Taking A Deeper Look At "Proof-of-Brain"

in #steem7 years ago
The following is a post examining current structure of Steem's distribution mechanisms which when put together act as a "proof-of-brain." Some issues are talked about and some ideas and considerations are put forward. This post is made in the name of improvement and addresses potential concerns I have with the current ecosystem versus the ecosystem imagined in the Steem whitepaper and bluepapers.


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What is Proof-of-Brain?

I think that it is important to define and get a clear idea of what we are talking about before trying to analyze any idea or concept. In order to make sure everyone is on the same page, we will be making multiple references to both the Steem whitepaper and Steem bluepaper. Proof-of-brain is described in the Steem bluepaper as having the following two properties:

a pool of tokens dedicated to incentivizing content creation and curation (called the "rewards pool")

a voting system that leverages the wisdom of the crowd to assess the value of content and distribute tokens to it

These two properties come together to allow the Steem blockchain to distribute a large portion of the block rewards using human participation as the mining mechanism rather than using electricity and finding hashes which traditional proof-of-work blockchains utilize. The human work is what is valued here rather than the hash rate of your army of computers.

While some may debate the terminology and argue that such properties do not encourage actual brain power, we'll ignore semantic arguments and try to get to whether or not the whole proposal idea actually works as intended.



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Does Proof-of-Brain Hit Its Target?

First off, we need to understand what the goal of Proof-of-Brain tokens are. The bluepaper helps to clarify this goal a little bit:

The users who produce content are adding value to the network by creating material that will drive new users to the platform, as well as keep the existing users engaged and entertained. This aids in distributing the currency to a wider set of users and increases the network effect.

So the goal of the system is to attract users by rewarding them for their contributions. This overarching goal should be no surprise to anyone using the platform. But let's dig a little deeper. The goal is to keep users engaged in the platform and to distribute rewards to a wider set of users. So, we want compelling content (not necessarily quality) and a fair distribution amongst the users. These two goals ideally lead to desirable network effects and the platform gaining mainstream traction.

In terms of distribution of rewards, however, we should be a little more specific than simply distributing to a larger set of users. Given the nature of Steemit, this goal is achieved simply due to content creation being more accessible to the public than mining. We get a clearer goal of what an ideal distribution achieves in the Whitepaper:

the funds must be as decentralized and distributed as possible

However, the whitepaper and I will both concede that ideal distributions are impossible. The whitepaper ultimately settles on the view that the most popular content will receive the majority of the rewards while the other contributors to the ecosystem will be rewarded with the small remainder. This is similar to how Steem works now. Whether this achieves the goals of distributing funds in a decentralized manner effectively we'll go into later.

One last thing before we judge the Steem model, is the concept that the whole proof-of-brain model is designed around. Note that this is what the Steem whitepaper says and emphasizes with italics:

Steem is designed around a relatively simple concept: ​everyone’s meaningful contribution to the community should be recognized for the value it adds.

While this is very much a subjective notion and proof-of-brain model is a subjective proof-of-work, there is something to note about this lofty goal. Contributions should be recognized for the value that they add. If we use the information earlier, value should be determined by how well the content engages the community when in turn should lead to desirable network effects.

Well, does proof-of-brain hit the target? Yes and no. It does a fair job of distributing rewards to popular content creators and rewards them for creating content. These powers users do drive new users to the site and many of them have initiated efforts to help new users and promote a greater sense of community. However, the goal of keeping the older users engaged through compelling content is not achieved to the extent one may imagine it would to achieve those desirable network effects.

The major issue is not the content itself, but the misalignment between the goals of the curators and the goal of the platform and the proof-of-brain system. In the current system, it is not compelling content that is rewarded, but profitable content. While at times compelling content can be profitable, this is not always the case.

And if we extend that compelling content is meaningful content, and that profitable content is not always meaningful content, then we see that Steem fails in it ultimate goal to reward meaningful contribution.

Proof-of-brain thus dissolves into people concocting schemes on how to make a quick buck and generate profit rather than use their brains to create meaningful content. While one could consider such activity as a legitimate proof that one has a brain, one would look down at such behavior as harmful to the ecosystem.



