RE: Revamping Curation Is The Way To Increase Steem Power Demand
Right now we have bots that are powering down millions of vests a week and regaining the entire balance powered down simply by curating
I've seen this claim repeatedly made. It appears false. My power down rate is currently 20K/week. I'm making 3K/week with a combination of light botting and manual curation. @berniesanders is making 4K/week. @wang is apparently the most successful bot relative to SP and is making 2K/week while powering down 4K/week.
Seems there should be snopes page on this :)
More importantly though, voting for curation rewards is a competitive activity. There is always someone who is going to be the best at it. Looking at that one individual during one particular time window is not a good way to assess the effect of the mechanism across the overall system. This is no difference from balance in games. There might be a few excellent players with very high K/D ratios (imperfections of that metric noted), but that fact alone does not imply the game is unbalanced at all.
Also - writing is harder than curation, why should it be an equal split?
The rewards for reading are split among potentially hundreds or thousands of voters.
@smooth You are the No. 1 VESTS gainer last month without posting any. Increase of curation reward will surely increase your earning but it will discourage many good writers IMHO.
1/3 reduction in posting rewards will discourage "many good writers"? I doubt it. Which ones, exactly, will quit if they earn 1/3 less? (Or maybe that won't even happen because better curation rewards will engage more users and attract more investors as OP suggested, increasing the size of the pool.)
As for my own rewards, those were achieved only using a paid staff of 10 curators (some working close to full time) with much of the rewards going back to them as salary and bonuses. I've since had to cut back on paid curation because the economics no longer support it.
I'm now working on a revised and downscaled program with less risk and exposure for me. As curation becomes more competitive and as the size of the reward pool in VESTS shrinks each day it, becomes tougher and tougher to justify high level professional curators (who IMO did a great job which included finding some great posts that did extremely well once promoted, but sat undiscovered for 10 hours in some cases).
There is no free lunch here.
I disagree that we would lose good writers. We may lose some writers alright, but not the good ones. The fact that we're getting paid at all is revolutionary, and I agree that the curator should be valued as much as the writer. My writing has no value without those who read it and those who promote it.
My only concern is with the ongoing distribution. With increased curation rewards for whales and decreased author rewards for minnows, wouldn't this increased the disparity between whales and minnows?
And as you've said before, one of your reasons for powering down is to try to spread the rewards more evenly. I have absolutely nothing against whales powering down and it's my belief that if the system were to discourage whales from doing this, this would further discourage investors. However, I can see that from those who cannot see what's going on from the outside, from the markets point of view it just doesn't look good. So I'm wondering how we can address this to make potential buyers aware that with steem this trend is different from when you see it with other cryptocurrencies.
Also, as suggested by one of my brothers who are here on steemit, perhaps we need further incentive not just for whales, but for minnows to buy steem. Website perks for example might be a good way to attract a small amount of investment from a lot of minnows. Since becoming a dolphin feels like a goose chase without using your money, because of the difference between a $10 and a $3000 account. If there were better incentives to try to reach an $P of $500 worth, we might see a lot more users reaching into their pockets.
Distribution in the form of rewards is too slow to matter very much. Over the next year approximately 20 million STEEM will be distributed in rewards (both content and curation rewards) and the total money supply will reach about 300 million. Under any conceivable scheme a very large portion of the 20 million will go to very large SP holders (including some who are successful posters as well). The only really significant redistribution that can possibly happen is though the market. I don't consider this a good reason to cut rewards for voting across the board, large and small alike, which is what cutting the size of the pool does.
Good question. I don't know of easy answers here. 95% of the stake is owned by roughly 1% of the users. There's no fast or painless way to spread that out. I guess time and confidence that things will work out longer-term is the best we can do.
I don't believe you are sharing your post key (of smooth) with your curator team. Are your referring teamsmooth?
I think we should push for a change where a user can delegate a percentage of their SP voting power to a user along with a percentage split of curation rewards. For example if you wanted to delegate 20% of your SP to 4 good curators, and keep 20% for yourself you could. You could start by giving them an 80/20 split, and increase their split percentage as a reward for doing a good job.
@clayop
The way it worked is the team members submitted candidate posts to me and I vote for them myself using the web site, as well as adding some of their identified authors to a list for automated voting. I received the rewards and paid the team members for their work from other funds (since rewards are SP and can't be transferred).
I was in the process of creating a different process using mulitple posting keys for the various team members when the economics shifted in a manner that discouraged further investment in curation infrastructure, so that work is on hold for now. I'm still accepting post recommendations and voting manually, though at a lower rate than previously (in part because the market has become much more competitive with multiple curation teams operating; I'm an investor and supporter of one of them).
