Whales - Can the community buy out a portion of your influence?
Growth, user retention, and user engagement are three of the main factors that will determine whether the Steem platform goes down in history as the next "MySpace", or the next revolutionary platform that we all dream it can be.
If you don't want to read all of the details, you can skip to the "bottom line" (question) at the bottom of the post.
The launch of Steemit.com, and the past several months of "beta testing" have given us a lot of valuable information about the good and the bad aspects of the platform.
Here are some of the common complaints:
- The UI is missing a lot of key functionality
- Regular users have no say in the platform. All that matters are whale votes.
- The majority of the votes on the platform come from bots, rather than engaged 'regular' users.
Solutions to many of the problems are in the works, but there is one big one that has many of us stumped:
How do we (fairly) give more influence to the 'regular' users without breaking the promise of more stake = more influence that was made to all of the early adopters / whales?
It has been suggested by many that if the whales just stopped voting, that would "solve" the problem. The dolphin and minnow votes would then be a much more significant percentage of the active voting pool, and their votes would be worth a lot more. The problem with this, is it is not fair to the whales. They all earned their stake and influence, and it is not right for the rest of us to demand they give it up.
@snowflake brought up an excellent proposal in this post, which I expanded on here. The idea has been discussed by many people now, including several whales. While there is some resistance to it, there does actually seem to be quite a bit of support.
The basic idea is this: Let's pay the whales to only use part of their influence.
Here are the details:
- All accounts with more than 250 MV of SP would be "investor class" accounts.
- All accounts with 250 MV or less would be "regular users".
- Users with "investor class" accounts would only use a maximum of 250 MV worth of their voting power.
- In exchange for not voting with the SP beyond 250 MV, all SP above 250 MV would earn additional interest.
- The additional interest would be paid by eliminating curation rewards.
- The "investor class" users would also be given a "moderator" ability, which would allow them to use their SP beyond 250 MV for downvoting abusive posts or canceling out the downvotes made by other moderators.
Key benefits:
- Regular users would feel like they have more say in the platform.
- Whales would still get to keep a large influence.
- There would be more incentive for 'regular' users to power up, as becoming a dolphin would mean having an influence in the site. (The likelihood of 10 users buying 100 MV of SP to become a dolphin is way more likely than 1 user buying 1,000 MV to become a whale.)
- The decisions on what posts earned significant rewards would be shared among whales and dolphins. There are a lot more dolphins than whales, which would allow voting/influence to better scale to a platform with significantly more users.
- Large SP investors would be able to get a return on their investment without being required to curate.
- Curation guilds could form with more users that were voting with their own voting power.
- The benefit to having auto-upvote bots would be greatly diminished.
I discussed it with @pfunk, and he suggested I ask the whales. Ultimately this will only work if there is buy-in from the major stake-holders.
So whales -
( @blocktrades, @ned, @freedom, @dan, @jamesc, @abit, @val-a, @smooth, @dantheman, @ben, @mottler, @tombstone, @databass, @val-b, @michael-b, @rainman, @summon, @michael-a, @hendrikdegrote, @transisto, @pharesim, @steemed, @berniesanders, @proskynneo, @xeldal, @roadscape, @arhag, @thejohalfiles, @wang, @safari, @witness.svk, @cloop1, @riverhead, @batel, @wackou, @steempty, @enki, @bob, @tamim, @fuzzyvest, @engagement, @adm, @jaewoocho, @alice, @kushed, @onceuponatime, @itsascam, @amcq, @bitcube, @goku1, @nextgencrypto, @renohq, @recursive, @gavvet, @glitterfart, @thecyclist, @alvaro, @blackjack, @thisvsthis, @dele-puppy, @smooth.witness, @bhuz, @arsahk, @donkeypong, @satoshifund, @c75c39f25a90, @lafona-miner, @azeroth, @fyrstikken, @datasecuritynode, @complexring, @coldstorage1, @fulltimegeek, @au1nethyb1, @steemstermon, @clayop, @creator, @anastacia, @liondani, @steemaccess, @abdullar, @firstclass, @samupaha, @imadev, @skywalker, @fminerten, @xeroc, @hr1, @bytemaster, @smooth-e, @arama, @b943863a19cf, @jesta, @puppies, @cryptoctopus, @stellabelle, @kidrock, @roelandp, @ramta, @jabbasteem, @steemit200, @snowflake, @nanzo-scoop, @freeyourmind, @tyler, @newyo, @dimimp, @someonewhoisme, @hiva, @anonymous, @benjojo, @sean-king, @delegate.lafona, @pfunk, @analisa, @bitcoin2016, @silversteem, @node1, @cass, @ioc, @faddy, @noagenda, @paladin, @figaro, @rossco99, @slowwalker )
Is this an elimination of all curation rewards, or only those for accounts above 250 Mvests?
Was going to ask this question myself. If all curation rewards go away, that would make me sad because I earn a lot of curation rewards. On the other hand, I've never been sure that Steem needs curation rewards in any meaningful way, so I'm probably ok with getting rid of them.
Well, to be fair, no social media platform needs to pay people for posting. We know that millions (billions?) of people do it for free every day.
But as long as this platform is centered around payments and investments, then it makes sense to appeal to more than just bloggers. In fact, I would argue (and do argue) that there needs to be more incentive to attract readers and voters to Steemit. Content consumers are an exponentially larger market than content creators. If you want Steemit to grow, you need to attract people who will actually read, vote on, and share the content. So, rather than eliminate curation rewards, they should be increased - at least back to the 50% reward that they initially were.
