Make Minnows Into Whales - Use the Main Steemit Account as a Curation Guild to Elect "Super Curators"
Background to the Problem
There are a limited number of whale accounts on Steemit with limited attention and ability to curate.
Currently there are about 29 active accounts with Legend status (steemd) of 1000 MV or more. You can see this in the image below:
The largest whale account belongs to the Steemit team (@steemit) and is not used for voting as the list below taken from steemdb shows:
The Steemit Account Currently has over 79 million Steem Power with 218.23 GV (see image below from steemdb page for @steemit account).
That is a lot of potential voting power that is being unused.
There is little doubt that high value whale payouts attract new users.
Seeing others obtaining them whilst they do not is a considerable source of frustration that I have seen myself amongst new users.
This is likely one of the major reasons for people quitting and leaving.
Dan, Ned and various members of the community (including myself) have discussed the potential benefits of delegated voting and curation.
That may take some time to implement on a global level.
I know that everyone is working hard to make things better but there is perhaps something else that can be done in the meantime.
User @craig-grant has recently suggested what I think is a fantasic idea which would make use of this untapped potential and bring new visibility and equality to Steemit.
The Idea
Craig's suggestion is to use the Steemit Account voting power to create a kind of Super Curation Guild.
This is how it would work:
- Voting power from @steemit is delegated to 10 or more (as many as 200) different active user accounts who become "Super Curators" (SCs).
- Platform users elect these Super Curators like witnesses.
- Super Curators keep the curation rewards in exchange for their work.
- They are able to use the delegated voting power for 7 days on/ 7 days off, to create a rotation and ensure variety.
- Limit eligibility to non-whale accounts so only accounts with less than 1 GV are eligible - thereby increasing the range of people with whale power to a wider range of people.
- Limit to high reputation accounts (e.g. cut-off of 50 or 60).
Advantages
- You create a group of 10 or more new whales (a 34% increase) - indeed on the extreme end you could create 200 accounts with 1GV delegated voting power which would be a 689% increase over the current 29 active (over 24hrs) accounts with this level of power.
- A wider variety of curation and increased engagement.
- Potentially greater visibility for minnows and new users.
- Empowerment of active curators and people who engage with the platform but don't have enough SP to make a big difference to posts.
- Accelerated redistribution of SP.
- Give new users something to aspire to rather than the very limited niche of Witnesses.
Drawbacks?
I personally don't see any significant drawbacks beyond these points:
- Obviously this will require work from the Steemit team to implement.
- The Steemit account is used to fund new accounts so is constantly being drained this may limit the time this plan could operate. However I feel that given the huge amount of SP that it has this will take considerable time to have any impact on the curation guild suggested above.
- Even if only temporary the effect of this guild would have such potential benefit to the community as a whole by accelerating redistribution and making minnows feel rewarded that I feel it is worth pursuing.
- Some of the current high power users may not like it although I suspect the vast majority will see it as reducing some of the pressure on them to curate.
Please Discuss, Share and Re-steem
Please let me know what you think about this idea. Perhaps myself and Craig have missed some vital reason why this can't be done?
Whatever you think, the more people that hear about this idea and discuss it the better.
Hopefully we can get the attention of the Steemit team with this.
If we truly want to keep improving things as a community then we need to do our part. We can't expect the Steemit team to do it all on their own and neither should they.
We all have a stake in the success of Steemit and I feel this is one of the best ideas I have heard in a long time to keep pushing things forward and help Steemit to get to the level which it truly belongs at.
Reward for Reading: The Obligatory Kitten Photo
If you like my work and aren't already, please follow me and check out my blog (I mainly discuss photography but I do other topics like this too) - @thecryptofiend
You can find and follow Craig Grant @craig-grant
Photo Credits: Photos number 5, 9, and 10 are Creative Commons wihout Attribution taken from Pexels.com. Screenshots are taken from steemdb by @jesta and steemd by @roadscape. All other photos are taken from my personal Istockphoto.com account. Further information can be provided on request.
