Why didn't facebook implement the dislike button?
Despite most social media platforms use of a "down vote" button, facebook refused to give in to the many petitions for a "dislike" button, opting instead for emoji's or "reactions".
If Mark Zuckerberg believed that a "dislike" button was too negative for a social network then what happens when you add monetary penalties?
Steemit is 1 year into this exciting experiment and we've seen ups and downs. One thing we can say for certain though, is most users don't like to be flagged.
There may still need to be a way to "flag" in cases of "abuse", but there are ways that we could diminish the need to use the down-vote to redistribute the rewards of a subjectively "over-valued" post.
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Payout Recommendations
When a large stakeholder or group of stakeholders upvote a post the payout estimate goes up. Lets say the payout reaches $50. When the first curators voted they voted for it to make more than $0.00. It was the last voters who pushed it to $50. How do we know the first upvoters consider this an appropriate payout? The only information given to the Steem Network was an upvote along with a weight, which doesn't say very much. If stakeholders could vote for a payout recommendation we could prevent the need to reign payouts in, because in many cases they may not become excessive in the first place. The system has more information available to it to make better payout decisions earlier.
We already use Median in Steem Because it is a Robust Statistic
The price of Steem Backed Dollars is determined by the median of the price feed over the last week. This reduces the volatility of the peg, while preventing outliers from having adverse impact. These are the same objectives we should have with payout estimates! Volatility is the source of the pain of loss aversion. Excess is what we are trying to police with downvotes. While there will still always be scope for deliberate abuse, preventing the need to police unintentional excess may reduce most of the problem.
I believe that I already asked you this question, but do not remember that you have answered me.
If 100 000 users will say... that some post is helpful and an author should revive $1, how much this author should receive. $1? Curators during voting cannot know for how many users something can be useful.
Or lets say, that 10 users will say, that some post is really helpful and an author should receive $100, how much the author should then get? $100?
If I didn't answer before I probably didn't understand the question.
I think what you are saying is the more people liking something the more it should be worth. But this of course could be a simple cat meme. People can judge real value for themselves, I don't believe the value depends on how many people valued it. If it really was helpful then users would vote a lot more than $1.
If the 10 users who say that a post should receive $100 have a lot of Steem Power, then the author may receive that payout. However, if they are 10 minnows, then they likely wouldn't receive near that amount.
I am unsure, but imagine that if the sum of all the median payout votes for each post was lower than the total value of steem in the reward pool, then every author would actually be recieving a little more than the median.
Maybe @demotruk can clarify if I'm right on that.
No, if we imagine this implemented, the median threshold would always apply. What would happen is that the Steem reward pool would be able to have a daily surplus. That surplus would mean that more payouts would be possible in the future instead of consistently paying out the same amount. This could enable Steem to sometimes facilitate much larger projects via a single payout.
Would that not be prone to abuse? If whales could intentionally accumulate a surplus for example, and then use one post to vote extremely highly on, bringing all the surplus rewards to one account?
The same amount of money is being paid out in total. The whales could just as easily extract rewards among many posts than one large post. As usual, large payouts will always require high levels of consensus (as long as downvotes are allowed).
IMO this kind of voting is against every User Experience guide. As they say "don't let me think" is what users are used to currently on the web. People do not like making decisions. Especially so difficult with numbers. Also... I do not like that fact, that with that system everything will be about the money. I am strongly against that.
We need to figure out how to design a system, which will allow us to calculate fair number for each post but still having minimal input from user.
I think the problem, if it is just one problem, is bots. No matter what the design, the bots will jump on any small imbalance and create an increasingly smaller number of highly upvoted posts. Somebody wrote a post a month or two ago about the real value on social media: attention. If upvoting required some hugely ugly and inelegant capcha, then @user will know for sure they are giving attention, and perhaps give more thought to curation, and the bots could go .... somewhere else.
[EDIT] And filling in the ugly capcha could be rewarded by a very small payment from a faucet.
I would love to lose the bots. I wrote a post myself a good while back about the attention economy and so did my brother @demotruk. If the bots cannot be stopped then it needs to be profitable to vote manually. Which would mean people putting real subjective thought into how they vote - something bots don't do as they follow a set of rules and don't really evaluate content. I think if manual curators are less predictable then the bots will have a harder time chasing the rewards.
