RE: Steemit Update: HF21 Testnet, SPS, EIP, Rewards API, SMTs!
...we have been hard at work adding the changes to Hardfork 21...
There isn’t much info or a link for the final SPS and EIP proposals for this fork. Where can we see that information?
As shown in the charts, 2e12 approaches our current linear rewards at roughly 16 STEEM...
At the current STEEM price (which seems to be pegged at $0.40 - somebody stop that, please), this would bring the curve to linear at ~$6.40. I think this is ridiculously low and will neither “bring balance” nor be “meaningful.”
The main reason this EIP was pitched was to mitigate bid bots. I disagree with that reason for the changes, although I do agree that the protocol changes are good. But this “2e12” algorithm will have practically zero effect on bid bots, so I wonder why such a relatively short superlinear curve is being touted as the ideal and a “meaningful” curve.
Not to mention the fact that many human voters can also put a post into the full linear algorithm with a single vote. This seems that it will only have an effect on smaller voters/voting. That isn’t necessarily bad, but it doesn’t address what most of the promoters of the EIP are hoping to “fix.”
I would prefer a longer, more gradual trip between superlinear and linear. “Popular” and highly-rewarded content should require more voters and/or larger votes from the most invested users. I don’t think linearity at 16 STEEM accomplishes the goal of properly discovering and rewarding such content.
If you could, please link to the rest of the hard fork info. I’m sure readers would appreciate it.
[EDIT]
I see that a link for the EIP has been added to this post - a link that takes us to a post from last month from @steemitblog regarding the initial proposal. So, I'm going to assume that whatever protocols were mentioned there are what is being proposed for HF21.
Oh, right...no specifics about the protocols were mentioned. So, I'm going to assume that we are working with the following:
- The "2e12" curve mentioned in this post.
- 50/50 content rewards split.
- A downvote pool with an unspecified amount of voting power.
- An unfunded SPS.
With this info to work with, here is my stance:
- This is wholly insufficient and practically meaningless.
- I am in favor of this.
- I am indifferent.
- Seems pointless to have a proposal system with no funding, so this is a waste of code.
Overall, with the information provided, I would not approve this hard fork. I would suggest that the protocols are revised or that the complete information is publicly provided and linked in the original post.
For more info on my own positions/proposals regarding the SPS and EIP, you can read these two posts:
https://steemit.com/steem/@ats-david/thoughts-on-the-steem-proposal-system-sps
https://steemit.com/steem/@ats-david/thoughts-on-the-steem-economic-improvement-proposal-eip
I feel similarly and will reject this hardfork. I agree about 1) and 4), but I'm more negative on 2) and 3) than you are.
I'll add that 50/50 is also insufficient; bid-bots will continue to be profitable till it's something like 20/80. What they lose out in author rewards allocation, much of it they make back in increased curation rewards. Similarly, rampant self-voters will get 100% irrespective of the splits anyway, so they don't really care. Overall, I'm indifferent, because, despite its ineffectiveness in solving the alleged issues, and disincentivizing content creation, it should hypothetically encourage people to curate and power up more.
I'm against a free-for-all downvote pool with no abuse mitigation protocols and an undefined amount of voting power. I've been campaigning for viable downvotes since the beginning, but this is a facile implementation. Even the zealots/fanboys of this hardfork will admit that this will bring around some toxicity, but it's a "necessary evil". To which I'll say - if you really think encouraging toxicity has any place in a "social" network, at any point, you know your entire system is due for an absolute and complete overhaul. I'm tempted to invoke Godwin's law, but I'll pass. To be clear, I do think things will settle down, and it may marginally benefit the economy. Like you, my opinion has little consequence to the consensus, but I don't want any part of this anti-social network as a witness.
The only solution is a complete overhaul from scratch. When they get around to it, and is designed by people who understand elementary human behaviour, I'll consider returning.
Agreed. Maybe a small group of people should put in a proposal to SPS to fund an economic team. Tweaking the same parameters every HF is just not going to do what is promised - we need to look deeper.
