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RE: Guardian of the steem universe : A different perspective on the role of whales within steem ecosystem [ part 2]
It's a cool idea. I've only skimmed it for now, but I will come back and review it in more detail later. Also resteemed :)
Some initial thoughts:
- You will need to get buy-in /agreement from the major stake holders in order for this to go anywhere
- Having the limit in MV instead of dollars would be better for scalability
- What would stop people from just splitting their SP across lots of littler accounts?
- Would the benefit of being a moderator outweigh the benefit of being a regular user?
(Sorry if any of these were already addressed and I didn't catch them during my skim)
either that or just hardfork it.
that said, i agree there are a lot of sybil issues that the OP doesnt address.
Whales don't downvote shitty content because they'd rather save their power to upvote but in a system where they can only downvote they would do it a lot more.
Can you elaborate on this please?
I don't know how the math would work, but I suspect a whale splitting their SP into hundreds of 8k accounts could probably earn more by upvoting sock puppet accounts than from the interest they would get by being a mod.
The counter to that is that hopefully the other mods would be able to catch that and do their jobs as moderators.
Great! Hopefully we can get the whole community behind the idea :)
Yes that's the idea. Moderators would downvote content that's overpaid. It doesn't really matter if it was upvoted by many sockpuppets, if the content is shitty payout will go down.
We would have a system were post would go through a lot more scrutiny, which will increase the quality of content selection.
Another incentive for whales to not split their account is that by letting other users vote they will increase the demand for steem and so the value of their account.
And the "evil whales" running the split accounts would astroturf the downvoted content, and say look at poor XXX hes getting downvoted by the big bad moderator. Dan is such a troll. Then dozens of fake voters would say "oh noes! we're being oppressed" And the moderators would back off.
If TPTB had the spine to downvote overvalued content, the system would work fine as is.
The whales (most of them) might agree to this increased scrutiny in principle, but they won't put it into practice.
If the whales were willing to downvote shitty, overpaid content they would be doing so now.
Count me in on team @snowflake for this one! I don't have a lot of influence, but I'll push for it as much as I can :)
I hope you don't mind, but I wrote a modified / TLDR version:
@snowflake's really interesting proposal - Turn whales into moderators and give dolphins all the voting power (TLDR Version)
foundation
This has not been enough of an incentive for many of them to curate responsibly in the past, and there is no reason to believe it will in the future.
If my account was worth $80,000 and the limit for curation was $8,000, then I could theoretically just divide my balance across 10 accounts (each being $8000) and still have the same impact (relatively) as one account worth $80k.
That's how sybil would play out here. You can get around the new set of rules simply by creating more accounts.
One thing that I missed on my first pass through was that there would be no more curation rewards. Users with a lot of SP could split into multiple accounts and gain additional influence, but there would be no financial benefit to doing that other than the ability to vote on your own (and friends) posts.
I totally missed that too!
Here is my reply to @timcliff
Yes you could split your accounts but there won't be any financial incentives to do it. Overtime accounts that have chosen to split will lose power over accounts that didn't.
I don't think they'd necessarily lose power over accounts that didn't.
Given two situations:
It's very likely that you could create a voting algorithm that would outperform the proportional percentage of inflation. So in fact, a smart dev could probably earn more by dividing up their stake into smaller accounts and continue to play the curation game just like they do today.
I'm happy to be wrong here, but until math proves it, I've got to believe that the system that's based on performance (as opposed to flat percentage) will be more profitable.
To be completely honest, the only solution I see to the problem you present is to completely remove curation rewards. Whales would stop voting on content to just earn rewards, and would leave room for the actual members of the community to vote on what they find interesting/valuable.
unless they got kickbacks from the posts they rewarded. thats the thing, youd be giving the 80K guy (not to mention the 800K guy) a huge amount of influence if he elected to split his account into smaller accounts. he be able to assign a massive amount of the reward pool with noone to gainsay him.
Man, did you read my post? :-)
Hahaha, apparently not good enough! It was uh... before I had my coffee :)
jesta's comment covered my idea on how a sybil attack would go.