I would like to see this idea fleshed out. As I currently understand it, there is no way to prohibit bots (because of the open API). "people putting real subjective thought into how they vote" is extremely ill defined and if it were to work in any way like the Steem we have, it would need to be worked into the game theory.
The problem is that we as people are pretty predictable. I know there are a few amazing AI bots out there, like @biophil 's is supposed to be, that do not just chase whales.
In my view, we need to offer alternative bots that are not purely interested in rewards, at least as an option. That was one of my goals with my own bot 🙂
This is not possible on the Steem blockchain, but could be on Steemit.com
So the bots could easily get around it, as things stand right now?
@richardjuckes yes, it's impossible to prevent bots on the Steem blockchain.
Personally, I don't think it is desirable to stop bots either.
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Yes. A Capcha is a web front end "wall". For it to work, the only way to access the web service must be through a managed website, or with managed access to the backend. Steem is accessible directly to the backend.
I'll actually be posting about it today and laying out why in detail.
Another solution will have to be thought of, or another way of thinking about the problem.
The normal users are minnows. If the developers create the user interface, users could choose to only see an "upvote" which on the blockchain would automatically choose the highest payout for this users vote.
Whether we like it or not @noisy, steem is about money. Always has been, always will be.
I agree, there are UX concerns. For that reason I have suggested that for new users we could continue to have upvotes and downvotes as normal. It would simply be that the client would choose a high default recommendation for upvotes (for example a standard minnow upvote could provide a $1,000,000 payout recommendation. It would take an enormous number of minnow votes to ever actually reach this threshold).
My view of Steem is that it is a stakeholder governance system, designed to facilitate the collective decision making process of giving out money. Perhaps I am in the minority but I see Steem as inherently a monetary system, and that's not a bad thing.
Just to add, 100'000 users could really like a cat meme, which brought a smile to their day. That is of course valuable. But is it more valuable than than if somebody found the cure to a very rare disease..? Imagine there were only 10 users on steemit who had that disease and they all benefitted from 10'000 more smiles in their lifetime...
I don't think it's fair to say that something that is helpful to more people is more valuable than something that helps just 10 people.
I agree with you, the value is extremely subjective. One personz $1 is another personz $50. When the money isn't coming out of your pocket, the amounts could be wild.
You bring up a really good technical point, how to decide the actual payout. It should obviously be SP weighed, regardless of how many votes (as it is now), but then we're really just deciding a proportion of the reward pool. So it would be
(total reward pool value / total suggested reward value) * this suggested reward value = this actual reward value. The actual reward value would almost certainly never be the suggested.The counter argument to this is that a consensus could probably form along similar lines as it has now. In the beginning the rewards would be all over the place, and then as people get used to the system and more importantly, get used to the payouts they get, they will probably gravitate towards similar values.
This might be a really bad thing or maybe not! It's really hard to know, but I have the impression @dan (RIP) would not have agreed. Maybe that matters less now than it ever did. You could add to this @dragosroua 's suggestion that we have "skin in the game", i.e. it also costs the voter to up or down vote. I am speculatively certain that this would keep rewards much lower, but might even drive us to "undervalue" posts.
I think the problem with both of these ideas is that they have unknown group behavior outcomes, but then again, we're here to try things out right? 😄
100,000 users saying that a post should be paid out $1 is extremely strong consensus. It sounds like $1 is almost certainly to be an appropriate payout in that case. Steemit is not a tipping system where we each pay for the value we receive, it's a governance/budget system where we pay out as a collective. I think you are wrong that the collective cannot come to good decisions here, the collective is extremely good at coming to decisions like this when using a median, the phenomenon is known as "The Wisdom of Crowds".
It would require that the users have the stake to reach that threshold otherwise. The threshold only applies when the r-shares based payout would reach it otherwise.
Such an innovative idea you have here. Though, it may be both more ergonomic and efficient to have a slider which determines how much you think a post should be paid, instead of an upvote button. This slider could replace the current voting power slider as that would no longer be necessary.
Supposedly they don´t need the downvote since there are no rewards to be distributed. A like on facebook doesn´t have the same intention as an upvote on steemit. On steemit we a) appreciate value and b) reward it. On facebook it is just a) since there is no b).
In an environment (like steemit) where everybody is able to have influence on the distribution of wealth - while the degree of influence depends on the who (votes) and the when (is the vote given), everybody should have both the right to agree or disagree.