But why get rid of the bidbots when it's better for business to cater to plagiarists and folks willing to extract tokens with as little effort as possible so they can dump them as soon as they are received? Why would it make sense to encourage actual content producers to do well, attract millions of potential curators, and the billions of dollars they bring with them? It's counter productive to want to find ways to attract billions of dollars to this platform. A few dollars in the hands of a plagiarist and a few thousand in the hands of the few who promote them is WAY SMARTER for business than if we had millions of consumers and billions of dollars pouring in. Everyone knows that!
Positive perception... is what is destroyed through vote selling. I've said this over and over again in posts I've written as well as comments.
Any serious high quality content creator runs a mile when they see how the system works on steem. The levels of shit content on steem aren't just the result of con artists, plagiarism and spam artists... it's also the result of a huge amount of people of quality either leaving, or never joining in the first place when they see how the system is set up.
Believe me, I pitched an idea for a steem community marketing up-and-coming authors to a friend who works in publishing in early 2018. After many conversations the jist of what she said was; that the system was far too corrupt for them to get involved and risk reputation or their clients interest.
Big mainstream entertainment industry investment is what will bring huge value to steem. And this will not happen the way things are working now.
I have horror stories as well. I once nearly convinced a top chef in Canada to hire a blogger and do foodie articles to promote his business and menu. I had him until he saw the front page, and I had to explain why some of that trash was there. He wasn't comfortable putting his name and image next to anything like that and also said, "If I was caught buying positive reviews for my business, I would be ruined." Dude is a millionaire, drives a fast car. No doubt he would have purchased some STEEM. Articles that double as advertisments that could potentially earn enough to pay the blogger, plus have a free form of advertising, along with a platform that allows free publishing, those links can be then passed around social media. It's an easy sell until you see the disaster these folks have created with their paid votes. If someone comes and sees it's impossible to compete without paying a toll, they just take the traditional route, because it's easier and more effective. Current front page drives eyes away. Why would anyone invest in that? That approach is only for the amateurs who don't know the business, which is why the vote sellers market their service as something that leads to success. Pros already know how to be successful. They don't need the "miracle cure."
@nonameslefttouse that is stunning. People like that are presented the blockchain alone is tough enough, but having someone that may have actually considered implementing steem/steemit into their business and feels they can't is mind-boggling to me. You are right, that is where the real growth is going to come. There needs to be some level of saturation of regular users within businesses like this. Getting new users is hard enough, steemit's focus I believe should be more on retention and let the success stories in their own carry your marketing effort for you.
One hundred percent, every change should be focused on getting "regular people" onto steem. This whole chasing of investor dollars is silly. This myriad of problems we have would be an annoyance instead of an ecosystem if the userbase were truly in the millions and not just "millions of accounts". We need the voices of people who don't have the time or energy to waste trying to game the system. That's where the "your upvote directly rewards content creators" pitch matters. They don't care about getting 50% of their pennies back.
The cool thing is if you feel you have a better idea there is an opportunity to create your own sidechain with steem-engine...
I'm the user I think there should be more of. I haven't got any tech savvy, really. I think steem is a great idea as advertised, the implementation just makes it tough to be joe schmoe on here.
Yep same here. I think keeping people like yourself and me as well needs to be more of a priority if possible.
I hear you m8. Yeah, that sounds very familiar.
Absolutely spot on. There is a big issue on steem with some of the biggest SP holders having nothing to do with, and no interest in content creation, or understanding how this can be a virtuous cycle that brings increasing investment when incentives are there and are honest.
Lol, but I'm gonna retire from this comment thread I think.