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Addressing The Issues

So, lastly I'll address some more specific problems and address some potential ideas with regards to those issues. While these ideas are not meant to be specific changes I would desire, they are meant to spur discussion and encourage brainstorming potential solutions.

First off, I argue that the main problem with the distribution of rewards is due to curation not working as desired. This is due to profit chasing rather than looking for and engaging with meaningful content. The main issue with this profit chasing is that it centralizes where the rewards go which is an attribute of a non-ideal distribution.

The most obvious aspect of profit seeking that users seek to reward their own content rather than seek meaningful content. This goal is achieved through self-voting and vote collusion. The first can be done directly, through biding bots, or through multiple accounts and the second is performed by a group of people conspiring to upvote each other's content without regard to the content itself.

The most obvious solution would be to ban the self upvote. But this only prevents one of the four avenues of rewarding oneself. That is not to say that such a change would not be desirable. Making the life of a profit-seeker harder does discourage the behavior and could encourage users to vote for other content given that they have to take additional steps in order to use the other methods. An idea, but not a perfect one.

Another solution would be to decrease the weight of repetitive votes on particular accounts in a manner similar to how voting power decays and replenishes over time. This mitigates the effects of all four of the methods as all methods require the same account or group of accounts to dish out the rewards. While it does not solve the problem explicitly, it prevents the centralization of rewards by a single user via a friendly group of individuals or accounts one happens to also own. Thus, only the truly popular are able to attract heavy rewards.

So, that goes over several basic ideas that have been discussed by several users in the community and the potential effects such implementations would have.

But other than rewarding one self, one can vote on profitable content and maximize their curation rewards. This is often done through frontrunning or following powerful voters and voting on the content they vote on (trailing). The issue with both of these means of rewarding users is that they centralize rewards. Rather than find meaningful content, profit is used to maximize one's own self and in the meanwhile and creates a situation where we see a non-ideal distribution.

If we go back to the decaying weight idea from earlier, we can argue that the rewards generated for upvoting the same content creator should decrease over time decrease one form of frontrunning, but you could simply frontrun a variety of popular voters.

Another idea involves simply decreasing the curation rewards for popular users using a variable split via some weighting mechanism determined by prior rewards or having users themselves determine the variable split. The issue with allowing users to determine the variable split is that they may keep curation rewards high in order to attract a large amount of users.

What we want to do is to attract the discovery of undervalued users and increase their popularity and because of this, a variable split that is performed automatically based on prior rewards might make more sense. In either case, we want the percentage of curation rewards to be lower for popular content and higher for unpopular content in order to encourage the discovery of meaningful content. Note that these ideas do not encourage upvoting bad content, but rather discourage the centralization of rewards among the same group of popular users and encourages users to find content meaningful to the community by undiscovered users.

That does it for this look at the proof-of-brain mechanism and what it has yet to achieve. While these solutions are vague and open, I feel that any discussion about these mechanisms and how we as a community want them to work are only helpful in achieving the goals that Steem has ultimately set out to achieve.


Sources:

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Steemit Bluepaper
Steemit Whitepaper

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This is a very good article in my opinion. It deserves to be among those who earn hundreds or even thousands dollars (as if the Steemit brainer system works as expected). And all advices written in this article should be taken into consideration by those decision makers.
But the reality that, it just has 9 votes and 4 comments since 1 month ago ( Iam going to add to be 10 votes and to be 5 after this comment) clarifies that there will be no chance Steemit will be a real brainer platform. (almost) no one care. People are too busy with their 'mining' activity in anyhow they find it possible.
I was among the people who think that Steemit is a hope, a place that stimulates me to practice my writing skill.
But then when I realize how this platform really works, It makes me feel sick and lowering my motivation into the lowest level. This article is one of the examples (too tired to post other links here) and some of them have been written since this platform still in its young age.

I did a search for the proof of stake or proof of work argument and this popped up it is a sad state of affairs when quality content is not seen, the limitation of a 7 day reward period does stymie the creation of quality content even though it is greatly appreciated.

