So, You want to change the reward pool?
There is talk of changing the economic structure of Steem's blockchain again.
The first change being discussed is to put some of the curve back into the reward pool, currently it is linear.
If you want to know how that plays out, just take the posts that have the most rewards, and take rewards from all of the rest of the posts and add it to those posts. It basically makes the reward pool heavier on the top. (See Trending Page)
My account might even be big enough now to benefit from this, but I can't see how it is going to give anyone incentives to vote for someone else. Nor do I think it is going to change engagement or distribution, in fact I think it would hurt.
Now add the other "idea" I've been reading about. Increase Curation Rewards, by giving a larger percentage of the stake to voters instead of posters. It sounds good for engagement on the surface, but in reality most of the votes are cast by SteemVoter and various automated voters. Those who write those bots also will understand the curation code the best and be able to "game" the system effectively. It would be easy just set up your autovoter and watch your passive investment grow by voting for the highest rewarded Authors.
Add those two things together and you have HUGE incentives to vote for those who you think are going to receive the most votes, set up on an Autovoter and walk away and earn. In my opinion our two biggest issues are engagement and distribution and I fail to see how either of these fixes would help to address those issues. In combination I think they could be make the problem much worse,
I have no idea how serious this push is and what the odds are they can talk SteemIt Inc into coding the changes that are being called for. I am going on record to say, I do not want to see us change directions right now before we get communities and SMTs, and I do not support these changes at this time and I think they mainly benefit the largest accounts who receive the most votes. In other words it would be a step backward.
We can keep tweaking the math on the blockchain, but the values of the largest stakeholders are already built into the economy and you do not provide a spirit of giving by changing math. If you want more users to be rewarded, simply vote for more users.
I know things are not perfect, but I do believe we are seeing improvements in quality and meaningful engagement, but of course I can only base that on my own perspective.
Curiously watching how this will play out. If you were not here when we had a "curve" in the reward pool, make sure you understand there is already history in place on how well that worked out for the average end-user. I'm watching some interesting discussions go on and as always I am willing to listen to the other side, but for now, I do not support these changes or any delay in things we are already waiting for.
You can view some of the discussion here
I upvoted. Not because I necessarily agree (I'm in the process of thinking this through more thorougly).
But because the rewards were sitting at $49.95, and my upvote caused the payout to start with a 5, which gave me a feeling of importance and power, temporarily filling the infinitely empty void in my heart with an illusionary feeling of purpose - the hopeless void has been left there by the love I never had as a kid.
Thanks, Steemit.
Haha! You are funny, only now the price seems to have dropped and I am back to 4... So, I guess you just don't matter that much! :)
Yeah, it's just like my father said.
As my grandmother would say, "Whatever's clever, my dear." Then there's, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Funny thing is, the corollary does not imply, "If it's broke, you must fix it."
Good point, sometimes the cost of the fix does not justify the benefit of it. So perhaps we can add the lemma: "if it's broke, consider whether to fix it".
@whatsup,
If it's curve lets make it linear, if it's linear lets make it curve! This way we introduce a change!If curve not work lets go back to linear!
Whatever they introduce, we all will find a way to make money!
Cheers~
It's going to be interesting to see what happens after Hard Fork 20.
I didn't like the curvy rewards, especially because they rely on big whales giving you upvotes and they aren't doing that nowadays.
Every now and then I make a post that does exceptionally well and I'm not sure how I would be affected by that change, but I'm against it at any rate.
I also think it would encourage the buyers to be even more proactive with the bid bots. That's something that might not be good for the system.
As for curation rewards...... I don't know. As a content creator curation is something that I don't look at very often.
I think there is some fantasy that the bidbots will go away. I am not sure. I really don't even know how seriously to take the discussion.
Always an interesting site: SteemIt.
We have this already. Strategic voting for curation rewards tends to keep rewarding the same people or you have to try and second guess what a whale is likely to vote on. I tend to think curation rewards should not be too big. I think whales already do quite well from curation and the rest of us just make cents at best.
What we need is something that keeps the minnows engaged. They need a chance to get some attention if they are doing good work without having to buy their way up the trending page. Maybe communities will help with this. We have the ad-hoc Running Project community and that's helping some people get more attention.