I agree. A simple directory creation for upvote purchasing may also be the answer. Allot one spot over the top twenty (non-botted payments), say the 20th one, at that, and have a random pop up feature that has any paid for/bot voted on any given search or hash tag. Then you would have to define what a bot necessarily is. My definition- a group of voting delegation for the apparent overwhelming purpose of selling votes with little to no precondition of content quality or other affiliation to that group or other subgroup in benefiting blockchain growth through original creativity or original programming. I use an example.... @steemmonsters (or the re-branded name of @splinterlands may be more appropriate). They would be the golden goose as far is this is concerned. Creating alternate tokens, building an upvote pool that was created for the purpose of benefiting their players that have done some level of content creation that is original and commentary on their game with forums now that are also tokenized. Versus bidbot X, that upvotes the person with steem/sbd ready to spend, and yes does some level of quality control but cannot be expected to patrol thousands of posts a day if they are big enough as a vote service. If more whales saw the benefits in delegating portions of their steem to causes like this, and would even actively participate or even sell the assets generated due to delegating to this venture the economy would open up... beyond belief. The upvote that carried by SM also is limited, so even the most heavily promoted post is no more than like 7-$8 at the moment, so there is certainly no guarantee that that vote purchasing will guarantee that even that post is guaranteed to land in overall trending searches. If the paid for upvoting services were collected, and listed less prominently and openly displayed as "promoted posts," again, showing up every so often rather having all posts at the top, then maybe that could also show some level of integrity of voted posts. Also with the hike in curation I am also for the bigger fish curating more because they should, they are bringing the capital to the table. The people that are whales on here are not people that went to STINC HQ and said "give me your steem," then ran out the back door and rode away in getaway cars, somehow they earned it whether we agree or disagree in how they did earn it under rules for the blockchain at the time is beside the fact, it is theirs to do with it what they wish. Long story short, opening the economy up to more users and getting actual movement in steem and SP to people that are here and doing legit work and building communities is where you are going to win. People showing up need to have a reason to stay, simply getting them here is not enough. There is a lot of support and energy that goes into that. When respectable retention becomes possible over time then we will truly see changes. I think labeling any article that has any vote within the post under a clearly defined definition of bought votes and is listed as promoted will be a great start in my humble opinion to having some credibility, among also generating some diversity in thought among those that are at the top. It seems very "group-thinkish" in how resources can be spread, or the group-think is very heavily enforced because real answers for re-invigorating the steemit economy is not being allowed into the hardforks in my humble opinion, at least since I have been here.
All that complexity, for nothing. If I want to go on stage, I'm not going to buy the tickets for the seats in the theater. I don't even see why people put so much thought into buying votes, when all that does it force the performer to perform in front of an empty house = no money. There are business models that have been around for centuries, they work. All this buying votes nonsense and coin stacking and people wanting handouts and miracle cures goes against everything that actually works.
Exactly, those cheating authors using those cheating bid-bots cheated the steem economic model.
Everyone knows: When you cheat, you win, and everyone respects you for it.
@themarkymark is #1 when it comes to faking things and number of bid-bots the one is running
Yes, literally! Everyone knows that! Duh! It's all so simple!!!
Hey, it's fun to joke around and all that but I just noticed you delegate to Tipu bidbot and Tipu's vote hasn't been removed from the instance of plagiarism I recently found boosted up to the trending(joke) page. Here's a link with more information and a link leading to the instance of plagiarism can be found tucked neatly inside that post.
I would like to see that vote removed and the money the plagiarist spent on the vote should go to me because I'm awesome.
Thank you and have a wonderful evening.
I don't delegate to tipU anymore. Those are residuals from prior delegations, I think via some issuance and dividends of tipU coins.
Alright but if you know somebody who knows somebody, maybe they can get someone else to do something about it.
@cardboard is the man you after
That sounds like code talk. Is this agent cardboard easy to work with or should I wear a vest?
Agent Cardboard. Lol!
He/she seeks like a reasonable guy/gal but I would always recommend the best!
I tried to message @cardboard, the owner of TipU, but no response thus far.
Except it incentives bid-bots by making it financially necessary to make it to linear rewards.
How many top 20 witnesses are running a bid bot? If the EIP threatened their bottom line they would veto the hardfork, which is exactly why it obviously benefits them.
You've hit the nail on the head as to why the EIP may have been carefully reworked, or even didn't properly address this issue in the first place.
At the end of the day, until these practices are weeded out nothing will change! At this point will we never get a chance to find out what a reward system that de-centivizes vote selling even looks like, when so many of the top 100 witnesses make their bread and butter running vote selling services. As you say, they will just veto the hardfork if it threatens their interests.
Or maybe I'm wrong? Not sure I care at this point.
Posted using Partiko Android
Is there a list or way to find out which top 100 witnesses are running bid bots? I may want to rethink some of my votes..!
