The flaw of the current voting system AND AN ACTUAL SOLUTION !
I really hope this idea will find its way in front of the smart people here ! I've spent a few days with this flaw in mind thinking about a way to solve it and I'm happy with my solution !
When you allow people to win money by doing something, they will quickly figure out to the better way to do it. They optimise their time and effort. It's not a bad behaviour, it's humankind nature. Don't judge, you do the same !
The problem !
The current problem is that newbie may post very good content, they have very few chance to be noticed. On the other hand, anyone with 200 followers, including a couple of whales, will be voted systematically. Even if they post a short, useless, 10 minutes written blog, everybody will vote for them, only because we know they usually get fat rewards. I'm pretty sure a big percentage of people voting the well-rewarded bloggers don't actually read the blog, unless it's something that really interest them. I know, I've just voted a blog on "how to cook eggs" from a blogger that usually get good rewards.
The solution !!!
We just need to add one more algorithm to the beast !
The highest reward you can get right now is finding gems and vote them after 30 minutes of publication. That's very good because it incentivises steemers to actually read the "new publication" section and decide as human (no bots) which content is interesting or which one you want to be noticed. That's very good.
The problem is, it's time-consuming and there is a faster way to earn money. If you consistently vote the well-rewarded bloggers, your average return by vote is very decent. You don't have to spend much time and it's simple ( we love simple ). That's the current flaw of the system.
Based on the same time investment, that (machiavellian) voting behaviour shouldn't give higher returns than voting the hidden gems.
The other part of the problem is that we'll soon see the top bloggers posting like crazy, every king of low-quality content and get every time more rewards. In the current system, there is nothing to stop it. We may soon have 20 top bloggers systematically voted by everyone.
My solution is to add a rule in Steem.
This rule would tend to decrease gradually the potential reward on your blogs as your reputation increase.
Yes, that sounds completely illogical !
Well, it's not. Think about it, the more reputation you have, the more followers you have. The more followers, the more money you get on your blogs. The more money, reputation and followers, the more people start voting you without even reading your content.
What happens if you decrease the reward as reputation increase ? People will know they can earn something by voting systematically good bloggers, certainly a good average curation reward BUT not as much if they invest a few minutes reading the "new section" and find any newbie posting something better (This is actually what should happen).
The effect of this rule will make it easier for newbie bloggers with good content to start to cumulate reputation and some funds.
As they move up to the well-rewarded blogger's population, they will experiment more and more difficulties to increase their rewards because competition will harden ! When having a high reputation, they will have to produce better content than newbies if they want the votes of each of their followers. Now, their followers are reading their content to decide if they vote for them or if they try to find something better from a newbie ... problem solved !
It shouldn't be an asymptotic curve. If a blogger is really good, he should be able to continue to grow the average vote (or reward) on its blogs. But it certainly can't be every time easier as your reputation grow ! Maybe a logarithmic curve may work. I'm sure the big brains behind Steem would find a perfect mathematic function that deals with it, my mathematic studies are too far in my past !
I would do it with a gradual decrease of the maximum voting power users can allocate to a blog in function of the reputation.
As an example, until the reputation of the blogger is below 50, when you vote him, you do it with your full 5% (if you are at 100% voting power). When the blogger reputation increase, the maximum weight of voting power an user can use to vote him decrease.
Blogger reputation : 51 > vote max 4.9%
Blogger reputation : 52 > vote max 4.8%
Blogger reputation : 53 > vote max 4.7%
Blogger reputation : 54 > vote max 4.6%
(can't be linear)
...
This is the raw idea. Obviously, it needs to be discussed !
A couple of things:
a. no curation rewards for voting on posts above a certain threshold (~$1000)
b. reduce the target level of voting activity (faster steem power decay)
c. implement bots that give extra power to those with good reputation by following their votes.
d. implement bots that grab the most profitable curation rewards from good authors minutes after they post (giving 90% to author) and discouraging others from jumping on the bandwagon simply for rewards.
