Your voices have been heard: Steem 0.14.0 will improve voting rewards!
With the implementation of Steem 0.14.0 whales will have a lot of their voting power chopped off, making YOUR votes more relevant.
There have been several complaints about the inequality of the current voting system. Good posts are not receiving rewards even if they get a lot votes. Most Steem Power is concentrated on very few whales and if they miss your post you are probably not going to get much.
However, it seems @dan and @ned have heard your voices and the new 0.14.0 release will greatly improve “normal” users experience:
We are changing the target number of votes per day from 40 to 5 so that more people keep their voting power below 100%. The purpose of this change is to rebalance power toward normal users and away from bots. You can still vote as often as you like, this change merely impacts the speed at which voting power is consumed.
To understand what this means let’s remember how the voting reward system works: there are 27,000 steem distributed daily according to the voting weight received by each post. So by reducing voting power, whale's influence on rewards will greatly diminish.
After the fork, highly voted posts should receive better rewards but extremely high payouts could become rarer, making steemit's rewards more balanced. We may not see a lot of 5k posts anymore but instead we will have lots of $300 posts.
I am personally pleased to see that Steemit Inc is listening to its users and making changes to improve their experience.
This definitely calls for a happy dance!
NOTE: The voting power will be reduced for ALL users, not only whales. However, whale´s impact on the total porcentage of the voting distribution will be less than what it is now. Everytime a whale votes on something is redistributing future payouts, taking a porcentage away from all posters and giving it to the person he voted for, after the fork whales will only be able to do this 4 times with full power (now they can do it 40).
This is a very poorly understood change.
Look at it this way, every user gets so much power flowing into their cup. Under current rules most users cups are full and their power goes to waste.
Power voters waste less power because they keep their cups less than full.
New rules allow normal people to use more of their power by draining their cup faster with each vote. This means they can capture more of their power.
Net effect is the percentage of power used by normal voters increases, while power voters decrease.
Dan you aren't thinking like a user. Please for the love of god get some usability experts to help you out. You need to start taking into account optics and casual users. Do you not want this platform to be adopted by the masses? Maybe I'm confused about your goal.
This is not the right approach to be taking if you want the platform to grow and be adopted by more casual users.
The optics of a 5 vote limit is problematic. Spare us the math and fancy new tools that we'll have to use to do something so simple as upvote and figure out a way that we can upvote by clicking on what we like without worrying about how much that vote is worth and how many other votes I plan to do etc.
There is no need to make something simple and intuitive into something complex and burdensome.
At the very least start with 10 or 20 votes and show us a positive effect.
That is exactly what Steemit Inc needs! UX advice. While steemit is wonderful, it is currently "by engineers for engineers", thus hampering mainstream adoption.
What they need is to profile several users, only one of them being tech savvy crypto veteran.
If the idea is to teach the masses about crypto world it is best to simplify, not make things more complicated.
Steemit is much more user friendly then BitShares, but it is not user friendly enough! While my experience in UX design isn't all that great (I worked in it for maybe 8 months), I've read a lot on usability before that gig, and after. There clearly IS a problem.
In scenarios like this it is useful for powers that be play the "Prince and Pauper" game. Try starting as a minnow, and get an accout at least to what is it where you get the slider 300 SP? At least a couple of days of only using the minnow account would be very insightful!
Yeah, I would love for a few founding whales to do an undercover boss like research experiment.
Thanks for your comment, I was having a VERY hard time explaining it!
I think this summarizes it: "Net effect is the percentage of power used by normal voters increases, while power voters decrease."
Where do you get the idea that your power is going up? No one's power is changing. The only thing that is changing is the number of votes we all have at FULL power. This is not a way to spread the wealth, since you, yourself, will only be able to vote for 5 posts at full power on any given day.
Lets say you made a post that was voted by 100 minnows and dolphins but no whales voted for you.... all whales voted 40 times on different posts, your rewards will be diminished by the amount of posts whales decided to vote instead of yours.... with the new system whales can vote for less posts with full power so if you have a highly voted post you should be safe from this dilution.
I apologize because in the post I clearly did not express my point clearly
Thats great, thanks for the information @dantheman!
So for somebody who uses the site more actively than the average user, will this drain their voting power even more? Considering accounts that are under (30k sp?) can't even scale their votes, this seems like it will kill the incentive for minnows to keep being active and voting away on comments and posts. I have already been having my voting power very low for most of my time here, for me this seems like it tells me to not vote as often as I've done before.
Or am I totally missing the point of the change somehow?
I think they've changed things so accounts with 300 SP can now scale their votes.
Yeah I noticed it after. :)
Thanks for the great explanation :)
I'm not clear on how this hurts whales?
It will affect every user in the same way, but now whales can only vote 4 times with full power.
Everytime a whale votes for a post is taking rewards from another post... it is all proportional and there is only 27k steem to be distributed daily.
Each vote will be 8 times as powerful (all else being equal). I suspect whales (and I) will be using fractional votes more often.