I don't think there is tbh meanbees... Not that I know of anyway. If you visit bot pages some are clear who run them, others less so.
Posted using Partiko Android
Why not develop an app or script to reject all witnesses who endorse vote selling?
I'm not involved with any bid bot, but I don't think it really matters if others are. I'm more interested in the overall economics and how it functions at a system-wide level than in who happens to be doing what.
This person or that person running a bid bot literally doesn't matter. If the economics favor it, that creates a valuable niche. If one person doesn't fill that niche, someone else surely will.
The vote selling economy on steem is not a valuable niche... it's a bleed of value. That bleed happens both in the talent that leaves this platform due to the fact that quality isn't rewarded manually, and steem Blockchains reputation in the wider world. I've noticed this same attitude among a lot of devs and some of the witnesses... + dapp owners etc. It's blinkered to assume that steem Blockchain primary usecase and best UC is not content. Therefore quality content should be nurtured by those with stake to create a virtuous cycle (eg when people see professional level content get curie awards they strive to improve to try and get those awards).
Bidbots drive away decent content creators. Simple fact. Curie can only encourage them up to a point... beyond that point they leave. I know this because I've been a curie curator for over a year... I've seen it again and again. Those people who claim bidbots aren't the problem obviously haven't seen the multitude of posts I have where talented people anounce they're leaving because they've discovered that votes are bought on here. I've seen tones of them while searching for curie.
To put it super simple, the vote buying system on steem sacrifices legitimate long term growth of the price of steem for short term gains for a few people.
If publishing houses invested in this space (to source or promote authors) it would lead to huge $ value. If legitimate film interests invested in this space (to promote independent film festivals or up & coming directors etc) it would lead to huge $ value. If steem somehow leveraged streaming entertainment (similar to YouTube) it would lead to huge $ value. I only have one instance of proof that vote buying is why they run a mile and that is in the publishing industry... I talked about that in my other comment in this thread.
I'll tell you what will lead to the continued devaluing of all our investments. Allowing the best content creators to be continually devalued and driven away by the fact that people with a tone of SP just want to sit back and watch money come in with little to no work. That's what vote selling is all about.
Yeah sure, if they're allowed to. Stinc and a handful of the most stake wealthy on steem could use their SP (downvotes) to stop bidbots if they chose to. But half of those stake wealthy people I speak off are involved or run bidbots so we're kind of fucked. Also their hefty stake weighted witness votes could remove the witnesses who perpetuate vote selling from the top 100 and send a message, but they don't because half of those stake wealthy people I speak off are involved or run bidbots.
You say it doesn't matter @smooth, you're wrong. But this comment isn't really aimed at you per say, these are thoughts that have been gestating in my mind the past 24 hours watching the comments on this thread.
This is the last I'll say on the subject.
Posted using Partiko Android
I'm quite sure you misunderstood my intent here. I meant valuable in the sense that people can make money doing it. I didn't mean valuable in the sense of valuable to Steem overall.
You should better understand what the permissionless property of blockchains means. No one needs to be 'allowed' to do anything, they can just do it. The only way in which it can be stopped is by changing to system rules and incentives to make it a smaller or non-existent niche.
Fair enough dude. I don't say these things to get some drama tokens 😉
But these issues I highlight are very real and they need addressing fully now! Especially with Facebook trying to enter crypto and Eos coming with voice.
I want to see everyone's investment in steem bring huge returns! Not just a few people getting moderate returns, as steem is driven out of the space and loses that first mover advantage.
I've spent nearly 2 years putting a huge amount of time in never powered down. I'm not the only person to put such time and effort in, I'm sure you have.
I don't need to better understand it, I understand it very well!
I addressed this above when I said stinc and high stake people could stop vote buying by excersising their right to be allowed to downvote both the people who run these 'so called' services, and the people who use them! That would be them exercising power in a permissionless environment. It would exercise a measure of control, and considering stinc have had massive stake lying around for 2 years doing nothing it boggles my mind why they haven't at least attempted to stop something that is so obviously of detriment to both the platform and the price of the steem. Obvs that would start a whole new discussion about if we're now centralized... but I feel that the stake distribution on steem (and the ninja mining by more than just stinc) means that ship has sailed.
