Steemit's biggest ever experiment extravaganza!
Are you ready?
Steemit is a really big social experiment that seems to hinge on the code, not a community at all according to many. So, let's run with that and run an experiment. Not just any experiment though:
Steemit's biggest ever experiment!
From what I have heard, some people seem to think that the bidbot pull on the pool doesn't really make that much difference to other people's payouts. But for some background, the bidbots vote every 2.4 hours (10 full votes a day) with over 30+ million SP. So, that is +300 million SP in votes per day or +600M vests.
For some perspective, that is 10 x ~$5640 votes per day or, 56,400 SBD worth of pull on the pool every day. This gets distributed to ~1.5% of all votes per day. Also, bear in mind that these are paid for with ~45,000 liquid SBD.
We can test if this has any affect on the other 98.5% votes that aren't using bots.
There is another experiment ongoing at the moment called Burnpost being run by @smooth. The idea is to take SBD out of circulation to reduce the inflation and try to keep the price down. @smooth, I really like your experiments but, can't we do better? Yes. I repeat:
Steemit's biggest ever experiment!
Ready?
Ok. Lets kill two birds. Let's see if the pull on the pool can be affected AND lets burn a metric shit ton of SBD at the same time. If the bidbot operators are right, this experiement should have very little affect on them and if @smooth is right, we could see a reduction in SBD price.
I did say that this was Steemit's Biggest ever experiment so, lets get a little meta. The Steemit account hold roughly 44 Million SP in it which equates to a 100% vote of... $8300. 10 x is 83,000 SBD pull on the pool or approximately 50% more than all the known bidbots combined.
Let's Play.
@smooth creates 10 x Burnposts and the Steemit account votes every 2.4 hours on them (to keep max damage) and the SBD will be burned. this should be about as definitive of a test that is possible to see if this experiment has an effect.
The next question is, what happens to the bidbots when the pool that they have been drinking from is more than halved by a very, very thirsty king of whales? Well, this is going to effect everyone on the platform equally but according to many, the bidbots aren't really the ones that are lowering the price of other posts. If that is true, it should have very little effect on all of our earnings.
If 83,000 SBD being called from the pool each day doesn't have much of an effect on earnings then, the bidbots may not be so harmful to the entire ecosystem but, if it does?
This would be a pretty definitive test to illustrate just how this all works and, it is fair on everyone. How long would the experiment need to run before it is felt? I don't know but, perhaps some of the numbers people @crokkon, @paulag, @abh12345 might like to play around and do a hypothetical.
With only one account doing all of this, the numbers should be relatively easy to calculate and track and perhaps a few days or a week is enough. My limited knowledge assumption is that an 83,000 pull on the pool each day is going to have a very large effect on all earnings and, the return of the bidbots, at least at their current settings. The SBD burn is outside of my area totally but perhaps @smooth would like to comment.
Shouldn't experiments that should provide quite definitive evidence be encouraged at this early stage of the platform? Wouldn't it be awesome just to see @steemit vote at 100% 10 times a day for a week or so? Since it can be over a limited time and effects all accounts equally, this should be completely uncontroversial and, as everyone keeps saying, do with your stake as you please. @steemit has stake and this way there is no problem with suppression or promotion since all are affected equally and no one directly benefits.
Perhaps after this we would have clear evidence on various things and then we could create strategies based on what we have learned. With the visual and the nubers data available, we could also put an end to lots of the arguments over this or that and move on to actually building the community together. I am game, you?
@ned, got the keys handy?
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
Who is saying these things? The relative value of votes on the system has nothing to do with voting bots, it's just a % of how much SP is used to vote in total.
Of course voting bots comprise a very significant amount of the SP used for voting, but all that SP would still be used for voting even if bots didn't exist!
Do you think that if bots didn't exist all the whales that currently delegate to them would just say "ok i guess we'll just let our SP sit and not do anything!"?
I really don't understand why people think getting rid of voting bots would solve anything. I guarantee that if all the voting bots disappeared that nothing would change with regard to the problems they are blamed for.
The rewards pool share for votes would remain the same. Large stakeholders would still sell their votes, it would just be done in a non-transparent manner that's not available to the majority of users. And trending would still have the same "issues" that it does now. It might just not be as obvious what's going on to the average user.
Well, I know one huge user, the biggest account in fact that wasn't voting before leasing out its SP to bid bots. There were also a lot of other big ones that were curating instead and only earning curation rewards. You are right though, they were at a disadvantage to those that were selling votes off-site.