While I know you disagree, the reason I like the bidbots is enthusiastic minnows can gain some stake! I know we have abusers, but they could be flagged.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
I've said several times I'm not bothered about minnows gaining a few extra dollars, although I understand the profits are low. It just seems crazy to see others spending hundreds to get on trending. It's an arms race that's for out of control. The big winners are those who sell the votes. I realise some of them redistribute the profits to delegators, so there's an argument it's spreading Steem around. It's just something I'm not interested in doing
This is one of the biggest problems I see here right now. The bidbots are out of control and people can easily get themselves a reward of $100 +. I don't see how changing reward curves back is going to make this better. If anything, it'll make things worse and make bidbots even more profitable, as long as you have enough money to throw at them. It's taking away so much from people who try to be honest and not use them. I wish there was something we could do about these bots.
People own their stake, they can rent, sell or buy stake. The site wasn't filled with quality getting to the top anyway. I don't have a problem with people investing in their content. It is a choice on all sides.
I understand it can be disappointing for those who don't want to use them, but I really question if they are an actual problem or the focus on it is the problem. My opinion they at least give people an option for visibility that they didn't have before.
The more options we have to stay engaged the better in my opinion.
There is no saltiness in my reply. :)
Oh no worries, I didn't think there was!
You are right ofcourse, it's people's own stake and they can use it however they like. I guess it's the idealist in me who doesn't like this idea though. I'd love to see a site where good content does rise to the top. Where rewards are based on quality instead of who you know and how much cash you have handy. To me, that would be a more interesting and inviting site and it would probably invite more people over than a trending page where either crap rises to the top through bid bots or where whale fights are in the spotlights.
I guess Steem needs other things to grow, because Steemit just shows us humanity at its finest, which is more of the same inequality you can basically find anywhere else.
And hey, as long as you don't check out Trending/Hot too much, you don't notice these things. Just gotta make sure to follow the right Steemians to make this site work for you through your personal feed :-)
I've proposed adding bot voting limits (idk how this could possibly be enforced, but if bot owners were able to be slightly less greedy in hopes to regulate overpromotion, I think bot bidding limits would be ideal
Buying a profitable bot vote is essentially buying resources from their community and bringing them into ours. I strongly encourage it. One of the things that's really hobbling our effectiveness is community-minded users buying into the idea that all bought votes are bad.
On the flipside buying an unprofitable bot upvote generally does the reverse, and a lot of bid-bot in the strict sense votes are really hard to make a profit on even when Steem isn't falling like a rock.
I agree. Many of the accounts that are selling votes are not whales they are developers, who took the risk and rented delegation. The bots are distributing votes to non-whales. I see this as a win.
The main issue I think is promoting spam posts and them getting to trending
Maybe exponentially reducing the vote value when voting for same person in 24 hrs. That will stop some exploitation. Stop sp delegation and people will start curating manually. Tie voting key with something more critical like transfer to stop vote selling.
I'm Interested to see how it all plays out. I am not opposed to vote buying and selling, some people want to build a "blogging site". I want to build a Steem Economy.
That makes Steem an asset, one that can be bought, sold, rented and leased for various business ideas. Who am I to tell a whale what they have to do with their stake?
The important thing to understand is that undistributed rewards pool shares are also an asset, and buying and selling them is no different from buying and selling any other. If you can get them for less than their value then you're winning.
I think the mistake here is that you're assuming that the reward pool goes undistributed. My understanding is that if an account holding the standard 14.5 SP placed a single vote, and that was the only vote of the day, it would effectively distribute the entire reward pool to the content that it voted on.
Bidbots reduce your ability to grant rewards & in turn, negatively affect your curation returns. I think if the bidbots didn't exist to delegate to, the overall payouts would be larger as a result of inactive users leaving their stake unused - or perhaps if they were not inactive, the distribution would be wider than just those who want to pay to have their spam upvoted.
I've seen the dilution happen, it's very real - the 'pending rewards' dropdown says 'pending' for a reason.
I love this idea, because it will atleast make exploitation a little harder to do on a large scale. Stopping sp delegation is also a good idea, because it might make the bid bots less powerful. I'm all for blocking their power.
bidbots force us to become investors in our community. Return on investment is maximized when you have investors on one side, worker bees in the middle and the speculating public on the other side.
