So, You want to change the reward pool?
There is talk of changing the economic structure of Steem's blockchain again.
The first change being discussed is to put some of the curve back into the reward pool, currently it is linear.
If you want to know how that plays out, just take the posts that have the most rewards, and take rewards from all of the rest of the posts and add it to those posts. It basically makes the reward pool heavier on the top. (See Trending Page)
My account might even be big enough now to benefit from this, but I can't see how it is going to give anyone incentives to vote for someone else. Nor do I think it is going to change engagement or distribution, in fact I think it would hurt.
Now add the other "idea" I've been reading about. Increase Curation Rewards, by giving a larger percentage of the stake to voters instead of posters. It sounds good for engagement on the surface, but in reality most of the votes are cast by SteemVoter and various automated voters. Those who write those bots also will understand the curation code the best and be able to "game" the system effectively. It would be easy just set up your autovoter and watch your passive investment grow by voting for the highest rewarded Authors.
Add those two things together and you have HUGE incentives to vote for those who you think are going to receive the most votes, set up on an Autovoter and walk away and earn. In my opinion our two biggest issues are engagement and distribution and I fail to see how either of these fixes would help to address those issues. In combination I think they could be make the problem much worse,
I have no idea how serious this push is and what the odds are they can talk SteemIt Inc into coding the changes that are being called for. I am going on record to say, I do not want to see us change directions right now before we get communities and SMTs, and I do not support these changes at this time and I think they mainly benefit the largest accounts who receive the most votes. In other words it would be a step backward.
We can keep tweaking the math on the blockchain, but the values of the largest stakeholders are already built into the economy and you do not provide a spirit of giving by changing math. If you want more users to be rewarded, simply vote for more users.
I know things are not perfect, but I do believe we are seeing improvements in quality and meaningful engagement, but of course I can only base that on my own perspective.
Curiously watching how this will play out. If you were not here when we had a "curve" in the reward pool, make sure you understand there is already history in place on how well that worked out for the average end-user. I'm watching some interesting discussions go on and as always I am willing to listen to the other side, but for now, I do not support these changes or any delay in things we are already waiting for.
You can view some of the discussion here
I upvoted. Not because I necessarily agree (I'm in the process of thinking this through more thorougly).
But because the rewards were sitting at $49.95, and my upvote caused the payout to start with a 5, which gave me a feeling of importance and power, temporarily filling the infinitely empty void in my heart with an illusionary feeling of purpose - the hopeless void has been left there by the love I never had as a kid.
Thanks, Steemit.
Haha! You are funny, only now the price seems to have dropped and I am back to 4... So, I guess you just don't matter that much! :)
Yeah, it's just like my father said.
@whatsup,
If it's curve lets make it linear, if it's linear lets make it curve! This way we introduce a change!If curve not work lets go back to linear!
Whatever they introduce, we all will find a way to make money!
Cheers~
It's going to be interesting to see what happens after Hard Fork 20.
I didn't like the curvy rewards, especially because they rely on big whales giving you upvotes and they aren't doing that nowadays.
Every now and then I make a post that does exceptionally well and I'm not sure how I would be affected by that change, but I'm against it at any rate.
I also think it would encourage the buyers to be even more proactive with the bid bots. That's something that might not be good for the system.
As for curation rewards...... I don't know. As a content creator curation is something that I don't look at very often.
I think there is some fantasy that the bidbots will go away. I am not sure. I really don't even know how seriously to take the discussion.
Always an interesting site: SteemIt.
Maybe exponentially reducing the vote value when voting for same person in 24 hrs. That will stop some exploitation. Stop sp delegation and people will start curating manually. Tie voting key with something more critical like transfer to stop vote selling.
I'm Interested to see how it all plays out. I am not opposed to vote buying and selling, some people want to build a "blogging site". I want to build a Steem Economy.
That makes Steem an asset, one that can be bought, sold, rented and leased for various business ideas. Who am I to tell a whale what they have to do with their stake?
The important thing to understand is that undistributed rewards pool shares are also an asset, and buying and selling them is no different from buying and selling any other. If you can get them for less than their value then you're winning.
I think the mistake here is that you're assuming that the reward pool goes undistributed. My understanding is that if an account holding the standard 14.5 SP placed a single vote, and that was the only vote of the day, it would effectively distribute the entire reward pool to the content that it voted on.
Bidbots reduce your ability to grant rewards & in turn, negatively affect your curation returns. I think if the bidbots didn't exist to delegate to, the overall payouts would be larger as a result of inactive users leaving their stake unused - or perhaps if they were not inactive, the distribution would be wider than just those who want to pay to have their spam upvoted.
I've seen the dilution happen, it's very real - the 'pending rewards' dropdown says 'pending' for a reason.
I love this idea, because it will atleast make exploitation a little harder to do on a large scale. Stopping sp delegation is also a good idea, because it might make the bid bots less powerful. I'm all for blocking their power.
bidbots force us to become investors in our community. Return on investment is maximized when you have investors on one side, worker bees in the middle and the speculating public on the other side.
In our case, we play all three roles simultaneously!
I have stated earlier that if one content creator has to reward another, then it is due to four reasons: quid pro quo, making money, altruism or genuine appreciation.
