RE: Elimination of Curation Rewards
You make lots of valid points here... it's the actual implementation of a fair and balanced curation system that is the hard part. I'm a newbie here, but have been part of dozens of "this kind of gig" since the very first revenue-sharing , user-generated-content sites back in the late 90's (Epinions, Themestream, WrittenByMe, etc) and they almost all fail, mostly for reasons related directly to curation.
So far, what seems to work best (again, hard to implement) is a system that awards the greatest curation influence to those who are the actual "community builders." In other words, those providing consistent high quality content also hold the most influence over curating to ensure that quality content rises to the top, and junk/spam/clickbait sinks into oblivion. Steemit already self-regulates because there are "sliding scale" controls in place... but maybe there also needs to be one that values an "actual eyeballs" upvote higher than a bot upvote.
The other source of many failures seems to be the broad underestimate of the impact of a simple piece of psychology: Human Greed. We worry about trolls, but there's a FAR larger, more pervasive and destructive element out there whom I've come to think of as "Money For Nothing Seekers." They are the ones who respond to someone (well meaning) saying "I am making some extra money social blogging on Steemit" for ALL the wrong reasons... at least "wrong" in terms of community building and creating lasting value and quality. Yes, they exist. Yes, they number in the millions. They can take an unprepared site down in a few months. I think most of us know this, but we tend to sweep the magnitude of their impact under the rug... but that would be a grave mistake, in my opinion.
Anyway, getting back to curation (and keeping in mine the desires for decentralization, support for alt viewpoints and no censorship), it seems important that there be system safeguards that (a) recognize when someone is trying to "game" the system-- most likely through automation-- both on the content and curation sides and (b) uses a sliding scale of sorts to render "useless/empty contributions" less and less valuable and visible.
One final thought, before I end this dissertation... IF the long term roadmap is to create a decentralized alt social network that potentially serves tens of millions, seems that would be hard to accomplish without promoting Steemit to a large audience of "outside eyeballs." That said, I think it would be wise to make sure the internal systems-- rewards, curation, social features-- are rock solid just with the existing user base as it grows slowly and organically, before any sort of large scale appeal goes out there. In other words, don't throw a big party till you're sure you know where to get enough food and beer and tables and tents in case it rains and volunteers to make sure nobody drives home drunk...
@denmarkguy, I could not agree more! Upped your comment for the emergence of commonsense, as rare as rocking horse poo, as I like to articulate.
There was recently a suggestion to increase the value of a captcha verified vote by 10 times and an eyeballed (human) with a comment added by 100 times. Bot votes to stay as they were. The realities of this were horrendous in absolute terms.
Perhaps the converse would work better - a bot vote whether private bot or service bot (doesn't that sound funny to you?) if it can be verified as such could have a value of, say, 2% or 5% or 10% or 20% - I am not qualified to rationalise the exactitudes - thereby giving the real content followers a far higher say in value of content. The bots really do little to enhance any attractiveness of the platform other than 'Games' players but the voting system is clearly a key factor.
The bots may cost money to run - but at the expense of the big picture - they are feeding off the good stuff and are, don't shoot me, acting as parasites.
The problem is that at a blockchain level (where the votes are calculated) there really isn't a way to distinguish between humans and bots.
A capcha system is the only such proposal, but I am not aware of a way to implement one within the blockchain. Plus, even if we could - it would add a mental burden to the act of voting that would be discouraging to a lot of users.
I prefer the elimination of curation rewards, as it essentially eliminates the incentive to use bots in the first place, unless they are the type that can evaluate aspects of post quality (like plagiarism) that are hard for humans to do.
@timcliff I was curious about your thoughts on a guaranteed payout of the curation reward pool (say 50%) for all whales above the arbitrary 250MV, on a prorata basis according to a weighted average of SP held in exchange for voting power eliminatin (like preferred shares). I proposed this to @snowflake earlier and he's not a fan.
My thoughts are:
What are your thoughts?
If you divide the existing curation rewards up across everybody (those curating and those not curating) then those who are actively curating will get less than they are today.
The 250 MV threshold proposal has been put on pause for now, but if we were to go down that path eventually - there is a very complicated equation to solve as far as making there enough incentive for whales to keep the SP above 250 MV powered up (without being able to cuate/vote), without paying them too much at the expense of the network.
If the 250+ users were only getting 50% of the curation rewards and had to give up their influence - they would be incentivized to just use a bunch of accounts < 250 - because they could make more that way and use all of their voting power.
I went through the math on this... i think on the can opener post.
if you found a way to exclude the steemit account (which, i don't take it as a given that you could. Or that TPTB would be cool with it even if it were possible), and you limited it to just 1GV and above whales, you would be able to offer about 50K sp a week divided up among about 150 G vests, which amounts to around 260 SP a week per Gvest if divided porportionally. This amounts to around 2.6% per year non compounding.
That gets cut in half to 1.3% APR if you include the steemit account. I didnt go through and do an exact count, but my spitball guess based on some quick tallying on steemdb is that if you added in all the accounts between 250MV and 1GV as well, you would end up with something like 1.7% apr not including the steemit account and just under 1% including the steemit account.
You have got my vote, not that it counts! I really do appreciate the enormous amount of effort you are putting in to ensure the successful future of steemit.com - I hope that there is apt reward for you! Someone like me asks a question and they do not get a reply for a minnow, they get a reply for a human.
Respect aplenty!