The payout amount is defined by the total amount of power the voting users decide to transfer. We have the opportunity to downvote, to not vote (which equals 0% power), and we have the opportunity to upvote from 1% till 100%.
That means that we have 201 different possibilities to evaluate a piece of content - from 100% disagreement over indifference (0%) until 100% agreement. That´s quite a lot, isn´t it?
In order to pay tribute to the general interest of keeping things simple, I wouldn´t add another driver in the voting process.
It's actually 2001 degrees, since you can go down another decimal point in the back end.
But I don't see that as equivalent, it's only 2001 degrees from bad to good. You still send very little information about what you think a payout should be with this voting system.
If the closer-to-linear rewards pool resolves the problems that we have with reward distribution right now, then I will agree. The system works well enough without adding (a tiny bit more) complexity. But adding a little more complexity is still preferable to a solution that doesn't work.
How would a bot estimate the ideal payout sum for an article?
In my opinion that's not implementable since it requires too much manual effort (upvoting, estimating % of power to provide, plus estimating desired payout sum and typing in).
That would be very little of Albert's purpose...;)
I'm not sure how the answer to your first question would affect the value of this proposal. The bot creator can choose any method they like for how they vote, including applying the defaults.
Did you read @the-oracool's suggestion for UX?
I would even expand on this. It could be a slider which actually rises exponentially, not linearly. Or it could be a button which you can either press for a standard upvote (defaults applied), or press and hold for a payout recommendation. As you hold, the payout recommendation could rise at exponential speed (holding for a second = $1, two seconds = $10, three seconds = $100 etc.
The UX of this can be done well, it's just a matter of coming up with what works best.
I am mainly thinking about new users and keeping things as simple, easy to handle and as understandable as possible.
Right now the power of a vote is defined by the power that I personally would like to allocate on a certain piece of content. A payout recommendation would separate the vote from the power that I am actually able to contribute. What if voters recommend 100$ but nobody is really able or willing to pay them?
Regarding the bots I am just saying that they don´t have the intelligence to really evaluate content according to its quality / value. A payout recommendation would need to answer the question: What is this piece of content worth and how much would you pay for it?
In case of bots it could only be a default setting, which means that the majority of estimations given would not reflect the true quality / value.
To me this is not a technological question, it is an ideological question :)
Great post and I totally agree ! Thanks for the mention and shareing this with everyone , its a great idea ! 👍😉UPPED AND RESTEEMED !
i think its hard to implement this. Unless you want to turn into akasha. they actually pay the authors in amounts, but this means it goes out of your pocket. have you thought about the tech behind this?
I'm no techy but @demotruk is
What is difficult about it exactly?
The only change is that a payout recommendation is included in the vote transaction (defaults could be applied either client side or on the blockchain consensus level), and that at payout time, the median of those (based on r-share weight) is chosen as a threshold. If the payout would be above the threshold value, the threshold value is paid out instead. Technically, it is very straightforward.
I am no tech. I should probably write my comment in a question form :) I just don't understand where the threshold value to be paid is coming from. the same way like upvoting?
Ordinary users could continue to see the exact same upvotes we see today. Only larger stakeholders might want to actually include a payout recommendation other than the default (which could be something crazy high like $1,000,000).
The users who do want to include a payout recommendation could do it in a variety of ways. They could be prompted to add a recommended value to every vote, or they could have a range of pre-chosen values like in the image below:
As for how the median value is actually chosen, well that's pretty straightforward. You take all the votes and you rank them in order of value. You weight each vote by their r-shares, in other words the "size" of the vote where bigger stakeholders generally give bigger votes. Then you take the midpoint of that, and that value is your payout threshold.
Imagine we have 4 voters, blue, yellow, red and green. They each upvote the post and include a recommendation. They all each have different amounts of Steem Power, so their votes are not the same size:
To get the median we rank them with the highest values at the top, and the lowest at the bottom. We then take the point in the middle as the threshold.
That threshold would only then apply if the 4 voters had enough voting power to reach $100 in the first place.
it would be interesting to see this in practice. I suppose the value of payout is relative to volatile steem price in the market, right?
Yes it is. This would slightly reduce this volatility, since the threshold is independent of the Steem price.
this would mean you pay out of your pocket.
The money is still coming 100% from the reward pool.
Good one... The button is perfect.
I won the whale vote contest - watch out! Good things coming!