Of course, it has gone to the point where there is no going back anymore due to delegation, currently the people that are losing out are the ones that are not buying votes since the rewardpool is finite. What this means is that you either have to also start buying votes to compete with other users or you will be left with a smaller piece of the reward pool pie.
It seems to me that the only solution at this point is to encourage everyone to buy votes on their quality content and to eliminate the easy rewards just for running a bid bot.
This.
The Catch-22 situation of the so-called promotional element bot operators have tried to use as PR has been reached.
It's "Do or Die" mostly nowadays. Do throw your earned SBD away at somebody who just is slightly more connected and more apt at maintaining code.
If there were no bid bots grey operations would still happen but on a much lower scale and, finally, we could hope for investors with a mid- to long-term focus again, rather than the quick buck grab Wild Wild West this has become. But, obviously, that's logic the short term profit grabbers are not interested in.
Manual curators needed and a bot that will overpay to out support the maximisation bots. If a manual curator thinks it is worth more than the bid, bump it higher. Be picky and with enough SP, trending would have quality content providers that deserve the payouts, bidbot or not. Not that Trending matters anyway.
This is not going to go anywhere is it... wild wild west is the law of code.
Yep. Last year before mass bidbots, when rando whale was the only real game and good for newbs who outgrew it eventually, it was a very different place here. Can it return to that now that they ate the "apple"? Uncertain, but why we don't just turn off self voting and end at least half our major grievances? That never flies and i get a million reasons why back, but its undeniable, kill self voting, and then people will have to work a lot harder to do those back door whale sales and shit. We can't really effectively kill bots ever no matter what anyway, we'll just make them less accessible, I suppose. and deterrents stop a large percentage of lazy people. The truly determined will find their hacks anyway, but lots less will.
Self voting, is a huge problem in terms of pool drain, why do we NEVER discuss that, and lean on the old trope, *well the investors, and their stake, and they can do whatever and well, after all those same whale investors are or "own" the top 20 who could make any of this true anyway..." blah blah blah
turn off self voting, watch magic happen. That's my prediction. (Oh but they will make sockpuppets!) and yep they will, some of them. But less of them.
Or you know, figure out communities, implement something like eos constitutions and turn people loose to screw it up for themselves in their own houses...
Basically, just do something already. Because looking at the roadmap, and talks at SteemFest(2), this place is always more becoming vaporware roadmaps bc.
2016 open
2017 open
2018 "more info about smts, the next thing we wont finish or do right here:[link]"
There is absolutely nothing else to expect than a proportional reward pool decrease for everyone else than @Steemit and some whales dumping their coins because they don't want to stay to witness another Steemit mishap.
If you didn't know there is an common shared understanding that Steemit would not vote with it's ninja-mined stake.
Bidbots have expenses close to 0 and are paid mostly as % relative to their SP, and the amount being their proportion of the global SP utilization. They are also depending on how people are willing to risk vesting in exchange for a % profit or in the case of @promobot extra exposure.
Shameless plug: @Promobot return 100% of the payment it receives to people delegating to it. No need to sign-up anywhere, delegate and get paid daily.
I actually don't agree with this entirely. As a first order effect that is entirely correct of course. However, I believe that for social, community, and ecosystem development reasons there are stakeholders who actually do want to see certain valuable contributors rewarded. When the reward pool is knocked down a few pegs in size and becomes less of a free money free-for-all for everyone, the resulting scarcity will force a reexamination of priorities. When people who care a lot about Steem are asking why they can't reward some very effective promotional campaign or development project with more than $100 and the answer is clearly too much the money being siphoned off by bid bots and the like, what happens next? Likely more consensus on the need to aggressively direct rewards where they do the most good instead of just everyone grabbing money and Steem getting real value for the rewards is little more than an afterthought.
It would be like demoing the effect of reward siphoning to expose a problem while it can be explained and understood rather easily.
Instead Steemit could communicate some more guidance and act as a though leader. That should have just as much effect with way less contention and should be prioritized over this.
Oh, I'm not at all suggesting this actually be done. I don't think Steemit should be using the ninja-mined stake to vote (not even to support @burnpost, which I of course believe operates in a generally beneficial manner, and if I didn't I wouldn't be running it), and indeed shouldn't be weaseling around that by delegating it to others who vote on their behalf (which, unfortunately, they are).
My comment was addressed as what I see as some of the beneficial indirect effects of constraining the reward pool from its current size which I see as just inviting a scramble by many people to grab the 'free money'. In fact none of it is free. Steem stakeholders are paying for it twice, once in inflation and the again in lost opportunity to actually do something useful with that money. But yes I agree some leadership could also help.