Any plan that eliminates curation rewards is dead in the water, as far as I'm concerned. There's already practically no incentive to hold SP. Eliminate curation rewards and there is in fact none.
@ats-david I do agree with your point regarding the need to attract readers, but I would respectfully disagree with the suggestion that increasing curation rewards would increase readership. What it absolutely would do is increase voting bot activity which does not create engaged readers entering the platform. Some authors have already written about the shady nature of the number of upvotes (in some cases) far exceeding the number of page views on a post and how the outside writing/publishing world will view that. I think the idea of increasing the rewards for commenting has a much better chance of bringing a larger and more engaged readership to Steemit.
Personally, I am on the fence about the curation reward system. When a small pool of individuals hold a disproportionate amount of voting power, the system as a whole will break.
The end goal of curation rewards (as I understand it) is to reward individuals who spend time and effort to discover good content , upvote it and increase its visibility and separate it from the content which is not excellent, plagiarized, etc. When voting power is pooled and concentrated so severely into the hands of a select few, then the content only becomes what they and/or their proxies decide it will be and curation as intended does not exist. I think this is a large reason for the exodus of quality authors who do not write content for the more popular tags.
I don't think treating whales as Preferred Shareholders and removing their voice from voting on content is entirely fair either. If I took tremendous risk and put in my own time and resources into a company, I would want both a Return on Investment and a vote. What is very transparent is the voting system is incredibly broken. I would suggest rather than eliminating voting power above a certain threshold, perhaps geometrically reduce the power of each additional 10,000 vests or so. This way returns can be had, voting power can be increased, but the rate of increase is drastically reduced and allows the field an opportunity to have a true voice and impact with their vote. It would also encourage more to build STEEM power, because it becomes an attainable goal with real rewards of vote power.
My $0.02 anyways.
My two biggest issues with curation rewards are:
The idea isn't to "earn anything significant." The idea is to earn anything at all. This is one of the most common misconceptions about this platform - that everyone should be earning a bunch of money for doing menial tasks with little investment. As far as I can recall, that's not what STEEM/Steemit is all about. It's supposed to be a way for people to earn a little bit of cryptocurrency for doing what they would normally do on other social media sites. This isn't supposed to replace everyone's full-time job.
So, with that in mind, if you're earning a few SP every week by simply upvoting posts when you read them, then you're doing much better than you normally would on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or pretty much any other platform in existence, where you earn precisely nothing for doing the same thing. What can we call "significant" earnings in relation to that? Maybe five SP per week? Ten SP? Fifty?
I think we tend to lose sight of what this place really is and that probably has to do with how posts were being paid out in the first couple of months. Not everyone is going to earn thousands of dollars per post, or hundreds of dollars per post...or even tens of dollars per post. But, if you're earning something from posting and curating, then you're doing great compared to the major social platforms that are most widely used.
Curation alone isn't going to promote user engagement. You get engagement from an active user base and engaging content. We don't have the former and the latter is quite scarce around here - and mostly due to the tiny user base.
@snowflake I disagree with you that "Steemit is about rewarding content creators". If you read the white paper, rewards are supposed to be for all valuable contributions, not just "content". The former includes voting.
I agree with @ats-david that the curation rewards should be increased and, if they were, a lot more users (not just bloggers) would be getting significant rewards on a regular basis and would be more enthusiastic about the system and in turn telling more of their friends (also not just bloggers) why they should sign up. The cut from the original design has not just been by 50% but more like 75%, and this has had a devastating impact not only on the incentives to buy SP but also the incentives for non-bloggers to join and participate at all.
The other changes I would make to curation rewards are to make them less top heavy (by generally making rewards less top heavy) and to make them less front-loaded meaning reduce the share that is earned by the first votes. All voters should get a share (early voters can still get a bit more). Both changes would reduce a lot of the current incentives to run curation bots. If early voters on the best (by far) paying posts didn't get such an enormous share of curation rewards, more of the curation rewards would go to ordinary voters.
That is one goal. It is not the "primary" or only goal. Curation is indeed an important factor and we know that the original split in rewards was 50/50 for content and curating. Voting incentives are just as important to the goals of STEEM/Steemit as content creation are.
But as I said - the market for content consumption is exponentially larger than that for creators. The user base can expand much more and much more rapidly by incentivizing readers and voters just as much or more so than content creators.
Based on what data? If you have no incentives for readers and voters, why would they care to buy in, power up, and spend time curating? How many people do you think will pay to use social media, which is free on many more user-friendly and wildly more popular sites and apps?
Not everyone is a blogger. And if you have only a community of bloggers, it will likely be small and the bloggers will likely spend more time on creating than they will on curating.
You make some really good points, and I agree with pretty much all of them. With that said, I still think that the actual way curation rewards play out in practice is not good for the long-term growth of the platform.
And from more rewards for comments (which is coming)
Steemit is about rewarding content creators, that's the primary goal of steemit. More content creators will earn rewards with a proposal like this, it is totally aligned with steemit's objectives.
That is currently impossible to do on steemit !!!
Why? Because UX is ages behind FB (or othe platforms) for example...
Maybe eventually that is the major problem we have... It's difficult for the average Joe to feel comfortable like on other social media platforms!
PS And in my humble opinion that is why bitshares exchange is still not successful . Very bad UX compared with centralized exchanges!
One way to fix this is to reward more curation rewards for post that are above average rewards for a author and less if it's below average for a poster. You his last ten post. This would be hard for people voting author list to game.
It's an interesting idea but it actually starts to make the blockchain calculations quite complicated.
