RE: Witness consensus status to fix the actual steem’s economic flows (ENG)
I have read the article in question. I believe that the behavior will change to people just trying to optimize their curation reward, thus going for the traditional high paying posts, thus bods bidding for accounts at the best time to optimize rewards, again not going for good content but for the best return - just another bad behavior.
I believe we should start with getting rid of all bidbots. They are the biggest evil, people buy votes and with it reputation. Reputation is not earned but bought - people with 6 months on steem has reps above 70!! The entire system is messed up by bidbots.
Then there are people with numerous accounts, voting for themselves and withdrawing all money that they make, trying to milk the system. Only one account per person should be allowed. (I can still vote for myself and receive 50% of the curation reward, will this split really help?)
This is my feeling.
The changes in curation window, is ok in my view.
I think the RC system could have worked to curb bidbots, but now they went and multiplied every bodies RC with 10 - mine never goes below 99%.
The reason that making downvotes cheaper is so important is to remove the incentive to simply go for high paying posts, because those posts, if overrewarded, are more likely to get downvoted.
Curation rewards and superlinear are methods that reward concentration. They don't reward merit. To reward merit requires (both directly and indirectly) that the community police when rewards are not deserved, and that requires there be a lot more downvoting going on. It is unfair and not effective that currently what little downvoting there is ends up being done by a few people and even then not that often. Those people then, in addition to giving up valuable vote power with no compensation, face directed hostility and retaliation. The only way to fix this at every level both economic and social is by encouraging wide and more regular use of downvotes.
One criticism of downvotes is that they 'take away rewards' and this will discourage people from posting and chase away good contributors. However, that is not correct. Downvotes only move rewards around. The same rewards are paid out, and when the good people of Steem are downvoting 'the bad stuff' it means 'the good stuff' will be rewarded more, not less.
Bidbots are not really something that can be gotten rid of or curbed directly. They are users taking advantage of the same system rules that are available to everyone and their structure emerges out of the broken upvote and downvote incentives that exist on the platform today. By changing the incentives we hope a result of that will be more useful models of voting, curation, and monetization emerge on the platform.
Actually if you vote for yourself you receive 100% of the reward. That's precisely the problem. If your content was really valuable then this is okay; you are being rewarded for valuable content. But if it wasn't and the only reason you are getting that 100% is your own vote, then we need the community to police that and say 'Not so fast!'. That means downvotes.
The goal of increasing curation to 50% is 'a carrot' to go along with the stick of downvotes. By curating other people's good contributions instead of voting for your own (maybe, uh, less than good), delegating to a bidbot, etc. you stand to earn 50% instead of the current 25%. We hope this, along with the increased downvoting, will encourage more people to do it.
I really want to see flagging normalized. If those who are upvoting valueless content feared flags, they would think more carefully about promoting content they thought might get flagged.
I don't understand it at a code level, but common sense says, if I have 10 votes a day, and I spend 11 (one flag) that has to come from somewhere. It has to be paid for in terms of stake and resource credits... doesn't it?
Downvotes would still use RC, so in that sense they wouldn't be completely 'free' and do indeed use resources at the code level, but would be far less expensive than the status quo where every downvote costs you an upvote.
Putting the responsibility for this on uncompensated labor by the community isn't practical either, though. I can see the value of this as a stopgap solution but we really need something better.
Uncompensated labor? The members of the community are not employees, they are stakeholders who have EVERY incentive to participate in the protection of the asset STEEM.
He's right in a sense. It is uncompensated. If we had a good proposal for downvote rewards that would be great. We don't, but this proposal for 'free' downvotes moves the needle in the right direction. Intead of uncompensated downvotes that cost a lot, we have uncompensated downvotes that are free. The latter is far preferable to the former.
yeah, I'm for incentives that get people to flag. I just don't like the employee analogy I guess.
See my reply to @whatsup below
At least people will start giving a fcuk. Stop focusing so much on bidbots.
If it was so profitable why did yallapapi stop using them?