(Verification for me here: http://www.aapicture.com/about-me)
Some of my Previous Posts and Tutorials:
- Daisy at the Castle Keep - High Contrast Black and White Photos
- The Updated Steemit Etiquette Guide - New Additions and Your Help Needed
- A little idea for Steemit that could end up being a big idea for progress: The Ideas Factory
- The Missing FAQ - A Beginners Guide To Using Steemit
- Medical Jargon Buster
While I understand the goal, I think this plan backfires, as more whale voting diminishes the value of everyone else's votes (not just the whales). For most of us, our already lousy vote value will become worth even less with this plan. And authors who don't win the whale vote lottery will also earn even less than they do now.
I'd rather have less whales voting, or somehow cap the vote of whales, so as to allow the rest of us to have a somewhat more valuable vote. Thousands of users with a small yet meaningful vote (>1cent) is going to do this platform a lot more good than a few more whale vote lottery winners whose payout comes at the expense of everyone else.
Edit/Add: A proposal that would make low SP holders' votes more valuable
Good point but whales are voting already. This may even take some of the strain off them to vote so may not necessarily mean differences in rewards in the long term.
This way we have whales who have been elected and whales who have bought in both able to curate.
I think this gives a fairer system overall even if other people's votes may go down - that happens anyway when more people join or more people buy in. It is the way the system works.
It isn't happening though and this is a potential way of improving things and making them fairer. It also creates aspiration for people who join the platform and can even help create a new role for those who solely wish to curate but can't justify it in terms of the current rewards.
Yes, whales are voting already, but more whales makes it worse.
Many people, incl myself, have invested real money in SP, and will find our vote to be worth even less than it already is and the authors we vote for to receive even less too.
There was also a promise that Steemit would never vote - at least that is what I understood - as an investor who invested for voting power, I'd feel cheated if they came back on that promise resulting in a significant reduction of my voting power.
This change would further demotivate people from buying Steem (another negative for the price of Steem).
Steemit itself would not be voting though. Perhaps you can suggest a better solution for the current problems?
Obviously the promise that Steemit would not vote, meant that Steemit's voting power would not be used. Delegated voting is just like Steemit voting it's just letting someone else do the voting for it. No difference, and would break the original promise to investors.
Besides yes I do have a better solution: The Elusive 1 Cent Vote - Proposal to Scale Down Exponential Posting Rewards
This proposal would also have the effect to increase the value of most peoples' votes and reduce that of the whales.
@ottodv Sorry about posting here but the nesting issue is preventing posting directly. Thanks for the extra info. I was wondering what the reason for the declining voting power issue was in the update.
I can't find the Steemit account not being able to vote in the white paper but I may be missing it or it may have been state elsewhere but @smooth is saying this too and he was there at the start so would probably know.
The alternative would for the the Steemit team members to delegate their voting power as an alternate source that doesn't break any prior agreements but obviously that would be up to them if they wanted to do that.
The thing I liked most about this idea was having elected high power curators and if we get some kind of voting delegation system- even having a proportion of all delegated voting used in this way could work well.
@plotbot2015 Some actual figures would be great but I am not the best person to provide them as I don't know the details of how everything is calculated code wise. A member of the team would be best placed to do that.
That is your opinion. I am not aware of any legal contract in this regard. This is a constantly evolving platform that is currently in Beta so I don't have problem with it.
Technically it would not be that particular account voting so I don't have a problem with it. I don't know what the exact promise was so I can't comment on that.
It's a good idea but I prefer this one.
I think that technicality would be dishonest legal trickery if it were done and I would have a problem with it.
Yes correct my opinion is my opinion, and yours is yours. ;-)
There was a change implemented in the latest hard fork precisely to allow @steemit to formally decline its voting power: https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/324
See also release notes for version 0.14.2 (emphasis mine):
Opinions matter less to me than data. Could we see some numerical simulations of the two proposals to see what they would do? The verbal descriptions are not detailed enough for me to cost/benefit either proposal.
Some numerical simulation would be interesting I agree.
I don't see the two proposals as mutually exclusive by the way, they might even be complementary.