Assuming you are talking about the comment reward pool.. this pool will be completely unnecessary if curation rewards are removed.
Replying to below.
Would it be more complicated than reputation? I am thinking of a field that averages the last ten or twenty paid out post. If payout is greater than the number that is attached to each user name curation is slashed or boosted.
Yes.
The problem of current curation reward system is no association with engagement and therefore vulnerable to bots. Why do bots matter? Because bots cannot analyze, rate, or filter content by its quality. For instance, if I ask you about your upvotes on posts, you maybe able to tell me reasons why you value them, and your curation created value. If I ask the same question to bots, they cannot answer why the posts are good.
If we want to keep curation rewards, we need to integrate user engagement to it, as I suggested in my post. If not, I agree that curation reward is doing more harm than good.
This:
Is factually incorrect. There's an entire Internet search and advertising industry that has emerged in the last 20 years by doing exactly that. Steem bots may not do it very well, yet, but after some development time, they will. Bots are just a continually improving approximation for their operators' own preferences.
Their operators can.
I'd argue that quality content is what attracts readers and voters, not the rewards.
People aren't reading medium or reddit because they're rewarded, it's because they both have tons of quality content and good communities built up around them.
I do agree that we need to add more incentives to holding SP - but I don't agree with keeping a broken system because it's viewed as the only reason to hold.
Medium pays writers and is failing. Reddit is mostly unpaid writers and is doing fine. People write for free and are paid in reputation. No need to pay them anything of value.
Right - medium has it's own set of problems, which have nothing to do with curation or readership. They failed to find a viable business model to keep paying writers. Also, not all writers on medium are paid, you can go signup and start writing right now if you wanted. They attract non-paid bloggers through an extremely polished and easy to use author experience, and then authors go out and promote themselves on other platforms.
Luckily it'll look a lot more like reddit (I hope) once we get communities here sometime this year.
Sure, quality content is great. But what does that mean?
I would also argue that excellent UI development and actual marketing would also attract people. We're still waiting on those to play out.
Posted via busy :)
It means content that people actually want to read :)
Amen. I'm right there waiting with you and exploring ways to try and help. There's only so much we can do from the outside to impact those factors though.
Replying to comment above
Sybil depends on a cheap entry price. A $6000 entry price won't lead to Sybil. If they do split their accounts it's more management time and record keeping for them and they are just back where they are today. I don't think we should worry about that.
Not necessarily, people already have these amounts.
An account with 1000MV could spend 125 STEEM to create 5 accounts, and then transfer 200MV into each account. Each of these accounts would now be eligible for curation rewards with approximately the same weight as a 1000MV account.
The entry price wouldn't change.
Bingo. Paying for content is stupid . There are oceans of free content. The valuable thing is sorting through bad content to find good content. Discussions are also nice. That's why almost all rewards should go to curation and comments
It is very debatable if the paid curation model actually incentivizes the "good" content to bubble up to the top. It favors picking "winners" which are based on a lot of game theory factors, many of which do not actually deal directly with quality or user engagement.
I do think if steem distribution was better and the exponential was less than 2 it would improve the functionality of the "bubble up" but it's just a theory until tried. Maybe the old 5 full power votes a day would work too.
You got it backwards, curation rewards reduces the number of readers and voters.
Based on what data that can corroborate this claim?
More users with influence means more readers. Also look at the comment section, barely anyone is voting.
Can you elaborate on this?
Sure. There are lots of reasons for that. One of them is that it doesn't pay much to vote on comments. There's not enough incentive for many users.
More influence, means more inclusion, more involvement, more activity and ultimately more reading. If curation rewards are removed everyone will vote manually which will lead to a lot more reading too.
[nesting]
@ats-david
You have two things you can vote on:
You also have a finite amount of votes to maximize your total curation rewards. This leads people to vote primarily on Posts, so they earn more rewards.
If you were to eliminate curation rewards, then there's no difference in voting on a post or a comment, which would lead to an increase in votes on comments, which would lead to more comments...
That's my train of logic, not sure if it's solid or not yet, but that's where I'm at :)
Curation rewards are only unique thing about steemit. It's also the only reason to power up.
It would be an elimination of all curation rewards. If it was just for those accounts above 250 Mvests, then the incentive would be for all the whales to just divide their accounts into several 250 MV accounts to collect additional curation rewards.
Curation rewards is the best thing about the platform. The only unique thing. We should go 50 curation 25 comments and 25 authoring.
Still though I like the idea of capping rewards. I wonder if we could lift inflation and use that to pay whales? If you just capped it I think that's also ok. It's like a dash masternode. Whales could run many moderating master nodes. Unless they all voted together (possible with bots) it would still redistribute power.
Perhaps the other answer is to have rewards grow expentilly till 250 then go up very slowly after that.
It is a very controversial part of the proposal. There are people on both sides of the argument. IMO - curation rewards are actually doing more harm than good. (I explained my reasoning in some other comments within the thread.)
I think you are right for the whale accounts. Curation is too easy to earn without reading with a bot. but limiting to under 250k (and still earning curation) might fix the issue.
It would suffer from sybil, whales could just divide up their balance into multiple 200 MV accounts and use the bots to vote with all of them, thus earning rewards again.
@jesta to prevent sybil, can we give moderators extra power? Say, a moderator with 300MV can nullify upvotes with 3000MV. Then we may have the issue that one moderator can counteract another moderator, however that's easier to be solved as it's an issue of a smaller group.
answer to @jesta (nesting)
What if we include TIME in the equation?(!)