Adds an upvote and a follow one way of helping to support creators in the long run.

hi @freedomno1 , it takes sometime for me to realize that Steemit is just like a real life ecosystem. There are good and bad people. Hard truth. It depends on us to choose which side, good or bad. If you choose to be a good guy, , use steemit to practice writing skill and don't put a high hope to earn reward. Let time decides, whether good guy win or lose, or there will be a new ecosystem that provides a friendly environment for hardwork writer.

totally agree

following

I appreciate the compliments. Even if I don't get lots of rewards, I at least have a way to practice writing and being creative while getting something in return which is nice.

One of my chief concerns has been about the smaller and newer users losing motivation as it appears that size matters, and often times it matters too much. It becomes hard to these smaller users to be found since so much organization of the different sites is reliant on payout.

I still have hope for Steemit and am genuinely interested where the whole platform goes, but there are times where I think that perhaps a better thought up distribution scheme and blockchain platform would work much better and simply dominate Steem like Facebook did to Myspace.

I like your honest writing. I think most of the true meaning content creators are still in centralized platforms. In steemit, most of them are trying to collect some bucks. That's the reason some people says this is still in its young age.

Dude I thought I would make it known that you are among the top results on google for "proof of brain" and thus, you will inevitably have hit some sort of pioneer research trail.

This whole process of me researching proof of brain, finding your post and seeing the almost zero upvote status, looking at the comments... This is going to happen hundreds of times over this year and beyond.

And you get no credit on the platform for it.

Here's to the future, and thank you for playing your part.

Thanks for stopping by.

What we want to do is to attract the discovery of undervalued users and increase their popularity and because of this, a variable split that is performed automatically based on prior rewards might make more sense. In either case, we want the percentage of curation rewards to be lower for popular content and higher for unpopular content in order to encourage the discovery of meaningful content. Note that these ideas do not encourage upvoting bad content, but rather discourage the centralization of rewards among the same group of popular users and encourages users to find content meaningful to the community by undiscovered users.

What about the idea of not making the author/curator split the variable, but somewhat de-linking the author and curator rewards for a post and looking across posts to determine curator rewards. Posts from "already popular" creators would get the same type of per-post author reward, but the amount of reward allocated for curators on those posts would be low, and the amounts of curation reward for posts by "previously undiscovered" people would be higher. It seems to me that you wouldn't want to "punish" unpopular creators by lowering the percentage of rewards they get for their posts since the prospect of getting rewards is an incentive to create stuff in the first place and getting a smaller slice of an already small pie could work against that. But it makes sense to me that there should be a greater reward for identifying and popularizing under-seen content and maybe less reward for saying "yeah, that person who everybody knows posts popular stuff posted some more stuff that will be popular".

Yeah, I get where you are coming from. The above proposal may make it appear that newer users are being punished for not being popular. The issue with looking across posts would be an implementation one as different posts have their rewards due at different times, but it is an interesting idea.

We could also leave the split 75/25 and simply burn some portion of the curation rewards from popular users as they get more popular. This achieves the same effect as decreasing the percentage of rewards without affecting the author's payout.

Your lack of updoots perpetuate the statements you've made...

While I appreciate the compliment, upvotes (for now) are not that important to me. I want an ecosystem which encourages the hidden gems to shine rather than one where hidden gems have to play the game and expose weaknesses in the system to maximize rewards.

The current environment slows down the legitimate growth of the platform and in the current economic environment in the technology sector, growth matters and plays a role in determining which platform grow into powerhouses and which disappear. Steem has the first move advantage, rather than prioritize SMTs they should be prioritizing user experience.

If Steem dies, upvotes won't be worth anything to anyone.

Informative writing and good suggestions for Steemit platform. Now I understood Proof of Brain concept. Cheers!

I strongly agree on this article,its a great set up plan for this platform...not only does it encourage undervalued users but it spreads its distribution extremely wide around the globe.
Goosh you cant imagine how relieved i feel now after reading this,i almost gave up because i am still a newbie yet no attention ..i even thought perhaps powering up all my steem will help me be noticed yet nothing ...but if one or two persons can reason like this here then it means there's still hope! Thankyou very much