comments, and no need to rehash them here. basically I still even after the responses to me do not see nor understand the benefit to the author. Will votes and comments go up on my post? not likely. Will the bid bots make more money? likely, after all authors are going to want to replace what they feel are "lost rewards". Will a curator toss a vote on a post that has a $0.080 payout pending or will they place that vote on an author that bought votes via a bid bot and has a payout of $8.00? that one is more iffy.
Dump the time allowed to curate down to zero minute, it really does not matter if there is a time limit or not. The only people that need a set time limit are the bots, and they are not people. Imagine you hit the "New" tab and see your favorite poster just posted, boom you can vote right away, maybe beat the bots.
As far as I can tell the argument for 50/50 continues to be that Steem will be improved by giving Kevin more money, and people are buying into it for some reason.
I think what the witnesses need to really be fixing, but will never happen is the imbalance of witness selection. It is pretty much a farce when one person can control half the witnesses, if two band together they can control almost 7/8th's of the witnesses. If steem.io was really concerned about steem they would ensure that no one individual could control that large a percentage of the witnesses.
Of course the answer you will get back is that they will just split out and use more accounts to maintain the control. So limit the witness votes to 7 witnesses per person/account. It's likely that 90% of the people do not have more than 7 witnesses selected already. It will never happen, because then the people might have a real voice in how things work.
Steem will be improved if the author himself is allowed to choose what percentage of curator rewards he wants to give back.
Why should we impose restrictions?
I don't pretend to know nor follow all of the ins and outs of this but I can agree on the drop off of content here. I struggle to find votes to distribute as my feed is becoming more and more of a desert. There ain't no smoke without fire...
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I didn't realize that so many proposals to change rewards to 1.3x were circulating. I thought that was just a random article. I hadn't heard about people wanting to switch to 50% curation. That doesn't sound like it would benefit minnows and redfish very much.
It's the latest in a long line of depressing news. (And it sure looks to me like it's another example of the top witnesses deciding things among themselves in secret meetings.)
It would be nice if some of that stuff was more out in the open. Then we could all know what's going on. I'm not sure why they would want to adopt a proposal that would benefit the largest accounts if they're really trying to help the smaller accounts. If we're going to have a middle class, we need the red fish and minnows to grow.
Kind of surprising that such votes by witnesses isn't its own blockchain operation. People voting for witnesses should I think ideally be able to extract tables like this from an RPC node with a few lines of code. The fact that this isn't the case is rather disturbing.
I'm not sure why they don't have it on the blockchain. If you noticed, Steemit set up the RC system so that they don't need witness approval to make changes. That's worrisome to me. If Steem is decentralized, why wouldn't it be something that's decided by the community?
The kevinwong post proposal formally came out earlier this year (seems like mid-Summer, but I'm lousy with time frames). I personally hadn't seen anything about it until it popped up in a comment conversation on a different post, recalling it, where Ned said he'd read about it. That was only a few weeks ago, I think. According to one comment in this latest post by cervantes, smooth says this discussion has been going on for something like a year.
So, basically, the 1.3 superlinear curve is not that popular, but the 50-50 idea is. But there's shortening the curation window, which is fine, and also incentivizing downvotes, which only big SP with high rep are going to do, anyway. Now, they want to be paid to ruin people's accounts. Woohoo. :) That little editorial comment is mine, not what they said. I'm just thinking about what a separate downvoting pool in the hands of some people would do, and it's not pretty.
Honestly, I think the idea of the 1.3 super-linear curve is a better idea than 50-50 curation. The latter is much more directly going to damage small accounts. It seems like they're trying to push the smaller users out as they work on bringing on SMTs. Remember, the point isn't to have Steemit (or any of the platforms on Steem) be successful. It's to build a place where dapps can give out their own tokens that are built on top of the Steem blockchain. They're courting the dapps, not the users.
I don't think Ned cares if users are around. Why should he? He'll likely get much more money by selling dapps on the idea of running on his blockchain than from people buying Steem. His ICO already happened (even if it never really happened). Now he has to have something else to make money on... dapps are the answer.
The witnesses won't really have to care about the users either, because once SMTs come online, if all users leave and it's only the dapps that are using Steem, they'll still be earning the same amount of Steem.
I'm not saying that the witnesses are doing it from a place of being malicious. I'm sure some of them really do want Steemit to succeed. It just seems that everyone who has some control over where Steem and Steemit will go is more worried about the big picture and "getting there" than they are about the people and experience now.
Even with 300 SP available, I still don't have enough RCs to post and comment as much as I'd like. And I'm nowhere close to one of the top users. New users still won't be able to gain followers if they cant network. I don't know how the system works, but couldn't the top 20 witnesses take a small paycut so the newbies could actually post?