There are many options out there and we are looking for things that are simple, scalable, and derived from first principles.
how does this solve the problem outlined in this post?
¨The current problem is that newbies may post very good content, they have very few chance to be noticed.¨
to a) if threshold is per post and not per user it doesnt help to solve the outlined problem
to b) vaster decay of voting power also doesnt help that voting is more spread, therefore is contra-productive to solving the above problem (that said out of other reasons im still in favor of it)
c) this also doesnt help newbies
d) also doesnt help newbies
I think a) actually will help the newbies. It goes like this:
Too complex. Why not just remove curation rewards?
I also feel that is the right idea. But then questions is how to encourage curators to work for the best of the platform, since its already hard to curate content. People will always upvote what they like, even if that doesn't bring them money. Just the discovery of new content will be harder, someone has to do that. If steemit would employ curation team to boost quality by giving some power to good posts and no power to bad ones and then present content to public, we would have a delay on new content but would certainly help things out along with the removal of curation rewards. Some may see this as some kind of censorship but curation is essential for this platform.
If you are trying for simple and scalable, why not impose a kind of "luxury tax" of say 15% on the top 15% of posts with a set timeframe, say 24 hrs (noon to noon).
-money set aside in pot
-given to top 15 posts with content deemed worthy (under $100 initial payout)
-voted on immediately after the announcement of the contenders for the payout (vote for 24 hrs)
-voted on by everyone, 1 vote per session (you can only vote for 1 post)
-highest vote getter gets receives the most reward, scaled down from 1 - 10
The best way I see to set up the secondary vote is an additional ONE VOTE button. This button would be used only to select the top 15 posts under $100, with payout percentage TBD (To Be Determined)
This will give you a vehicle to recognize minnows without having to change the voting structure. It also gives minnows a chance to have equal say in determining a payout, with the 1 vote rule to determine the 2nd chance winner. Thanks for your great work on Steemit.
You call that simple?
I am excited to hear about the options you are considering. I really appreciate the thought you are putting into this. I think the voting/curation/reward system is one of the most important issues Steemit has at the moment. We have to get this right! Having the right incentive system could be the difference between Steemit becoming the #1 mainstream content site that everyone uses, or it not. I also find it impressive that you took the time to read and comment on this person's post. The level of caring that you and the other people working on Steemit have for the site gives me a lot of hope for the future of Steemit!
1 ) I didn't know that
2 ) Tell me how in PM please ... (just kidding)
3 - a, b, c ) I see your team was already working on the solution before I even spotted the possible problem. I wouldn't expect less from you guys ;)
3 - d ) Woudn't it reward massively bloggers that already have good reputation ? If I had a bot following me and voting up after a minute anything I post, I would certainly post lots of low quality blogs every day.
I fear that bloggers that usually make a few hundreds of $ on their post continues to earn the same amounts (or even more) independently of the quality of their content. Only because bots and people expects them to continue earning this much.
b. It would encourage users to be more selective on what to vote and how much to vote in general. That is the best solution from the one's you've stated above. Also it's fitting to the current growth rate, a system like that I believe needs to be implemented at some point in the future.
Dan, is it theoretically possible to implement reputation into the consensus protocol?
I have some ideas that would make the reputation system almost un-gameable and bot resistant. I will post them soon, but they all require additions or modifications to the current consensus system.
Hi Dan. I like (a) personally : )
However, I'm not sure it solves the issue, because the OP argues that quantity not quality will be rewarded for those with lots of followers, and that is what needs to change.
An issue I see with a. and b. is that they could still hurt a steemit minnow if he/she is having a rare successful post. I wouldn't want to see that happen (since I'm a minnow!)
c. and d. sound like better ideas to me. They are a good way to de-incentivize bad voting habits without hurting authors or good voters.
It's good that conversations are happening at a high level about tweaking the rewards system. It feels pretty rough right now in the sense that rewards don't match quality as much as it matches who wrote it. And as this post alludes to, much of the high quality minnow content goes unseen.