@thecryptofiend I am posting here, because of the nesting issues. And then upvoting your comment screwed up the order.... so my comment would not appear under yours there.
Delegated voting would be a great feature, it was discussed somewhere already. One way was as the possibility to loan voting power to someone else and collect interest in exchange or part of the curation reward.
Lol that is another issue I hope we can get fixed. Yes I have heard it discussed (DV) a few times. I think the team are probably working on it. I'm not sure on the ETA for it but it would solve a lot of these issues and a global option would mean there would get around the Steemit account problem.
good man! following now as you get it :) if you have time look back on some of myposts about that..also, I am a strong supporter of a #whaledayoff idea :)
This is a bad idea. The 'steemit' account was created via the ninjamine for a specific purpose and investors have been told what it would be used for. It was explicitly stated that it would be not a voting account. Those who have bought into and vested SP for two years did so with the understanding that the 'steemit' account would be non-voting. Introducing the 'steemit' account into the voting pool at this point would enormously dilute every other investor's voting influence, and worse it would do so after people already locked up their investment for two years. This would undermine trust and discourage further investment. The platform relies extremely heavily on new investors buying in to absorb the supply being sold by people cashing out. Anything that threatens to undermine that support from investors, such as this proposal, is an existential risk.
Thanks for your input. @ottodv mentioned this too. I was not previously aware of that statement on the steemit account and I may well have missed it. Is it in the whitepaper - I had a quick glance through but couldn't find it?
The other alternative would be if any of the large holders who are members of the Steemit team would want to delegate their voting - exact same idea just using different accounts as the source of voting power so no agreements are broken.
The part of it I like the most is having the elected curators like elected witnesses. Indeed if we can get true delegated voting for all accounts then that would be ideal.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. Your wisdom and technical knowledge is always appreciated.
There is no particular reason to focus on the Steemit team. Any large (or even small; perhaps this makes even more sense!) stakeholders can delegate their voting power to others, as is being done by Curie and other existing curation groups. Steemit is developing some curation guild features for a future version of the code, which can be added to the mix when they are ready, but the idea of cooperative and delegated curation is something that can, and is, being done right now.
You are right I think that would be the ideal situation if everyone could delegate their voting power and up until now the only real way to do it is with groups like Curie. I do like the idea of electing curators like witnesses though and I suppose if we can get delegated voting working for everyone that would be the situation.
My reference to the Steemit team was in case they were hesitating or wanting to test the system out on a small scale before rolling it out to everyone. It could be a pilot run to iron out any issues or problems.
I do not agree it is ideal for everyone to delegate their voting. A large population of independent, individually-invested, and diverse users with different interests and perspectives is a far healthier way to allocate voting power than recentralizing it under a relatively few designated (and presumably less- or un-invested) curators.
For those who choose to delegate their voting, that can probably add value over not voting at all, but forcing that model on everyone is not a good idea.
In fact if it were feasible to get rid of elected witnesses and have every stakeholder sign blocks instead of a relatively centralized small group, without giving up the specific operational and governance advantages that it brings, I'd be in favor of doing so. I see no such compelling reason to centralize curation with this form of system-wide delegation.
I hadn't considered that.
I think it would be a great temptation to delegate voting to someone else because it is a lot of work for not much reward (or so it seems).
A global option would likely cause more centralisation as you say due to the temptation to pass off your voting power to someone else. Thank you for pointing it out.
One way that could potentially mitigate this would be to only allow a certain percentage of voting power to be delegated.
Then you run in to the potential issue that due to the way the system works if people only pass of a percentage and then don't bother voting it makes no difference - since the rewards would adjust to the amount of voting being carried out.
This would make it a pointless change.
I think I see more and more the dilemma of running an endeavour like Steemit.
Every time you try to fix one thing you and up breaking something else.
Luckily we have a lot people in the community to scrutinise things in advance.
I agree that if DV were to be implemented some kind of measures would need to be taken to reduce the centralisation.
The problem is we do also currently have a degree of centralisation due to the large amounts of SP held by a few individuals. It would be a matter of striking the right balance and making a positive change.