200MV that are 6 months old should be "stronger" than 200"fresh"MVs
If users could earn curation for accounts under 250 MV, then the incentive for the whales would be to just split their large accounts into lots of 250 MV ones.
Can you elaborate on why they are the best thing, is it the money aspect or something else?
It's the most unique to pay people to sort through bad content and find good content and order it from best to worst.
First it's the easiest way to earn crypto currency. There is no other way for a common person to give a scarce resource ( his attention) and get crypto.( I would put crowd funding, not blogging as #2).
2nd it's a game. Finding and voting for something first is fun. The curation rewards are your score.
Third It's a business. It's almost like investing in a post except you are an activist and can drive traffic, resteem, or promote your investment.
Now other sites pay writers. Or maybe they facilitate payments through advertising. There are lots of ways to pay but it's not much different than a site that advertises and pays its users in bitcoin. This has been done lots of times and the sites paying the most will win and the ones with the most revenue will pay the most. A startup might win if it dominates a niche but most will fail.
For curation benefits there are no competitors. Maybe Reddit which uses moderators and votes but they aren't paying them and all votes are equal. The curation plus power function makes this unique. ( though I would say should be less than 2)
don't cut curation!
Upvoting good content is a natural behavior, users will do it regardless of the incentive. The fact that users assign real money to content and that they have a limited amount of it guarantees that only the best content will be upvoted.
The easiest way is to post content, most newbies have no clue about curation rewards and how it works.
The game is rigged by bots. I also use a bot and one week i decided to do a little experiment by manually voting instead, my curation score dropped a lot. The very large majority of curators are just subscribed to bots.
Also curators are encouraged to vote fast, this creates a situation where everyone upvote without reading any content, even manual curators they have no choice but upvote blindly.
More like lobbying
What better way to do that than increasing demand for steem..
Which sites?
OK. Then it's a no-go for me. See my response to biophil.
I agree with @ats-david. Getting rid of curation rewards is a bad idea. It will kill off a large incentive to power up. But perhaps we can settle on a middle point for your idea. Rather than all the curation rewards going to interest payments for investors, maybe a percentage of curation rewards can be allocated to investors instead. I.e. Whales above 250MV would be paid interest proportional to their vests, and that has the benefit of them not having to actively curate but still receiving interest on their investment. This figure should be similar to what they would have received if they curated. Whereas curation rewards would still be paid to those with holdings below 250MV.
In this scenario, curation rewards would still be distributed similar to what it is now, but dolphins and minnows would have greater voting power, and would be incentivised to powerup more.
I could be on board with this as well. There's no reason the diverted curation rewards would have to goto accounts with >250MV, they could go to everyone.
I still want to see curation rewards removed though - or at very least replaced with a better system.
Right now, the curation rewards are only paid to the accounts that are actively curating. If the curation rewards for accounts above 250 MV were split among everyone with that much SP (without needing to curate), they would be a lot lower than someone could get for actively curating. There would still be an incentive for a whale to split their voting power into smaller accounts and actively vote.
Maybe the active curation should be twice or 50 percent more then the passive investors.
All the whales don't use all voting power do they? They leave some on the table. Those leaving money on table now would likely like the passive option.
Most whales use bot to curate so I'm not sure if this is really a benefit.. In my case I would probably split my accounts into 2 and chose curation rewards over this because I would earn more with an efficient bot than curation rewards given as inflation.
Perfect!
Only if the additional interest isn't high enough. When you break up your account you give up your share of the >250 MV payments.
Agreed. I don't know how the math works out as far as at what point the investor interest would outweigh any incentive of influence + curation from having multiple 250 MV accounts.
As discussed elsewhere though, I feel that eliminating curation rewards entirely as part of the proposal has merits for other reasons too.
If eliminating curation rewards is being done for other reasons then it should be a separate proposal. It is certainly not necessary for the concept of buying out a large portion of the voting power.
[nesting]
@snowflake
There is one reward pool from dilution and the allocations in it are more or less arbitrary and have been changed multiple times. If there is a good reason to buy out voting power then a portion of that rewards pool can be allocated for that purpose. It doesn't have to be specifically the curation rewards.
And curation rewards, frankly, have been cut so much that even if they were redirected I'm not sure that would be sufficient incentive to serve as an effective buyout. But again there is no reason to fixate on one particular slice of the pool.
@jesta is actually proposing that in a separate reply to the post. I am not opposed to the idea of just eliminating curation rewards.
As far as buying out the voting power, I could be wrong but I don't think that we could provide a large enough incentive without the extra money from the elimination of curation rewards.
If curation rewards are not eliminated how are moderators going to be rewarded?
@snowflake
Why do moderators need to be rewarded? Downvoting bad content is a natural behavior, users will do it regardless of the incentive. Right?
[more nesting]
@snowflake
Curators will also be rewarded most likely in the new community system, where they could receive a portion of the author's posting rewards for that post existing in their community.
@ats-david
The idea is to "buy out" the largest stakeholders from voting at all (or at least, doing so, with the bulk of their SP) except downvoting (i.e. making whales moderators) so the influence of smaller stakeholders grows (under some sets of assumptions it could grow by a very large amount)
Here's an idea: what if you paid people for unspent voting power? Right now, when an account's voting power is at 100%, they have this trickle of voting power that's just going to waste. If you paid them for it (the network "buying back" the potential curation rewards they could be earning), each person would be able to choose whether they wanted to earn curation or just sit there and let their balance grow.
I haven't thought through it at all, but it's a quick-and-dirty way to let whales individually opt-in to something like your 250Mvest proposal. AND, because of the sub-linearity of curation rewards, large accounts would see a bigger bang for their buck by not voting than smaller accounts.
