RE: Why the Whale War might be good for Steemit
The large scale crony voting risks literally turning Steem into a Ponzi scheme, as I've further explained here: https://steemit.com/steem/@troglodactyl/is-steem-a-ponzi-scheme
Partly this can be solved (or at least managed) by continually building consensus on definitions of abuse and what should be downvoted. In the long run, I think we'd be well served by a few protocol changes:
Downvotes should get curation rewards. Steem is based on the premise that most of the stakeholders will vote in the network's best interest to increase the value of their stake. This should be just as true regarding downvotes as upvotes, but currently dealing with spam and abuse is uncompensated. When a post or comment is downvoted below 0, the voters who downvoted it should be rewarded, just as upvoters are rewarded for curating good content.
There should be curation penalties for losing voting wars. Currently, shortsighted stakeholders see no incentive for avoiding abuse. They feel they have nothing to lose, because each of them think their own actions are too insignificant to impact the price of Steem. If there were curation penalties (negative curation rewards) for downvoting something that settled to net positive votes or upvoting something that settled to negative, then stakeholders who more often than not oppose what others consider best for the network would have reason to sell their stake and move on.
Increase the length of the vesting schedule. The level of abusive voting indicates that many voters don't have the longterm interests of the network in mind. The length of the vesting schedule should be gradually increased after #2 is implemented to give abusive stakeholders time to see what's happening and sell out gracefully.
Return to a non-linear reward curve. Linear rewards reduce the incentive to generate consensus on what is desirable and what is undesirable. If the R^2 curve is deemed excessive maybe we should go with R^1.5, but R^1 is a step in the wrong direction. Combined with #2, curation penalties and rewards should be calculated symmetrically on the same curve, with exponentially higher penalties and higher rewards for posts settling with stronger consensus.
This largely seems to be based on the assumption that most downvotes are deserved. In my experience, that is not always the case. Also, the reason for the downvote is disagreement on rewards payout, then why would 0 be the threshold? Just because you don't believe that a post should make $500 doesn't mean that it should make 0.
As I said, Steem is based on most stakeholders voting in the network's interest (which if the system is properly designed will also be in their personal interest). If this is true, then most of the time when a downvote is not deserved people will come together to counter it with upvotes. If that's what generally happens and if when it happens the downvoter suffers a penalty then continued abusive downvoting becomes much less likely. If most of the stakeholders are malicious and will downvote good content just to watch the world burn, no protocol change will save the network.
The change I propose would make downvoting less useful for rewards disagreement, but I see that as a much less serious issue than outright abuse. It's imperfect, but I still think it would be an improvement.
I think there is a really, really simple way to deal with this. Bring back the four posts per day rule. Before HF19 we had a mechanism on steemit that allowed all users to post four posts per day and receive maximum rewards. At the fifth post, maximum reward payout dropped I think to 75%, sixth 50%, seventh 25% etc. I think this is the best way to mitigate this type of abuse, and would be a really simple solution to this problem.
four post are too many for a whale. i think the number of posts for whales should be less. may be once a week. and there should be a limit to steem power an account. it should not be unlimited
If it's actually purely abuse this is easy to circumvent with extra accounts. Just make 10 bot accounts and post 4 times a day from each of them. A real user trying to build an audience would suffer from splitting across multiple accounts, but an abusive reward harvester wouldn't have a problem with it.
What if minnows were to be protected against whale flagging them. Might encourag them to "do the right thing"
If minnows were protected against downvotes we'd see even more new 'minnow' spambots overrunning the network, impervious to all countermeasures.
1% max on anyone share of the common pot?
Remember we can't control how many accounts a person has and how many are bots, so any effort against truly deliberate abuse that relies on a per-account or per-post limit can be circumvented with more accounts generating more spam.
1 post per day, 10 steem max on all the post. Your precious spam network is not worth the effort and more ppl can get coffee money. And a monthly vote on whose account should be closed and balance burned, like witness vote but more witch hunt
Totally agree. Minnows (like @haejin) should be protected against greedy parasite whales (@berniesanders) so that they don't have to rely on 'protection' from other whales like ranchorelaxo.
I think you do not know what those terms mean.
:D I hope this comment was on purpose.