I'm currently working on a new initiative with my curation team that should start going within the next few days. The process and curation goals will be slightly different than before, and more in tune with the current market.
If curation bring in more Steem owners and price goes up 1/3 it could be net postitive for authors.
I fully agree with @beanz. From the market site steem as investment doesnt look good with the inflation of at least 100% per year. Even if 90% is given back to Steem power holders, still the market graph looks going down for an outsider. The hyper inflation also destroys the incentive to use steem as currency or to provide liquidity.
Reduce steem inflation rate drastically
Therefore i would suggest to reduce the inflation of steem dramatically to 10% per year. 5% could go to steem power holders.
Reduce the time period you must hold steem power drastically
Also I would suggest to drastically change the time period that you must hold steem power to at max one year.
Give incentives for users that verify their identity
We should also think about giving incentives for new users that fully verify their identity. This could look like the following: If you verified your identity, you get 30% interest per month, until the value of your steem power equals 500 steem dollars.
Give incentives for using steem dollars to buy something
Also we should think about incentives for buying something with steem or steem dollars. For example you get up to 10% of the purchase price if you buy something from an verified steem merchant.
There is such way on traditional markets, they call it credit
If I put 20 hours per week into posting material that makes roughly $60 a week, and suddenly this is cut by one third, but I still have to put the same amount of work in to write good quality content... Many people value their time more than money @smooth.
the "game"/"money making scheme" is nice to those who benefit from it, but I thought steemit was a social media, meaning where people interact.
What good (to the author/community) does it do to the upvoting of something no one read ?
Because a bot upvoting, means just that, no human read the post. It was upvoted based over criteria which have nothing to do with interest (mostly based on author rep or stuff like that).
And it will be upvoted for the same reason by most of the upvoters, curation reward not because the article is good or was a good read... In terms of social media it is in my opinion a fail
It is described, I think, as incentivized social media. It is clearly not exactly the same as regular social media and is more of a hybrid between that and cryptocurrency mining (as in "blogging is the new mining").
But if we are to accept this, doesn't it mean that a large portion of the quality content creators out there won't be drawn to the platform? If this is the proper understanding of the platform, then there's no reason for good writers and creators to come here. Visibility is likely a higher priority for creators/artists than the money - especially those who are trying to build followings. If curating is only for gaming purposes, then it makes no sense to try to attract writers by trying to market to them with the claims that they can "get paid for quality content." They won't be getting paid for quality content. They'll simply have a chance to be paid for being the most easily gamed by bots.
@ats-david
I'm not really sure if you are trolling but come on. The content that gets voted up for most part is the most popular stuff. More people think it is the best quality, or at least most of-interest to them. Take follower count for example, which presently has no reason to be gamed in this system (though elsewhere in social media it does and I'm sure it will here). @dollarvigilante has almost 3000 followers. A lot of people here like him and think his work is quality. So when he gets voted up that is exactly quality work being voted up, even though it happens in practice by a combination of people and bots (controlled by people). Similar comments could be made about @gavvet, @charlieshrem, @heiditravels, etc. Even @msgivings who was a highly divisive author and had an issue with plagiarism, was widely followed and her posts consistently had very active comment sections. People here like them and appreciate their work.
If you think you're the next Bethoven and your musical symphony scores are top "quality" and should be voted up, well you are one person who thinks that, and you might even be "right" in some philosophical quality sense, but the system is unlikely to reward you accordingly if no one else knows about you or cares about your work.
Now if your issue is that whales control all the stake and have different opinions about who or what should be voted up than you do or some other users do, my answer is the same as it has been every time this has been discussed: We need to redistribute the stake (via selling).
Finally, if your claim its all bots and nobody actually likes the stuff that gets voted up, I disagree. See above.
It is a game yes, but it is a game that results in the most popular authors and content consistently getting the most votes, along with fairly consistent successes from hidden gems. That's both the intent of the design and the results we see in practice (again see above). Is there a better system that exists? I doubt it. Go post on Facebook or Twitter with no followers and see if you have any significant chance whatsoever to get a lot of exposure (you don't). At least here there is a constant ongoing effort (because that effort has the potential be rewarded) by those who are digging through hundreds and thousands of junk posts to find a few that look like that have a lot of potential and voting them up, which in turn starts to give them exposure and shot.