This is true to an extent, but what I said about responsible use of downvote to stop negative 'niches' from proliferating is valid.
The network effect is what can truly make steem a wold class platform. An ever expanding network of people sharing content, and the advertising that would bring and other investment streams is what can catapult steem to overtake Facebook. This isn't rocket science. It also follows that as steem's value proposition is to actually pay people for their content, we need to fulfill that value proposition to succeed.
I know that there are issues to do with balance between stake flowing out and stake being converted into SP, also the relative lack of trading of steem as a token.
But, as I stated in a comment above, if the issue of steem being a fundamentally unappealing place for content creators doesn't change soon, we will lose any first mover advantage to facebook coin or voice.
I don't disagree that the best way to change all of this is to make the system not reward vote selling/delegating behavior... and better reward manual curation or delegating to a guild that does the work for you, I'm just unsure this HF21 will achieve that, and if it doesn't... well the clock is ticking.
Steemit always intended their stake to be non-voting, in fact they implemented a feature into the blockchain code to enforce that. For various reasons the feature was never used, but the tradition of not voting with their stake remains. That tradition exists for a reason, at least historically. With the dominant stake they once had, if they did vote, no one else would have any meaningful say at all in anything. So for that reason, and because the stake was mined for the purpose of funding the company, compensating their founders, and giving away to new users, they have never voted (apart from a few specific exceptions, mostly emergencies).
Even despite that tradition, they do delegate a large amount of stake to steemcleaners and some other downvoting efforts. It simply numerically isn't enough. I haven't done an exact calculation but my intuition is that bidbots alone have more stake than Steemit (recall that Steemit has sold a lot and continues to sell a lot; the meme about Steemit having an absurdly dominant stake like 80% as they once did is complete wrong), and bidbots are not the only problem.
Trying to solve this the way you suggest would not work and has not worked. Working against the underlying incentives by trying to tell people what you think they should do with their stake despite incentives encouraging them to do something else is inefficient to the point of ineffective, even if you are ultimately right in a way. It is like trying to push a car uphill several miles to get to a repair shop but collapsing from physical exhaustion before you get there, when you could instead roll it downhill to another shop at the bottom of the hill.
I share some of your lack of certainty about whether HF21/EIP will produce the intended and desired results but I think they are worth a try. We should have tried making such improvements long ago, but since we have not, there is no time like the present.
I do and do not agree with you.
I have spent most of my time at Steemit without buying any votes. I remember what a rush it would be to get a vote from curators who had read my story and liked it.
But then...they seemed to die out.
Writing the same quality posts as before, but getting just a few no_value -or small_value votes, without comments from readers anymore, it made me lose interest in posting.
Only then did I learn about SmartMarket. So we now talk about how they make us authors big money. Where? How?
If I send SmartMarket Steem10 for a post, I get back (usually, but not always) my Steem10 plus a ROI of between 5% to 10% (in other words, 0.50c to Steem1. ) One Steem has been roughly $0.30 to 0.40....which means, uhm...how many must I buy, at what cost to me, for me to earn enough to buy one cup of coffee per week?
And I am breaking the bank? !!!
I have not withdrawn even one SP for taking to buy a coffee or buy myself food. But because I treat the buying of votes as a part of doing business on Steemit, I am destroying Steemit?
At least, from me, if your tastes coincide with mine, you can read some stories, poems and some controversial political opinions to stir your blood.
What exactly is it you Flaggers and curators provide? I hardly ever see any of you, so I know you do not support those who write original material - unless it is about Crypto.
I sympathize, I really do. I also never get curie votes anymore... but I can tell you why they dry up after a while as I'm a curator. Below is the curation guidelines from the curie official discord, if a curator gets too many rejections from the reviewers they get kicked out, so you are incentivized as a curator to follow those guidelines. @curie focus on new authors with exceptional content because they don't have (delegated) enough SP to support great writers in perpetuity!
No I'm not attacking people for working within a broken system, I'm saying that if the system can be made to not reward that behavior and whales can be forced to actually curate, or delegate to curation guilds so that they can do the work for them, people like you and me, will have much better chance to be rewarded for high quality writing.