In our case, we play all three roles simultaneously!
I have stated earlier that if one content creator has to reward another, then it is due to four reasons: quid pro quo, making money, altruism or genuine appreciation.
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged had a model of innovators working with each other and was the earliest block chain. but in practice it is a hard one to pull off.
the better model is to become outwardly focused. readers on the outside, no bid bots in the middle and creators on the inside. i think SMTs will help in this case if we can get a viable business model going.
this means that in addition to attracting a Medium or Hackernoon, we must also have our own group that will attract mass readership.
otherwise the law of diminishing returns will take over.
if we still try and persist in making money out of each other then:
it just makes me wonder whether blockchain will solve the problems that we expect it to do. will making transparency a virtue and money an everyday incentive, produce the results? Writing is hard stuff and generally requires skill, perseverance and luck. are we expecting too much of steemit once all the dust has settled down? i know it must have been easier in the beginning but that is always true of any venture. when the gloss has worn off, the enduring value must shine. Just like the moon, will steemit be reduced to a mere reflection of our own base motivations?
Great comment!
So basically, people with the money to pay for loads of voting bots (who are currently boosting their own posts up to $100) will get even more benefit at the cost of people trying to be 'fair and honest'.
And with this, voting bots will gain an even bigger income, giving everyone even less incentive to do their own work.
Wow, how many bad mistakes can one make?
Resteeming this for more attention.
I didn't actually think through how the bidbots would be impacted if they are impacted at all. I actually think the impact would be on the autovoters.
Something I've never used. If these changes go through, and I don't know how likely this is, it will probably be the end of my manual curation. I'll just pick a few friends to upvote and put my energy elsewhere.
Hmm, I've been using a combination of the two for a while now. I use autovote on a few authors for two reasons: I feel they are under appreciated, or they have shown me a lot of support through many thoughtful comments and I want to return some of the love. Most of these auto votes are around 20% strength, so I have plenty left for manual curation.
I don't always have time to go through my feed and there are some people I feel deserve my support even when I don't have time. Whenever I do have time though, I go through my feed to find good posts to upvote. After that, I check out the rest of Steemit to find good posts elsewhere.
I like doing it like this, because it means I'm never at 100% VP, which would feel like a waste. I'd rather support a few people automatically so my VP gets put to good use.
I don't think this would change if they do implement these changes. I still want to have VP left to upvote random posts I enjoy.
Yep, well to me there fine as they are. I'm open of course. But seems pretty good right now. Thanks @whatsup for posting and sharing this
Hey @whatsup, it's the first time I come upon one of your posts, I believe, so I gave you a follow :)
I completely agree with your points. There are too many upvote bots out there and automated curation systems to justify that change as better for everyone. As someone who has grown organically in the last year, I've seen how it can be so rewarding just to curate and post with human interaction without the use of any bots of that nature. Human curators are different, you tag them and they see valuable content and help people get noticed. Bots and automated curation systems don't see the quality of the content. They don't see the difference between my smoothie post or my videos. Someone who wants to upvote certain posts, by being there humanly and physically, they can select what content to upvote. They have freedom of choice.
One thing I've mentioned before and I'll say again here, I think a better solution would be to increase the amount of upvotes allocated at 100% curation. With only 5 upvotes, a lot of people don't know if they should upvote or not. That being said, I'm the kind of person who just upvotes posts I like at 100% ALL THE TIME and then comments I enjoyed at 25%, typically. I will upvote until I am down to 0% some days, if I am very active, because no matter the value of my upvote, I want those people to know that I upvoted their content because I found value in it. But a lot of people conserve their upvotes, which is understandable. With more upvotes at 100%, and THEN more upvotes per each percentage, people will be more incentivised to give out more upvotes, to curate more, as opposed to being stingy. The solution IMO is not to give more of the payout to the curators. That just takes away from content creators, and then who's going to want to keep creating content that has value, other than people like you and me. Most people will resort to spam or just post random pics with no great effort (not talking about photography posts) and just share anything, really, while those who post valuable content will suffer. And once again, the bots will win.
That's my take on it, anyway.