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RE: Proposing Hardfork 0.20.0 “Velocity”
It's a really bad idea to allow more people onto the platform when the protocol is basically still in alpha stage (STEEM is the first experiment of it's kind).
There are huge problems with the curation incentive (self-voting is more profitable) and curation quality that need to be resolved first. From my experience not even 10% of the content is curated anywhere close to fair.
I could not agree more! The Steemit white paper says "...algorithms must be designed in such a manner that they are resistant to intentional manipulation for profit." Unfortunately, financial manipulation seems to be a feature of SP weighting of VP, which decreasing the number of votes necessary to fully extract the maximum of rewards from the pool of new Steem created each day has made worse.
VP decay has become a bigger disincentive to curate than even exponential weighting of votes by SP.
It has decreased my ability to curate dramatically, and I am very discouraged by it.
Furthermore, bots curating debases the importance of Steemit as a platform for human content creators. AI can have my job (srsly! please...) but if Steemit isn't going to defend human sovereignty against bots, then let me be the first to welcome our robot overlords.
This chart exemplifies the problems with curation:
It dates to just prior to HF19 and shows that almost all author rewards were captured by a handful of accounts. @aggroed (from whom I got the chart) provided figures: 99% of author rewards were being captured by 1% of accounts. He also estimated that HF19 would improve things to where only 93% of rewards would be captured by about 7% of accounts - an over 500% improvement, but still far short of the 90% to ~33% of accounts envisioned in the white paper.
I suspect @aggroed didn't reckon on the explosion of self voting that the 400% increase in VP decay HF19 brought.
This problem should be addressed before a massive influx of new users is disillusioned by the obvious financial manipulation. Steemit, like people, only gets one chance to make a first impression, and once those users reject Steemit, they'll be unlikely to come back later, even if the problems are fixed and they hear about it.
"Any widespread abuse of the scoring system could cause community members to lose faith in the perceived fairness of the economic system.", from the white paper. Fairness is really important to people, and even other species. It's even more important than money.
Well said :)