@smooth actually brought up this exact idea in @snowflake's post. It is a good idea and I'm not opposed.
Two arguments against it are:
Yeah, that's a fair point. Even if the rewards for curation would easily be higher than the rewards for sitting, it would easily feel like an incentive not to vote.
That's true.
If the rewards for curation are higher everyone would curate.
Good points. The problem I see with this proposal too is that minnows's influence wouldn't be stable. If their influence goes up and down all the time they would be confused and might not buy as much steem power as they would otherwise.
That will be true regardless though. The amount that an individuals vote is worth is always dependent on the amount and way the rest of the active voting stake is being used.
For SP holders author rewards is actually some sort of taxation. Curation rewards is like tax didaction, so at the end active curator pays less taxes
I doubt that removing of tax deduction would be of any help for the economic growth
The money from curation would be directed into passive interest that would go to all SP holders.
Which would make about 1.7% p.a.
It would be best to continue the conversation here: https://steemit.com/curation/@timcliff/elimination-of-curation-rewards
I'm not a whale, but I don't particularly like the idea. The reason whales have more influence is that they have more at stake (i.e. skin in the game). Their large holdings give them incentive to prioritize long-term steem value over short-term rewards. Minnows and dolphins don't have as much incentive to encourage long-term thinking.
IMO, especially with the price of steem as low as it is, the proper way for minnows or dolphins to gain as much influence as whales is to invest more time or money into the platform.
People do facebook and reddit for free. Even as minnows, we already have more of a voice than that.
Keep in mind that 250 MV is still a lot of stake. Someone with 250 MV is going to have a lot more say than a minnow or even moderately large dolphin.
If someone is going to buy/earn that much SP (about $16,000 at today's prices), I'd say they have a good amount of skin in the game.
In the end, if it's implemented, any whale who doesn't want to agree to those terms will just split his/her holdings into multiple accounts, so I guess it really doesn't matter much anyway.
True, they could do this. The idea is to incentivize them not to by paying them additional interest for their SP.
Yes, Tim ,but where are the grown-ups?
The asylum is run by the inmates ;)
Right but I don't think many would. Mainly they want the price to go up.
@dennygalindo, the bad news is that it is overpriced
I could not disagree more. The reason why steem has got to an all-time low is because of Whales. The people who are being responsible and trying to get this wonderful idea with dreadful leverage back on track are the people who actually make the effort to create content and not abuse the system. Who else can possibly be responsible other than whales?
There go several more voting bots!
When steem launched, its value was 0. It's not even close to an all time low. It is infinitely higher than it was a year ago. And you don't get to just assert without evidence that the reason it's low compared to July is because of "Whales." What does that even mean? Where are the studies and data that led you to that conclusion? Maybe its low because people have trouble with key and wallet complexities. Maybe it's low because of dissatisfaction with the UI. Maybe it's low because every third post is someone whining - yet again - about the steem drama of the month.
As to bots, when you're done with that crusade, maybe you can go convince Google to replace their supercomputers with an army of humans to populate their search rankings. Only humans can rank pages for search indexing, right? And maybe we can get Neflix to shut off the AI and use humans to create their movie recommendations.
I have just checked - you really do not know a thing do you - who whined? When you make a comment in a discussion like this, do not do it out of ignorance. Have you heard one whale making any comment about what matters, other than their balance? No, because of course they are culpable. A magnificent idea with a dodgy system of leverage, usurped by myopic, greedy people. How many subscriptions, how many accounts. Go read all about it in the digital forums - you will soon see.
The truth gets shot down whilst the gunners position is on a retreating sandcastle and the tide is coming in ... I have done the mathematics and it does not look good. Sycophancy will ensure a Myspace conclusion. I am just man enough to tell it like it is ... go on shoot all you want!! You will find blanks in your magazine.
It would be good to try and keep the debate about ideas and concepts, and not make it personal. I've found that most people here are pushing for what they view as best for the platform. At the end of the day there are right and wrong views, but people arguing bad ideas are not necessarily bad people.
I agree ... to put a smile on your face ... 'he started it, sir!'
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about ... get educated ... who can be blamed for this absolute mess other than the people with the power - I bet you are one of the greedy ones who intravotes incessantly to try to hold on ... grow up!
Maybe you should name names and point to specific bahavior of the whales you are talking about. I went though about 70 of your submission and personally would not upvote most of them and might bring them down should they reach the frontpage. Steemit is not big enough at this time for you to try posting stuff multiple times a day and expect more than a handful of real people to see your post. Actually you did post some great stuff so I don't know why it didn't catch on, maybe it's lost it get lost in your other posts. As people tend to upvote stuff from people they follow.
Hi there @transisto, thank you for commenting and it seems you had a change of heart mid-stream! I am grateful for the interaction.
I do not mind criticism levelled at me at all. I welcome it as it shows that someone is listening and that they care. The comments which I have made about the behaviour of whales would not be possible if the platform had a system of fairness. My comments are not personal. Naming names is not going to be fruitful and I have been targeted sufficiently by the powerful voters much to my detriment. I am just prepared to stand up and be counted and voice my opinion. There are a massive number who feel the same way but stay silent in fear of the repercussions.
I have done the analysis and it is not pretty. Where else can responsibility for performance lie but with the SP owners. I hope that you do not feel that my analysis and work with a positive attitude towards steemit encourages you to join that throng! That would be a shame.