Right back at ya. I've been writing poetry and fiction on steem for just shy of 2 years, I'm not sure I've ever had a comment from on any of my content from you. There is a problem with not enough content consumers on steem, if we had the readership of medium.com it might be different, but as it is now every author on steem has to be sooooo active reading others and networking to even get a sniff at engagement and reasonable payouts. This is part of why you might not get much engagement, it is a networking game right now.
I do and do not agree with this lol. I've never flagged in my life, so far as what curators do.... well look at that list of stipulations above and you'll see that every one of your curie rewards when you were newer to the platform had someone behind it doing a full plagerism check, going through a check list of other criteria like working back through the links on steem homepage to make sure that you can be verified as who you say you are by checking if you have an intro post etc. Using google to check sections of the text to see if it's old material reposted from a website. There is a fck tone of work goes on behind the scenes and the curation guilds are pretty much the only entities ensuring that anyone has those great moments when something of high quality they've created (art, video, writing) gets a decent amount of valuable votes.
Everything I'm saying in the comments in this thread is geared toward trying to get across to any high-ups reading that the vote selling needs to stop, not to attack people like you who have legitimately started buying votes out of sheer frustration, but in the hopes that if it gets sorted the massive amounts of SP delegated to bidbots will end up being used to reward people manually based on the quality of what they are producing.
P.s. I also haven't taken anything out of the steem platform that I haven't put back later. A little out which I traded with and increased my BTC stores but I put more back in than I originally took out. I honestly understand why you're frustrated with the penny payouts on your posts.
Go look at my blog to see how many, and who I comment on and engage with. I do agree that the crypto, and steem posts, get a lot more notice which is stupid as no one outside of steem is interested in that stuff. It boggles my mind that people don't see how insular it all is and how damaging this is for attracting mainstream people to our platform.
I apologise - many times that I used the word 'you', it was because I was/am aware that many others who are attacking authors will be reading, so I was writing for a wider audience. My error was in not specifically saying so.
I checked to see why your name does not ring a bell. You are right, I have never, that I recall, read anything of yours.
First of all, I mostly read/write SF&F stories - but not in poetry. Poetry has more of an emotional and spiritual side to it.
I orginally came to steemit because I had spent nearly 18 years writing my novel (it is about 13 books, of over 700 pages each). I lost my money and that is how I ended up writing, so as to have somethingt o do. It started that way, but then I fell in love with my characters. Writing all day and night, developed me to the point where I was having lucid dreams about them - and those adventures I had shared with them, became part of their story.
I had no way to publish and there is a limited market for my kind of writing, so I was excited when I learnt about the blockchain and saw it as a way of keeping my books available even after I die.
Two years of publishing every day and I am only close to the end of posting of Book 2.
I also, for a long time, devoted time every day for helping new posters. This was where I saw the bad effects of flagging. For instance, Bernie flagged a Nigerian who wrote an article to help Africans feed themselves by using a tiny piece of land. He knocked the guy to zero Rep and try as I did to help, I was obviously too weak. Bernie said he flagged because he felt like it and I in turn was threatened, as does the trash guy, who also threatens he will attack anyone siding with the person he trashed. I checked and he has a delagation given to him of SP25,000. Coincidence? But he actually trashed someone who spoke out against Bernie....
The number of nasty people on Steemit is far greater than most know, I do not know why I fight back but nobody, to this date, has flagged me to death, but it does not make me more tolerant of them. It just makes me feel I am wasting my time here.
Since I no longer believe I will earn anything to top up my state pension, I do not really care about the upvotes. For instance, today I posted a very short story. I got about 40 upvotes. Only one of them means anything to me, as that person read and made a comment. The rest just have stuck me on an upvote bot...with even some of them never appearing on steemit anymore.
I would prefer to be on a platfrom where they are open about it being a cut throat battle of wits, than this pretence of caring about new or poor posters, when most use them as soft targets to vent their evil moods on them, knowing they cannot fight back.
As from the date of rewards changing to 50 / 50 I will ensure nobody can reward me at all, so no bogus curator can earn anything, while I still get my story posted and preserved for a while.
Thanks for answering me and I wish you the best on Steemit.
