I guess that I’m not the only one that feels like the post HF19 era is not really helping Steem. Since I care about the site I wanted to engage with witnesses, to get to know whether they are discussing the topic and what are their thought processes. Since lot of people feel the same, I think that this could be perfect opportunity for some of you to present yourself and gain some new witness votes. Also the situation could be clarified for those like me that want to know some of the stuff “behind the scenes” but have not yet found access to it. We (the users) would also have the chance to discuss such a topic with those we vote for.

I understand that there were some good changes. It’s not like I oppose the whole HF. I just feel that it’s not time to rest on one’s laurels. We have to be ever-vigilant in order to have a permanently growing platform.

Source

---

Topics that I want to tackle

1. Prize pool drainage (Self-vote cap)
2. Power of vote 4x stronger and its outcomes
3. Horrendous portion of daily generated Steem concentrated on few accounts causing inability to appeal to masses
4. Weekly/Monthly pay out cap

First I want to tackle the problem of depleting reward pool and if there can be something done, or whether we will soon be on week-to-week supply basis. I will present possible partial solution to that problem.

Then will come thoughts on 4x power boost.

Third problem will be an inability to attract sufficient amount of people to near the Steem’s potential and what I think is the real problem.

Forth part will be another solution, this time to both the tackled problems – the weekly pay out cap.

Keep in mind that I don’t understand the code perfectly. I did not anticipate the negative outcomes of HF 19 (I actually fully supported it) and it’s possible that some side effects of proposed solutions are evading my sight. I mainly want to stir up a discussion where Witnesses would also engage. 

---

Prize pool drainage

Basic info + data

I think it’s important to clarify how this all works, so everyone can create his opinion based on some facts.

• Current yearly supply of Steem is 251,530,472.283
• Every 250,000th block the an inflation rate decreases by 0.01%
• At 7,000,000th block it was 9.5%
• Current amount of blocks is 13703390
• Current inflation rate is then 9.231
• Every day a 251,530,472 * 0.0923 / 365 = 63,606
• Only 75% of that is claimable by authors and curators, therefore 63,606 * 0.75 = 47,704
• Every day there is new 47,704 Steem to claim

Pre HF 19 situation

There were 2 major factors why reward pool was growing over time, instead of depleting.

• No-whale-voting experiment
• Non-linear voting curve

The only way how to get to know the old reward pool known to me is – When the HF19 hit, my vote was worth 0.35. Now it is 0.7. Now I also have double the amount of SP than I had back then. If I had the power I have now my post HF19 power would be 0.70. So now its 10x less powerful, which means that the reward pool now is 10x smaller. The reward pool now is 756,575 Steem and is further depleting every minute. That means that the reward pool had been around 7,565,750 Steem.

Not only didn’t the wealthiest of us vote with more than 1%, also to unlock one’s voting potential, one had to team up with bunch of other voters to actually have an impact. Truth is that even with the experiment most users felt like they had no influence whatsoever. 

Post HF 19 situation

Even though to me it looks like the no-whale-voting experiment was a great success, we can’t possibly want from whales not to vote ever again. At the same time I believe that linear voting is fairer than its predecessor, because now one can vote with the actual power one has. With the situation as it is now though I’m inclined to think, that the reward pool will be depleting more and more until we reach that point when we are basically on day-to-day basis of Steem in reward pool (or week-to-week I’m not entirely sure how it works).  To provide a counterargument I’m going to share with you @timcliff “Reactions to HF19”. He claims that the Reward pool recalibration is nearing its equilibrium. I’m not convinced though, because first visible proof to me has yet to cross my eyes. Unfortunately I did not understand the steemdb data he has provided.  Anyway read the post if you want to have more information inputs. 

Self-vote cap

We have finally reached part where I will propose one of the possible partial solutions. I think we will all agree on the fact, that every Blockchain is “ruled” by the algorithm. What is not forbidden is allowed. All the investors are expected to act in the platforms best interest. The strength of the algorithm, the “output of work” that it provides, reliability and so on are all factors that ultimately influence the value of the token.