@smooth, Do you really think most average users even know the size of the reward pool or how it works? Most of them still think stinc pays them for being here or some magical thing. So I'm not sure 90% of the users here would even understand this conversation, let alone stop being driven by "free money" promises because of it.
You aren't wrong about the "whys" but I think the experiment will prove no change in majority user behavior.
Honestly, we all keep yapping about potentials, when turning off self voting for once and for all, would quite literally end nearly every problem but bot rings and voting circlejerks, which are NEVER going to be completely eradicated, anymore than anyone has completely eradicated collusion from poker games yet in 200 years.
That's just not possible. In fact a huge portion of the voting power now goes through bots (a while ago I was told 30% and it may be even higher now) which means many people it isn't even literal self voting any more. Stakeholder delegates to bot then pays bot to vote for stakeholders posts (possibly on a different account). Stakeholder then gets the money back from the bot.
Even if this particular loophole were plugged there are an infinite number of ways to obscure self voting.
Not really, but larger stakeholders who allocate most of the money do.
LOL true!
I don’t belong on this thread but have to comment.
What?! You burst my bubble. All this time I thought SteemitInc was paying for my penny payouts!! What is a gal to do now? 😉
Interesting topic of discussion!
Isn't this breaking the common-shared agreement on technicality? It seems that code is law though so technicality is the law.
And why isn't it happening (other than the excuse that it is interfering with an 'organic' system)?
This community is not very organic and is becoming much less so considering it is now largely a blind pay to play platform. What would have pushed this post up the ridiculous scale is if I had voted myself into trending.
This is about as trash post as my heart will let me get but, it does create discussions that clarifies certain things for me and those who stop by my blog, from people who are invested heavily in the platform. You might not agree with the proposal (I don't agree with the proposal) but, the platform is floundering and there is so much that isn't seen, shared or being done.
The core problems I have with the bidbots is, blind voting, lack of engagement with the majority of it, narrowing of rewards/value heavily biased to those who already have stake. It might be idealistic but this was meant to be a community that backed value based on content the community found value in, not the author which is what is happening now. What happened to manual curation? ~25% not enough to engage in the community cosidering on top of that there is the likely appreciation of Steem value to come?
I self-vote now, it is my stake. Fine. But, using the bots is calling the community to vote on me also (blindly). I am saying that my post is worthy of community support and proving the worth by ordering them to support. That is not community consensus, that is dictatorship of a kind and the ones delegating are supporting all kinds of things they may not agree with (say, if I had used bots you delegate to to bump this up a bit).
There is a space for the bidbots but, I do think there needs to be a massive ramping up of community/manual curation on them still before flags are involved as flags come with no reward and are therefore unlikely.
There has to be some community engagement on content (which is all we have) to call this a community doesn't there? Otherwise, just call it an auction site and be done with it.
... Yeah, I am idealistic and not very good at maximising my own value at the cost of others.
I did not but assumed it quite early on.
So, everyone should delegate all of their SP to bidbots and sit back for passive earnings except those who want to use bidbots to earn?
Also, shouldn't this all be in the FAQ under investment options or something? Perhaps in the UI there could be a dropdown list of all registered bots and people could delegate directly at signup. For those that buy in, we could streamline the process and direct them straight to where they need to go to maximize their investment.
On a side note: What if some willing bidbot's did similarly to you and put say, half a vote aside to flag the TA? Those that do not agree could undelegate the bidbot of course and move to one that doesn't flag but, wouldn't that return at least some percentage to the pool as a community service? It would cost 5% of profits max but, would likely take 2% if all bots joined in considering the 30+ Mil combined SP
sorry, 3am brain here, remind me what TA means again please?
Technical Analysis (@Haejin)
the SadKitten bot needs to be stopped it only helps the whales, everyone knows that,AND when any post has a upvote that shows a amount besides zero that the post will most like then be viewed by someone and maybe even upvoted, and everyone who does up vote get a slice of the pie, the down votes hurt not only the person who upvotes their own post but others who also get a part of it. and when the coins are devided up by steem the only one who get any are the select inner circle aka the whales, which is the only reason that the sadkitten bot is really their, why not flag all the other bots out there who always upvote the whales the ip and vpn always show that the bots are from select whales even now some whales are now changing often the ip and vpn to cover ther butt, steem was a good idea at first then the greed and bots and now even more sad kitten proves it greed and censorship to keep the peasent poor while the rich get richer, greed is greed and nothing more and it will be the death of steem as people flee and will not want steem
FYI, @burnpost does not (currently) burn SBD
The SBD received by @burnpost as rewards is sold on the market in exchange for STEEM, which places it into circulation and directly exerts downward price pressure on SBD (and upward on STEEM). The STEEM is then powered up into SP and designated for future burning, ensuring that it will never reenter the market (putting further long-term upward price pressure on STEEM).