An absolutely transparent sybil attack might be downvoted by the moderators, but i seriously doubt one with even the flimsiest pretext of being a legitimate post would be.
Moderators would downvote overpaid content, this user would be wasting his power if he was upvoting shitty content. He'd better off rewarding real content that's not going to be downvoted.
Allocating a good portion of the reward pool to yourself is something whales could do today so why don't they? There is multiple reasons for that but the primary one is that they are going to be downvoted if they do. So it really is no different to how the system works now.
You mean the witnesses? I think the community needs to be more vocal about this, because it really would benefit everyone. Like I said we need to think about the bigger picture. Whales are the biggest stake holders and would benefit the most with a proposal like this because it will increase the value of their stake.
If the limit is in MV, the limit would have to be reajusted every time the price of steem increase. Why do you think it would be better for scalability?
Because all those small accounts will not receive any financial benefit from doing so. The inflation will only be allocated to account > $8000 and it will be higher than it currently is because it would include all current curation rewards . Also the more accounts decides to split the more inflation will be allocated to the one who don't. Basically you would increase your power by only using it to moderate. Another incentive for whales to not split their account is that by letting other users vote they will increase the demand for steem and so the value of their account.
Yes, I believe so. Money is really what matters to most people at the end of the day, and the fact that moderators will still have their power to moderate makes it a more attractive option.
Well, while this could be done without a HF - to do it right, a HF would probably be required. So witness buy-in is required.
They are not the only stake-holders though. You would also have to convince a majority of the whales, as well as the dev team to take it on.
Just because it is a good idea is not a guarantee that you will get everyone to buy into it. Getting the consensus of the community will be half the battle. (There is still a lot of convincing that needs to be done.)
I think having it as a percentage of stake makes more sense than a dollar amount. If STEEM is worth the same as BTC one day, would that mean everyone with more than 8 STEEM would be a moderator?
Having it as an adjustable witness parameter might not be a bad idea either.
...
The rest makes sense.
I will say, I do really like the idea. If you would be able to get buy-in from the community (mainly the whales and devs) I would support it as long as there aren't any major objections to the idea that someone brings up (which I am not able to think of myself).
One last thing though - you have two completely separate proposals here mixed together. There is the moderator part, and then the hiding of payments. I'm actually against the hiding of payments part.
I'm not sure how I could convince people... If people can't see for themselves that the system is broken then I can't really help them. I guess we will have to wait until the current design shows its limitation. People need to see it to believe it kinda thinking.. maybe when the price hit $0.001 they will start wondering why..
This is why the number that seperates users and moderators should be in USD, if it was in SP you would have to change it as the price of steem increases. It would be very inconvenient unless you could do it without forking the code.
The hiding payments part is actually an integral part of the proposal.
If you don't hide payouts during the voting period users would see their posts go from say $1 to $8 back to $2 and back up to $6, users would just be totally confused and it would be playing with their emotions, no good.
I think people tend to think that moderators won't really vote much, they would just check for overpaid content. This is not true, moderators will vote a lot. If they want the rewards to go the right place the will have to.
bait and switch.
Oh buy this SP and power up. Youll b e able to vote to reward content you like.
SIKE! you can only downvote now. You just got steemed!
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but I would not be in support of this unless there was support / buy-in from the majority of the stakeholders. If the whales do feel that this is what it does, then I guess we are back to the drawing board.
I've talked to a few whales, and there doesn't seem to be major opposition that part (at least from the people I've talked to.) Plus, if it really bothers them that much - they can still split their SP into multiple accounts :)
The idea is that hopefully the ability to actually influence rewards by investing in SP will encourage a lot more users to get involved in the platform and invest in moderate amounts of SP in order to be more influential.
This is a laudable goal. But this seems like a very complicated and very exploitable way to try to achieve it.
If giving smaller accounts more influence in rewards is your goal, then IMO step one is to get rid of n^2. Thats certainly less exploitable in terms of self-upvoting than what youre proposing (and the only reason we have it is to prevent self-upvote abuse), and it would probably be way more effective at actually producing a measurable increase in the actual effect a regular user could have on reward distribution.