That's probably the best example, which proves it is can be true. Just because @wang is the only one who can accomplish this right now (that we know of), doesn't mean everyone won't be able to in the future. How does that make the statement false?
The entire reason I mentioned bots is that if we went to a 50:50 split, it would make it even more possible to power down and completely regenerate that value simply by running a bot. @wang as an example would jump immediately from making 2k/week to 4k/week, which is what he powers down.
I feel like you and I both play the "devils advocate" roll a lot ;)
That wasn't the original claim:
The original claim was off by power of two in the case of @wang. Also, a lot of this is natural, even structural, early-adopter dynamics. Ignoring competitive factors (see @owdy's reply), the reward pool is fixed in STEEM/day but SP inflates by about 5% per week. The two are inevitably diverging.
This is not devil's advocate, it is simply false (as far as I know) that people are currently making as much from curation as they are powering down. @wang, so far the tightest ratio so far identified is lagging by a factor of two, and others are lagging even more.
Finally even if it were true, would it matter? Imagine that power down were extended from 104 to 208 weeks (both arbitrary numbers). In that case curation would indeed currently match power down for @wang, but so what? How about 1040 weeks? 52 weeks? All these comparisons are arbitrary and meaningless.
Let me make one last point. Any linear change in curation does not change the balance between larger, smaller, dumber, smarter, human, or bot curators, it simply affects everyone's rewards proportionately. When we cut @wang's rewards in half we also cut in half the rewards for every modest-SP user on the site (which is most of them), and likewise for doubling them. This particular change is entirely neutral to whether these rewards are too top heavy or bot-friendly.
I would also guess that content rewards are probably as top-heavy as curation rewards, if not more so. Clearly people like @dollarvigilante, @charlieshrem, etc. are earning faster from content rewards than they are powering down. Why is it considered acceptable for them but not for curators? Again I would say the comparison between the two rates is arbitrary and meaningless.
THIS^^^^
@jesta
The ratios do not change significantly over a short time period (only about 5% divergence per week) and not at all if you measure both rewards and power down using the same units.
Come on, that's completely silly! He voluntarily reduced his powering down rate to match his reward rate. Every single user who ever earns a reward at whatever rate whatsoever can do that!
It is also seriously cherry-picked BTW. Depending on which particular time period you choose on that chart you can get the result to increase, decrease, or stay the same!
I think the most important point you are missing is that rewards denominated in VESTS decrease single every day. Everyone here now, including @wang, is an "early miner" in a sense and we are all benefiting from the rewards being much larger than they will be in the future. That short-term fact shouldn't be used as a basis for system design.
@jesta
Likewise!
You're talking about SP, I'm talking about VESTS. That 2.5k SP he powered down this week is the equivalent to 7.8125 million VEST. That's exactly what my original claim was about. I still don't see where the statement was false, maybe I'm just dense. Where's this power of two you speak of?
It's true if you look at it from a monthly perspective. Here's wang's ~30 days history, the red line is VESTS:
3 power downs, 1 week of no power downs, and only curation. It's pretty much even. If you want to run the numbers yourself, here's an API endpoint with every day's snapshot:
https://steemdb.com/api/account/wang/snapshots
My entire point was that if we went from 75/25, to 50/50, that the red line in the chart above would be increasing faster. I am not against early adopters making some profit, we're all early adopters here. I'm also not against bots, but I do think they should be kept in check.
In my opinion - yes, it would. As I learn more about the subject, it may not matter to me anymore, but currently my perception (and others) feel this is a problem.
Thanks for the good discussions on the topic :)
@smooth - Points taken, and thank you again for engaging in this topic so far with me. Regardless of the point by point back and forth we're having, I also think that fundamentally you and I are seeing this from different perspectives.
But you're right. I drove this comment thread by starting to talk about bots and curation, which is a totally separate topic from the actual rewards structure itself. They play off one another, but ultimately shouldn't dictate the direction of one another.
Just a note on this - It's just the timeframe I have currently since I've started recording. I don't have more complete data, and I doubt anyone else does either. I'm not cherry picking on purpose, I'm just using what I have as an example.
Can the bots be a positive for the indirect distribution of SP. What if the Whales use bots to follow volunteers that find new users with good content. The Whales can't do it all by themselves. They set their power to vote the same as the volunteer at a certain percentage. (Slide Scale) Maybe they can even divide the SP to their own secondary account to follow more volunteers. They are keeping their own SP but just voting with the volunteer.
These volunteers would have some stipulations for votes. Don't vote for themselves, don't vote for users over a certain amount of up votes or dollars already awarded in a post, look for new users with quality content.
