RE: UserAuthority (UA): explanations, applications and implications
The diminishing returns implementation is something I've supported from the first time I heard of it suggested by @rycharde some months back, in this post. On point 13 I'll quote it
Self-voting and voting cliques cannot be eliminated. Indeed, for curators self-voting can be important in triggering votes from their followers. It is also a waste of social power to spend considerable time on negative interactions at the cost of more positive ones. Therefore, there can be a rule that voting for the same user, whether oneself or another, will decrease the power of each subsequent vote, within a limited period. For example, take the last 10 votes of a user and, if a new vote is given to a user already voted then that new vote may be worth 90% or 80% of what it would normally be. This can be scaled down to the point that further votes have even less value. I repeat, this will not stop such behaviour but will decrease the reward pool that it generates and therefore mitigates some of the effects on the whole system.
Pretty much the same thing, though we can quibble on the details. I'm currently looking at ways to implement it in a new SMT I'm thinking of because it's extremely unlikely Steemit will implement this even though it's a great idea. It's also an anti-spam measure, increasing the number of accounts needed to take advantage of the free SP delegation by orders of magnitude.
Maybe you have a better insight into internal Steemit discussions than I have, and I would be curious why actually probability is so low that this idea will be considered one day? Do they just don't like the idea or would it be very complicated (respectively needed too many system resources - one had to save the information who upvoted whom for a while ...) to implement it?
I ran it by several witnesses at the time the post was published and it just didn't sit well with them. Most of them didn't agree with the idea that clique voting should be disincentivized in the first place. And the others thought it would be too complicated and processor intensive. And they have a point.
But really Steemit Inc. are very relucant to change anything so fundamental and their eyes are fixed on SMTs really, there's no political or engineering will for anything like this. I think a parameter change is as much as is likely to happen. Don't forget that for any hardfork, even if it is crafted over months, it's up to the witnesses to agree to adopt it in the end.
Still I think it would be a good thing to do to spread things out more. The rewards are heavily going back to the top guys so it's not great for the platform as a whole, in my opinion. People disagree with me on that, usually saying that the large investors deserve the "return". Well their return is so massive that I think they should be economically encouraged to curate with a wider net.
This. It's easy to like rewards when they're pouring in, but every reward attained comes at the cost of an other's rewards, and at this stage Steemit should be investing in growth, which depriving new accounts of rewards definitely doesn't do.
It's not that people able to game the system are somehow nefarious, but that they're gaming the platform out of utility for many, and this shoots themselves in the foot.