RE: Curation by Prediction Market Proposal
It sounds like the best way to play this game is to just continue doing what most bots are currently doing ... focus on dan, ned and any business tied to Steem and only upvote their post. Only now you get to play a game of predicting the monetary value of their post.
Why would anyone, that wants to earn for curating, waste their time on any other accounts? We all know (my assumption) going in that things will continue in this fashion. We're told that 20 votes is best to prevent from diluting our voting power and that creates a situation where the curator will/should focus on only 20 accounts/post they know will consistently be upvoted (dan, ned and steem related service accounts).
Why would a curator waste time on upvoting the new guy who just made a great post if they risk not only a financial gain from doing so, because other "curators" are only focusing on the "Big 20", and also give up one of their precious votes (assuming a 20 vote dilution limit) on the new guy?
Risk taking by actually attempting to curate good content, from new users or lesser known users, is not beneficial in this scenario afaict. I simply don't see most "curators" branching out to take risk like this very often when you can continue doing what works and make a steady income.
I'm not very bright (and it shows), but I simply don't see this changing human behavior one bit. I think it will eliminate most unsophisticated bots, but it will do very little to change the human desire to maximize their own rewards using the easiest method possible. And the easiest method is to continue doing what's been proven to work ... upvote dan, ned and any steem related service account.
That's my 2 STEEM.
Edit: grammar.
I think the very calculation of reward payouts for curation (not just on how it is distributed to curators, but the amount of the curation payout itself), needs to be adjusted by which account is the author of the post in question, and how consistently their posts have been upvoted in the recent past. I think the system should give boosts to curation payouts (not content payouts) for underdog winners relative to consistent winners, since it is much more difficult for curators to consistently predict the underdog winners.
Like you said, if we all know that @dan and @ned's posts will get highly upvoted (based on historical data from the recent past) what value are curators (those collectively voting for that post) adding by confirming that? Certainly not as much as that added by the curators accurately predicting the success of an underdog post. And yet, because a post's curation rewards is equal to its content rewards (in the current system and seemingly in this proposal as well) the former set of curators would earn a much larger payout than the latter set.
I think this is a huge insight. Something that could easily be implemented. A simple rule could be that curation rewards are only paid if a post's author receives a final reward greater than their average reward. In this way half of the time curators get nothing for upvoting consistent winners. This would also mean that authors make more from their lessor posts when they maintain a high average. Authors would have no incentive to spam low value posts because it would lower their average reward and in turn cause them to lose more to curators when they create something great.
I think it can be a little less discontinuous than that and I don't like the perverse incentive for an author to resist commenting and discussion for fear of hurting their financial rewards, but I think there is something there in that idea.
So there is a certain amount of payout allocated for a target post based on the net_rshares (same as current system), but the distribution to curators wouldn't simply be 50% always.
Each author would have a weighted average (net_rshares)^2 (denoted
R) for their posts (evaluated at time of payout) over some moving time window (4 weeks maybe?) where the weight factor is the (net_rshares)^2 of the post divided by the currentRof the author. A weight factor much larger than 1 of a newly paid out post's (net_rshares)^2 drivesRtowards that (net_rshares)^2 easily. If the weight factor was exactly 1, it would be a like a normal average. A weight factor of 0 is as if that data point didn't even exist. So the author's posts/comments that get no upvotes (particularly true of comments) do not dilute their weighted average.If the (net_rshares)^2 at time of payout for the author's post is
r, then the fractionfof the payout allocated for that target post that goes to curators could, for example, be:where
x = r/Randcis some constant less than 1 such as 0.2. Forc = 0.2, I have plottedfforr/Rranging from 0 to 2.No matter whether the post is a top-level post or comment, it would always receive exactly 50% of the payout allocated for that target post. This means top-level posts would get the same payout as in current system, and comment's would get the same payout as they would if they were top-level posts (instead of only getting half as much as they do in the current system). Then, the remainder (
0.5-ffraction) would either: be sent back to the reward fund if the target post was a top-level post; or, be distributed to the post's parents as is done in the current system (or better yet with a faster decay factor than 0.5) if the target post was a comment. We have seen that most comments hardly get enough upvotes to make a big difference, so I don't think reducing the reward contribution propagating from children is going to have that big of an impact. If the decay factor was changed, whatever amounts are allocated for parents could mostly be distributed to the immediate parent, which I think is the most relevant contextual post to reward anyway.They don't get enough upvotes because nobody wants to waste his voting power on comments but prefer posts! (and we can not blame them, I lost for example all my voting power just for upvoting responses on a single post today!That sucks!) In reality most would love to curate responses as well but they don't have the economic motivation with the current system!
