RE: Improving the Economics of Steem: A Community Proposal
I honestly think the only way to fix it at this point is to make actual curation more profitable than self voting, which requires a return to exponential curation curve and around a 50/50 split. I honestly don't know if anything will fix this shit at this point because like you said voting collusion trumps content quality for passive investment, but the fact that we literally have to build a second layer protocol to disregard the distribution of the first layer protocol because it is so fucked is simply hilarious to me. We've gone full circle to the point where we have no value proposition over someone creating their dapp and community on tron, eos, neo, or countless other blockchains. Three years of running a company like a personal piggy bank and then lobbing a hail mary by allowing people to circumvent the distribution is a joke at best.
This does not even impact curation for content quality at all. It merely changes the financial equations governing how profitable corrupting curation is.
We can eliminate financial incentive to corrupt curation altogether. We should.
I flag trash. You have received a flag.
Omg, this hurt to read due to the truth in building a second layer protocol to fix the first layer. I had never thought of it that clearly...
It's painful
This is a good idea in theory but in reality whales eventualy just vote for the same people because they think other whales will as well, in an attempt to maximize profits from curation. This ends up a few lucky authors getting most of the rewards as everyone piles in to get curation. We saw this happen when this platform first launched. In my opinion they are trying to solve a problem that may not be fundamentally solvable. I don't think stake based voting can work. Sounded good, but when money became involved, it changed everything.
Plus the post literally says...
Are people deliberately skipping this part?
I'd say most of us that have been around since the beginning realize that it's a bit "too little too late" considering the middle class on STEEM has basically been taken out to pasture and there's not much left besides mega-whales and plankton. If they made these changes years ago when plenty of us were asking for them and telling them explicitly that this (the situation we now find ourselves in) is where it leads, the warnings were not headed. You can't wait for a house to burn down and then realize you need to call the fire department if you want a chance to save anything of value inside.
Saying that the house has burned down is an exaggeration. I'm not arguing that these changes should have come much earlier, but better late than never. I can't tell you if they will have the dramatic effect we want them to have, but there are 2 decisions: giving up or fixing the system.
Right, but by ignoring these suggestions for years they exponentially compounded the problem and now only want to consider fixing it because the majority of users are gone. There's no illusion in my mind that this is anything other than a ploy to lure people back.
The question is what is it in it for anyone to come here now that all of the easy stake has been hoarded by whales and we've gone from begging for scraps to praying a crumb falls. I get that there's a disconnect between the haves and the have-nots on this platform, but it's a little late for singing kumbaya and ignoring years of intentional abuse by the power players that created this situation.
Choosing to ignore this problem and run a vote selling service gives what you're saying here zero credibility from my perspective because you are in fact one of the people that chose to enable the shit that led to this situation for your own profit. Stop pissing in the wind and own it. I'm not going to sell anyone lies to help you guys keep getting rich off them.
Steem has been a platform where whales thrive since its inception - it was even designed for that purpose. People should be incentivized to buy into Steem, so they have power in the system. This was the case even more so in the past than today since the stake is far more distributed.
And vote-selling is simply one way for people to cope with the way content-discovery on Steemit (and most other frontends) has been designed. In the past, people were much more reliant on whales upvoting their content, thus gaining visibility; than they are today. Thanks to vote-selling.
Now, should everyone be able to reach trending with their potential shitty content? No. But putting the blame on me, for giving people what they want - I think you're making it a bit too easy for yourself throwing blame around. Especially, since I've still powered up nearly everything (~99%) I made on Steem. You're welcome.
Funny, no one makes that happen more than you.
Don't deny it. Shifting the blame to those that have been trying to prevent it is egregiously disingenuous.
You are directly and personally responsible for creating the situation we're in now. You have continually and strongly advocated for exactly this result. For your profit. You are a perfect example of why this OP will not work, because you'll just game it and maximize your profit.
You are exactly why we need to completely eliminate the potential to extract profit from corrupting curation and replace that with dividends from funding development. Were that more potentially profitable than vote-selling, that's what you'd do.
We don't need to be rid of you. We just need to use your financial interests to benefit our community, rather than allowing you to degrade our community by listening to your specious drivel intended to do nothing more than increase your profits.
I flag trash. You have received a flag.
Congratulations, you used a broken system and people's greed to your advantage. We should holiday in your honor.
0_0
!dramatoken
Oh you, twisting my words. Naughty naughty. But to make it very clear: I built a system that I needed myself so I wouldn't be stuck with the horrible content-discovery Steemit provided in 2017.
Once communities are here, I'm sure people will create closed communities, where promotion is forbidden.
You have
DRAMA!To view or trade
DRAMAgo to steem-engine.com.Haha. Got him.
Wolfie is a bit of a conflicting character.
On one side he indeed is making money off of a broken system helping perpetuate it and on the other hand he is a witness so he needs fly around keeping the appearance of adding value to the platform. Haha.
I used to have a similar frame of mind: "Ill use bots and once i grow i will help others.!"
That is really just a ludicrous idea that simply perpetuates the problem.
How do you fix the problem? Insert a repressive aparatus.