Excellent points as always.
Ok @smooth I agre with you but now the question is... how many investors do we have??? How many investors came in the last 30-60 days??? I don't think so many. So We should do something to bring oxygen to Steemit (social media). Because this project if will continue like this... will collapse soon... and this is a message clear since the end of August.
There are absolutely investors in the last 30-60 days. I see that 6 days ago you sent some coins to Poloniex, presumably to sell them to "cash out". (I don't mean to call you out specifically, as sending coins to an exchange to cash out is a perfectly normal and expected thing to do; this is for illustration) Who do you think bought those coins when you sold them?
Scare away investors (even more than what has already been done; this is hardly an investor-friendly platform) and you might as well just turn out the lights right now. We've already seen a preview of this with the price and reward pool down roughly 90%. Consider the effect of another 90% or more.
I agree we need to breathe some life, but that has to include also not scaring off or (proving their fears correct by) screwing over investors. Improvements to the platform (some of which I'm sponsoring in the form of alternate interfaces) have to happen alongside maintaining an investor-friendly approach in order for there to even be a platform.
True Smooth infact I consider you one of the best in steemit as always promotive of new and nice things (i.e. you support RHW) that is an amazing thing.
I mean could be nice create a channel on Rocket chat or whatever you want to meet up and organise what to do to bring steemit back (back to april-may and I was here at that time) in the way that who have ideas @thecriptofiend or @logic just to do an example can share the opinion.
I suppose we don't need to write posts making profit to share a good idea but seems to be the only way to have a chat with you guys.
Honestly talking people buy and sell SBD or Steem to do speculations or to make any profit.
I have noticed that several people left, there is a post that I read yesterday where is telling that steemit counts 100k+ people but I can see always less posts and this means that something is wrong.
I am not on Steemit with the idea to become rich writing posts (of course at the beginning it was) but to be part of a system that if will find a good way could become a successor of Facebook.
@logic just create a post about people that needs help. Now think, if really we can support people (after verifying the truth) guess how many people will come here to support instead of pay several companies that says that are helping but we don't have proof of it (in Italy we have "8x1000").
Investors will come... Governments will come and will invest money.
Now think about all the old people that of course would like to help who really needs but of course will not create an account on steemit but could donate 1 dollar or whatever they want.
Think about 10 million of people that know that we are helping as well (a part make profit) means at least 10million dollars that could be given to all the users as SP and increase the voting power and we can be always more helpful for people in need!
This is just my idea. Stop making only whale and users profits. Let's give a sense of all of this!
bingo.
This was an excellent idea that Craig talked about in his video. There is much need for this. Great content creators are leaving because they don't feel they have visibility. This will also bring up the quality of the content because people will feel that they actually have a better shot at getting seen and actually earning something for the work they put in. It could also provide an additional income source for the people curating since our own accounts can't earn hardly anything from that aspect of the system until we have way more power. I'm Resteeming this.
Thank you. Yes - one good example is the fact that hardly anyone watches videos on Steemit - which is why Craig doesn't get the traffic his posts deserve. It has been the same case with some of your videos too.
This is a superb idea. I really can't think of a downside beyond increased complexity, but as you pointed out we already have witnesses and the fact is, nothing about this system is simple but we are all gradually coming to understand it better. This would be an incredibly powerful means of extracting new value from the biggest whale account and super-charging the appropriate distribution of steem. Brilliant!
Thanks hope it gets the attention of the people who can do it:)
I would like to throw my hat into the ring as a potential "super curator," if it were to ever happen. The trending page is just...not good for business, to put it nicely.
Great - hopefully the team will see this.
That's a great idea, I think anyway to increase the distribution and further decentralize this platform would be good. The largest criticism I hear of steemit is they don't want to join because "steemit is a ponzy scam" because the distribution is so centralized. I personally don't find that to be the case but if there is a way to decentralize it more especially to those who do not use steemit yet, that would be a good thing. Great article.