Say a Whale had two volunteers doing the searching and voting for 20 posts, meeting their criteria, with what ever percent on the sliding scale they want. That's 40 votes a day and spreading their power by their bot just voting the same as their volunteers.
I'm just trying to think of ways to help. And I try and think, If I had this kind of power, I would want to spread it out as far as I can to benefit the community. From what I understand the bots could do this....
Anyway .... Just an idea. :)
Pk
There are all sorts of things going on in this system, bots being used in different ways, humans voting for all sorts of reasons, comments being made to attract votes to themselves or to the post, etc. I don't think we really have a full grasp of it all, and our understanding will likely decrease going forward. Large complex systems with complex interactions, feedback loops, and competition quickly become impossible to fully understand.
@smooth Exactly and that is just taking account of conscious human motivations. It is hard to know the unconscious motivations and behaviours that people will engage in.
I'm pretty sure this was the case about a month ago. For at least a couple of weeks, @wang was making over 6k SP/week when he was still voting at 14 mins. Ever since he cut down on his upvote delay, the bot game has been a lot more challenging for everyone.
See my reply to @jesta. Not only is this a matter of increasing competition but also structural inflation. The rewards are getting effectively smaller, by design (until a floor is reached but not for quite a while).
I do agree that a 50/50 split would make the curation 'game' more appealing, and would provide additional incentive for users to power up. My issue with it is this though:
Even though the curation reward is being split amongst hundreds of thousands of voters, it is really the big whales who are getting 99% of the curation rewards. Even a good dolphin curator with 5-10k worth of SP who maximizes their curation by somehow voting on posts that all get upvoted by whales, will only see a very tiny portion of the curation rewards from the posts.
The "little guy" curator will still not have much incentive to power up, because even with increased curation rewards - their portion is so minuscule that it won't really matter. It seems like in the end it will help the rich get/stay richer, but offer very little to average users who can not afford to buy in 100k worth of SP.
This problem is solved by redistribution (i.e. whale selling). As long as <1% of the users own 95% of the SP (source: https://steemd.com/distribution), everything else will follow along in this same (broken) proportions.
Spread the stake, then the system can work really well, not before.
As I said elsewhere, linear changes in curation (specifically cutting it in half or doubling it) do not in any way change the proportions that are going to various demographic segments. Cutting whales' curation in half does not help anything if it also cuts non-whales curation in half (or worse, pushes non-whales below the minimum floor where they go no curation rewards whatsoever), and that is what was done.
And finally, what is happening by piling on even more content rewards? A few very successful bloggers are concentrating the bulk of the rewards, amassing huge portions of stake, becoming the next whales, and still not helping the little guy (btw, many of them are using automated voting now). This is not really solving the problem either.
Nevertheless, despite this ongoing issue, even in this thread I see non-whales discussing curation and their strategies for performing it as a compelling form of engagement.
@smooth True! Infact little dolphins can make significant SP/month; easily compare infovore and charlieshrem (very new btw) with equivalent SP and followers but significant differences in curation return.
I also manually curate 6.7 SP/week & from where I am from that pays my coffee all week )).
I totally agree.
What level do you currently need to be at though in order to make any serious money from curation rewards though? 50k? Does cutting that from 50k to 25k really provide much more incentive to power up? Regardless of whether the split it is 75/25 or 50/50, I think the threshold of SP needed to really make a difference is so high, that nobody other than a huge investor is going to see this change as an attraction to power up.
I don't completely agree. While most of the rewards are going to a handful of contributors, there are still a significant number of small users who are getting a lot of SP from posting. I think way more users are gaining SP from authoring than from curating. With a 50/50 split, less money would be going to low SP holders through posting, and more would go to high SP holders who get the bulk of the curation rewards.
you are an exception in that you are a whale that actually cares about curation. i think the biggest problem with Steem currently is that curation power wasn't optimally distributed and those that have it either don't want the power or aren't well equipped to have it: https://steemit.com/steem/@ntomaino/optimally-distributing-curation-power
I agree with your post except that I wouldn't say I'm the only whale interested in curation or even necessarily the one most interested. Several of the others vote very acively and @berniesanders is backing the Curie Project which seems to be an excellent curation program. Nevertheless, yes, we need redistribution. The proposal in the OP helps support this goal by giving people more of a reason to buy.
You're not the only, but are of the few. I appreciate the work @berniesanders is doing as well in protecting the integrity of curation power and not hesitating to downvote posts that compromise the integrity of curation power.