Yesterday I sent Ned Scott a helicopter view of the platform which I refrained from editing in the name of openness. I also sent him my spreadsheet from mid-December showing the numbers. There are contributing observations to go alongside these. I am happy to send these to you as well. My sense of care towards steemit does not have a pride - it is real.
I am not some young discontented soul! I turn 54 in a few days time. I have run public companies, blah blah. I have also worked in Digital Media with a Sydney based agency. My concerns are sincere and I have no problem with anyone seeing my research, so long as I don't get shot as the messenger! I would welcome any discussion about valuations and why steem is valued as it is and how the ship can be turned. If anyone thinks that this can go live with metrics like over 100,000 times leverage, they are seriously barking mad. The media will dissect it and comparisons to Facebook and Google will pale.
Yes but the current system is wildly disproportionate. A whale might have a thousand times more skin in the game but end up with a million times more influence. That leaves the little guy, or even the middle guy, with effectively no influence at all.
ok. But that imbalance can be solved by simply tuning the voting weight algorithm - as people have suggested for months. I would not oppose that sort of adjustment. I just don't see that a cap is necessary or useful.
If they establish a new tier of investors, how long will it be 'til steemit is flooded with posts from a new crop of users complaining about how unfair it is for whales to earn higher interest than regular users?
I really like how this conversation has evolved and I support it's exploration/implementation however I can.
To "keep things simple", I think a good first step would simply be to remove curation rewards.
I can't speak how this change would impact others behavior, but I can explain how it would impact mine. Currently I follow a curation trail (via streemian.com) which makes up the vast majority of my voting. I still do vote manually as I read steemit, but something like 98%+ of my votes are automated for curation rewards.
Removing curation rewards would cause me to cease this behavior and the only things I'd be voting on would be things I actually read. There still may be a case to automatically vote for specific people (who I'd like to support), but it wouldn't be about rewards anymore, it would be about supporting those I'd like to encourage.
I have earned 4.5 MV over the last 30 days through curation (roughly 2.1k SP). I realize that with these changes (removing curation) and by doing a more even distribution (via "interest") it's very likely that I wouldn't earn that much. I might only earn 2-4 MV. My curation currently accounts for somewhere between 0.25% - 0.5% of the total rewards pool (for example, on the 12th of Feb I was 0.34%).
I am ok with that, simply because I believe this change would give a lot more people influence within the system. It may not be what's best for me personally/financially - but I do believe it would be what's best for STEEM and Steemit.
Yes, I think this is exactly the type of voting behavior we want to encourage!
I don't think you need to do this. The reason those curation bots are easy to make money with is they are experts at front running whales. If we had a more fragmented whale base (by limiting voting after 250mv) then those bots wouldn't work.
As long as curation rewards exist, then bots will profit by voting on posts that they predict are 'winners'.
Right but it's much easier to predict 200 whales than 1000 dolphins. Remember the London whale?
That is true, but there would still be plenty of game-theory to play around with. Bots might not make as much but they will still be able to make money.
Just the ability to vote on posts 24 hours a day right around the 30 minute mark gives them a huge advantage. There will also still be tons of users that are on auto-upvote lists, which are easy to predict.
@ timcliff I wasn't aware of that 30 minute rule, seems like a bug that need fixing instead of working around it.
Does it mean that it make no difference at any point when you vote in the first 30 min ? And that guilds use that to predict good post ?
Bots will also profit by voting on posts that are just good, which may or may not predict winners. Not all bots attempt to front-run whales.
But of course there's no way to differentiate, I just thought I'd make the point 😇
Agreed. It is a good point. There are bots that vote in ways that take into account more than just maximizing curation rewards.
They are the whales.
Something like 88-89% of all rshares from votes each day come from the top 100 curators. That won't change in the current system whether we have 1000 users or a million.
I'm in that list.
Can you elaborate on this?
[Edit] Nevermind. Sorry, was confused by nesting.
I elaborated on my response to snowflake a little bit below.
I also nerded out a bit and added these stats to the rshares distribution page in the steemdb labs.
It has been brought to my attention that you might have found my tone rude. I apologise if I caused you any offence whatsoever. I tried to say how I respected your expression of the points you made and tried to make it clear that the points I was making were by no means a criticism of you. I am truly remorseful and regret any ill-feeling I caused.
Furthermore, I understand that you have been responsible for a great many enhancements to the steemit experience through the building of data enhancement sites such that we may all see more information surrounding our day-to-day activities. For these things, and I am sure, much more besides, I thank you most sincerely.
I have put a lot into this platform as well, in very different ways. I can get a little, upset, shall we say, when I can see the failing aspects dominate the opportunity. I stand by my beliefs and proposals. I do not stand by the claims of fools who cannot see the folly of their ways. I actually wrote a post about this very matter a few months ago prior to the current malaise.
I had the opportunity to communicate with Ned Scott on this very subject this afternoon. I am aware that he may not agree with everything I say but we share similar frustrations.
I hope you will accept my apology and understand where I am coming from.
No worries at all @ebryans! I summed up most of my response below.
They should be removed only if the system is improved as in the proposal. As you can see in the discussion these rewards mean a lot to some users. I say don't remove them if you ain't gonna make the influence situation better for them.
Simply removing curation rewards would make the influence situation for the vast majority of users much better.
Right now, ~88% of the daily reward share distribution is given out by top 100 curators. That's 88% of all rewards for all posts being determined by 100 people. I'd put money on a bet that says the majority of the top 100 (at least 50) are curating primarily to gain a return on their investment.
The remaining ~4-5k users that cast votes every day make up the remaining 12% of the distribution..