Thank you. Yes I think this solution would work because of the fact that SC would be elected and could be rotated. It would definitely democratise things and mean that there was less pressure on the current whales too.
Coming from the persons who reside in democracies... those statements don't hold much weight.
I think it's a good idea! I came here to read. I comment on posts that I like but I don't really want to make posts.
With my low SP, Curation really doesn't earn me anything.
Great it would be a good fit for someone like you and might allow people to delineate between being curators and posters due to the greater rewards.
Being a Super Curator would fix that.
Great idea! Should certainly help people feel more inclined to join. Especially, when more people would make more Steem and improve the speed of amount of joining Steemians!
Exactly. Assuming it can be made to work and there aren't any problems it would definitely help and act as a way to motivate people to curate well.
There is another way forward, which is for minnows and dolphins to vote.
If there were 3800 accounts active in the last 24 hours and about 500 articles and most of them only got about 6 or 7 votes, then it's because most of those accounts didn't bother to vote.
People need to vote. Go to the new section and vote for at least twenty articles a day. The problem is that most arn't voting and those who afre are voting for just a few authors. Spread the love people!
Most people don't vote - you are right. I think they see very little reward for their work. This would help with that.
https://steemit.com/@cygnus/curation-rewards
https://steem.li/curators
There's tons of rewards to be had curating the top curator has like 300sp and is making over 69% returns. He's human too not a bot (as far as I have heard and can tell personally). Like I said, there are tons of rewards to be had curating people just need to get off their fat asses and expecting a free hand out.
The problems on steemit are nothing different from anywhere else, people are fucking lazy, that's it. I think this proposal is completely unneeded personally. What happened when we dumped more rewards on the scene in July, when people were making 1000's for their posts? Why they just went and dumped it on the markets and helped aid in the tanking of the price, real team players they were helping to build the system.
The people who need to be rewarded are the people who are HOLDING AND PRODUCING QUALITY. Not one of the other, at least right now, and when I say rewarded I mean with the big payouts like 100's to 1000's.
So yeah I think the concept is good, and in the future yes this could be implemented, but right now steemit's success depends on who they upvote, not how they upvote.
All my opinion of course.
I read that too. What isn't clear is 69% of what? I also think the statement that there are a ton of rewards is BS when you consider that that user made 5.3 SP this week. That is not in my definition or the definition of anyone I know a tonne of rewards.
It seems your perception is in direct contrast to most other people I've spoken to, including myself.
its 69 % of the total steem power he has... over the year... that wasnt clear, or am I wrong there? 69% returns are phenomenal, just because the user has a small amout of steem doesnt change the perspective. I also realize my opinion is the unpopular one, I 100% agree with you there, and I'm not saying the community has to go with it, I'm merely stating it, and as someone who has invested a few grand I think that should be alright?
I feel this way because I'm making 16% returns very easily, I dont watch, I dont open steemit every five minutes, I just use it, read what I like and upvote the authors I enjoy as I see them. I'm putting in zero effort when it comes to curating other then just using steemit and i'm getting that, so to me, I see curation as fine and dandy.
I've actually written a post on how I beleive curation should be reallocated from anyone with over 15,000 SP in their curation rewards to the people under 10 or 5,000SP. It was merely a rough idea but I said I'd be willing to give up 20% of my rewards to help distribution, again because I'm finding it that easy. I kept thinking maybe rewards were skewed in the favour of the whales (and dolphins), but with their overall sp slowing dropping (even though they are selling) I figured it was slowing redistributing downward. Then I saw the post about @cygnus and thought holy shit, it is possible.
EDIT I need to revoke my previous opinion on this idea, I agree with it, I completely forgot steem is handed out daily regardless this will merely spread out the people who can give it out. So thumbs up to the post idea, however I'm still of the same position that curation rewards are actually paying decently, if not exceptionally, and if anything a little redistribution would be alright in the beginning to help steemit diverse.
Great response! I agree that's why if we got delegated voting it would solve a lot of these problems.
This seems to be and excellent idea. Upvoted and resteemed. Hope it reaches the right people!
Thanks yes me too:)