Why not gradually reduce the curation reward for posts that have already been curated much? I know there already is a large penalty in voting late, but the OP asserts that it is still profitable to blindly vote for trending posts. If that is true, simply add a factor to the curation reward formula that further reduces or eliminates rewards in proportion to the number of votes the post already has. Whether this be better done by count or by steem amount should be carefully thought through. It might be better to use count, to introduce a little bit of a "one steemer, one vote" element into an otherwise pretty "the rich get richer" themed scheme.
Couple of really good solutions. Good work.
This experiment (Steem) could be amazing but also can go straight to a wall with misguided decisions. I just wanted to share some brain juice. This is only an idea and I'm not even pretending it's a good one but hopefully it can serve as the ground for further reflexions.
why not reduce curation rewards according to how much curation reward was payed in the last time period lets say 30 days to this user.
I would suggest to use this formula:
NewCurationReward = CurationReward *
(AverageCurationReward + AverageCurationReward) / (CuratonReward + AverageCurationReward)
AverageCurationReward = Sum CurationReward of all people that got more then 100 dollar through blogging / Count(of all people that got more then 100 dollar through blogging)
With this in place curating a new person would give double the curation reward. The CurationReward of curating a user that got twice the curation reward in the last 30 days will be reduced to 2/3.
Agreed. Curators that find gems among dirt should be rewarded more than the curators begging at the feet of famous bloggers. In order to maximize the benefit curators provide to the community, incentives need to align with the amount of information they add to the system. Voting on nobodies is high risk, and needs equivalently high reward to compensate. It seems to me curation rewards should be inversely weighted to the average expected performance of the poster. The result being curators being rewarded half as much when the poster is twice as successful. Right now steemit is like a record company where all of the talent scouts are following the labels most famous bands like groupies instead of looking for up and coming artists.
The problem I see is people will try to post more or less in function of what they would earn. This could have a negative effect on bloggers wanting to have some kind of daily news blog.
if they are well known bloggers they would still have enough followers that vote for them.
getting curation reward is not relevant for most of the users, its mainly relevant for whales and maybe delphines.
The reson for getting curation reward should be for the work to spot good new content and not for voting on bloggers that so or so get a lot of payout.
Just my input on this:
But on the other hand a system like that with a lower restriction could work....
Thanks for the inputs !
Yes I care too about the future of the platform and fact is minnows are leaving, data on steemle and steemd shows it all. About the whales using different power to vote, That is already helping, Dan is voting more, but uses most of the time only 20% of he's actual power and he isn't the only whale doing so. This is enabling whales to vote on more posts and are setting their voting power accordingly to the subjective post quality!
These are interesting ideas.
Thanks you sir ;)
Hi, like you said this is still a raw idea but this really sounds interesting, though I would say the reputation should be higher, cause as of now, you could reach more than 50 with a couple of lucky posts (litterally just A COUPLE) and then be sent to oblivion again. :(
The example I've made is only there because I wanted to be sure I was clear in my explanations. My mother tongue is french and I'm never completely sure if I expressed myself clearly.
The numbers in the example are not important ;)
I like this idea. "a gradual decrease of the maximum voting power users can allocate to a blog in function of the reputation". Regarding the maximum voting power allocation limit, I also have an idea while it is quite different than yours.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@atomrigs/proposal-steem-power-rental-market
Thanks, I'll read it as soon as I can.
Not sure it will be today. In Europe it's late and they've suggested me 3 others blog related blogs to read in these comments.
I'm pleased to see that I'm not the only one concerned and that there are others ideas out there !
Great community !
Good follow-up @glitterfart to my AskSteem Question !
It seems so ;p
Very, very interesting! You just point out what I discovered fews days ago. I wish someone up there will take a good look at your solution! It just makes sense.
I hope so as well ! You can help and share it if you have a social channel somewhere with Steemers ;)
I don't really care if I make 0.00$ with this blog, I really want to share the idea.
Excellent problems and solutions analysis. Spot on, GREAT JOB glitterfart!
upvote
Thanks bluehorseshoe