We actually proposed something very similar 2 years ago as well:
https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/details-on-proposed-comment-reward-curve
I hear you, I spent way too much time and energy trying to preach to people that their greed was destroying a potentially world changing technology, but none of them gave a shit as long as they could get theirs. There's no doubt why people left and it's not just the price. Whale games are whale games and if you didn't get in first or fuck people over for stake you ain't getting shit out of this place. Unless you live in Nigeria, Venezuela, or the Philippines (or somewhere equally impoverished) this technology isn't changing your life and empowering content creators. The greatest lie ever told on this platform was "bid-bots are for promotion." Why the hell would anyone come here and promote to a community of a couple thousand people that are pretty much smart enough to avoid the trending page unless they had no following to begin with. I literally don't even care to rant about it anymore, but I'm right there with you, we tried to stop this shit and the people that had the power to change it did what was in their best interest, just like they always do, and got rich off the illusion we (the community) were pedaling for them.
Are you really surprised that people did what's in their best interest? Humans always do what's best for them. Greed is pretty much a natural incentive. Similar to the need for power. From my perspective, what you're doing is shouting at the water for being wet, not seeing that it could be poured into a glass and shaped. Or in relation to Steem: you want people to behave in Steem's best interest? Then align the incentives that Steem's best interest equals the individuals best interest.
This is an entirely false statement.
The true statement is:"People generally do what they THINK is best for them and people are generally idiots."
There is a huge distinction here.
For example:
A vote seller thinks that he is doing what is best for him but the fact is that by acting in such a way he only achieves a short term perception of gain while in reality greatly hurting his investment.
If the time frame is long enough the person will be unable to even realize that fact due to seeing his stake increasing.
Quite prescient. You denote the difference between profiteers that dismantle businesses to sell the parts for profit and investors that grow the investment vehicle to produce capital gains.
Cash is king all too often, IMHO.
I flag trash. You have received a flag.
not really possible, greed and best interest for community does not go together in whatever combination.
who can imagine a whale that is selling votes or just selfvote, looking through steem posts to find good content? I can't.
Posted using Partiko Android
This is exactly why tweaking curation and author rewards and splits won't work. Nothing makes curation - actual curation for content quality - more important to substantial stakeholders than their stake. As long as profit can be extracted by corrupting curation for financial maximization, @therealwolf will do it.
We need to eliminate mechanisms that create financial incentive to corrupt curation completely. Tweaking them won't ever work. We need to create a dividend stream from funding development of Steem and the ecosystem that will provide better profitability to that ilk, while making curation unsuitable for extractive profiteering.
I flag trash. You have received a flag.
Agreed but waiting years to do that BECAUSE it was in the self interest of the people that had the power to change things (vote out witnesses/fork the chain) didn't leave the majority of users with much of a choice now did it? Yes we could have all just been independently wealthy and paid whatever ransom to liberate a system from the control of the people keeping it that way, but it literally makes zero sense as I'm pointing out now, because they didn't do anything to deserve the wealth but pay themselves for the privilege of being wealthy. Easier solution, fuck STEEM and fork.
I hear you, but the problem isn't precisely greed, it's designing an economic system that's more resistant to game theoretical pitfalls like the prisoners dilemma or tragedy of the commons.
It's not that I don't understand if we all stopped and voted honestly, we're all better off, but individually I know that if i did that, everyone else would still just keep milking. So the options to me are join the milking or abstain and lose your share but not make any material difference to the failure of the platform overall. I bet many other stakeholders are in the same boat.
Good news is different economic incentives vary in how resilient they are against these game theoretical pitfalls. This is fixable :) I finally got Inc to listen to me, so that's a great start
@kevinwong said you were a smart guy. He"s right!
Posted using Partiko Android
I'm supporting a 50/50 split
Exponential curve is likely too strong because n^2 means someone who has 100 times more SP than you has a vote that carries 10,000 more weight than you. Now that people are more sophisticated, this perhaps would open up to even more abuse than the current system
But indeed some level of superliniearity is necessary. I like the convergent linear curve proposed by vandeberg as far back as 3 years ago. It has a superlinear head that forces all profitable spam into the light, and a linear tail so no collusive piling on between whales/bid bots
I also think a moderate amount of free downvotes are necessary. Basically every measure helps, but every measure has their own downsides if you tune them up too much. This is mostly an optimization problem.
I broadly agree with your points and think it's better late than never. I share your frustration as I've been proposing this for over a year, and I'm grateful that recently @justinw, @andrarchy @vandeberg and other inc members became receptive to these ideas
Sincerely, I hope it's not too late, but after years of being ignored and no delivery of promised updates it's hard to be enthusiastic about anything at this point. I guess time will tell. I agree we never need to revisit the old exponential curve, my thoughts were more slightly exponential, but I think the vandeberg model is fairly close to what I was thinking.
Yes, yourself, van and me are no foreigners to feeling that we have an answer but being told to go beat it for long periods of time
But now that we have Steemit Incs attention, it remains our best play. Incentivize the behavior we want. Each measure that does this (curation, free downvotes, superlinear) have their own drawbacks as you increase their intensity. So it's an opitmization problem of maximizing benefits - costs.
I believe this is a broadly fixable problem and yes, i feel it's overdue by a couple of years, but it might not be too late to turn this ship around
Isn't that behaviour development that imbues the underlying investment vehicle with greater value, creating capital gains? Let's do that instead of corrupting curation with ANY financial incentive through which funds intended to market Steem are instead gamed for profit.
I flag trash. You have received a flag.