RE: Proposing Steem Equality 0.19.0 as the Next Fork
Your account has voting power as a percentage, 0-100%. When you vote, you consume a percentage of the voting power. The delta is consumed and is used to determine the exact number of shares you give to content (Those shares are then used to determine the actual reward at the time of payout, but more shares means more rewards). Currently this is tuned such that voting 40 times in a day breaks even with how quickly your voting power regenerates. Voting power will regenerate from 0% to 100% over 5 days. 40 votes a day over 5 days means that you use 1/200th of your voting power (or 0.5%). That all assumes you only do 100% weight votes. The actual consumed voting power can be less if you do not vote 100%. In which case it will be harder to vote down to the regeneration breakpoint. For every second that you are at 100% voting power and not voting, the regenerated voting power is effectively lost.
The proposed change will allow you to use more of your voting power in a single vote so that it is easier to reach the breakpoint and fewer users will have wasted voting power.
The voting algorithm applies
used_powerboth to the value rewarded and the draw-down fromcurrent_power.Thus the total value which can be rewarded from any level of voting power is always the same for an equal sized section of the voting power drawn-down.
If we set
a₁to the value of a 100% vote andrto the factor that the voting power decreases for each 100% vote, then the total value of the maximum possible votes in rapid succession before any regeneration of voting power is an infinite geometric series:Thus if
a₁is 100% of its value andris 0.98, then total value of maximum possible votes is 50 times its value for a 100% vote. And ifa₁is 80% of its value then total value of maximum possible votes is 40 times its value for a 100% vote. And ditto fora₁at 60%, 40%, 20% of its value then total value of maximum possible votes is 30, 20, 10 times its value for a 100% vote respectively. Thus we can see any sectioning of the voting power provides equal total value. This is because more votes can be made at the lower voting power levels because the voting power decreases slower.I'm not sure if it's a good idea to allow users to use "mega"vote, it will increase self voting a lot and could be a really bad combination with a linear curve. The feature will make it easier for selfvoters to hide.
Please consider all the implications, i personally think it is risky.
I actually think a "mega" vote makes it less likely self-voters would hide. When we consider attacks such as these we often ask ourselves what we would do to pull it off.
So, what would I do to pull off a self voting attack with linear rewards? I would make sock puppets that would post and vote on each other. I would post a lot so that I could spread out my stake without the posts ever getting paid enough to draw attention. I would never want to have large payouts but I would slowly siphon off the reward fund. Frankly, I wouldn't care how large someone's vote would be because I would probably not vote with full weight anyways.
If you have an attack that does rely on larger votes, I am eager to hear it!
The attack is to sign on for five minutes, make your 4 votes, and then sign off. In doing so you parasitically dilute the contribution of those who actually care enough to participate more meaningfully.
This comment has been very enlightening.
Currently if an author wants to give all power to himself he will have to selfvote 200+ posts per day but with the "mega vote" anyone can just write a few posts and give 100% of the power to himself. It's going to be more visible but it's also going to be a lot more legitimate and easy to upvote yourself.
Why would someone upvote other people when he can write just a few posts and give all the money to himself instead? The only thing that would prevent this behavior is curation rewards unfortunately most users don't care about curation rewards.
But this is visible and will likely be downvoted. Smaller payouts on more posts is not as visible and less likely to be the target of downvotes.
While I am a fan of letting people increase the % power of their votes, I do see @someonewhoisme 's point.
You say it will be more visible and likely downvoted... but by who? Who is going to police how often people are posting/upvoting themselves and decide how much is too much?
If a medium sized person were to use all their voting power to only vote for their own posts, minnow flags would have no effect and you would have to find people with larger stakes and convince them to use a similarly large portion of their voting power to cancel it out.
While you are correct, minnow downvotes will also have a larger impact (because of linear rewards) and the whale voting experiment shows that large players are willing to forgo their rewards for the betterment of the platform.
Are you a steem developer @vandeberg?
You can't expect people to act in certain ways especially when there is little incentives for them to do so.
I proposed a few month ago to create a moderator/investor class https://steemit.com/steem/@snowflake/guardian-of-the-steem-universe-a-different-perspective-on-the-role-of-whales-within-steem-ecosystem-part-2
.
This is necessary to align incentives with everyone and create a balanced ecosystem.
Users in the investor class could be the guardian of the platform and could be encouraged to moderate. But don't expect people to moderate out of the goodness of their own heart, it's not going to happen. @smooth and @abit are the exception to the rule.
@fingolfin also made a good point below. Users are not going to go around police each other and downvote self-voted posts.
I guess I am just saying this could be another example of not completely being able to forecast how this would work in reality. You say it will be likely downvoted, but do you currently know how many posts get downvoted or why?
Other than pure flag wars between people and the current whale experiment, I would say most of the flags I see come from people like steemcleaners in an attempt to fight abuse. I'm not sure self voting would really fall into the abuse category and your average user isn't going to check the authors voting history and the % power of those votes when they read a random post.
How will the average user know that random author John Smith only upvotes his own posts at the max % allowed? Even if you did a little digging on every author of every post you read, how much upvoting yourself is too much? Using 90% of your voting power on yourself? 80, 70, 60.. where do you draw a line that says this cant stand and I should downvote it?
I agree. People are not going to waste their voting power to downvote self-voters, it's not going to happen unless they have real incentives to do so.
Like you said there is no way to determine if the self-voters deserve a downvote, this is going to create a very toxic environnement if people start to downvote left , right and center.
If only they had listened...
OK, so what I'm reading is that the way Steemit calculations work, it's more accurate to think of my voting pool as that I get 200 votes in a period of five days (which of course averages to 40 a day). So in that case, if I know that I'm going to take a few days off, it would make sense for me to vote 40 votes for each of those days ahead of the break (not after it) in order to fully use my votes. So theoretically, I could vote 200 times (full strength) on a Monday, and that would cover all my voting all the way through Friday. Then I'd have to wait until Saturday to start all over with the next 200 votes?
If I understand that part correctly, then I would propose to base it on seven days, not five days, because most of us think in terms of weeks. So, allow a user 280 votes over seven days, and if the user wants to use all the votes up on Monday, then they are depleted until the following Monday when 100% returns.
Another way to look at it is if I decide to take a couple days off voting on weekends, I could set my 40 votes on Friday to be worth three times as much so that I don't have to vote 120 times to actually use up all my power, but could use up the same amount with just the 40 votes. This would be ideal for me because after several weeks of tracking my voting habits I recognize that by the time I've hit 40 votes I'm done in terms of both time and mental resources. So yes, I would love to be able to double or triple my normal voting strength on days when I know that I will be taking the next few days off. So if this is in the works, I'm all for it.
Thanks so much for taking the time to explain it to me.
Just to make sure I comprehend correctly -- are you implying the following:
After "mega-upvoting", at full-weight, it would take a total of 5 days to regenerate all voting power?
Mega-flags will also exist? (This might be dangerous)
We are not proposing allowing use of all your voting power at once, but more than you currently can. And yes, downvotes can be larger as well. But following the principles that currently exist, they must be larger or else you cannot counter users that are using the larger upvote.