No worries. I hear everything you're saying and we actually have similar interests/backgrounds. I'm a published (and by that I mean outside steem lol) poet and studied creative writing at university. I also write Sci-Fi and fantasy, but I don't put much fiction up on steem anymore as the audience is not here for it. As you said, it is more important for a writer that people are actually reading what you're writing and even when the bots aren't of the 'bid' variety on here, often a lot of the votes are auto votes. Having said that I'm grateful for the auto votes that fall on my account. I mainly write travel articles or opinion pieces on here as I'm catering to the audience to the best of my ability. I still can't bring myself to join the slew of people who post nothing but articles about steem. It just seems insane to me. I write one article per month about a steem orientated subject max lol. I still put - what I think is - some very decent poetry up sometimes, but most of it gets saved for submitting to online journals that pay or literary anthologies that gain exposure and build a writers CV.
I've seen this too and it is truly depressing. I've seen someone I knows account destroyed for saying the wrong thing.
Anyway, sry if I got defensive in my response before. I completely understand you were talking more generally rather than specifically at me ;-)
Take care Arthur. I'll visit your blog sometime soon and check out that good Sci-Fi you're writing :)
So you're essentially guaranteed a 5-10% ROI on every post you make? Do you not see this as a problem? Is this not virtually risk-free for you?
I understand that curators (and users in general) have mostly disappeared - and that's a problem with incentives, interface usability, marketing (the lack thereof), and the general downward direction of STEEM prices over the past year and a half. But what you're telling me is that any user can sign up, create a post, and then buy their way to 5-10% profits on an exploitation of platform incentives and rewards.
This is precisely why the system is failing us.
I'm not sure that posting content and buying votes for it is "doing business." And I don't think it's you or people like you that are "destroying Steemit." It's the package of protocols that were pushed and implemented in 2017 that are the problem - and the people who created and approved them. The protocols must be changed in order to correct the mistakes and restore balance to the system. That's not an attack on any individual or group of users. It's just the reality that we're in. I think too many people are trying to assign blame to regular users when their behavior today was just a natural and predicted consequence of adopting bad protocols.
For my first year here I was earning more than 0.50c perpost...and I did not risk my own SP (yes, a few times I did lose when buying, so ROI is not guaranteed). My writing has not changed to any great extent, but if I do not buy any votes, I rarely make even 10 to 15cents. I am not willing to spend hours on preparing a post for 10c and since the whales are buying votes, then so will I - until it is stopped...and then I will block ALL payments to me, so that nobody else benefits.
That is my decision, so what happens, I have nothing to worry about - except that it means I will not be able to help a few really needy posters from poor countries. I accept it as a cost of the way steemit has gone....
The idea behind the curve is mostly to bring all profitable voting behavior into the light to be scrutinized by everyone with their free downvotes.
The curve by itself is not expected to bring about honest voting practices alone. I can't see a very strong level of superlinear not favoring bid bots, even if we weren't at all concerned about voting equality, so I'm not sure why it should be considered.
The idea is to have enough free downvotes at any given time to push contentious content at least down to the point where they'll be making more curating honestly instead (buffed to 50%).
Convergent linear is meant to just prevent the ability to hide vote farming in micro spam comments relatively undetected.
I agree with you that 16 Steem is arbitrary and probably too low. Why not 60 Steem? Why not 30 Steem? How was 16 Steem arrived at?
If the price of Steem keeps going down then are we going to re-adjust?
This doesn't really need to adjust to the price of Steem because the idea is to limit the number of content elements which can be profitably rewarded by milkers (to in turn limit the amount of effort required by altruistic volunteer abuse fighters). That's a function of the size of the reward pool which is a set amount of STEEM. The price doesn't change that.
To put rough numbers on this the reward pool is about 50k STEEM per day. If the cutoff is 16 STEEM that means there can't be more than 3000 content items which are milking candidates (and probably less since rewards will be somewhat concentrated, not spread out evenly on 3000 comments). That's a number (or really a range) that is likely feasible for abuse fighters to keep on top of. 300k would not be.
Please define "milkers" because this is a new category. Couldn't any participant be accused of "milking" with such a broad word and unclear definition? I think first people need to define all these phrases and put it in public so it is known what exactly the abuse fighters are fighting against.