Here's the kicker: posts are made visible based on the rewards they receive.
Add all these facts up and you're looking at a system where "popular" content is being driven by a small group of people motivated by profit. All while the vast majority of the population is under represented and lacking any meaningful influence.
If the incentive to curate content you think will earn a profit (for yourself) is removed, most likely some of the people curating will stop, which will reduce the influence of the top 100 and let others (with smaller balances) make a bigger splash in the rewards pool.
TLDR - Removing curation eliminates "for profit curation", which reduces whale activity, leaving more room for everyone else to make an impact.
If they were motivated by profit they would not bring so much crap to the top.
I think they are motivated by short term profit over the well being and popularity of the platform leading to long term profit.
I addressed this point here. It's important to remember that we're looking at first generation bots. In the long run, the bots that succeed will be the ones that promote steem's long term value. A short list of things bots can do that human curators can't/won't:
Of course there's more, but hopefully that gets the point across.
Whether it does it well or not at this point, I can tell you that the goal behind my own bot is to help raise steem's price by finding and supporting quality content. Curation rewards are a secondary consideration.
Update:* Reading through remaining comments. Up above, you asked about the early voting penalty before 30 minutes, and I don't think anyone answered. I couldn't respond to that comment because of the nesting limit, so here's a link - https://steemit.com/steem/@cryptomental/steem-internals-10-payment-reward-system-demystified
I guess you are probably right, those rewards create such bad incentives anyway, the faster they are gone the better. I think they should be distributed as inflation to steem power holders though not added to author payouts.
I wrote this comment about a month ago, when someone proposed removing curation rewards from the comment pool. It's also relevant here, even moreso:
"I don't really have a strong preference, but it is important to be aware that there are deep ethical issues associated with harvesting votes on comments without rewarding the voter. This is basically what all other platforms are already doing. One of the things that makes steemit different is its attempt to reward all parties who add value. Eliminating curation awards on comments seems like a step backwards. I recommend this video, where AI expert Jaron Lanier discusses the same phenomenon on other platforms. Here is a brief excerpt that captures the argument.
The only thing that has changed since I wrote that comment is that I have thought more deeply about it, and now I do have a strong preference. Eliminating curation rewards would be saying that curators should perform unpaid labor for the authors and the steem power holders. I disagree with that proposal.
This is probably the one valid argument I have heard in favor of keeping curation rewards. (IMO)
Wish I could take credit for it. That reminds me, I really need to set some time aside to read "Who Owns The Future." ; -) Seems like it would be very relevant to steemit.
I very much respect what you have written here and the honesty with which you have phrased your points.
I would like you to understand how this makes me feel ... sick!
Over 4 months, I have written 166 posts, two of which put this platform on Page 1 of Google news item searches. I now have 2,480 SP; you did that in your sleep in one month, pretty much.
The system is outside any metric of fair. It cannot be justified.
There is absolutely no criticism of you in my writing this; I just hope that you can see that from any measure of right and wrong, that it is wrong.
I don't think it's exactly fair to compare author rewards to curation rewards, but I understand where you're coming from. Posting, witnessing, mining, and investing are all outside of the bounds of curation, and are independent systems to consider.
No worries about the tone, I got your drift and take no offense. There are things I feel just as strongly about and have the same types of adverse reactions towards in different aspects, with the bot/curation situation being one of them.
I'm happy we're having this conversation though and I hope the discussions that come of it will help change things for the better!
Just so you know, @jesta has done a buttload of stuff for the platform.
You know https://steemstats.com - @jesta built that. Himself. From scratch.
https://steemdb.com - he built that too.
and many other things..
There are tons of good authors on the site that are earning really crappy rewards for the hard work they put in. I am not in any way saying that that is not an issue. Many of us are trying to solve it though, but making attacks at other users who have gotten paid is not a good way to go about it.
What does this bit say to someone: 'There is absolutely no criticism of you in my writing this;'
I read that, but then in the same comment you said "it makes me sick" and he "earned his rewards in his sleep"
I admit I misunderstood (which I apologize for) but I'm not really getting what you were trying to get across to @jesta by saying all of that.
I have sent something else, which you will hopefully agree is as conciliatory as it could be
No worries :)
I'm not sure what you are trying to say, what is your suggestion to make this right ?
sure, i wouldn't have an issue with it.
I agree with @snowflacke's opinion. And I can give up what you said. It is a very easy decision to give up the curation rewards being paid for the bigger ones.
If we succeed in accepting @snowflacke's opinion this time, the meaning of 250mvest will be more than just mediator, maintaining Steemit order. If our decision succeeds, future decisions will change significantly. Investors will have a consensus structure to modify Steam's policies.
@timcliff, Thank you very much. Your article will be the cornerstone of decision-making process in the future. It will also be the beginning of forming consensus structure.
(Disclaimer: Everything said below is only my personal opinion)
I support elimination of curation rewards idea - curation rewards add too much of complexity that outweighs all the benefits they provide.
In regard of 250 MV voting threshold, I think it needs some further development - in current form it doesn't solve original problem (influence doesn't scale well with the number of users), and it also adds a lot of complexity (that I see as another big issue right now), e.g. now you need to counterbalance whales' initiatives to not make them to split their accounts into multiple 250MV pieces and regain their influence back, giving them some passive income might be not enough or giving too much can counteract the decentralization of the stake.
"canceling out the downvotes" - it would be nice to enable this for all users, or even better - turn all upvotes or dowvotes into analogy of comments that would be votable too, so upvotes or downvotes on them would affect their strength.
