Absolute vs Relative Steemit Earnings
Many Dolphins and Whales think in Relative Post Earnings
What this means is that many smaller accounts mainly will look at the pure $ amount of their post earnings regardless the size of their own upvote, while the bigger accounts will mainly look at the $ amount of their post earnings in relation to how much their own upvote is worth. This way of thinking will often leave both usually a bit unsatisfied.
Minnows: To low SP accounts it can currently be very frustrating and discouraging to put a lot of time and effort into making posts only to see rather small 0.01$-0.50$ post payout even after having build a following.
Dolphins & Whales: To higher SP accounts it can currently be frustrating and discouraging to put a lot of time and effort into making posts only to see them earn ~ 5$-300$ while they would earn 10$-600$ when they would just make a bunch of low quality shitposts and do 100% self voting.
Where Did It Go Wrong ? (My Theory)
Ever since the Steem Backed Dollars (SBD) went up in price early december, the platform itself increasingly encouraged very selfish sellout behavior. Many Whales used to act as curators using big part of their power to support mostly the Dolphins on the platform, while the Dolphins are mostly content creators who used some of their power to support and help minnows to grow. Because curation only earns Steem Power and no SBD, this happened...
Whales saw the gap between properly curating content and selling all their upvotes grow exponentially. This almost forced them to turn into upvote bid bots which is very similar to 100%+ socially accepted self-upvoting . (it's by far the most profitable and time saving thing to do for them short term.)
Dolphins got less regular whale votes which almost forced them to sell their upvotes to buy the upvotes from the whale bid bots they used to get for free, leaving them with far less daily voting power to support Minnows.
Minnows (who are not internet famous) have a very hard time to get something going on Steemit because the amount of "Free Upvotes" (upvotes where noting is directly or indirectly asked in return) highly decreased after the curation system got broken because of the SBD situation. As a result even more new members quickly give up on the platform.
Minnows Should think more in Relative Post Earnings
Dolphins and Whales Should think more in Absolute Post Earnings
Minnows often make a lot more money on Steemit compared to Whales when purely looking at the relative earnings and it can be a far more rewarding way for them to look at their earnings in relation to your Steem Power instead of just looking at the absolute amounts.
Dolphins & Whales should think more absolute and step away from the mindset to maximise short term earnings and look at the bigger picture instead. Using at least a part of their power to help this platform grow should lead to an increase in the STEEM price over time and leave them with smaller piece of a much bigger pie.
Where do you agree/disagree
What would you change to make things better
...
I'm new here, so I don't know what happened before the January this year, but your SBD price theory sounds plausible.
One thing I'm struggling with is the price of upvoting. As a minnow with small SP you're limited to ten or so votes a day. You want to upvote posts and comments but you have to stop yourself in order to preserve your voting power. An upvote is expensive for the small guys here.
Since you've delegated SP to me I feel the need to spread it around, to upvote as much as possible the posts in our community. I'm doing that, but I'm also participating in different contests and that takes some upvoting. Sometimes, I'll skip participating in the contests and upvote my fellow minnows, sometimes I'll do that and enter some contests, too. As the result of that, my voting power is screwed. I don't have enough of it to do the selfish thing, upvote the members of our community, and still have the voting power above 70%. I have to skip a few days engaging with folks on steemit in order to restore it.
I'm not complaining here, just pointing out one problem that minnows have. I believe that this is one of the major factors in discouraging the engagement with the community for many. If your upvote is expensive for you, why bother upvoting anything but that what you have to. On a personal level, powering up solves my problem, but we can't expect everybody to do the same. My belief is that the majority of people want to participate more, but are handicapped in their ability to do it.
I've been thinking about writing an upvoter that will give the ability to the minnows to do the same thing as the big guys: upvote with an arbitrary vote weight. I'm not familiar with the steem API, but I think it is doable. The thing that's stopping me from doing it is that writing such a program would be a dickish move. What's the point of upvoting with such a small percentage of already almost worthless vote?
Anyhow, I've got carried away...
You might want to test out busy.org, they allow to set your standard voting power lower without needing 500SP, this will decrease the upvote whorth though and get it below 0.01$ again though. The forced 100% upvotes and being limited to ~10 upvotes each day is mainly a problem for accounts with 300-499SP. It's also one of the reason I really dislike contest that require 2 or more votes to enter (also having to upvote comments, unless the payout is worth it)
Best things when having low SP is probably to just vote much more selectively and choose the contest to enter. You are probably referring to the stimp1024 contests. I've used to enter them myself aswel, they have become a very thin line. They used to be +EV where you expect to get more back for your upvote (that's what it pretty much comes down to, upvote to get something bigger back). It's a very clever concept, make 10 posts each day that all get all upvoted 100% by his 2nd account and ~110 upvotes on top from mostly empty accounts which highly decrease the payouts.
With a lower SP amount you will always just have to be more selective with the upvotes, there is like you say no point to make them even more small by using a slider.
You're right, the stimp1024's contest is the main culprit :-)
Just looked at my wallet:
The rest are the peanuts payments. The two I've listed have one thing in common: both are daily football acca. From now on, I'll enter just those. I guess, the FOMO have kept me upvoting all his posts :-)
I share your opinion, partly I thought something like this happened, but I had never thought about it in this precise way.
It sure is an interesting topic to think about. I plan on breaking down all kinds of upvotes on this platform soon.
How can I contact you to speak from time to time? You are the kind of person I would talk to.
Thanks, I'm not that active when it comes down to online chat but you can always send me a public or private message on Steemit (add # before the message with a space before the text to make it private, send "text" = public | send "# text" =private, without the quotes) if there is something specific you want to talk about.
Great analysis, Costanza. I completely agree that the incentive for whales to sell their votes is a huge issue that Steem needs to find a solution for. With PredictEV, we're building on top of the foundation that Steem laid, but the objective elements we incorporate into our reward algorithm help to at least partly address the upvote-for-hire problem. In essence, if you sell your vote to the highest bidder, you'll potentially be harming your earning capacity.
I sent you a link to our whitepaper previously, but I'm including another link here in case any of your followers want to check out what we're building:
https://predictev.com/#whitepaper
I've read your whitepaper today. will this all be build on SMT's ?
I don't have much knowledge on the entire technical side, but I do see prediction as they are done now all move to a blockchain. An adjusted steem model can really be suited for this market.
No, we’re launching our own chain with our own token. Doing so gives us more flexibility. We’ve discussed porting the network to an EOS chain eventually, but we’re planning to launch before the EOS codebase will be completed.
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Thanks failypick !
good exposure of facts. Congrats !
Wow, you greatly explained the current situation on the Steemit and in my opinion minnows like me are totally looking towards the short term earnings and the giants or whales thinking of long term goal because they are investing in Steem Power and they want to help other minnows and in turn self voting decreased because currently prices are also reflecting on downtrend phase and one's prices will move towards moon then in turn whales can enjoy huge profits and in this phase Bidding Bots are are playing an great roles or i can say that Bidding Bots got the opportunity to build their reputations on Steem Market. Thanks for sharing and wishing you an great day. Stay blessed. 🙂
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