Basically people who use the system to generate interest on their stake rather than to reward value contributions. That can take various forms, and most involve some degree of self-voting or vote-selling, but the exact scheme isn't that significant.
What is relevant here is to simply limit the number of content items that can potentially generate a high-efficiency return in this manner. If such returns can be broken up in too many pieces (without losing value to some form of superlinear curve), then downvoting that relies on mostly altruistic volunteer effort will be overwhelmed.
But then what happens to the content itself? I see this as reactionary and a bandaid solution which does not improve content or increase retention. Do you not notice less people are generating content now?
It's because content producers are moving to other competing platforms.
What happens to the content is that hopefully some of it gets rewarded instead of having much of the reward pool milked out by stakeholders paying themselves, effectively draining rewards away from all content.
Whatever else is going on with other platforms is interesting and worth paying attention to, but doesn't really change much about the mechanisms that do or don't work on Steem. We can't simply wish for value adding content to be rewarded, we need a mechanism that actually does that, which is what this is attempting to do.
It isn't guaranteed to work it is the most credible effort to date in my opinion.
Maybe as a first SPS proposal we should seek to hire an economist to fix the Steem economy. It could cost something to hire a full time economist but could be worth it.
To address this specific point, the convergent linear curve has literally nothing to do with bid bots. Its intent is to address profitable low level reward milking using enormous numbers of comments spread widely where they are hard to find. This is much harder to deal with using downvotes, since even with the free downvotes in the proposal, downvoting is still unrewarded so relies on altruism and voluntary effort. Bidbots are pretty much the opposite, as their function is to push posts to the higher end of the payout distribution.
I think $6 (if that is indeed the right number, I've seen conflicting claims) is probably more than enough for this.
well as i was thinking with my primary school math (i ignored it after) acc that does not get to 6.5$ will be:
and well that is a huge amount of accounts, strange but it is.
but we all know that big acc will get to the rescue and vote for all those small acc...
Ha! Citations? Evidence? Public forums?! Polling? Logs? What are those?!
I am not a tech guru to understand all the background - usually I trust your conclusion @ats-david, one thing I want to know more is:
WHY? I do not see any value to this, are you really confident this will help content discovery or encourage anyone to manually search and vote valuable content at all?
I’ve talked about this for about two and a half years, but this is basically why I’m in favor of higher curation rewards:
That excerpt was taken from here:
https://steemit.com/steem/@ats-witness/block-change-you-can-believe-in
I sincerely hope you are right - many of the content creators feel curation is not happening at all - now they might get less they might leave - if the price goes up by 3-4 times as of the change - perfect. I simply have only doubts this incentives to curate "manually" will ever happen. Thanks for replying!!
Better curation, but no one creating content anymore. Good plan.
Why wouldn't anyone create content if rewards were split 50/50?
Because under the new system, it seems that if one person gives you a 1 USD upvote, you will only get 0.27 USD instead of 0.75 USD. That's a big difference.
I don't think your math is correct.
But you're telling me that people will not post because they'll "only" be getting $0.27 (or 27% of the stated payout, according to you) for a post nobody sees instead of nothing at all most everywhere else? I'd be willing to bet against this claim.
I also don't think that you're taking into account that better incentives for stakeholders likely means additional positive price pressure for STEEM, which would make each of those "1 USD upvotes" more than 1 USD.
Well the math seems to be confirmed. Someone replied to my question and it is true :( Do not forget I just gave one example, it might be difficult for some to get "something" because the don't get to the 0.02 minimum needed.
We will have to see if Steem actually goes up in price. They have to change a lot for it to go up again, right now I don't see it.
The HF21 Testnet EIP portion needs some work. In short what exactly do we gain here? Is it going to somehow increase the price of the Steem token? Is it going to bring more activity not merely more new accounts? What is going to be done to reward actual activity?
The reward curve seems not good for rewarding activity or how else do we explain why activity is much lower? What would create more economic activity? SMTs? How does this EIP help?
I think keeping the interest for long term holding is essential. The more power up incentives there are the more the price of Steem can go up. No one has given much thought into the forever falling price of Steem?
Decreasing author's reward.