Hi @val-a, thanks for your reply!
One idea that was proposed regarding this was to have the threshold be set at a dollar amount instead of in vests. It would allow the solution to scale, assuming that a large increase of users would be correlated with an increase in the price of STEEM.
I agree that the complexity part is a big deterrent. I don't know if there really is a much simpler way to accomplish the goal of reducing the influence of the largest stake holders though, that is still fair to them, without some level of complexity along these lines.
Decreasing the threshold and set it in dollars can make counterbalancing the initiatives to be much harder.
Basically this proposal splits SP into two different kinds of assets with different initiatives to hold - this adds complexity and changes economics.
I think we need to wait until guilds and votes delegation are implemented and see if this solves the problem, if not this proposal can be revisited.
I agree. Sounds good.
There are two separate proposals that have been discussed too (besides the buying out of whale SP)
I think both of those ideas would be good to consider, and could be done before the delegation and guild changes.
I would support both.
Even I am a newbie with no complete understanding i thing that might be a good idea too @val-a @timcliff - just matters we all work together for the sake of platform success
Hi @val-a, we spoke a month ago about a Steem Power delegation/rental deal, and I'd like to move forward with it if you're interested. I'm in the market for about 200,000 SP, possibly more. Let me know if you want to discuss this - you can email me at philip.brown (at) gatech (dot) edu.
What delegation and guilds changes are you refering to?
https://steemit.com/steem/@timcliff/whales-can-the-community-buy-out-a-portion-of-your-influence#@val-a/re-timcliff-re-val-a-re-timcliff-whales-can-the-community-buy-out-a-portion-of-your-influence-20170214t181112143z
Not sure what I am supposed to be reading via this thread? I think guilds are not scalable and too complexe for the average joe, and so they are a waste of time. And voting delegation, is this a new feature or?
Discussed on Steemit Chat.
Note sure what to expect yet as far as guilds. We'll have to wait and see.
Vote delegation is a proposed change in the next HF (GitHub Issue 818).
I worry this would become quite complex
This complexity can be handled on UI side. Only downvoting procedure may slightly change as well as reputation calc algorithm.
While the specific number is still debatable (250 MV), I really like this idea. Voting cap and removal of curation reward will catch two rabbits, i.e. whale issue and bot issue. Two-tier membership model will compensate big stakeholders and incentivize them to hold STEEM.
In addition to this, I would like to suggest applying
n*log(n), which is less exponential thann^2to the reward system. 250 MV vs. 1 MV is a large gap if we keep n^2.I love this!
Agreed. It is just a proposal, and a simple number chosen for conversation sake. Details like this can (and probably would) be tweaked if the proposal were to actually be implemented.
The original idea that @snowflake proposed actually had the amount being set in dollars (rather than vests) so that if 5 years from now STEEM is worth $100 - we don't have the same problem all over again. (It would be a good problem to have, but might as well solve it once and be done with it.)
I haven't given this a lot of thought yet, but I have been thinking about it since you brought it up last night. My initial reaction is that I like it!
I have skimmed through the comments and did not see anyone mention delegated Steem Power. (Apologies is I missed it)
As a whale I want to see the value my stake increase. There are a few ways I can go about doing that. I can create content, I can vote and get paid curation rewards, I can play the market, or I can help increase the value of the platform as a whole and my stake will increase in value. I have opted for the last option and am letting Steem Guild and Curie use all of my Steem Power to help out new and growing authors. Yes, I get paid some curation rewards but the strategy is far from optimal if I were to maximize my return. There are many other whales doing the same thing which means that there is a lot of Steem Power behind the idea of suboptimal initial returns as a form of investment in the community. This is key!
Delegated Steem Power will allows whales to maintain ownership of their stake while transferring the privileges of holding Steem Power (and the earning potential it entails) to other accounts, particularly minnows. I am confident that the community will run with this feature and that whales will be more than willing to delegate their Steem Power for the betterment of the community.
Delegating voting power in the way it is done today is considered by many to be a bandaid more than an actual solution. It is also risky for the whales to be sharing their private voting keys with others.
The blockchain level delegation of SP that is being worked on does not allow the original owner of the SP to collect any of the curation rewards from the SP that they delegated. It essentially acts as if the receiver has the SP for themselves.
That is correct. We have stated many times that propagating curation reward back to the delegator is too expensive computationally.
How will you decide, you (the dev whales) will give out your SP weight to whom / how much each?
If you delegate your SP to only a few people, it's not much different to current situation: Curie and the Guild is using your SP already. With SP delegation you'll only address the bot front-running issue happening on the Guild, but even Curie does not suffer from that. A side benefit is that Guild members don't need to vote for their contents with your accounts (but still with your SP).
If you delegate your SP to a lot of people, it means that everyone will get only a small part of influence, and likely those SP won't be voting as concentrate as it's doing now, that's a big disadvantage in influence in comparison to the whales who are voting independently. That said, you giving up your influence/reward doesn't mean other whales will. A few whales giving up their influence by divesting / SP delegation or simply not voting only means other whales will have much more influence. When money is involved, most people tend to earn more money rather than give out more money.
Perhaps it's time to revisit the
N*Nweighted reward distribution algorithm again.@timcliff @val-a @clayop @transisto @snowflake @ats-david @jesta @smooth
This is a very exciting proposal! I've been thinking about @snowflake's posts all week and I love the way this idea is evolving. I know it might not technically work or get accepted. But I have to say... I haven't been this excited about a proposal since cutting the hyperinflation. I really hope the discussion continues until it's either accepted or proven flawed.