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RE: Self voting will now NOT be default steemit.com behaviour
I wonder how you will handle someone setting up another account to upvote themselves, or groups of people agreeing to upvote each other. I don't have any issue with people upvoting their own post. I think people should have to pay to upvote their own comment, just like a post promotion, because it changes the rank in a comment stream. I have, once or twice, upvoted my own comment to rank in higher in a comment stream. It didn't seem right that I was rewarding myself for increasing my visibility.
We are not seeking to do this, and the main beneficiaries of disabling self voting will be minnows, who will then instead be able to use their votes as part of their engagement strategy. Self-Circle-Jerk takes a far more advanced bot than we have made at this point. But it's a start.
I agree that getting paid to promote yourself is wrong! That's the whole point!
"I agree that getting paid to promote yourself is wrong! That's the whole point!"
Why? You do realize where the value of Steem comes from, right? People investing money into it?
I'm confused, do you think it's difficult to create a second account and send Steem there to vote for yourself? There is no barrier of technical knowledge here.
No but it does take more effort. Minimally more I'll grant you, but more. It is friction and the interface is not designed to work for that use case.
From reading your comments it's clear that you think this is not a solvable problem. But is that the only reason you oppose this, because you think it cannot be done? Or do you agree with self voting in some fundamental way? I'm curious.
To be honest, I'm torn. I agree that putting large amounts of money into the ecosystem should reward you with stake. I further agree with Sean-King's logic that a Steem Power that didn't let you vote for yourself would be worth much less than one who does. I'd guess as much as half or more. It's hard to get away from what the results of that might be for everyone.
My main objection is indeed that this will not stop the issue. It's like trying to create a complicated system to ban trolls on Reddit. They'll just make another account in 3 seconds. I feel like you will only punish the "dumbest abusers" and all the sly ones will simply get an even larger ratio of the haul.
But, another aspect to why I object to this issue is that I think there is much more severe (and clear cut) rewards abuse happening in Trending which is literally locking us all out of the best spots on the platform. I posted about it, but nobody seems to care:
https://steemit.com/curation/@lexiconical/exposing-advertiser-circle-jerks-in-trending-reward-pool-rape-and-bookingteam-com
I mean, take a look at the business tag in trending. It's all BookingTeam.com junkmail, with the same crew of auto-upvoters.
I feel like the Sheriff of Nottingham Forest chasing Robin Hood even worrying about self-upvoters. At least they paid in and gave the token value.
Incidentally, I have my own biases and I also want to retain the ability to self-vote my content, given I have put nearly $50,000 into Steem.
PS - Thanks for not just muting me as your compatriot did, btw. The reality is we all want the same thing - the rewards pool going to reward actual content creators. Our disagreement is about regulation and motivation, not intent.
Firstly, you're welcome. It takes all strokes and styles 😜
I fear this is far too much the motivation of users here. It's like the goose has just started laying golden eggs and everyone is thinking "why not?!"
But really we all know this is a glitch in the system that has to be corrected. Can you honestly imagine self voting continuing as it is now? I'm preparing stats on this and be sharing them soon. @sean-king imagines we are all rational and I saw you were right to tentatively disagree on this point. People have burned things down to the ground for a less lucrative payday.
Self voting of larger stakeholders just shows new minnows that they're even farther from reaching great SP and influence. If these guys at the top can basically pay themselves there's less for them. Though maybe I'm wrong and they will actually want to be the rich guy paying themselves too. It will all be aspirational though as no one will be able to build up their SP except by buying in because there are much less votes going outward to others!
Okay we're really taking this on board, it's a big point a lot of people are making. While I thought initially that some movement towards a solution would be a step at least (i.e. removing self voting as an operation) that it does not also deal with sock puppets is crucifying us. We're working on a proposal that would do both.
For the sake of argument, how would you react if I told you we had it solved for both cases? Are you too tied to your bias or could you see yourself supporting it?
100%
Congrats...u just walked into the vipers den and said "i smell alot like chicken...whats the problem?"
Lol...
Ah, well, one is giving me civil replies with interesting discussion. We'll ignore the guy that muted me after he made a mistake with his own argument and admitted it.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out. Steemit is such a complex ecosystem now that prediction of consequences seems less practical than testing and adjusting. It would be nice to see some analyses afterwards showing whether the planned effects are actually occurring. I appreciate all the experimentation that goes on here!
The 4th member of the Co-Operative, @rycharde, is a mathematician who does a lot of work on Game Theory, and there is in fact models you can create that give pretty clear predictions of how humans will play with new things.
He has friends in the field who can quickly build a simulation based on a series of variables that is pretty accurate at predicting it. Basically, it just models the process of people learning how to exploit the system. From this you can in fact judge the effect, before implementation, to a pretty large degree.
I was absolutely ecstatic when he showed up to talk about what his angle was. This gives our development process some really good evidence to justify changes. He also happens to practically share my own theories about gravity and biology as well.
I followed you just in case you decide to write about gravity :-)
That's something I will definitely be doing in the future, though I am reluctant to write anything until I have a new idea or, better still, if I have the time and money to actually implement some of the experimental devices I have proposed previously.