Clearly you do not have a good understanding of what is actually going on and how things work. I would suggest you take that up before making ridiculous proposals. Even if intended as an attempt at humor/sarcasm/irony, that works a lot better if you know what you are talking about before you try.
(@burnpost would start burning SBD, and would even using its STEEM/SP to buy SBD for the purpose of burning, if SBD were to drop below $1. Obviously that is not the case now.)
Thanks for coming in @smooth and explaining it. I have been asked several times about it and I haven't been able explain it well enough so, this will hopefully help.
I think we could agree that on the scale of Steemit, this is only mid-range ridiculous.
I am not a very funny person in writing but, I thought the title would suggest some level of humor but, I think only the people who would read my stuff often might realise it.
Although I don't know what is going on, people keep asking why Steemit doesn't get involved so it seems there is a breakdown in communication which is no surprise considering the UI, low-level of interaction between groups and Steemit's and many others in the know's unwillingness to publicly address some of the issues the average user of the platform faces.
It seems that lately, the only time people seem willing to enter conversations is at misrepresentation and challenge. For the many, many small users, understanding can't develop because there is no clear source explaining it. I don't know if communities will help or not but, the current system has been broken for a very long time.
Anyway, thanks again :)
LOL good point!
"I think we could agree that on the scale of Steemit, this is only mid-range ridiculous."
That is the funniest thing I have read all day, so you got ONE bit of the joke across pretty well! :D
:)
I think the discussions can be fun and there is no need for animosity or anger, especially when people are openly and earnestly trying to do their best at working things out.
After reading through the comments from smooth and transisto I'm not so sure I really understand how things work here. But I give it a try. I think the assumption about the vote value and the SBD pulled out per day is not fully correct, because once the 44M SP start voting they immediately affect the value also of their own vote.
Taking the current reward pool size, price feed and recent claims, a 100% vote at 100% VP from a 44M SP account would theoretically be worth 8498.27 SBD (before the vote).
By placing a single vote, it would increase the recent claims by ~1.8e15 rshares (0.4% of all current claims), reducing their own vote value to 8463.95 SBD and everybody else's vote value by 0.4%.
By assuming 10 active votes, their own value would be 8167.13 SBD and make up 3.9% of the recent claims - effectively reducing the vote value of any other vote also by that percentage.
Assuming 10 votes per day over 7 days would make 18.9% of all recent claims, make a vote value of 6619 SBD and reduce the vote value of any other vote also by that percentage.
This calculation assumes that the current reward pool size would be the same even if this account voted for the last 7 days. This would certainly not be the case, but I currently have no idea how to factor that in?
Would a 15-20% reduction in the SBD-value of all votes affect the bid-bots more than everybody else?
Why would the reward pool size change? As far as I can tell, that's about as fixed as anything gets in the steem blockchain, being absolutely the inflationary rate.
I don't think that any kind of percentage reduction in the value of SBD would affect to the bid bots more than everybody else. In fact, reducing the relative portion of vote values for non-bid bot users would probably have the result of driving more people to bid bots in order to attempt to get a larger slice. After all, it clearly works as a distributive process and if the size of the pool shrinks, the inhabitants fight harder for the remainder.
The reward pool size is not fixed, the only thing fixed is the amount of Steem that is added to the pool per day. This is my understanding, not sure if all aspects are covered: The amount of Steem claimed at the payout of a post is the fraction of its own net_rshares divided by recent_claims (=sum of all vote rshares that aren't payed out yet) times the pool size. So as long as the total number of active rshares increases (=more and more SP is used to vote), the less Steem is claimed from the pool, the larger it gets.
If you are having trouble getting your head around the system, doesn't that tell of a little too much complexity and room for gaming the system? There are always going to be loop holes but this is one large account voting massively, and still it is hard to visualize. When there are thousands of much smaler accounts effectively doing the same thing in many assorted ways, it creates an entanglement that makes transparency near impossible.
Does this mean that with 30+ million voting (approx 65% of Steemit) All votes are reduced ~10% since they are maximising all of their voting power? So ~750,000 votes per day are reduced by 10% so 1.5 percent can have very large (relatively) votes? I am not sure that makes sense but you might understand the concept.
You tell me but it will likely affect them equally however, does that mean they have to reduce the prices? or take less profit? I don't know.
