RE: The Battle of Upvote Weights - Reviewing the Arguments with Extreme Use Cases
I am starting over, due to nesting....
I would argue that 40 is too high, just simply based on the fact that I am a fairly active user, and I barely ever use up all of my voting power.
You should note that a user who is voting optimally would never use up their voting power. Such a user would usually be voting at between 80% and 90% power. To put it another way, if you start at 100% power, and cast the full 40 votes, you will not be at 0. If you're typically sitting at around 80-90%, then you are probably using your full amount of votes.
In fact, even if you were voting 2x the target every day, you would never Use up all your power, you would just reach an equlibrium of around 50% power.
Tim's time
Lets look at you particularly, because you actually make a pretty good example:
You are pretty close to Carl in the 5 brothers example I wrote. Steemstats shows 19 votes for you in the past 24 hours. burnins vote power analyzer shows that this is fairly typical for you, on average.
In your own words, you describe yourself as a "fairly active user". But the thing is, a fairly active user shouldn't be maxing out on vote power spent (and thus reward) . Because if he was, further activity wouldn't be incentivized. Your level of activity is average (based both on your own "fairly active" description and what the vote power analysis says). We want to incentivize users like you to become above average.
So when you say that you think the number should be lowered because you usually don't use all your available vote power, what you're really saying (or at least the operational effect of the policy you propose) is that you believe that you are so active that it would no longer be judicious to reward additional activity from you with additional influence.
Lets assume that right now you spend four hours on curating per day. I realize this is my arbitrary guess, but it seems about right (though if im way off let me know), and represents around 5 votes an hour.
Here is how changing the amount of time you spend on curation would effect you under both the current 40v target and the proposed 5 vote target. By reward, i simply mean the amount of influence you exert on the system
| xxx | Time Spent Curating | Time change | Reward Change (40V target) | Reward change (5 vote target) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual | 4 hours | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2x actual | 8 hours | +100% | +100% | +0% |
| 3x actual | 12 hours | +200% | +100% | +0% |
| Half actual | 2 hours | -50% | -50% | +0% |
| 1/4 actual | 1 hour | -75% | -75% | +0% |
| 1/8 actual | 30 minutes minutes | -87.5% | -87.5% | -50% |
As you can see, under the current system, you would be rewarded with double infulence for increased participation. You spending more time voting is incentivized with additional influence on the system.
But only to a point... the system is willing to pay you for four more hours, but nothing beyond that, as at that point we're in crazy person land.
Likewise, if you decide to become less active on steemit, under the current system, you are penalized. You have less impact on the distribution on rewards. Currently, if you spend half as much time curating per day, you have half as much impact.
With a 5v target, you get nothing for investing more time. Also, there is no disincentive for you to spend less time curating until after you have cut down your participation to 1 Hour.
In a sense this "levels the playing field" so much that there is no incentive to play the game. If you look at how increaseed participation would change your impact on the system under the 5 vote target, there is almost nothing you can do whick would have any effect at all. Double your time spent curting, no impact. Half it? No impact. Quarter it? No impact.
Right now, the fairly inactive user... the guy who only votes say 5 times per day, has an incentive to become fairly active like you. With a 5 vote target, he gets the same influence as you with a quarter of the engagement.
Thats the thing about giving the perfect attendence award to the kids who missed 2 days of school. What it really does is encourages the kids with perfect records to miss the two "free" days.
Its important to keep in mind that the "threshold" number -- the point where we no longer incentivize increased participation, shouldn't be average. It should be above average. BEcause if it isn't, the avcerage user is "flatted" the same way you are in the chart above.
Its a very well articulated argument, and I think it very clearly makes the case for why a higher voting threshold is better. I will continue to make the case for the opposite side :)
Probably the best counter to your argument is that there is a trade off between wanting to incentivize users to spend more time curating quality posts, and wanting to make the system more appealing for the "average user". The 'average user' is not going to like the fact that they do not get to exert their full influence on the site, with whatever SP they have earned/bought. I think most people would be willing to accept some reasonable threshold, but if someone has to spend 4 hours a day on the site in order to exert their full influence - a lot of people will think that is a ridiculous expectation for a social media site.
The counter to that, which is basically what you are saying above, is that the people that are spending 4 hours a day curating probably should have more influence than the people who spend 1 hour.
But then you have the argument that people who are able to vote on 40 posts are not necessarily doing a better job than people who are voting on 5-10. In my opinion a 'normal' user who finds 5-10 really good posts is adding more value than someone with an author list / voting bot, that auto-upvotes 40 posts per day.
It really boils down to a subjective "what do we want to achieve/incentivize/reward" question.
As you also know, the limit is not a hard limit on the number of votes that you can cast and still exert influence. If the limit were set to say 10, and you take my voting behavior as an example - I can still vote on my 15-20 posts a day, and just decide how to best distribute my influence. One could even argue that a limit of 10 may be a better incentivizer for me to vote better, because it would force me to start thinking about which things I vote on are worth 100% vs. 50%, 25%, and so on.
Personally, I feel that a reasonable balance that encourages users to spend ~1-2 hours a day on the site to exert their full influence is an optimal target for a social media site. We should want to make the 'average user' that puts in a good effort and makes a valuable contribution our core target.
I hate to pick a number, but after all the discussion we have had, I really feel that 10 is the ideal number. The average user should be able to find 10 good posts a day that are worthy of their upvote, and if they want to vote on more, they can decide how to best allocate their weight.
lol. actually, im pretty sure 10 was the number that we started at for vote target.
If this is the goal (and i don't necessarily believe that it ought to be) there is actually a way to make sure you pick the right number.
Make the vote target a dynamic number based on the average votes cast by users with more than 0 votes (or some number based on that)
This is very true. The system was actually designed so that the guy making good selections was incentivized by curation rewards, but curation rewards have been trimmed so significantly that they effectively have ceased to matter.
The pool for those rewards used to be the same size as the pool for author rewards, but its been reduced by about 80%. First the 50:50 ratio was changed to 75:25, then the reverse auction system was implemented (the 30 min penalty)... right now, if i were guessing, id say the ratio is something like 90:10 or 95:5 in favor of authors.
That gets into a whole new conversation. I think we'll save that for another day :)
It's been fun discussing with you!