The responses curation will be a problematic in future also if you not implement something like "seperate voting power" for posts/responses like suggested here... https://steemit.com/steemit-ideas/@liondani/separate-voting-power-for-post-and-responses
I feel like I'll have to reread this post many many times before understanding it.
I like the idea a lot, but comments would have to be excluded as it's very unprobable for those to get over the average.
When they're excluded it'd encourage voting for them though, because you can be sure to get a reward. That's two big problems solved with a simple change!
Seems to be on the right way!
The average should be calculated separately for posts and for comments, otherwise posts would always be above average and comments below average.
Won't this tend to destroy the rewards received by consistently good authors? With no incentive to upvote, these authors will get fewer upvotes and and less rewards). Yes, they will still get some from the joy of rewarding but in a competitive system you will get what you pay for which is a lot less participation in voting for these authors.
So can you and Dan work together on an algorithm and then come up with a way so users can opt-in to test it? I think curation is important as it is. Maybe it's not earning a whole lot of money for the average person right now but it's the feeling of playing a game which really matters here and these small wins each day keeps a person playing.
If certain players are consistently big winners for long periods of time but you want to figure out how to encourage underdogs then figure out some bonuses for underdogs? Prediction markets are a bit complicated I think and even less players can play that game.
So as someone who is interested in growing the value of Steem, not collecting sycophants, we need to shift the reward structure for voting. One way for us to do that is to downvote our own posts. This will create a scenario where our own content gets ignored and harder to find even though it is what is of interest to many users.
If it is of interest to many users then it is good that it gets votes. There is no reason for you to downvote it, and no actual problem here.
If you really want to punish the bots for assuming your posts are valuable, go ahead and post "dont upvote this post" occasionally and downvote that after the bots upvote it. You could even create a bot to do it!
I didn't want to be the one to say it, and I'm impressed and pleased that you did. :)
I just voted your post up and I doubt it's going to offer much in terms of curation. People tend to vote for what is valuable but I think one problem with voting is it's STRICTLY UP AND DOWN. If it were more detailed so you could communicate more like insightful, interesting, sad, funny, then maybe people would be able to vote up and curate in more creative and diversified ways. This way people would vote more and you'd have more granular curation.
Up or down doesn't communicate much. It doesn't tell the world why a particular post is valuable. This means people trying to figure out what to curate cannot for example decide to vote up the most funny posts on Steemit with their bot because they will have no way to determine what is or isn't funny according to quantified means. Only a human can detect funny but a bot could then vote up everything initial human curators voted as funny.
Yes, I like where you are going with this..... we could have more than one way to vote and reward voters who voted as most people did, for example if your bot voted "funny" but most people voted "angry" then your bots gets nothing and its fair since you didn´t actually read the post.
Maybe this something where the use of Emoji's can be used to vote on content. You have a range of emojis, most likely 5 at most that people can choose from. This help give a more granular response and eliminate the binary option that computers are good at.
I like that. It adds colour and fun and familiarity for "average" social media users.
That is actually correct curation given the current userbase.
It might even be correct curation later because, well, what else do all steem users have in common besides steem? The diference is that later ned, dan, etc. will likely make much less frequent steem-related posts, or their posts will be technical and nature and not appeal to all steem users, so probably only voting for their posts won't work. For now all their posts are of interest to nearly all system users, so it shouldn't be a surprise (or viewed as a failure) that they attract the most votes.