I think a large part of the arguments would end if there was more sensitivity on what they voted upon, meaning perhaps a high level of manual curation, very strict whitelists that get reviewed or what about, invites to purchase votes where if content is good enough, a manual says, 'this post is whitelisted'? Would that increase the incentive to produce higher quality and deeper engagement again whilst still offering high returns for bots/delegates? I don't know... but a few more humans involved might be nice.
I read the post, and the comments, Lots of debate and discussion. It's an experiment that is being talked about being run. That is all. I have seen competing thoughts on the proposed experiment, some say it doesn't need to be done that we already know what the outcome would/will be. But there are polar opposite opinions. So I say run it, see what happens and who was right and who was wrong. At least we will have a semi-firm answer.
THe reality though is if we as a community want to control the bots, then we need to be given the tools to control them. Tool number one for me would be "I don't like bots" they are all banned from my post, even being called by commenters to upvote their comments. In other words if I have a bot banned it can not do anything on my page/post. Period. That's a Capital Period.
Let the consumer decide who they want to visit their page/post. Give us the ability to Block people, not just mute them. Part of freedom of expression is being able to determine what you want to read or look at. So my blocking someone from viewing my content is not Censorship. Hustler magazine and Playboy magazine can not arbitrarily mail you their magazine and then scream Censorship when you refuse delivery.
This should be a tool included in the package. I think there are too many tools missing.
And yes, this post is a moot point but, people don't seem to realise what is going on so this would show them in a day, maybe two I guess.
I'm pretty much a realist when it comes to the downvote, the whales and the long time users really do not want to see a change to it, but I think a blocker would be a great way to prevent not only the spread of spam, but the spread of the tiny URL scammers. Post owners bock them no one sees their post, so no one clicks on the link. of course The scam busters would need to be able to have access and see that post, so a lot to think about on it.
My sentiment exactly. Was hoping to get through just one day where I didn't see a "let's fix it" this way post or a "this or that" post will cause Steemit to fail in the long run.....been here since January and all I ever see is all talk and no action.
:D
I would love to see what happens if this took place - just for the S's and the G's.
I'll be checking in to see what's been written tomorrow morning and shall pass this on to a few who may have a comment.
Burn baby burn!
It would be pretty cool to see such a large scale experiment at steemit. At least, it should return something usable to build upon that is clear enough that consensus is easier to reach.
Exactly right. We are all seemingly just guessing at present. An experiment would give us something to analysis and evaluate.
lol, well that would be interesting.
I don't think the bots have 0 impact, I think the reward pool is allocated by voting power owned by investors. Each investor can choose to rent, lease, sell or use their voting power. Nobody has a moral obligation to build the community or the site. As proven by Smooth. Also, so far he isn't burning anything. He is just selling SBD and buying Steem. I do the same thing and I curate besides.
It would be pretty damn fun to see I reckon. There are some other experiments I would like to see also. The bidbots could put aside 50% of a vote and... bye bye TA. At least there would be some community value in that.
But just to sum up my brief intervention about worthy 'experiments' here.
"ANY sort of beast, entity, insect, microbe and/or fucking germ (AI or not. High SP or not) that within a LIVING COMMUNITY Our Community can't READ, is too lazy to READ or outrightly refuse to READ must be":
¡Excommunicated, disallowed, suspended, execrated, banned, abolished & disappeared once and for all!:
ANY ability to vote if they haven't READ thoroughly first the content of a post previously before cast a vote.
Unfortunately, the world has gone at least for the time being where people care enough to read.
That would be a great experiment! Really curious how this would evolve. It is really hard to make a prediction, but I guess the bots would win!
THey would have to adjust considerably I think including their prices and margins as Steemit would be taking a massive slice of the pool they access and making it unavailable. Essentially, Steemit would squeeze everyone into a little corner of the pool. The bidbots will still have the same percentage access to the reduced pool size but, that would mean returns are also affected. ...I think.
The burning of SBD would be interesting too
The burning of SBD could be a good thing, because if I understood it correctly, it is a depth from the system to us. The lower this gets, the better. Correct me if I am wrong!
Still people find it easier these days to make a profit with bot investments! I do wonder where this perception comes from! Less people are maybe using the bid bots, maybe the transparency bot has something to do with it!
Less people are making profits but the profits continue for a narrow group. In the end, it will be a duopoly and then a monopoly. Of course, it would never get that for before it all collapsed.
While I don’t want to undermine a business plan, I wont cry if it does collapse! Maybe some more power will be used to upvote new Steemians to be discover!
Not all bots are bad, but the bid and flat rate bots may vaporize!
Atleast this way we'll be sure of some uncertain things. Thank you for theb informative post.