Sure, this is a freemium blockchain. It's one where you have to pay if you want to play more. But you have to at least let the users "play." Otherwise, they're not going to try the game long enough to want to pay. Then again, if SMTs work and they get dapps on board, Ned and the witnesses win either way. They simply don't need us.
Well, I can't speak to any of it being better, so you're ahead of me. It used to be 50/50, and there was a different linear curve, and they changed both of those because of something else that was going on. I've asked, on a few posts, and so far, no answers as to what caused the changes in the first place, or why it would be favorable either to roll it back or tweak it.
I believe Ned has his eyes on bigger fish, that may or may not bring more users to STEEM either through dApps or SMTs. He's not so interested in Steemit, the app, but apparently has a stake in something user friendly if he's off creating another company with different devs and some kind of community based dApp codenamed Destiny.
And the dApps should care about users, because I'm not sure how they end up earning if they don't have people using their dApps. And they need to have a lot of people using them, from the look of things. Which means, they will need more and people, and be able to retain more of them.
So, I don't know. We actually may be in the middle of doom and gloom, or it may just be growing pains as I keep reading by others, or more meh than anything else because of suppressed STEEM values.
I have no idea.
I just know I'm working on my best month of earnings ever, thanks mostly to curie, engagement contests, and blocktrades. I don't know how to duplicate the blocktrades one, so can't count on it, but I am hoping for a second curie, and continuing to place somewhere in the money for the contests, even if it is Steem Monster cards (this or next might be the final week of that, depending on what yabapmatt decides).
In my case, having a decent October is about time, because I've been in a royal slump for months.
re: paycut
I would think anything would be possible. The witnesses would probably have to agree to their own paycut, though. :)
re: 300 SP
One of the reasons why I haven't been so keen on delegating, but we all have our priorities, and in some cases, those priorities help us earn. So, I don't know what to tell you about that. It's kind of like darned if you and darned if you don't.
I don't know why it changed. I'm not sure why they would change it back.
Ned is Ned. Enough said.
The dapps won't care though, because they'll have enough resources that they'll make sure their users can do what they need to do. They'll have a lot of SP and they'll delegate enough so that their users can keep getting SMTs.
I do think a lot of people have left, so that's one reason for the doom and gloom. I've known dolphins that powered up and quit. It's too bad.
I was hoping the Steem Monsters prizes would continue a little longer. I was thinking I might save up some of my SBD from this week and use it next week as my single-week earnings aren't enough to place in the Minnow League. I have been engaging, so I should be able to get another 1.5 Steem from Engagement, but we'll see.
Glad to hear you've been getting some good earnings! That's nice to see. I don't know how to duplicate experiences though. I got a few bigger votes from the Netcoins contests, but those are done.
I haven't heard of many people approving their own pay cut.
Yeah, I delegate to SSG and to Steem-ua. Both of those do get me some return, so I'm hesitant to remove them as that would drop my earnings and lower the amount I'll be able to get in the future. I'm trying to be appreciative of my followers and voters by using the earnings to power up and put that back into SP which can be used to appreciate those people back. As it is, a 100% weight vote at 100% power with 0 delegated out would still only be $0.043. With the number of votes I give, that wouldn't go far. Therefore, I'm trying to level so that will grow faster. Not sure if that makes sense, but that's where I'm at right now.
I think they had one good suggestion. This is to make the flags free or add some curator rewards for the flags. Flag bots vs upvote bots.
Incentives need to economically make big fishes vote for quality content. What will mathematics say?
We need the opinion of Mochizuki!
I clicked on "About" and saw this:
Interesting...at first I wondered, out of the total rewards mentioned, I wonder what share of it the top 50 members earned.
Then I wondered rewards platform for publishers to monetize content and grow community.
Do not forget to remove the word "publishers" and replace it with "curators", so that the message is not misleading.
So, that leads us to...we deduct what the top 50 earners earned, then deduct what goes or has gone to curators...just what is left for those who actually created the posts? I saw the word 'dust' with references to low earnings - so how about we change the title 'publishers' to 'sweepers'?
Now THAT would be honest...but not very tactful, isn't it?
.
As far as I can see (as a member of the general public and not a maths expert), as with all other platforms, the creators of the platform make the most money (and very few of us resent that being so), BUT they, the Lords of Creation cannot fight their nature and end up getting greedier and greedier, wanting a larger and larger share of the honeypot.
You want to argue I am wrong? I'm certain you'll pull out complicated arguments I will not understand - just as you cannot seem to understand that what matters, when dealing with the unwashed millions, is not whether you can put up a good argument, but how your arguments are perceived by all of us, the ones who make it possible for you to become so wealthy
Do Not Meddle With Success, remember it is called 'Killing the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs'.
A thought I had.
If the rewards for curators is to be altered...the first 30 get a share of the cake? Why not change it to the first 30 in the list, weighted by the amount they voted - which would kick off all those with large votes who vote 1% power, with zero benefit to the payout?
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