RE: My take on HF21
I think you make some excellent points here, no time to really comment in depth as I really SHOULD be working on something else, but very three valid and coherently made criticisms of the HF I think.
Very fair point about how it may not be beneficial for businesses, it would be interesting to hear @starkerz views on this particular point.
Although I'm ambivalent about whether killing off rewarded micro interactions is a good or bad thing - I enjoy giving out those 2-5 cent tips on comments myself, and receiving them back, but is a cheeky comment on a post by a 5-30K account (the level of SP of most of my 'Steem friends') really worth even 0.02 cents, that's 20 cents if Steem 10* like we all hope.
The short answer to that is obviously no, so maybe getting rid of rewards on those isn't such a bad thing!
I see the micro rewards as much more valid and potentially a huge draw to the platform in the future. Going forward it’s obvious that the vast majority of accounts will earn very little, regardless of what changes. Steem is just too scarce at any semblance of scale. And your average social media users account really shouldn’t be making hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for some selfies and food pictures. These casual users won’t bother to link a Steem wallet to a bank account, cash out for fiat, etc. all for the sake of $5-$10... but they will spend Steem back. That’s easy & free.
As a comic artist, I can interact with folks in my comment sections and over time they’re easily going to get a few bucks worth of upvotes from me. Then I will gladly sell them a comic for $3 worth of Steem. Through that experience, they’ll probably be a loyal fan, a promoter, and possibly reach into their fiat pocket to buy more merchandise too. Even at its base layer, without SMTs and overcomplication, Steem can be a great loyalty rewards & marketing system. That’s even how I’ve begun pitching Steem. Not as “come blog and earn money!” but as “come hang out and get a few free comics!” (Valid for my target audience of course!)
So I may be speaking selfishly out of my own use case scenario, but it’s one I see working for lots of businesses and brands. I want my vote value to go to my target, not boomerang back to me in curation. I want my lone vote to matter. An inciteful comment from a reader remarking on page 7 panel 2 of a comic isn’t going to achieve consensus or go viral, but it’s a perfect place for that one on one relationship building and value reward.
Unfortunately taking the rewards down to 65% to fund the sps will seriously affect client relationships which we have worked hard to set up. Inflation for funding the sps must be taken equally from all parties. If the witnesses don’t like it, they can leave. I know we at oracle-d will continue to be a witness regardless. Funding the sps from rewards and splitting post rewards 50/50 will affect many business models on the steem blockchain significantly, and not for the better. It will give delegators less reason to delegate since they can no longer reward as much as they could before and there fore the whole reason for delegation is gone, that reason being the ability to have a trusted third party manage your ability to influence others.
In my view the whole problem here is that you can sit and earn 15% from bots and various other schemes on Steem for doing nothing. This is truly crazy. The Idea that large holders (or anyone) is able to earn 15% pa for adding zero physical value to the chain is socialism for the rich. This 15% pa is backed by the value created by the community so in order for the Steem price to hold value the community needs to create more value than this 15% per year before it can break even. How can we possibly expect this to work? The Steem price will go up once the amount of fiat brought in through investors surpasses the value of the inflation distributed. At the moment much of this value transfers to the pockets of people who just delegate to make a passive return in exchange for not actively engaging with the network. This is unsustainable.
The true fix is here; Not anywhere else. If large stake holders are rewarded more than 5% per year for doing very little value added activity, we are finished.if it stays at 15% pa we are finished. If people don’t like it, they can leave and go find another unsustainable model to leach off where they can get their 15% for doing nothing. If they want more than 5% pa then get if from the fiat they can charge users or clients for accessing their projects or services. Large stake holders should be rewarded no more than 5% inflation from the chain and they should only get that 5% based on the value they create for the community, how successful the projects they help set up are and how they often they interact with them positively. If our hard forks do not move us towards this model, we are unsustainable, and will continue to get poor together as we give away our precious token to people who do not add value to the ecosystem.
Initially, when I heard about the 50/50 proposal I thought, hey that's a bit drastic but at the same time saw how little engagement is left on Steem so a part of me figured no harm in trying and shaking things up cause the current path is going nowhere. I did feel it was too much of a change, 65/35 or 60/40 would have been more prudent, but some feel it isn't enough to make a significant difference to user behaviour, fair enough but as I'm discussing this in public and am receiving feedback from you and others I am realising more and more that steemit.com and other frontends aren't the only game in town, there are many other business models, 50/50 kills fundraising models like fundition and many other business models like yours, so yes I agree with you but I think my voice is in the minority.
Also great to hear that you as a backup witness who has the most to lose are happy to take an inflation cut to save on the content rewards being reduced on its own.
It would be good to run 50-50 on a test net somewhere for 2 months or so and see what happens. Then make a decision based on that. Any professional team with millions of dollars of market cap on the line would run a test first before going to the real thing. (I would think that by definition, upward mobility becomes very difficult with 50/50.) it maybe that we should propose several curation models and let the community choose here. I know this might not be in ur interests, but another incentive to get people curating and encourage more organic content creation would be to penalise users who use bid bots and users who delegate to them, thereby removing enough Steem form each vote to make them uneconomic (we use bid bots all the time by the way - but this is to keep up with the Joneses) in an ideal world, promoted content should result in burned Steem, and not add a selling pressure to the Steem price by redistributing Steem to token holders who do not do anything to add value to the chain.
What ever we decide to do, I propose we test 3-5 options first. That is what any team would do in order to minimise risk to the community and obtain the most clear view. For example, we could run a 25/75 split between author and curator as well. If we could get the content sponsored externally, the best authors could earn rewards additional to Steem rewards and content consumers and whales would be incentivised to review content. This would bring back organic discovery again. But really none of us know what will happen and this puts a lot of risk on a change like this. So I would advise running several test cases for a few months and then let the community decide what it likes before deciding on one particular solution. This will also give businesses adequate time to adjust their models before the change happens. Either way, the community must get organic content discovery going again at the same time we must disincentivise larhe holders from earning rewards unless they are adding value to the chain via supporting projects or setting up large, manual curation teams to properly distribute the wealth to the highest quality content.
I don't think a testnet would be a true representation of what would happen, only a small subset of users would use the testnet and since rewards aren't real on the testnet you can't simulate real human behaviour. I have no issue if bots are no longer the flavour, we have many services, bots however do democratise visibility where anyone can purchase visibility and does not discriminate, I would hate to go back to the days where u have to kiss ass of whales and go cap in hand to try get their vote so you can get your content promoted, I think that is very humiliating.
Yes, this is also tough. One thing is for sure, these days u have to pay a whale for exposure. It just means organic content discovery has gone. There should be voting guilds with many curators and large delegations to solve this issue. But, you are right, every scenario has its down sides, it just depends on which type of down side will result in the most active whales and organic content discovery.
I said I was ambivalent! Thanks for the detailed reply - you make a very valid case for micro rewards - I hadn't really considered in that way TBH but it certainly seems like a strong argument FOR linear.
Although... this scenario isn't most people on social media and I think SMTs cld be another way of giving out loyalty rewards.
But there is still something appealing about the simplicity of linearity.
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