The problem is that people are selfish and most of them will prefer the short-term profit and the long-term credibility of the platform will come later. This is not global rule, but this pattern (short-term more than long-term) is very visible among a lot of wealthy users on this platform. I do not want to fight against people that are legally using their investment – they self-vote a lot. Not only that when person is selfish enough to use most of his power on himself, when he will be fought and won’t gain anything, he will have all the power now to fight those that flagged him first. This is undesirable.

Point is that those actions ultimately hurt the platform. This is in no way in accordance with the whitelist. Users can of course defend the interests of the platform, but the platform should defend itself too. I would love to defend the platform you know, but my account would be demolished if I decided to cast a flag in a way where I think someone’s power is being abused. And you know what? I don’t want to sacrifice myself, and almost no one would.

Basically all my propositions will be caps, for I think it is the best solution I have heard so far. Problem is that not only comments are being self-voted, but I have come across several wealthier accounts that spam posts too (single photo in a post, no text, photos of something like monkey bars and 10 posts per day where every single post has received a self-up vote worth 20 dollars). Therefore setting a cap only on comment votes would be useless, because the spam would just transits into posts. I understand that self-voting is an important part of Steemit and I don’t want to get rid of it completely. Raising visibility for your posts/comments can come in handy, I just think that there has to be a set limit. Limited has to be the number of self-votes because setting a % cap would just mean that the person would need to spam more to use his capacity. The number also has to be less than 10 (obviously). This is first topic that I want to be discussed. 

---

Power of vote 4x stronger and its outcomes

The idea of having 4x stronger vote is a good one. Almost no one has time and more importantly energy to read over 40 posts daily and having a possibility to utilize ones power in just 10 votes is great. Also possibility to greatly reward those who you think is deserving of it is awesome. In general I’m a fan of this change, but unfortunately it has brought many side effects with it too.

There were times when posts had much more votes than views. It was partly due to trails, but significant factor was also the fact, that since people didn’t have time to read 40 posts, they just voted blindly. Sometimes people (like me) didn’t just want to vote blindly and at least quickly went through the text. If it caught their attention, they would leave a comment too, thus increasing the traffic on the post. I was sad back then. I’m though even sadder now, because suddenly posts have much more views and comments spammy comments than the actual traffic and votes. The reason I think is that people do not have sliders. To gain a value on a post it’s necessary to receive votes from dolphins, ideally whale(s). Nothing can change that. At least some value though can be generated even by the minnows. The problem is though that minnows very rarely unite to vote for the same posts in order to generate some value – because they can only vote on 10 or so. If we had slider accessible much earlier, they could vote for more posts, not giving any miraculous value to the post, but at least we would have less of those posts that are informative, have 80+views, but 10 up votes. Do you think that the slider could help this matter, therefore motivate more users, because they would be receiving at least a bit more up votes? Or would it remain the same because most of the users wouldn’t want to spend extra time and would just use the full powered votes? 

---

Horrendous portion of daily generated Steem concentrated on few accounts causing inability to appeal to masses

I want to state in the beginning that this is only my opinion. It is not an offensive act, nor it is an opinion born from greed and envy.

Since the HF I’ve been spotting accounts that have been generating ridiculous amount of Steem. What I think is, that when a post hits 500 dollar mark, it should have some gigantic value in it. Those posts are the first thing a new incomer will spot. They are basically the main source to look at when potential user is deciding whether he should join the platform or not.

I’m not going to mention the users that frequently pop up in the trending page, but rather summarize them. Most of the users there either post once in a while – max 3 posts per week – to maximize information’s and not to milk away the reward pool, because they know they will receive those up votes. Then there are those that post a lot – 1-2 times per day – but are actually giving a lot back in form of holding contests, supporting other users, finding people that would develop something for the page, while promising them a reward. Then there are those that post a lot too, but they are not giving much to the community, they are not even powering up the Steem to increase its value, but rather increase only their crypto portfolio. Some of them were also milking the page so much that after the HF up until now they have been taking more than 10% of the daily generated Steem. That’s just straight ridiculous. Now when the reward pool is already depleted, it’s much less, but I still have the feeling that some of those users are only milking the platform.

