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RE: Steemit Update: HF21 Testnet, SPS, EIP, Rewards API, SMTs!
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.