Yes, all users are affected the same way but there are less whales than there are minnows and dolphins so their impact on the total reward porcentage should be less.
Right now a whale can vote on 50 posts and take away rewards from the rest right?... in the future that whale will only be able to vote with full power 4 times, thus taking away less rewards from other posts.
When you and me vote, we dont make as much of an impact on the platform so even tho all users will be affected equally, the platform should have a better distribution.
50 votes at 12.5% power on the new system will be the same as 50 votes at 100% on the old system, it won't be as different as you think. The real difference is that a default minnow vote will be 8 times as powerful (but of course they will have less of them).
I still don't get it ... my % compared with the whales % remains the same ... I will upvote more than 4-5 times as well ... they lose, sure, but so do I ...
right, so basically ... as long the minnows vote only 4-5 times ... that's how they get an advantage? that doesn't make any sense to me ...
There is no actual advantage, but it will "feel" better to minnows. Right now, when a minnow votes, usually it seems to have no effect on the post, so they feel helpless.
In the new system, a minnow vote will be more likely to boost up the post by a penny or two because the vote will be 8 times as powerful. There is a price for this though, and that it will burn out their voting power 8 times as fast.
wow ... they just launched something new again ... we can measure our votes now
THAT's a good thing!
but ... only as long they vote only 5 times, right?
and is there a difference between voting for actual pages or just a comment? or is that all the same?
(I got 2.5k sp)
There are houndreds of minnows signing up to the platform everyday, as whales are a very selected few... so minnows votes will have more and more impact, especially as the platform grows.
sure, but at the same time ... because right now, it's all so skewed ... the platform is not growing, but shrinking ...
Exactly, minnows and dolphin`s votes will have more of an impact and there are always new minnows joining the platform but very few whales.
Will the value of an average person's first 5 votes increase? If it does, then 100 average people voting on a great post might generate e.g. $100 for that post, without any whale votes. That's how I'm hoping this change will work.
this entire post is predicated on the notin that whales are maxing out their votes right now, which for the most part they are not.
If you look, i suspect that you will find that around 5 is the typical number of full power (or full power equivalent) votes that the whales cast right now.
What this change will do:
It will decrease the number of full power votes you can cast by 87%
What this change will not do:
It will not make your vote more valuable, because in order to do so, it would have to decrease whale voting. But its not decreasing whale voting because whales are already not capping out their voting.
Yes I think I expressed my point very poorly, but look at it this way:
Whale`s votes are the ones that really make a difference on total daily distribution, with the cap this influence will be reduced and you won´t be so dependant on whales votes to make money... I would like to see how this plays out tho.
yes, but whales aren'tcurrently using 40 votes anyway. This will not decrease the number of whale votes. Therefore, it won't increase the power of non whale votes. The only thing it will do is make sure non-whales can cast their vote, which will be worth the same or nearly the same as it was, 5 times instead of 44.
This change is about further centralization, and promising users that their votes will be worth more or their posts will get paid more because of it is an sickening falsehood.
not sure how that will improve anything
we will now have even less voting power
they should have done the opposite
I would rather see more €300 posts and see less €K posts, Sharing the wealth is a good move. Just hope it works
I agree.
Their reduced voting power is a technicality. Its still proportionally greater than everyone elses. This fixes nothing and is just another "solution" to a broken system. What it does do is reduce currency by curation which is awfully convenient cosidering the plummeting value of Steemit currency. People are figuring out that the last effort to do this known as "Promoted Content" is a gimmick so their off to the next. These developers are really shitty central bankers. I pointed this out in my last post but of course the whales didnt upvote it so no one knows. So now with this system, there is even less incentive for anyone to join. Make voting power equal devs! I dare you! The site is going down and you know it.
Heh, it would be cool if at least once a month on a random days the voice powers were normalized towards some ammount. And then look at the results. If they are wary of sybil attack, make those days award only SP.
For someone capable and moving toward the $5k payouts, this sucks. Your voting power will be LESS than it is now. Not sure what you find to celebrate in this. The people capable of handing out $300 posts will still be above the dolphin line, only their ability to upvote posts at full capacity will be cut to 1/8 of what it was.
Actually, this does NOT decrease the voting power of whales . . . . Whales can partial vote. Any whale who opts to vote at 12% still gets 40 votes a day. Why didn't they do something more reasonable like cap the maximum vote weight? That would have been 'fairer' to the average person.
Whales will be able to vote 1,000 times if they want... what the new protocol establishes is that if they vote more than 4 times their voting power will reduce.
If they decide to always vote with 12% that is also goosd for distribution.
Nice that is great news since my posts rarely make over $1 anyways. This makes my earlier post invalid then that whales are only upvoting their own work!
No it doesnt. Your instincts were correct.
Nice one. Something had to change, that's for sure. I almost feel sorry for the whales who'll loose out... No, I don't actually. Too many people miss out on rewards as it is. Hopefully this will lead to people reading/voting on more diverse articles too.
Right @azurejasper, this will help authors in staying the platform and write good quality contents.