The problem with the 4x stronger vote is that irresponsible whales now have even bigger impact on the platform’s appearance. @timcliff admits that the HF has brought negatives, which are strictly associated to “the bad behaviour of users”. Now let me tell you a secret. People will always act only in their best interests if there is nothing to set the rules for them. This “bad behaviour” as @timcliff implies will NEVER improve just from incentivizing the “correct behaviour”. There is no “bad” and “correct” behaviour. What is happening now is bad for the platform, but for the users it’s good because they are the ones who are earning. Who cares whether the prize drops in long-term, when they cash out the majority now and are basically like “fuck off platform and thanks for several vacations where I can live like king covered”. This will always be present, if the algorithm allows that. That brings me to another partial solution… 

---

Weekly/Monthly pay out cap

Here we are almost at the end of the article. As I said, “bad” behaviour will not weed itself out, when those that behave “badly” are also the wealthy ones. Algorithm has to set rules in order to support “good” behaviour that will help it in the long-run, and not the selfish people in the short run. The idea that I liked the most is a reward cap. Basically it would work in a way, when all your posts would decline rewards on upcoming post immediately after crossing the threshold. This would force people to work harder on their post and have less of them of higher quality, while still having option to go for a BOOM article that would earn thousands. If that happened, one could either keep posting for no reward, or he could work on their next posts and publish them when the cap is refreshed. I think that this would lead to increase of the quality of the posts of those regularly hitting trending page, therefore increase of the appearance of the whole platform. The only ones that would suffer from this would be those that post a lot, earn a lot and give a lot back in the process. What do you think about this guys? I would be interested in hearing some numbers from witnesses that would theoretically support this idea.

---

EDIT: First witness to respond was @aggroed. He has already proposed his ideas in previous posts which I missed. I’m going to share them here. I have removed some the points which were irrelevant, or already solved.

1. Go the opposite direction with vote count. Give people more votes (80-100) so it's hard to keep only supporting the top 20 authors every day and you have to dig for more people. Support steemit.com based curation strategies that are fast to implement for new users so they can curate too (ie 1 click implementation of following the Minnow Support Project's curation trail). It ends up looking like a curation mutual fund :)
2. Make vote power loss dependent on the relationship of SP of the voter to the author. If they have the same SP it costs normal. If you're voting on a minnow with much less SP it should cost a whale much less of their voting pool to upvote their content. That changes the incentive to upvote minnows.
3. Double flagging efforts until its resolved.

My opinion:

1. Going the opposite way is a fun idea. It would basically force people into following curation trails, or up vote blindly even more, because going through that amount of posts is totally not in human’s capabilities. Bot voting is still very present so arguing that this change would support them is irrelevant imo. This change would remove the potential go “all in” on few posts and get ridiculous curation reward for the wealthy ones. People either wouldn’t use their power, they would join trails, or they would vote blindly. Be it any give result, minnows would prosper.
2. Don’t you feel that this change could ultimately drain the reward pool the most? If whales suddenly started voting for minnows and they would lose almost any power wouldn’t it backfire?
3. As I said, flagging selfish person will only ensure swift death for people of my power. Whales, that don’t post much, could potentially afford that. As off yet I haven’t seen any real action though.

Overall I have to admit that @aggroed predicted the outcome pretty well. A lot of people consider this HF a success and going in like 180 degree way may be a bit to much to push trough. I encourage everyone to say what they think about those propositions and ideally compare them to mine. Also @aggroed could further elaborate on my objections. Anyway you guys should vote for this pal. Hes currently putting out the hardest work for all of us lowly minnows. And that in my eyes definitely deserves supporting!

---

I will be so rude to mention all the witnesses that I’m currently voting for, because I would really like to know their opinion. Feel free to share it with any other witness, or user, that would be willing to engage in discussion, thus promoting his ideas to the rest of us. @good-karma, @roelandp, @jesta, @pharesim, @ausbitbank, @aggroed, @agoric.systems, @felixxx. Also I would love @timcliff to join us too (I’ve just recently got to know about you and I’m currently considering my 9th witness vote). Maybe this all is naïve futile try, but at least a though-out and executed try:).

Also I’m interested in hearing opinions from all of you. While it’s important to know the opinions of our witnesses, it’s also important that all of you, that want to add something about any given topic, or about all of them, express yourselves. That’s it I guess! See you in the discussion below.  

---