Thanks for that explanation! That's pretty interesting! I'm curious about what the input and output variables are. Was the impact of self-upvoting considered, but then rejected for the current system implementation? Or was that a surprise? Or was it seen as a possibility with low enough probability that it wasn't worth bothering with, until evidence accumulated?
So interesting! Now I really want to see a comparison of the projected and actual impacts, knowing there's game theory model behind your design decisions.
The impact of self voting was definitely considered in the original architecture design. This was why the reward curve was so heavily skewed in favour of whales. The justification for not simply leaving this capability out (it's just a simple if/then test) was complacence born of probably many years being accustomed to platforms like Reddit and Digg. Neither of those platforms are going to be around in 5 years time, whereas Steem, or its descendants, will be dominating the internet.
The white paper has a bizarre ref to Metcalfe's law to justify the n^2 reward curve. Metcalfe's calculation has been shown to be inappropriate as a measure of "network worth". The maths is simple: a network with N users has a max N(N+1)/2 connections, and as N increases can be approx to N^2. But this is to calc computer power needed, not social worth. More recent calcs show this to be closer to N.logN so approx proportional to N is the right order of mag.
Basically, not everyone connects to everybody else in a network, but rather superusers emerge and most users connect to one or more of these. Therefore as N increases, the size of the network only increases proportional to N.logN and not N^2.
I believe that n Log n is the current hf19 formula. that's what many people were pushing for.
So the new whales are not the same species as the old whales, it seems. I've seen so many recent posts arguing that a whale-sized self-upvote on a comment is simply return on investment and to be expected. And your comment about complacence and custom on Reddit and Digg still fuels my interest in that game theory model!
Then ur mathmetician buddy missed the ball completely.
I made whaleshares to help whales distribute power away from themselves in a free market (not use of force as proclaimed here) to help end the rule of upvote bots.
Why the hell u arent focused on this...blows my mind.
It would have been nice if someday we'd at least see even delegation added to Condenser, let alone Beneficiaries... What need would there be for whaleshares if it was easy to use a feature that is in the consensus logic?
I don't think this 'upvote the newbies just because they are new' strategy really helps anyone. It resembles a heroin dealer giving away free samples more than anything else. You would miss a lot of important elements of how this system works if you ignore the fact that it is pretty much a Skinner Box. I doubt over the long run it really does the system any good either, because many people will just abandon the platform in the conditions of a sliding price and lack of 'gifts' from whales.
Fucked if I know how you draw the conclusion that a self vote should not be possible by the rules of the consensus logic, is force. That's like saying that the referee at a football match shouldn't give out yellow and red cards when other people use force and don't play fair. If I was playing a game of football and other players were barging and high tackling, I'd rather not risk my neck on it. At least when there is a referee they will have to sit out for at least half the game after breaking rules of common decency. Oh, but the referee is using force. No, you consented to the consensus logic when you joined the network.
The central goal of my advocating these things has to do with putting more necessary tools in the hands of users, without requiring them to learn how to code python or javascript. Self voting is short sighted activity, not considering the non-quantifiable but nevertheless vital capital of peer respect.
damn u made whaleshares?? holy crap $800,000 in steempwer, i dont wana fuck with you man! hahah
I would have never guessed because your lack of a profile image (or at least it isnt showing up) i have noticed steemit wont show the profile pic when i open up a comment!
But i assume people without profile pics are new and dont know or care! And i am always telling minnows to create a profile pic to help them have a better chance of receiving an upvote as many of us experienced steemit users subconsciously just see the lack of a profile image/avatar and withhold an upvote bevcause it shows they dont care if they are nw! BUT u are proof that this is not always the case!
And also u should remember how many minnows still dont understand how steempower works ( i dont blame em) and when they hear "upvote bot" they assume that anyone can create a bot without having to fund it wth steempower!
they should realize how ...ok if u make a bot...u have to fund it! and that money has to come from somwhere! that whale could just keep all their steempower in one account and foocus $1000 upvots onall their friends!
u should remind minnows this with a simple image...
maybe this will help
LOL sorry i know that wont help but i love injecting humor into serious situations
Lol...bots bots bots. Will u care about how unreasonable this is?
Bots armies of fucking bots...and u guys are attacking self voting. What a waste of time.
You have a solution for bots? What is it exactly? Let's focus on your solution since you think mine is not going to work.
The solution is increasing curation incentive with a hard fork. It's as simple as that. The exact implementation of the change isn't as easy because of multi-accounting though.
I have been talking about solutions involving discovering numbers of transfers between accounts on the ledger, as part of this, and an even simpler one is to have the rewards calculation decrease rewards when votes go to the same account repeatedly, that the reward share and curation should shrink to allow more varied voting patterns produce better yields. This would punish bots a lot.
Yep that was my first idea too. It will probably improve 2 things at once, because people also keep complaining that the top 10% gets 90% of the rewards.
I think we are gonna bring some big and beneficial changes to Steem, that might finally eliminate most of the contentious conflicty shit that I think is bad PR for the platform.
Then you need to check out @rycharde 's latest post, it's advocating exactly this.
I'm thinking this is a very promising solution and would love to see more debate around it.