We are actively looking for ways to reduce whale influence and bad behavior. So far the best solution we have identified is to remove curation rewards all together. The existence of curation rewards does the following for whales:
- encourages reckless voting because the rate of return on voting on random comments is very high for the whale. Effectively, the whale spends $100 of community money and pockets $25. The $75 cost is socialized, but the $25 is privatized.
- the probability of being early on popular "good" content and getting an even higher rate of return is not higher than the "sure thing" of any random thing a whale could vote on.
- any attempt to impose per-account caps will result in sybil attacks
- good whales must vote as prolifically as evil whales or the evil whales will overcome them.
- any attempt to implement stake delegation for voting purposes is disincentivized by the curation reward algorithm unless curation rewards propagate back. This backward propagation is both difficult to implement and ultimately irrelevant considering points 2.
In other words, the curation reward system may be fundamentally broken and should be discarded. Once the curation rewards are discarded, then whales face no opportunity cost by not voting.
Why should I hold Steem power if you are going to nerf it?
Because profit?
Steem Power can affect the value of the awards for your post each vote
@dantheman, have you considered the idea of lending SP from the whales to the dolphins?
A whale could lend some of his SP (and take it back any time he wants) to a high-reputation dolphin and let her do some of the curation on his behalf. The curation rewards could be then split equally between the dolphin and the whale.
Dan actually did a post on this yesterday:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@dantheman/follow-up-to-people-rank-algorithm-for-better-curation-rewards
That was my understanding of this post he wrote the other day
Creation rewards need to be higher for the lower steam power levels and lower for the higher steam power levels - a gradually decreasing scale from the highest SP or vests on the network to the lowest.
Right now I there is not enough incentive to actively curate content.
I think even the power at which whales can boost posts should be lowered slightly and minnows increased slightly.
Interesting...
This won't work, because whales will create a lot of accounts.
This will not work. I'm approached (mostly by unsolicited chat PMs) nearly every day by authors who want to pay me for my votes.
In fact, to some extent, objective evidence of this can be seen clearly on the blockchain by looking at any whale's wallet. Unsolicited payments attempting to buy votes are received constantly. Often these are 0.001 but sometimes they are higher. If higher payments are more effective then we will see more higher payments. These are unsolicited payments, but even without any explicit agreement, those sending the payments can continue sending them to the whales who comply.
Voting power has a value and a market will form. At the high end the amounts at stake are high enough that transactional barriers to such a market become insignificant.
Removing curation rewards has more effect on the middle and lower end where it reduces engagement and any opportunity for voters to be compensated for their contribution (since transaction barriers impede a side-payment market) than at the high end where money and power will always find their equilibrium regardless of the blockchain rules.
I think you are really on to something here. If curation rewards are removed, it removes the incentive to vote on content that other people find valuable. Voting will become little more than a way of distributing funds to authors. It would open the floodgates for abuse and bribery.
If you're worried about whales not voting in a way that benefits the platform, why would you eliminate one of the primary mechanisms for ensuring that they do so?
Do the curation rewards include the value of the voter's own upvote? If it does, that should be changed before ever considering the removal of curation rewards entirely. Average users appreciate curation rewards, and taking them away removes an incentive to engage with the platform. But typical users don't really benefit much from the 25% of their own vote, which is at best a penny or two.
This can't really be done without incentivizing SP splitting and other manipulative games. If my vote doesn't benefit from the effect of my vote, then I will vote first with a small account, then with the larger one. The smaller account would benefit from the effect of the larger account instead of the (now-disallowed) larger account benefiting from itself.
It helps to think of a large account as being a whole collection of imaginary small accounts (say 1 SP each) that happen to be working together. Changes that try to put caps or limits on the ability of one account to fully benefit from its SP will encourage people to make these into actual small accounts.
Even coalescing all votes from a single IP into one pool wouldn't prevent this exploit; proxy services are common enough.
yeah, whole can of worms trying to track whos got what sockpuppets.
Oh man.... hopefully you can find a better solution. Curation was a big selling point for me joining as I'm sure many others as well...
Honest question:
If we get rid off curation rewards what would be the incentive to buy steem?
my guess is that you can still earn by posting and commenting. And that your weight in Steem Power would still proportionally move posts and comments higher. Am I wrong? Not sure but I hope that this is the case!
I wonder about that, too. For me this was a crucial element of the platform logic. If someone invests time in careful and responsible content curation then this should be incentivized. At least in a system in which posters get rewarded by exactly such curation efforts.
Speculative reasons: the guess that some may have made by now that the value of Steem coins/power/mist whatever the unit is called might grow just like Bitcoin and that investing a grand into Steem now regardless of any curation or posting rewards might return a nice 10 grand or another very profitable number. I think whether or not curation rewards become discarded, and whether or not interest even becomes discarded the mere fact that 10 Steem coins may become worth 10 BTC sometime in the future is a very integral part of providing incentive to ensure the Steem community grows healthy
If curation rewards are removed, surely large holders still have content visibility control as an incentive. Maybe this isn't such a bad thing and can be considered more of a balancing act. As dan said, the curation system may be fundamentally broken when large holders can game the system not for the benefit of the system but for private gain.
As for answers to your question, I think the incentive to buy steem still remains, except just one fractional aspect of the incentive would be gone. People will still buy it for the ability to make steem denominated interest at a rate higher than else where, they will also retain the content visibility voting power, whether or not this is important to them i don't know. And of course, the speculators will continue to speculate.
I am but a minnow who can't afford to buy steem. I am not incentivised to curate for profit because as a minnow there is barely a profit. And that's how it should be for a minnow.
But for those who have steem, such as the dolphins, the end of curation rewards I believe would be the end of steemit. And without the dolphins steemit isn't very promising for the minnows either.
There has to be another solution and thank you @dantheman for putting the issues here for everybody to brainstorm on.
There may be holes in my suggestion as I know that @steemit holds the majority stake of steemit.
But I'll throw it here just in case you haven't thought of it yet.
First of all I think the proposal you made in your last post about proxy vests for friends is going to massively improve the platform building lots of dolphins who can help with future bad behaviour.
Currently the more SP you have the more you accumulate from curating content. You say that per account caps will result in sybil attacks and since I'm not very techy maybe my suggestion doesn't get passed that either.
What if curators with higher SP could get higher curation rewards only up to a point? Such as a 3% stake of all steem or even 1% once this is further distributed
Would this prevent a 'whale-gone-rogue' from overcoming others as to remain vote-active on the platform they would have to remain below whatever SP that % is at at any given time?
@dantheman give half of the curation voting power and rewards to the 99%. Also give 20% of the new steem created each day to the newbies that are actively using steemit. The more active they are the more they get paid. We also need a direct bank link or a very least a paypal connection. So the masses of none crypto users can get in. The social media Butterflies