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged had a model of innovators working with each other and was the earliest block chain. but in practice it is a hard one to pull off.
the better model is to become outwardly focused. readers on the outside, no bid bots in the middle and creators on the inside. i think SMTs will help in this case if we can get a viable business model going.
this means that in addition to attracting a Medium or Hackernoon, we must also have our own group that will attract mass readership.
otherwise the law of diminishing returns will take over.
if we still try and persist in making money out of each other then:
it just makes me wonder whether blockchain will solve the problems that we expect it to do. will making transparency a virtue and money an everyday incentive, produce the results? Writing is hard stuff and generally requires skill, perseverance and luck. are we expecting too much of steemit once all the dust has settled down? i know it must have been easier in the beginning but that is always true of any venture. when the gloss has worn off, the enduring value must shine. Just like the moon, will steemit be reduced to a mere reflection of our own base motivations?
Great comment!
Yep, well to me there fine as they are. I'm open of course. But seems pretty good right now. Thanks @whatsup for posting and sharing this
So basically, people with the money to pay for loads of voting bots (who are currently boosting their own posts up to $100) will get even more benefit at the cost of people trying to be 'fair and honest'.
And with this, voting bots will gain an even bigger income, giving everyone even less incentive to do their own work.
Wow, how many bad mistakes can one make?
Resteeming this for more attention.
I didn't actually think through how the bidbots would be impacted if they are impacted at all. I actually think the impact would be on the autovoters.
Something I've never used. If these changes go through, and I don't know how likely this is, it will probably be the end of my manual curation. I'll just pick a few friends to upvote and put my energy elsewhere.
Hmm, I've been using a combination of the two for a while now. I use autovote on a few authors for two reasons: I feel they are under appreciated, or they have shown me a lot of support through many thoughtful comments and I want to return some of the love. Most of these auto votes are around 20% strength, so I have plenty left for manual curation.
I don't always have time to go through my feed and there are some people I feel deserve my support even when I don't have time. Whenever I do have time though, I go through my feed to find good posts to upvote. After that, I check out the rest of Steemit to find good posts elsewhere.
I like doing it like this, because it means I'm never at 100% VP, which would feel like a waste. I'd rather support a few people automatically so my VP gets put to good use.
I don't think this would change if they do implement these changes. I still want to have VP left to upvote random posts I enjoy.
Hey @whatsup, it's the first time I come upon one of your posts, I believe, so I gave you a follow :)
I completely agree with your points. There are too many upvote bots out there and automated curation systems to justify that change as better for everyone. As someone who has grown organically in the last year, I've seen how it can be so rewarding just to curate and post with human interaction without the use of any bots of that nature. Human curators are different, you tag them and they see valuable content and help people get noticed. Bots and automated curation systems don't see the quality of the content. They don't see the difference between my smoothie post or my videos. Someone who wants to upvote certain posts, by being there humanly and physically, they can select what content to upvote. They have freedom of choice.
One thing I've mentioned before and I'll say again here, I think a better solution would be to increase the amount of upvotes allocated at 100% curation. With only 5 upvotes, a lot of people don't know if they should upvote or not. That being said, I'm the kind of person who just upvotes posts I like at 100% ALL THE TIME and then comments I enjoyed at 25%, typically. I will upvote until I am down to 0% some days, if I am very active, because no matter the value of my upvote, I want those people to know that I upvoted their content because I found value in it. But a lot of people conserve their upvotes, which is understandable. With more upvotes at 100%, and THEN more upvotes per each percentage, people will be more incentivised to give out more upvotes, to curate more, as opposed to being stingy. The solution IMO is not to give more of the payout to the curators. That just takes away from content creators, and then who's going to want to keep creating content that has value, other than people like you and me. Most people will resort to spam or just post random pics with no great effort (not talking about photography posts) and just share anything, really, while those who post valuable content will suffer. And once again, the bots will win.
That's my take on it, anyway.
Nice to read about other ideas. Too be honest, I dont know what is best in terms of post rewards curve and curation cut from the post rewards. I do know we have super large issue at hand. One of them is the influence of vote bots on the reward pool and the other one is quality of content.
You wrote:
I curate music related post and go through many posts every single day. At some point, earlier this year, the number of quality post was increasing, but I think we got a lot of new users into our community, therefore logical the absolute numbers of quality posts was increasing. However, what I see now, is very much different:
All of the above is based on what I see happening in #music and other music related tags.
I don't have the solution, but what I think is we need to start testing. We see current problems already for a long time, but nothing has been done to test solutions. Steemit is still in Beta, which means to me, we shall test, change something and see what happens. Not sure how ling test cycles shall be, maybe 2 to 3 months? We could have already had 2 to 3 test cycles since the last HF.
Added to that: Communities and SMT. We can wait for these the arrive, but when will they arrive? Given the situation we are in, the arrival of these features maybe way to late. Those who are here for the community, to interact, will be able to jump to another community since more and more competitor networks are hitting the market. And soon ONO will be available in international version and running on the EOS network. This network is quite similar to Steemit; Time will tell if ONO can make their promises real; But it will be a strong competitor to Steemit and Steem, I'm pretty sure about that.
I wonder what will happen with bidbots when TRENDING channels are taken away from all the UIs to the Steem blockchain.
Interesting thoughts. I also don't pretend to hold the absolute truth, or know what will happen. We are all just doing our best to predict and guess the next best thing for the site to do.
Yeh, indeed :) That is why I like test cycles. One change a cycle, and thoroughly analyse the results, share with the community, to further fuel ideas, suggestions, opinions. I wish our witnesses would play a much more active role in trying to keep the community evolving to a long term sustainable one.
Government(SteemIt Inc) over site and regulation is rarely beneficial.
"If you want more users to be rewarded, simply vote for more users. "
This is a better solution, but it takes personal responsibility supported by effort and action without guaranteed results. It appears to be much easier to complain and clamor for someone else to make it fair.